Exploring the Desert

During our time together in Libya, Sue and I and our best friend Mustafa Gibril used to have an informal agreement about how to spend Fridays. (Weekends in Muslim countries are normally Friday and Saturday.) We would spend one Friday at the beach, the next inland looking for ruins, the next at the beach, and so on.

As I was in Libya for four years, this meant we spent a lot of days exploring ruins, most of which were from the Roman period.

Some of the ruins were well-known and easy to find, like these Roman remains at Ghadames.

Others were well-documented in archaeology books but extremely difficult to locate. As foreigners, we were not allowed to have detailed maps of Libya. So we spent many Fridays looking for the Mselleten Needles, two Roman obelisk tombs far from any modern settlements and roads.

Although the obelisks have been damaged by earthquakes over the years, they were worth the effort that it took to find them.




Many of the ruins that we found were Roman farms, often in a remarkable state of preservation, like this one.



Other ruins were much smaller and less easy to identify, like this example.



Sadly, any unprotected ruins near modern settlements tend to be robbed of their stones, which are taken away for use in new building projects. This was the case with a sunken Roman water cistern near Homs. The first time we saw it, the cistern was in reasonable condition, as these photos show.

When we returned a couple of years later, almost all of the stones had disappeared.

Note:

Most of our exploring was done in a Volkswagen Beetle, which proved to be capable of going over extremely rough ground.

However, longer and more ambitious journeys became possible when we bought a Nissan Patrol and had it fitted with extra sets of springs.

Our Nissan (foreground) near Sebha