This afternoon we ascended from the desert to the high limestone range that forms a rampart to the oasis on the north, and then we started crawling down into the Siwa valley. The desert plateau is about 600 feet above sea-level, and the oasis is 72 feet below it, and as the height of the hills is considerable there is a big drop down into the oasis. The track winds in and out through strange rocky passes, among weirdly shaped cliffs whose tortured shapes remind one of Gustave Doré’s illustration of the Inferno. These wild ravines are utterly desolate, even in the spring no vegetation grows among them. This is a land of broken stone where huge boulders seem to have been hurled about by giant hands. The sun sank low before we had escaped from the mountains, and the fantastically shaped crags were silhouetted with monstrous shadows against the yellow sky. Sometimes the narrow road seemed to cling to the side of a towering cliff, and at other times it twined in and out through deep, echoing valleys in the shadow of the overhanging, jagged rocks. In places the camels had to be led in single file. Once the men began to sing, but the dismal echoes among the caves sounded almost inhumanly depressing, so they gave it up, and we marched along in silence. Finally a line of far distant green appeared down below between two great cliffs, and one could see, very faintly, the masses of graceful palms nodding their crests over the murmuring oasis. To weary men after a six days’ camel ride across the desert the first glimpse of Siwa is like the sight of the sea to those ancient Greeks on the far-away shores of the Euxine. [Illustration: CAMEL CORPS TREKKING TO SIWA, NEAR MEGAHIZ PASS] When all the camels had come out from the last valley among the rocks we “got mounted” and rode for about half a mile, past groups of palm trees, already heavy with clusters of yellow dates, to Ein Magahiz, which is the first spring in the oasis. Here we camped for the night, watered the camels, who simply revelled in the water, and I enjoyed a luxurious bathe in the deep cool spring which rises among a cluster of palm trees. All night we could hear the thudding of tom-toms in Siwa town, which is only a mile or so away. “The cadenced throbbing of a drum, Now softly distant, now more near, And in an almost human fashion It, plaintive, wistful, seems to come Laden with sighs of fitful passion.” _30th._