Posted on Friday 23 July 2004

Beheira is a region of rich farming land located in the middle of the Nile delta. Its densely populated and fertile landcsape is dotted with mud huts and every other square inch is under intense cultivation with fields growing a wide variety of crops such as wheat and cotton as well as strawberries, okra and cucumbers. It is perhaps best known for its production of a fine variety of tobacco which is used in huqqah smoking.

On the 28th of June, 1911 at nine o'clock in the morning while standing in one of those fertile fields, a farmer by the name of Mohammed Ali Effendi Hakim observed something strange in the skies about his village of Denshal, near Nakhla (40 kilometres south-east of Alexandria). First he heard an tremendous explosion in his field and then looking up he saw that the sky had been streaked with a "fearful column" of white smoke. His dog, which had been there only moments before had been transformed into a mound of smoldering cinders.

To be born a dog in the modern Middle East would not, I think it's a reasonable to say, be the luckiest thing in the world. That seems especially so in a country like Egypt where in ancient times dogs had been considered sacred (and were even mummified) but were now, at least since the advent of Islam, thought of as unclean and lowly creatures fit only for hunting and guard duty. But the fate of Hakim's dog would have to be considered a extremely unlucky case of being at the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

Sometime before he crawled out from his resting and venturing out into Egyptian summer heat (that "sometime" being anything between 11 and 1,300 million years before) a massive meteor plummeted into the surface of the planet Mars. Its impact was so great that it made a crater of more than 100 kilometres in diameter and launched into space several tons of volcanic and sedimentary material.

This material went into orbit around the Sun where it collided with other rocks, broke into smaller particles and got bathed in cosmic radiation. At the time when the fragment of rock that later became known as the Nakhla meteorite broke away from the other material, Hakim's dog's wolf-like ancestors had only just diverged from their fox-like cousins (Mohammed Ali Effendi Hakim's ancestors meanwhile had not yet differentiated themselves from orangutans or gorillas).

This rock and others like it crossed the earth's path many times eventually entering its atmosphere at widely different times and places.

It is often said that the death of the dog was the only fatality ever recorded for a meteor impact. It was certainly this angle of the story that led the Egyptian newspaper "Al Ahali" to send a reporter to Denshal to interview the farmer who showed him a greenish fragment covered in pitch. He said that numerous shards had plummeted to earth and buried themselves to depths of up to one metre.The news when it was translated into English prompted a few British scientists, who were residents of Egypt, to visit the strewn area. They succeeded in recovering about 10 kilograms of the meteorite.

Curiously, none of them visited Denshal or communicated any further with Hakim whose eyewitness account was the very first report of the event. John Ball of the Egyptian Survey Department stated that the meteorite would probably have been lost to science altogether "but for the action of a farmer, Mohammed Ali Effendi Hakim, who communicated a note of the occurrence to the Arabic Newspaper El Ahali". But after discussions via telegram with an official in Denshal, Ball concluded that no meteor fall had actually occurred in the area and no column of smoke had really been seen there. He ended up dismissing the dog story as the likely "product of a lively imagination".

Poor pooch. As if being vaporised by a scorching ball of Martian lava wasn't indignity enough. Still, short and novel deaths, whether apocryphal or not, do tend to lend the victim a certain kind of immortality.

Nakhlite is now the generic name for meteorites thought to have originated from this ancient Martian impact and their extreme rarity has led them to be referred to as the "crown jewels" of meteorites amongst the cognoscenti. They have found application in providing a base for comparison with results being sent back by the Martian rover missions and some scientists have convinced themselves that traces of fossilized Martian bacteria can be found within them. This week saw the report of a new Nakhlite fragment weighing 0.7 kilograms recently discovered in the ice of Antarctica.