John Bell, director of Desert Surveys in Egypt, asked these questions in 1927. By the 1930s the papers grew even more modest. ‘I should like to add a few remarks on some of the points raised in the interesting discussion on the “Prehistoric Geography of Kharga Oasis.”’ By the mid-1930s the lost oasis of Zerzura was found by Ladislaus de Almásy and his companions.

In 1939 the great decade of Libyan Desert expeditions came to an end, and this vast and silent pocket of the earth became one of the theatres of war.