On the trail of myths and mirages, deep in the Egyptian desert

At the sunset call to prayer, the site guardian popped his head into the Temple of Amun and said he would be back soon. Then he strolled away down the dust lane towards the mosque tucked among palm trees, and I found myself alone in the ancient temple with a village dog, a small boy playing marbles and the ghost of Alexander the Great.

It was in the spring of 331BC that Alexander unexpectedly arrived in the remote oasis of Siwa in Egypt’s western desert. World conquest was going swimmingly. He had defeated the Persian king at two important battles and had just cut the ribbon on a new city — Alexandria. Within the year, his territories would stretch from the border of modern Libya to the Indus. At this point, his ears ringing with acclaim, he made a mysterious detour across the sand seas of the Sahara. He was looking for something. He believed he was going to find it in the Egyptian deserts.

Looking for things in deserts seems to be a compulsion for some people. All that empty space offers room for hopes and dreams, myths and miracles. In a world of mirages, reality can become a little slippery. The ambiguity of deserts, the sense of possibilities beyond the ordinary, attracts people of a certain cast — adventurers and explorers, monks and mad men, dreamers and fanatics.   

I called in on the monks first. Setting off from Cairo in a 4×4 with a copy of Herodotus, a box of dates, and a sense of relief that I was escaping the throngs of the Nile valley, I was heading for the monasteries of Wadi El Natrun. Christian monasticism began in the Egyptian deserts. In the 3rd century, a young man named Anthony went to live in an empty desert tomb where he spent most of his waking hours wrestling with the devil who came to tempt and torture him in a variety of supernatural forms, from lascivious women to wild beasts. The idea went global. By the 4th century, young converts from Ireland to Russia were retreating to caves and beehive huts for lives of denial and stale bread, fingers crossed for visions as rich as Anthony’s.   

At Deir al-Suryani, one of four Coptic monasteries in the oasis of Wadi El Natrun, just off the desert road between Cairo and Alexandria, I had tea with Father Elarion. Jolly, rotund and white-bearded, he was a happier soul than those early desert fanatics. Privation seemed to be off the menu in the modern monastery, if you don’t count the early rising. The monks wake every morning at 3am for two and a half hours of chanting and prayer in churches that have not yet caught on to the fashion for pews.

I followed Father Elarion into the 10th-century church where recent renovations have revealed exquisite murals. Startled faces of saints and apostles, painted a millennium ago, peered out at us where the plaster had been removed. Elarion beckoned me into a tiny space at the back of the church. This was the cave where an early monk, Bishoi, had lived in the 4th century. A chain was suspended from the ceiling, like the one to which Bishoi would tie his hair to prevent him nodding off during long days of prayer. He is buried in the neighbouring monastery of Deir Anba Bishoi. The monks say his body is completely intact, a desert miracle. Next to him is Paul of Tammah, widely revered for having died by suicide seven times.

From Wadi El Natrun I headed towards the oasis of Bahariya. My driver, Muhammad Mursi, a swashbuckling figure in turban and dark shades, was in high spirits. He loved the desert, the sense of freedom, though I felt the lack of traffic police might have been part of the thrill. “It is the space,” he insisted. “Everything feels bigger, more magnificent.” Beyond the windows of the car, the desert stretched away to unfathomable distances, scarred, pockmarked, desiccated like the staked hide of some mythic beast. Far off, watery mirages shimmered.

Near Fayoum, we arrived at Qasr el Sagha, a Pharaonic temple standing alone on a desert ridge. The site guardian welcomed us with a tray of tea. We sat in the temple, a cooling breeze wafting down the stone passageway. The guardian, who hadn’t seen anyone for several days in this remote posting, told stories of desert djinns. He heard them at night, he said, howling to one another. Sometimes there is the sound of running. Other times — and it was this he feared most — they cry like lost children.

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The Sahara has had many incarnations. Ten million years ago, it was a savannah much like east Africa. In the hills of Fezzan in Libya, in the Tassili n’Ajjer in Algeria, in the caves of the Gilf Kebir in Egypt, animals are painted on the rocks: rhinoceros and giraffe, elephant and hippopotamus, buffalo and antelope, followed by lithe human figures. But long before that, deep in the Eocene period, over 35mn years ago, these regions were a shallow sea, a place of mangroves, clams, shellfish, turtles, and whales.

Like oceans, deserts are an arena of winds. They act as a scouring tool and in the Sahara are thought to strip away 3cm of the surface every century, gradually revealing a buried past. At Wadi al-Hitan, a Unesco protected area, palaeontologists have discovered over 200 fossilised skeletons from the Eocene period. Among them are archaeoceti, ancient whales. The skeletons reveal a dramatic moment in their evolution — their transition from land mammals to sea creatures.

On foot, I followed the marked tracks across the empty desert, under a burning sky, from one skeleton to another. They are remarkably complete, their vertebra casting tails of shadow, their ribs like flared wings. The delicate bones of their rear limbs were clearly feet, not fins. Egypt is full of ancient wonders but few are as astonishing as these walking whales, from a time tens of millions of years before the ancestors of humans stood upright.    

I spent a night in Fayoum, and another in Bahariya, both in small lodges owned by Tzila, a young company set up by an Egyptian couple to offer desert escapes. The first was rather elegant, with a palm-shaded pool in the garden, the second a simpler affair. The following morning we set off from Bahariya across the open desert, the car swaying and rolling in the sand seas. Shifting gears, Muhammad roared up dunes. On the ridgelines, the car paused, tipped dramatically, then tobogganed down the other side. Around us, the desert blossomed into fantastical forms.

In the so-called Black Desert, the surfaces were covered with black volcanic basalt, charred outcrops and stands of quartz. Further on, in the White Desert, the Sahara suddenly became a world of limestone and soft white chalk, eroded into bizarre shapes — towers and pyramids and crescents, domes and pinnacles and giant misshapen outcrops, erupting from the hard white surface, cracked like a frozen lake.

When night fell, moonlight illuminated the desert floor and it glittered with ancient sea shells. Muhammad was disappointed I had not arranged a desert camp. “Next time, we will come with our tents and spend three nights out here. You will love it. Waking in the desert always feels like the beginning of the world,” he sighed.    

But I was heading to Siwa, the furthest oasis in Egypt’s western desert, and my time was short. The direct road from Bahariya to Siwa is closed at the moment, and it was necessary to double back to Cairo and Alexandria, then follow the coast road to Marsa Matruh before striking across the sands as Alexander had done.   

One of the unexpected characters drawn to these deserts, and to Siwa, was Lee Miller, an American model, photographer and war correspondent who was played by Kate Winslet in the 2023 film, Lee. In 1934 she had married Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey. Lonely in her marriage, unimpressed with Cairene society, she set off for remote Siwa with friends, following ill-defined desert tracks in her Packard car. Miller too was looking for something. In her case it was escape from banality, and the promise of those thrilling surreal desert landscapes.

 Siwa is still a long way from anywhere. It took me eight hours from Alexandria. It is a good road now though, in places, drifts of wind-blown sand threatened to overwhelm it. Siwa arrives in the way of all oases with a sudden explosion of greenery — thick plantations of palms, fields of alfalfa, bubbling water channels, birdsong, shade, repose. 

Miller was fascinated by Siwa’s otherness. Most Siwans are Berbers, rather than Arabs, speaking a dialect close to those of the Atlas Mountains, almost 3,000km to the west. Among its unique former customs was the isolation of young men from the age of 20 to 40 who slept in caves outside the town to attend to the fields. These zaggalah, as they were known, were noted for their love of music, dance and palm liquor, as well as for an acceptance of homosexuality, though gay marriages were banned by King Fouad when he visited the oasis in 1928.  

I stayed at the splendid Adrère Amellal, a traditional qasr, a cross between a sprawling mansion and a fortress. Overlooking a salt lake, its back to a white mountain, it is built in vernacular style. The rooms are elegantly rustic, the furnishings simple, yet it felt like one of the most luxurious places I had ever stayed. At night the whole place is lit entirely by hundreds of candles, mimicking the dense constellations of a desert sky.  

The creator and owner of Adrère Amellal, Mounir Neamatalla, a Cairene environmental engineer, has recently organised an exhibition of Miller’s photographs of Siwa. It hangs in a neighbouring property, the black and white photographs simply framed on blank adobe walls, the windows open to the desert.  

These images are full of the sensual delight of the desert, the flowing lines of dunes, the spiky palms, the beautiful simplicity of the architecture, the white robed figures. There are pictures of Miller and her bohemian friends, smiling into the sun, intoxicated by the place. The recent film captures something of her many struggles. The photographs of her so happy here in her desert escape were moving.    

Later I went to find the Temple of Amun, where Alexander sought an audience with the oracle. He had travelled to Siwa with a small bank of attendants, mounted on camels, eight days across the desert. It was the usual desert story. They navigated by the stars, they got lost in sand storms, their water ran out. This being the desert, the story has the usual embellishments. In his account, Ptolemy tells us that two talking snakes pointed Alexander in the right direction.

When the temple guardian slipped away for prayers, I stood in the forecourt in the gathering dusk. This was where Alexander would have stood waiting, over two thousand years ago. Then I climbed the steps to the main chamber where, according to some historians, he would have been ushered before a statue of the god Amun. Bats were already swooping through the twilight, in and out of the ancient ruin. I could make out holes along the walls. How the oracle actually gave its responses is disputed, but some experts have suggested the temple priests hid behind the walls and spoke the wisdom of the god through these holes.

Tradition insists Alexander had two purposes at Siwa. It is thought he wanted to be recognised as a god in his own right, a son to Amun, and he wanted to know if he would be master of the world. But Alexander himself never revealed what questions he had for the oracle, or what prophecies were given, saying only that “he had heard what pleased him”.

Alexander did go on to conquer much of the known world, but seems to have lost himself in the process, his behaviour increasingly disrupted by drunkenness. He would die eight years after Siwa, in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, after a prolonged bout of drinking, at the age of 32, beset by anxieties that Siwa’s oracle had done little to placate. His empire did not survive his death. Whatever pleasing prophecies he was given proved to be another desert mirage.   

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