Note 124 — Chapter VIII

Wadi Abu Rahal is a small feeder of Wadi Abad, joining the latter from the south in latitude 25° 0′, longitude 33° 30′. At the point of junction of the two wadis, which lies on the usual camel road from Edfu to the Baramia mine, a well was sunk by the Mines Department in 1906, in the hope of obtaining a water supply. I visited the well in May 1906, when it had attained a depth of fifty-four metres. The strata passed through were ten metres alluvium, then thirty-seven metres of sandstones and clays, followed by a thin band of bituminous shale, and seven metres of dark grey clays. From near the bottom of the well I collected specimens of Lingula and a mytiloid shell which Mr. Bullen Newton compared to Septifer linearis; the latter shell differs but little from specimens obtained from the English Gault, and thus tends to show that the Abu Rahal beds are of Cretaceous age. (See Hume, Preliminary Report on the Geology of the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Cairo, 1907. p. 29). Since my visit, the well has been deepened to seventy-three metres in sandstones with a bituminous seam, but water was not reached, and the well has been abandoned.