38. Western Desert, 1997 — Desert misadventures
In which Eleanor and Fiona get themselves into difficulties.
Are they driving to Siwa? Or are they in a bad Hollywood movie?
Eleanor
“Is that it?” Fiona asks from the passenger seat, looking down at the map and then back up again.
Up ahead we see a small grouping of buildings. According to the map, somewhere around here there should be a gas station. I glance down at the fuel gauge. We are just below half a tank of gas, and we’re just over half-way to Siwa Oasis.
I slow down, pull into the dusty parking lot and stop beside the sole gas pump. It looks ancient. There are no other cars anywhere—not on the road, not here. I get out, stretch and walk around to the pump. A thick layer of dust covers it. Oh dear, not a good sign. I walk over to the building that looks like it might be the office. The windows are boarded up and the door is locked. As are the two other buildings.
Well, shit. Shit, shit, shit.
Fiona looks at me quizzically as I come back to the car. “Any luck?”
“Nope. There’s not a soul here. Looks like this has been abandoned for years. Let’s look at the map again.”
We pour over the map, retracing our route. Cairo to Al-Alamein, where we stopped to find the graves of members of the Black Watch, Fiona’s grandfather’s regiment in World War Two. Al-Alamein to Marsa Matrouh, where we stopped for lunch and filled up the car with gas. And now Marsa Matrouh to Siwa Oasis—deep in Egypt’s Western’s Desert, and close to the Libyan border. According to the map, this is the only tiny settlement between Marsa Matrouh and Siwa. This is the only place to get gas on a 300 km stretch of nothingness.
And there’s nothing here. Not a soul. Not a car. Not a sound except the wind and the soft banging of a loose board on a building. It’s so straight out of a Hollywood Western it would be funny except for the fact that it’s not.
Fiona and I hatched this plan to drive to Siwa two days ago. We wanted to do something for the Eid Al-Fitr break. According to our guidebook on Egypt, “Siwa is the stuff of desert daydreams. It epitomizes slow-paced oasis life. Scattered throughout the oasis are crystal-clear springs. And at the edge of the oasis, the swells of the Great Sea of Sand roll to the horizon.” It sounded perfect. I rented the car, and here we are. I haven’t even told the Embassy I’ve headed out of town for the break.
“Did we miss something further back?” Fiona asks hopefully, turning around in her seat to look through the back windscreen.
“No, I’m sure we haven’t. We’d have noticed. There’s absolutely nothing out here.” And it’s true. As we left Marsa Matrouh, cars, shared taxis, donkey carts and camels gradually thinned until for the last hour we have seen not a single other vehicle on the road. It’s just the straight line of the road across a vastness stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions, the monotony broken only by wind blasted outcroppings of rocks.
Siwa is one of the remoter towns in Egypt—only connected by road to Egypt in the 1980s. Before that, you got to it by camel. We’ve come for the Shali Ghadi—the ancient fortress built of unique salt brick, and for its distinctive Berber culture. We’re closer to Libya here than we are to the Mediterranean.
“So now what? Do we turn back?” Fiona asks.
I pick at my lip. “I think we just have to carry on. We’re closer to Siwa now than to Marsa Matrouh. And maybe there’s a place up ahead that isn’t marked on the map.” I look at the map again. “Or we misread the map and this isn’t the place it’s supposed to be and it’s still up ahead.”
We drive on, my eyes glancing at the odometer and the fuel gauge every few minutes.
We hear a soft thunk, and the car pulls to the left. I pull over to the right and come to a halt on the non-existent shoulder. I look at the odometer. We’re 270 km from Marsa Matrouh. We still have another 40 km to get to Siwa. Sunset is in another hour. The Great Sea of Sand lies just over the horizon. Where the sun will soon be setting and I do not want to be driving in the dark or spending a night in the desert, I worry. The fuel gauge is in the red zone now.
Fiona and I look at each other. She shrugs.
“We better check it out then,” she says as she opens her car door. The wind I’ve felt pushing us sideways on the road makes it hard to open the door.
The driver’s side front tire is flat.
Well, shit.
“Well, then, time to get busy. I’m presuming this rental car does have a spare tire in the trunk?” Fiona asks, the wind whipping her voice away, as if it’s not the slightest cause for concern that two women are in the middle of nowhere, with a flat tire, with darkness coming on soon, we’re almost out of gas and we still have 40 km to go.
I pop the trunk. “Well that’s one problem solved,” Fiona says as she yanks the spare out of the trunk. I shiver, and reach into the backseat to grab my jacket. Our skirts flap like flags around our legs. There’s nothing out here except sky and desert and wind. We’re still the only car on the road.
I find the jack in the back, then poke my head under the car to find the jacking points. I place it, then jack the car up. Once I’m done, Fiona loosens the nuts, grunting a bit with the effort, but she manages to get them all loose. I help her get the tire off, then the spare tire on. She starts tightening the nuts down while I roll the flat tire back to the trunk and start repacking things.
Before we get back in the car, I stand for a moment taking in the landscape. I’ve read all of the Dune books. Arrakis could look like this, I think. And I shudder. Its desolation and bleakness is its beauty. And yet there are tribes who live out here. Turning back to Fiona, I give her a high five. Ladies united. We got this. I say a silent prayer of thanks to the desert gods. And to Alasdair and Tig who made sure I know how to change a tire. Now just get us to Siwa, I pray to those same gods.
Thirty minutes later the engine coughs and dies. We can see the palm trees of Siwa a few kilometers in the distance.
“I guess we’re walking the last bit then,” I say to Fiona. And we both burst out laughing. I mean how much more of a cliched epic can this “quick, easy” trip to Siwa get? We pull out our bags, sling them over our shoulders, and start to walk in the deepening dusk. On the outskirts of town we come to a gas station and we cheer. I head into the tiny store to ask if they can put some gas into a jerry can for us.
“No gas,” the attendant says with a shrug.
“What?!”
“No gas,” he says again. “Maybe tomorrow.” He uses that wonderful Egyptianism: “بكرة, إنشالله”. Which literally translates to “Tomorrow, god willing.” But actually means more like, “Who the eff knows, maybe never, I’m not promising anything, I really don’t care, and you can’t hold it against me.” It’s Egypt’s signature brand of insouciant fatalism, and it can be maddening.
I feel myself on the edge of exploding. We are so damn close. Could one thing, just one thing, please go right? I beg, I plead, I cajole. I almost yell out loud. But I don’t.
“1.استن, استن” he says, pinching all five fingers of his right hand together and moving them up and down. I want to swat him. But then he comes out from behind his counter saying, “I come back,” in broken English. And then he leaves the little shop.
I stand there surprised. Now what, I gesture mutely to Fiona. “We wait, I guess,” she shrugs back.
Twenty minutes later, with the first stars now coming out, he gets out of a small pick-up truck with someone else. “My brother, Ghanim. He give you gas,” he says simply. And he pats the back of the pick-up, gesturing us to get in. We climb in.
Ghanim pulls his truck up next to our little rental car. Taking out a jerry can he promptly proceeds to pour it in, not saying a word. Gratitude and relief flood me. Sometimes Egyptian fatalism drives me absolutely demented. But Egyptian generosity and hospitality is unfailing. We have been rescued by Egyptian kindness. I pull out my wallet and count off notes, handing them to our savior. He pushes my hand away, saying “2.زيادة, زيادة”
I insist, he refuses, I insist, he refuses. I pull back a few notes, and push them towards him again. He finally takes them. Never have I had an Egyptian insist I pay less. I’m getting a sense already of how different Berber country is.
With many, many thank-you’s, Fiona and I get back in the car and slowly, very slowly, drive the last four kilometers in the dark to the hotel. I’ve heard the stories about cars running into camels in the dark. The real problem is that the camel lands on top of the car, crushing it. I do not want to come across a camel in the dark. As we pull up in front of the hotel, I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. We’ve actually made it. We’re here. We’re actually here. Thank the gods.
As I get out of the car and stretch, what steals over me, quietly at first, and then like a roaring presence, is the silence. Siwa is just …quiet. I am so used to the background din of Cairo, the silence out here is a palpable presence. You can feel the vastness and emptiness of the desert all around you in the silence. It settles over me, like a prayer shawl, stilling my jangled nerves of the last few hours.
As I stand quietly, just breathing in silence like oxygen, full night descends. All the stars are out. Fiona comes to stand next to me, and we look up. Cairo’s dust and pollution block out so much of the night sky, but here the cosmos glitters above us. I feel like I am back at the farm in South Africa, looking at a sky so full of stars, you could almost read a book by starlight. It takes your breath away. The Milky Way stretches above us in all its resplendent beauty — the luminescent road across the sky.
“Oh, wow,” Fiona says, her voice filled with awe. “I never pictured this. The stars, Elle—the stars. It’s just—”
“Awe-inspiring,” I say softly, reverently. I never tire of this. The Drakensberg, the Wild Coast—these are other places I’ve been brought to stillness and tears by the sheer vast beauty of an African night sky, so bright you can navigate by its soft silver light.
And as bright as the stars are, so the temperature drops. Deserts can be blazing during the day…and freezing at night. Shivering now, we get our things and head into the hotel.
By the end of our first day in Siwa I am convinced the donkeys outnumber the humans. I swear, Siwa must be the donkey capital of Egypt. The ever present wind mutes their soft braying, which fills in, but doesn’t erase, the pervasive sense of serene quiet.
A quiet deepened by the lack of cars. There are hardly any cars in Siwa. There is also hardly any gas. The hotel owner told us this morning that the gas tanker didn’t arrive two days ago. It’s expected any day now, but who knows when it will actually arrive. “Tomorrow, maybe,” he says, shrugging with unconcern. Apparently this is a regular thing here in Siwa: no gas in town. No one seems bothered by it. One way or the other, then, Fiona and I are stuck here until the gas tanker arrives. I hope it’s soon. I don't want to explain to Magda how I landed up stranded in Egypt’s Western Desert.
We explore all over Shali, laze in hammocks next to the oasis, and wander aimlessly through the date groves. I cannot stop staring at the women’s dresses. The embroidery is so distinctive—and nothing like anything in Cairo. In the souq, I find an embroidered shawl for sale, and Fiona looks on in amusement as I buy it. “What are you going to do with it?” she asks.
“Get it framed and mounted as a wall-hanging. It’s a work of art, Fi. It deserves to be shown as one.”
On day three, the gas tanker arrives. Rested, entranced, a day later than planned, and with a fixed tire, we reverse our route. This time we carry two jerry cans of gas in the trunk. I am not making that mistake again!
February Indie Collective
I’m part of collective of other Inidie authors who cross-share each other’s books with our readers.
February I’m part of:
International Fiction (stories not set in the US)
Maybe one of these books from an independent author is for you?
(And yes, clicking these links does help me…it builds my reputation as an indie author who supports other indie authors, so 🙏 in advance.)
Bonus Material
Siwa: I seriously don’t make some stuff up…our Siwa adventures in photographs
“Wait” and other classic Egyptian hand gestures.
Total eclipses, Siwa and the Western Desert: a once in a lifetime opportunity
El Alamein: the only time I’ve seen my grandfather cry
Arabic. Literally, “Wait”. But when combined with the gesture it has more of a flavor of “Be patient, hold your horses, don’t get yourself all worked up.”
Arabic. “Too much, too much.”
Bold and a bit reckless, sure makes for great memoir material!! And can only envy that desert Star shine...