Recent Expeditions to Libya from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst

Abstract

South-east libya, one of the driest regions of Africa (Gautier, 1950; Hume, 1925, p. 79; Ball, 1939, p. 36), is administered from the oasis of Kufra, to the north of which lies the barrier of the Calanscio Sand Sea extending westwards to join the Rebiana Sand Sea. Two routes pass through the uninhabited desert to the south of Kufra. The route to Chad is provided with two deep wells, Maaten Bisciara and Sarra, each about 150 kilometres apart and dug in the late nineteenth century at the instigation of Sayed el Mahdi el Senussi (Bagnold, 1935). The other, to Sudan, runs along a beaconed route through over 320 kilometres of waterless desert to Gebel cUweinat standing 1934 metres high on the borders of Sudan, Libya and Egypt. Rising almost 500 metres above the desert plain to a height of 1435 metres, Gebel Archenu was named after the solitary acacia which stands opposite the outlet of the main wadi, over a kilometre to the south-west of the mountain (Hassanein Bey, 1924 p. 354, 1925). Fleeting visits to Archenu were paid by Hassanein Bey in 1923, by Desio in 1931 and more recently by Kanter in 1958. In contrast, the larger and more impressive granite massif of Gebel cUweinat to the south has attracted the attention of Breuil (1926; 1928), Caporiacco and Graziosi (1934), Winkler (1938; 1939) and of many others on account of its rock drawings; of Menchikoff (1926; 1927), Desio (1931) and Sandford (1933; 1935) on account of its geological structure; but until recently Gebel Archenu has never received other than scant attention. In mid-August 1962 an expedition comprising one officer, a doctor, a geomor? phologist, six officer-cadets of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and two non-commissioned officers arrived at Gebel Archenu to search for rock paintings and to make a brief morphological study of the mountain. The route followed from the coast to Archenu is shown in Figure 1. A base was established near the centre of the massif and its position accurately determined. It was necessary to drive to cUweinat in order to collect water, since the water at Archenu proved undrinkable (Hall, 1962). The 1963 expedition from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, was able to spend over a month in the desert during the very hot period from August to September, this time aiming to find a plateau about 160 kilometres south-west of Kufra. By consolidating the information from all the available maps onto a single chart, the northern limits of the plateau were shown in some detail, having been surveyed by Wright (1945) during the Second World War. Existing maps give little indication that an extensive plateau actually occurs between latitudes 22?N and 24?N somewhat to the west of Gebel Bu Simbel; and on the Mount Hessi 1:1,000,000 A.A.F. Aeronautical Chart published in June 1951, Wadi Faregh is depicted traversing what is, in fact, the western escarpment of the two main sectors

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.