A Gilf Kebir safari

Egypt Today (Richard Hoath)

Gilf Kebir has kept its secrets well. The vast sandstone massif lies in the southwestern corner of Egypt’s Western Desert, separated from the nearest pockets of population in the Western oases by the vastness of the Great Sand Sea, and from the Nile Valley by 500 kilometers of austerity known as the Selima Sand Sheet. Remote, uninhabited, virtually rainless, at times searingly hot, at others freezing cold, the Gilf was named and mapped only as recently as 1926 by Prince Kamal El-Din, one of the sons of King Fuad.

In the pre-war years the Gilf was explored by a colorful and travel-hardened collection of characters; members of the Zerzura Club seeking the lost, perhaps mythical, oasis of Zerzura in this most barren of landscapes. When war broke out, skills honed by these explorers were turned to desert warfare as this remote region became a theater for daring Allied attacks on Italian and German bases and patrols.

The Gilf might have remained unknown to all bar the most adventurous archeologists and a few students of those early expeditions but for an extraordinary book. In 1992, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, was published to great acclaim, winning that year’s prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.

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