Qualla: Cave of Swimmers https://qualla.com/cave-of-swimmers en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:34:06 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/1/y/cave-of-swimmers-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Cave of Swimmers https://qualla.com/cave-of-swimmers Cave of Swimmers: Introduction https://qualla.com/cave-of-swimmers/ Photo credit Roland Unger, CC BY-SA 3.0. There is no water here. There has not been water here for thousands of years. And yet on the wall of this shallow rock shelter, painted in red and ochre, small human figures drift with their arms swept back and their legs trailing behind them, as if caught mid-stroke in a lake that no longer exists. They were painted onto the Gilf Kebir, a sandstone plateau in the far southwest corner of Egypt, near the Libyan border, in a quarter of the Sahara so empty that reaching it still takes a week of driving across open dune. The figures are the reason this place has a name. People call it the Cave of Swimmers.

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Image: Roland Unger | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/1/y/cave-of-swimmers-wp/ss1y-cave-of-swimmers-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Cave of Swimmers: The Man Who Found Them https://qualla.com/cave-of-swimmers/ Photo credit Roland Unger, CC BY-SA 3.0. In October 1933, a Hungarian aristocrat and desert explorer named László Almásy came over the rim of a wadi in the Gilf Kebir and saw the paintings for the first time. Almásy had spent years chasing the legend of Zerzura, a lost oasis said to lie somewhere in the Libyan Desert. H...

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Image: Roland Unger | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/1/y/cave-of-swimmers-wp/ss1y-cave-of-swimmers-the-man-who-found-them.mp3 0:06 2 full Cave of Swimmers: When the Sahara Was Green https://qualla.com/cave-of-swimmers/ Photo credit Roland Unger, CC BY-SA 3.0. Almásy was right about the climate, even if the cause lay beyond what he could have known. Beginning around the end of the last ice age, a long wet phase known as the African Humid Period turned the Sahara into a landscape of grassland, shallow lakes, and slow rivers. Rain follow...

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Image: Roland Unger | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/1/y/cave-of-swimmers-wp/ss1y-cave-of-swimmers-when-the-sahara-was-green.mp3 0:06 3 full Cave of Swimmers: Swimmers, or Souls https://qualla.com/cave-of-swimmers/ Photo credit Roland Unger, CC BY-SA 3.0. Not everyone agrees the figures are swimming at all. The rock-art researcher Andras Zboray calls them "clearly symbolic," their true meaning lost. The German ethnologist Hans Rhotert read them as the dead. The anthropologist Jean-Loïc Le Quellec agrees, pointing to parallels with...

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Image: Roland Unger | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/1/y/cave-of-swimmers-wp/ss1y-cave-of-swimmers-swimmers-or-souls.mp3 0:06 4 full Cave of Swimmers: A Fragile Inheritance https://qualla.com/cave-of-swimmers/ Photo credit Roland Unger, CC BY-SA 3.0. The fame that The English Patient brought has come at a cost. The cave shown in the film was a built set, not the real shelter, but visitors arrived anyway, and the genuine paintings have suffered for it. Fragments have been chipped away as souvenirs. Surfaces have cracked after ...

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Image: Roland Unger | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/1/y/cave-of-swimmers-wp/ss1y-cave-of-swimmers-a-fragile-inheritance.mp3 0:06 5 full