The Dig at Wadi Anqa

The map arrived on Mara's desk at the Survey of Egypt on a Tuesday morning in September 1933, rolled in a cardboard tube, with a label on the end in Ibrahim Fikri's small square hand: Gilf Kebir, reconnaissance sheet, 1932. A. Bassett. For checking.

The Survey of Egypt lived in a long, cool, high-ceilinged building at Giza, on the west bank of the Nile, a mile from the pyramids, which on clear mornings could be seen from the drawing-office windows, standing up out of the haze like three folded sheets of brown paper. Inside, the building smelled of ink and dust and pencil shavings and the sweet, faintly sour smell of the ammonia used for copying plans. There were rooms full of long sloping drawing tables, where draughtsmen in shirtsleeves and tarbooshes bent over sheets of linen with ruling pens; rooms full of instruments in glass cases, theodolites and levels and chronometers and plane tables, polished and labelled like museum pieces; rooms full of maps in wide shallow drawers, every inch of Egypt that had ever been measured, from the Delta, where every field and canal was drawn to the yard, out to the Western Desert, where the sheets grew emptier and emptier until they were nothing but white paper with a few dotted lines across them and the words, in careful capitals, UNSURVEYED.

Mara was twenty, and had been at the Survey for a year and a half, first at the training school and then in the computing office, working out other people's observations: long columns of angles and logarithms and corrections that ended, if you had done them properly, in a single pair of numbers that said exactly where on the earth a man with a theodolite had once stood. Mara was good at it. Mara liked the moment when the columns came out, when all the small errors cancelled and the numbers clicked into place like a key in a lock. But Mara had never once been to the places the numbers described. The farthest Mara had been into the desert was a picnic at Saqqara.

Ibrahim Fikri came in at ten, as he always did, in his grey suit and his tarboosh, with his spectacles in his breast pocket and a cup of coffee in his hand. He was the senior surveyor of the Desert Survey office, forty-one years old, small, neat, quiet, with a dry voice and a way of looking at a column of figures as if it had told him a joke only he could hear. He had mapped more of the Western Desert than any man alive except two, and he had trained Mara at the school, and he was the only person in the building Mara was slightly afraid of.

The Desert office was a small room at the end of the corridor, with one window facing west, and on its wall hung the great mosaic map of the Western Desert, a hundred sheets pasted together on linen, three yards wide, that every surveyor in the building stopped to look at when he passed. Most of it was blank. Down in the far southwestern corner, where Egypt met the Sudan and Libya, near a mountain called Uweinat, there was a large irregular shape drawn in pencil, not ink, because nobody was yet sure of it, with a question mark beside it. That was the Gilf Kebir: the Great Barrier, a plateau the size of Switzerland, which no European had seen until seven years ago, and which no one had yet properly mapped. The old men in the oases said there were valleys in it where the hunters' grandfathers had found water and wild sheep, and some said there was more: a white city, a lost oasis, Zerzura, the place of little birds.

He put down his coffee and unrolled the map on Mara's desk, and weighted the corners with an inkwell, a stapler, a brass protractor and his own spectacles case, and stood back.

"Look at it," he said. "Tell me what you see."