Farafra

Farafra has been inhabited far longer than its size suggests. Prehistoric peoples lived around the depression when the Sahara was wetter, and archaeological evidence places people here from the late Pleistocene onwards, thousands of years before the pharaohs. Ancient Egyptian texts knew the oasis as the land of cattle, and it was familiar to the Egyptian state at least from the Middle Kingdom. It lay at the far western edge of the Egyptian world, watched as a route by which Libyan tribes could approach the Nile Valley.

Under Rome and in the Christian centuries the oasis was farmed and taxed like its neighbours, though it was never wealthy and never large. In the Islamic period the population lived in a single fortified village, Qasr el-Farafra, built on a rise so that families could shelter behind its walls when raiders came out of the desert. For centuries this was a place of a few hundred people, supplied by camel caravans from Dakhla and Bahariya, with a reputation within Egypt for isolation.

The modern oasis dates from the second half of the 20th century. The New Valley project sank deep wells and opened new land for farming, bringing settlers from the Nile Valley, and the paved road linking Bahariya and Dakhla ended the town's dependence on caravans. That road also brought visitors: the chalk formations 45 kilometres north of the town, protected from 2002 as the White Desert National Park, became one of the best-known landscapes of the Egyptian Sahara, and a small tourism economy of camps, guides and 4x4 drivers grew up in a town that had never had one.

Farafra's older families are Bedouin in descent, and the oasis keeps a strongly tribal social order in which family, lineage and reputation decide much of ordinary life. It has long had a name in Egypt for being unusually self-contained: for generations nearly everyone in the oasis was related to nearly everyone else, houses were left unlocked, and disputes were settled locally rather than through the state. Settlers who arrived with the New Valley schemes brought Nile Valley customs and dialects, and the two strands now mix.

Hospitality is the central social rule. Tea, heavily sugared and served in small glasses, is offered to every arrival and refused by nobody, and guests are fed before they are questioned. Men gather in the evening in cafés and in front of houses; women's lives are largely private and domestic, and foreign women are treated courteously but are expected to dress modestly, as men are.

Building is the oasis's most visible tradition. Whole quarters of the town keep their plain, smooth, mud-coloured architecture, and the old methods of building and repairing houses have been sustained partly because visitors value them. The local artist Badr Abdel Moghny, a former teacher, has decorated several houses with murals and shows his work in his own small museum. Otherwise culture here is domestic: weddings with drumming and communal cooking, saints' days, palm-fibre and wool crafts, and the long storytelling evenings of the desert camps.

Farafra is home to a few thousand people — an estimated 5,000 at the last published count — across the town and the farming land around it, the smallest population of any of Egypt's main Western Desert oases, though the depression is the second largest of them in area. Life runs on water pumped from deep wells, much of it hot when it reaches the surface and cooled in open tanks before it reaches the fields. Dates and olives are the traditional crops, and the newer irrigated farms grow wheat, alfalfa, vegetables and fruit, with poultry, sheep and goats kept by most families.

The rest of the economy is small: government jobs, schools and a clinic, building work, a few shops, and tourism, which supports drivers, guides, cooks and a handful of camps and guesthouses and rises and falls with the season and with Egypt's fortunes generally. Groundwater levels and the cost of pumping are the perennial anxieties of the farmers.

Daily rhythm is set by heat and by the road. Work is done early and late, the middle of the day is spent indoors or in shade, and evenings are social. The buses passing through in each direction are events in themselves, carrying goods, mail and the students who travel to university in the Nile Valley. Isolation still defines the place: the nearest hospital of any size, the nearest bank of any size and the nearest city are all several hours away across empty desert.

Farafra eats what the gardens give and what the road brings. Dates are the staple sweet and snack, eaten fresh in autumn and dried the rest of the year, and olives and olive oil come from the same plots. Bread is flat and dense, baked at home in clay ovens, and in the desert camps it is buried in hot sand and embers and knocked clean before serving.

Meals are simple and mostly vegetarian by default: lentil soup, ful medames cooked long and slow and dressed with oil, cumin and lemon, ta'meya fried from crushed fava beans, rice, pasta, tomato and okra stews, and salads of tomato, cucumber and onion. Chicken is the usual meat, with lamb or goat slaughtered for guests, weddings and feast days, often cooked slowly with onions and potatoes until it falls off the bone. Guides on desert trips grill meat and vegetables over the fire and cook rice in a single pot.

Tea is constant, green or black, strong and very sweet, often with mint or with desert herbs, and several rounds are served in succession to a guest. Coffee is taken in small cups on formal occasions, hibiscus is drunk chilled in the heat, and the oasis's own dates, figs and guavas end most meals. Alcohol is neither sold nor drunk here.