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Updated: July 2, 2025
Sheikh Ali Debalohp, the chief of the Kilab tribe, was to take us to his district, Wadi Hadai and Wadi Gabeit, some way inland at the back of the Erba mountains, which group we insisted on going entirely round. He was a tall, fine specimen of a Bishari sheikh, with his neck terribly scarred by a burn, to heal which he had been treated in hospital at Sawakin.
Unfortunately being no gold expert, I am absolutely unable to give an opinion as to the possibilities of the still existing quartz seams being payable or not, but there is abundance of it both in the Wadi Gabeit and in the collateral valleys, and it is improbable that the ancients with their limited knowledge of mining could have exhausted the place.
We left Wadi Gabeit next morning, and on the following day another messenger from Sawakin met us with a similar mandate; but as we were now journeying in a presumably safe direction we annexed him too, and went on our way rejoicing. Personally we felt that we knew the condition of the country better than the authorities of Sawakin, who had never been there.
Wadi Gabeit was just a trifle better than the country we had passed through, having finer trees in the valley beds; and here we saw the first colony of natives since leaving Mohammed Gol, consisting only of three huts of pastoral Kilabs, which will give an idea of how sparsely this country is inhabited.
Diodorus, in his account of an old Egyptian gold-mine, describes most accurately what my husband found in the Wadi Gabeit. For miles along it at the narrower end were the ruins of miners' huts; both up the main valley and up all the collateral ones there must have been seven or eight hundred of them at the lowest computation.
Debalohp's huts were certainly somewhere in the vicinity of Hadai, not more than an hour away, but for some reason known only to himself he would not take us there, though he went there himself every night, and when he joined us on our way to Wadi Gabeit he brought with him another wife, having evidently had enough of the other's company on his journey from Mohammed Gol.
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