I would, however, warn the enthusiastic tyro that, in the Libyan Desert, travelling as the crow flies is not always so simple and glorious an affair as it may seem when planning expeditions from a comfortable armchair.
-An Egyptian Oasis, H.J. Llewellyn Beadnell, 1909
The only crows I saw in the Libyan Desert weren’t flying but rather perching on camel carcasses to peck through the anus. Camel hide is thick and crows eat the soft part first. Beadnell, an old hand in the Egyptian Geological Survey, saw skeletons by the thousand along the Darb when he rode its last leg to the Nile. Eighty years later there were more.