the absence of rains and dews, of gales and thunder; but a frequent recurrence of terrible hurricanes: such is the meteorological constitution of the arid zone, which embraces all the northern districts of Africa, except the Mediterranean region—that is, from the snowy heights of Atlas to the fertile pastures of Soudan—and which extends in Asia from the west to the north-east, for all but one narrow belt, as far as the 119th meridian of longitude.
Foremost among the phenomena peculiar to this zone we must place those famous tempests which, in default of humid clouds, traverse with startling swiftness the changing surface of the Desert, driving before them whirlwinds of burning sand, and striking the traveller’s heart with a sense of unconquerable awe. The wind of the Desert is called by the Arabs the choum or khamsin; but is more generally known in European books as the Simoun, Simoom, or Samoun. It is the Samiel of the Turks; and, under a somewhat milder form, the Scirocco of the Mediterranean. Wherever, or however it blows, it is a pernicious and hateful wind; the blast, in all probability, which destroyed the hosts of Sennacherib at the bidding of the Divine Word,—
Torrents of burning sand sweep before it, a thick veil of darkness envelopes the firmament, and the sun assumes a blood-red hue.
When the Simoom rises, says M. Martins,[59] the air is filled with dust of such extreme fineness that it makes its way through objects hermetically sealed, penetrates into the eyes, the ears, and the organs of respiration. A burning heat, like that which breathes from the mouth of a furnace, possesses the air, and paralyzes the strength of men and animals. Seated on the sand, with their backs turned to windward, the Arabs, wrapped in their burnous, wait with fatalistic resignation the end of the torment; their camels crouching, exhausted, panting, stretch their long necks upon the scorching soil. Seen through this powdery haze, the sun’s disc, shorn of its beams, shows pale and ghastly as that of the moon.
Fortunately, the phenomenon never prevails over any very considerable area, and beyond its limits the atmosphere remains serene and calm; so that travellers who have watched it approaching in the form of a reddish cloud, without being able to calculate on its direction, have often escaped with no worse result than a panic, and have only witnessed its terrible effects at a distance.
It must not, however, be confounded with the sand-storms which the pilgrim encounters in the Arabian Desert, and which seem confined to that region. Dean Stanley, on his route from Suez to Sinai, met with one which prevailed the whole day. “Imagine,” he says, “the caravan toiling against this,—the Bedouins each with his shawl thrown completely over his head, half of the riders sitting backwards,—the camels, meantime thus virtually left without guidance, though from time to time throwing their long necks sideways to avoid the blast, yet moving straight onwards with a painful sense of duty truly edifying to behold. Through the tempest, this roaring and driving tempest, which sometimes made me think that this must be the real meaning of ‘a howling wilderness,’ we rode on the whole day.”[60]
A French cavalier, M. Trémaux, while crossing the Desert of Korosko, had the good fortune to witness the course of a Simoom, while himself in a position of safety.
It was the 8th of February 1848. The horizon in the south-west wore a hue of the evillest augury. Gusts of wind, which seemed to have issued from some red-hot brazier, beat in the face of the travellers. The camel-drivers, accustomed to interpret these sinister signs, and assured that a tempest was at hand, felt themselves called upon to give M. Trémaux a few counsels, which were by no means reassuring.
“As soon as the storm darkens the air,” said one of them, “by surrounding us with a cloud of sand, we must throw ourselves prone on the ground, wrap our heads in our finest stuffs, to protect our respiration from this sand, which burns the throat. It will be useless to trouble ourselves about the camels; they will lie down of their own accord, bend their head against their burden, and never stir so long as the tempest lasts. If the sand accumulates by our side, we must move in such a manner as to prevent it from covering us, making it roll under itself, but without exposing our heads. Remember these things carefully; and the will of God be done!”
“That is not all,” added another; “when the water-bags are partly shrunken, as are ours at this moment, and the Khamsin blows for some time, it finishes by completely drying them up.”
Thus warned, M. Trémaux was compelled to face, with all the resignation he was capable of, the melancholy alternative of perishing suffocated by the sand, or, a little later, of succumbing to the tortures of thirst. He continued to journey, or rather to drag himself towards the centre of the choking atmosphere, and to watch the scourge which rapidly drew near. This lasted a couple of hours, after which the travellers had the satisfaction of seeing the Simoom glide by on their right, and depart with the same rapidity.
A column of the French army, commanded by the Dukes of Aumale and of Montpensier, had met with a less happy chance on the 7th of March 1844, in the Souf, or Algerine Sahara; it was attacked by a Simoom, which prolonged its furious assaults during fourteen hours. On the day following, M. Fournel, a mining engineer who accompanied the expedition, ascertained that the meteor had swept but a narrow zone parallel to the Aurès range, and that at the mountain base the tranquillity of the atmosphere had been undisturbed.
The Simoom, or Khamsin, is, however, more troublesome and painful than really dangerous. M. Martins speaks of the annihilated army of Cambyses, the Persian king, which perished in the Libyan Desert (B.C. 524),[61] and of whole caravans engulfed in the sepulchral sands. “The numerous skeletons of camels,” he adds, “which we met with on our way prove that these catastrophes are still of frequent occurrence.” It is more probable, however, that they died from dearth of water and want of food. As for the Persian host, it was probably swallowed up in one of those quicksands, those hidden treacherous gulfs, which are found in the deserts of Libya, as well as in those of Persia and Arabia. The evil effects of the Simoom have, in fact, been exaggerated by the Arabs, whose highly-coloured narratives have been too easily adopted by credulous travellers. It heats the blood, it dries the skin, it renders respiration troublesome; but it does not kill.
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A FRENCH COLUMN IN ALGIERS SURPRISED BY THE SIMOOM.
A FRENCH COLUMN IN ALGIERS SURPRISED BY THE SIMOOM.
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Whirlwinds of Sand (Sand-Spouts).
Whirlwinds of Sand (Sand-Spouts).
It is not always a single wind which blows in the Deserts; but sometimes two or three currents, from opposite directions, cross and clash and drive against one another with increasing fury. Then is produced the singular phenomenon of the sand-spout, often witnessed on a magnificent scale in the sandy plains of Eastern Asia and Southern America. The sand is not now driven in voluminous masses in a rectilineal direction; but raised aloft in the form of long tortuous columns, which whirl to and fro like gigantic spectres in the mazes of a wild demon-dance. At the same time, the azure of the sky grows pale and troubled, the sun’s light obscured, the boundaries of the horizon seem to meet together; the burning dust held in suspension in the air renders it irrespirable, and if one of these whirlwinds encounters any object which offers a resistance, it carries it upward and hurls it a considerable distance. Fortunately the phenomenon is one of brief duration. The atmospheric equilibrium is speedily restored; the heavens recover their serenity; the atmosphere grows clear, and the sand columns, falling in upon themselves, form a number of little hills or cones, apparently constructed with great care, like those mimic edifices of sand or snow built up by children in their pastimes.
It is said that these furious whirlwinds have occasionally engulfed whole caravans in their tremendous vortex,—
Whether this be true or not, there can be no doubt that the spectacle is one of great magnificence, and calculated to inspire the traveller with emotions of awe and dread. Mr. Atkinson describes it as seen by him, on one occasion, when traversing the Mongolian Desert:—
“As we passed,” he says,[62] “in the middle of a space sown with innumerable hillocks of sands, we saw about thirty of them suddenly raise themselves around us, lengthen into long elliptical columns, and glide with many a whirl and sweep over the surface of the Desert with the hissings and contortions of gigantic serpents which had awakened at our approach. These spouts, for the phenomenon was no other, varied in diameter; the smallest measured between twenty and thirty feet; a few attained to a hundred; and one, which absorbed in its vortex all that it approached, rose to nearly two hundred. One might have said, on seeing them bending, rising again and crossing one another in space amidst an atmosphere of dust, that they were antediluvian monsters emerging from their geological bed, and returning into the feverish activity of existence. But soon, the atmospheric forces which had raised them beginning to fail, we saw these sand-spouts fall away one after another, and form on the surface of the Desert a number of moving hillocks similar to those from which we had just emerged.”
The poet, invoking the judgment of Heaven on the traitor, would fain doom him to the misery of cherishing hopes that shall never be realized. “May he,” cries the minstrel—
The image here is borrowed from that most singular phenomenon of the Desert, the Mirage; an atmospheric illusion due to the refraction of the sun’s rays upon the sand, and the intense expansion of the lower strata of the air,—in other words, it arises from the total reflection of the rays of light from the lower surface of a stratum of air. “This occurs when, from any cause, such a stratum of air possesses a higher refractive power than the one immediately below it. Such a condition of the atmosphere causes remote objects to be seen as if reflected in a mirror, or to appear as if suspended in the air. When the effect is confined to apparent elevation, the English sailors call it looming; when inverted images are formed, the Italians give it the name of Fata Morgana. The Arabs call it Serab, or Suhrab, the ‘Water of the Desert;’ and the Hindus, Tchittram, or ‘the Picture.’”
The effects of the illusion are extraordinary, but undoubtedly they are heightened by the imagination of observers, generally over-excited by fatigue, by privations, or sometimes by fever. These causes contribute to vary the nature of the phenomenon as seen by different eyes. Thus some gaze enraptured on verdurous islands bright as Armida’s enchanted garden, with feathery palms and blooming flowers, and delicious sparkling lakes; others see, in that dim far-off which is never reached, the laughing waves of ocean, with ships resting calmly at anchor, or
and camels browsing quietly upon its shores; others, again, see before them the rolling river, its banks studded with groves and palaces; and all this, while there is not a solitary real object on the horizon whose presence might serve in some degree as a foundation for their visions. It is the very phantasmagoria of nature; her wildest, most wayward, and most fantastic sport. The reflection of the sky, modified by the inequalities of the soil and the vibratory movements of the air, can alone account for the singular deception. Imagination shows its victim, in the reflected image of the cloudless sky, a sheet of water, which is variously taken for a sea, a lake, or a river; it invests the slightest objects on the earth’s surface with forms, colours, and dimensions, which are easily metamorphosed into houses, ships, men, animals; and it seems certain that those which in Nubia our fancy converts into camels would, in the Soudan, be transformed into elephants, and at Venice into gondolas. Imagination makes us its dupes, and gives to airy nothings
It becomes absolutely necessary, therefore, to distinguish these wholly personal illusions born of a heated brain, from those which are really due to a definite physical cause. The latter necessarily suppose the existence of actual objects, below or very little above the horizon. Under such conditions, the most frequent illusion is that which shows the sky or rocks reflected in the expanse of rarified air superincumbent on the earth’s surface, and which through this cause alone resembles water. It is then that the ignorant or inexperienced traveller, overwhelmed with fatigue and devoured by thirst, hastens his eager steps to reach more quickly that limpid water, where he hopes to refresh and reinvigorate himself, but which flies before his advance, and speedily vanishes altogether. Sometimes it is an inverted representation of terrestrial objects which appears in the air; or rather, these same objects, several times reflected, appear to multiply themselves. M. Trémaux relates that he saw the latter form of mirage in Nubia. He observed a row of doum-palms, which were about two thousand yards distant, repeated in several similar rows, each with a like number of trees, so as to produce the effect of a quincunx; among these trees floated several seeming sheets of water.
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A Mirage in the Desert.
A Mirage in the Desert.
We must remember, moreover, that the immensity, uniformity, and vacuity of the Desert, singularly contribute to render optical illusions frequent. The very serenity of the air assists in destroying the perspective to which we are accustomed in temperate climates, which are always more or less misty. Objects appear much nearer than they are in reality, because they are more distinctly visible, and also because nothing intervenes between them and the observer. Their dimensions, too, become arbitrary, for want of standards of comparison by which to measure them. So the trees and the mountains where the weary traveller hopes to obtain a temporary repose and a passing shelter from the Pythian’s fiery arrows, seem constantly to recede before him, like the rainbow when pursued by the ignorant peasant; and, until experience has taught him to rectify the apparent testimony of his senses, he is doomed, like Tantalus, to be the victim of continual deceptions,—
Nor is this all; hunger, thirst, weariness, and especially the action of the solar heat upon the brain, determine a peculiar pathological condition, a species of mental intoxication or delirium which powerfully predisposes the victim to hallucinations, and deprives the mind of that self-control which would enable it to chase away the phantoms that haunt it. To this affection, whose symptoms are frequently but erroneously confounded with those of the mirage, the Arabs have given a specific name. They call it Ragle. A distinguished French traveller has described it with exhaustive fulness,[65] and he attributes it to fatigue, excessive heat, and want of sleep.
It shows itself most commonly at night, and in dreams, attacks of nightmare, and a somnambulism of which the sufferer is perfectly conscious, without being able to throw it off. By day strange hallucinations affect the sight, the hearing, and even, though less powerfully, the senses of taste and smell. The aberration extends, as far as the sight is concerned, to the objects which we are in the habit of seeing; a small stone, for instance, expands into a rock; the rut of a carriage-wheel enlarges into the furrow of a freshly ploughed field; a tuft of grass or a bush will assume the grand proportions of a forest; and, what is remarkable, these objects seem always close at hand. Another frequent error is the elevation of horizontal surfaces; the horizon becomes a wall or a mountain. “It has happened to myself,” says M. d’Escayrac, “to meet with walls constantly reappearing before me. My extended arm has plunged into the masonry, but my body never encountered any obstacle; the rampart opened to give me a free passage.”
Hearing is, in its turn, affected. Then, any sound whatsoever, such as a footfall, the blow of a stone, the whisper of the wind, is changed into melodious sounds, keen cries of distress, the murmur of woods, the harmony of familiar songs.
One day, says M. d’Escayrac, I heard the click-clack of a village mill. Endeavouring to collect my senses, and to obtain an explanation of the sound, I perceived that it arose from the clink of my sword-belt against the pommel of my saddle, to which I had buckled my sabre.
Jomard, the savant, who experienced the effects of the ragle during his travels in Egypt, confirms in every respect the foregoing description. On his way from Rosetta to Alexandria, he kept along the border of the sea, and found his feet painfully staggering in the thick fine sand. Such a journey is necessarily one of extreme fatigue. After the first night, this fatigue grew overwhelming; the traveller lost all accurate perception of objects, or of the form of places. The surface of the lake Medeah appeared not so much a sheet of water as a monotonous plain. Constantly pressing forward, he maintained a hard fight against the overpowering sense of slumber. Half-asleep, half-awake, his brain was dazzled with the most fantastic phantoms, and the hallucination was so great that he plunged into the lake before him, without perceiving it, though the water was very deep. But the freshness caused by the evaporation of the water warned him of his error, and the vision suddenly passed away.
Such being the phenomena of the Desert, one can understand the dreary picture which Dante paints in his “Inferno,” of—
whose soil is—
and where—
decorative bar
THE Flora of a region where nature provides no genial fertilizing rains, and whose soil is simply a shifting sand, moistened only in certain places by a brackish water, must necessarily be one of extreme poverty.
It is reduced very nearly, as we have seen, to a few plants of the genus Salsola (salt-wort), flourishing on the borders of the salt pools and lakes. Nevertheless, at a few points, where a certain degree of fixity obtains in the sand, we meet with the thornless bushes or shrubs, the Ephedra alata and the retama Duriœi; some pistachios (pistacia lentiscus and p. terebinthus); the “drin” (aristida pungens), a tall grass, with linear leaves, some seven feet high, to which the camel is very partial; and the “ézel,” a member of the family of Polygonaceæ, which botanists class with the allied buckwheat and knot-grasses, and which attains the stature of three to four feet. The latter plant throws out roots, which are generally uncovered, to a distance of twenty to twenty-five feet; its woody stem spreads in its upper portion into gnarled branches, terminated each by a cluster of green, cylindrical and leafless twigs, which fall during winter. Elsewhere rise the tall trunks of the doum-palms, either isolated or assembled in scanty clumps, under which the traveller obtains with difficulty a modicum of shade, but which are otherwise of no value to him.
In districts where the surface is more broken up, notably in Palestine, on the banks of the Jordan and the Dead Sea; in the Sinaitic Peninsula of Arabia; in the Nubian deserts of Naga, Aredah, and Bahiouda; finally, even in the Sahara, in the “Desert of Erosion,” and the table-land region, vegetable life becomes more abundant and more varied, though still but of mediocre interest. However, a curious arbustus, the Limioniastrum Guyonianum, shows itself very frequently in these damp localities, where it attains sometimes the dimensions of a tree. Its attenuated leaves are covered with saline efflorescence, and its particles of rosy flowers relieve the monotony of the wilderness. In the permanent salt marshes, or chotts, some of the plants are analagous to those formed in the bogs of Languedoc.
Among the plants of the Desert I must not forget the rose of Jericho (Anastatica hierochuntica),[67] an annual which contracts itself into a ball, and, blown about by the breeze, seems a dead and withered mass of twigs. But plunge it into water, and it expands, regains the bloom of life, affording a remarkable example of what is called “revivification.” The fable respecting it is, that the first time it ever bloomed was on the eve of the Nativity, and that its flower remained open until Easter.
Several other vegetable species grow on the table-lands of the Algerine Sahara, which are found elsewhere under similar conditions of soil and climate. They are thorny shrubs and underwood, almost wholly belonging to the family of Salsolaceæ, or littoral plants, which only thrive on ground impregnated with salt; there are also sub-frutescent plants, partly dried up by the sun. In some places the nakedness of the earth is concealed by the bloom of geraniums and heliotropes. Further, you may notice in the region of the table-lands, the Melantha punctuata, a member of the Colchicum tribe, which bears a bouquet of very white flowers grown upon the sand, and surrounded by a crown of ensheathed leaves. Not unworthy of rejoicing the eyes of the most fastidious connoisseurs, it lives and dies unknown in the solitudes of the Sahara.
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Vegetable Life in the Desert. 1. Jujube Tree. 2. Lentiscus. 3. Tamarisk.
Vegetable Life in the Desert.
1. Jujube Tree. 2. Lentiscus. 3. Tamarisk.
In the hollows, where the earth preserves some degree of humidity, a fine soft sward prevails, of the most delicious emerald green; two herbs, the Alfa (stipa tenacissima) and the White Wormwood (artemisia alba),[68] often cover extended areas; the jujube trees clothe themselves in profuse foliage; the coloquinta stretches over the ground its branches loaded with spherical fruit; and the tamarisk, developed into a tree, waves in the wind its tufts of snowy and rose-hued flowers. It is in these meadows that the Arab rears his tent and pastures his flocks under a winter sky. The industrious and sedentary tribes seek in the oases a more benignant nature,—
and a soil which will repay their toil with liberal harvests. And it is there only, in truth, that vegetation presents a development, a continuity, and sometimes even a variety, which recalls the fortunate countries of the Mediterranean region.
The old geographer, Ptolemæus, compared the Sahara to a panther’s skin, sprinkled with black spots on a tawny ground. These spots which, by an effect of contrast, are set off in black on the yellowish tint of the desert, are the far-famed oases, which have furnished our poets and romancists with so many an appropriate image. Ptolemy’s comparison is the more accurate because these islands of verdure scattered over the sandy ocean,
have, in general, a circular form. We must except, however, the grandest and most beautiful of all, Egypt. That immemorial land of mystery and power is enchased in the Desert region like any other oasis, and only differs in its greater extent and more elongated figure. It stretches along the Nile like a ribbon—
Its length, from Cairo to Assouan, is 450 miles. Its breadth does not exceed nine to twelve miles, except at Cairo, where it measures about eighty miles along the sea-coast, which forms the base of a triangular district known as the Delta (Δ) of the Nile. The two other angles are marked by the cities of Pelusium and Alexandria. This long strip of fertility is narrowly shut in between deserts of almost incredible sterility.
A peculiarity worthy of attention, because it is the unique cause of the fertility of Egypt, is, that the valley of the Nile, instead of sloping down on either side to the river-bank, assumes a gently convex form. It is owing to this slight convexity that, at the epoch of the inundation—beginning in June and ending in October—the Nile waters overflow to the right and to the left, rest upon the soil, and there deposit their precious mud. How different the aspects of the country at different seasons of the year! First, the bright sparkling sheets of far-spreading and fertilising water; then the emerald green of the growing crops; lastly, the ripe warm yellow hues of the full harvest. Well might Amrou, the Arab conqueror of Egypt, remark to the Caliph Omar, that, “according to the vicissitudes of the seasons, the face of the country is adorned with a silver wave, a verdant emerald, and the deep gold of an abundant harvest.”
The soil of Egypt is, then, simply an alluvium mixed with the sand which the winds bring from the Desert. Its aspect is that of a rich, well-cultivated land, but bears the impress of a wearisome monotony. You see there neither the dark dense forest, the rolling prairie, nor the undulating woodland; from the shore of the Mediterranean to the tropics you meet everywhere with the same cultivation; the same mud-built villages, with their dirty and winding streets; and ever the same clumps of palms, which would end by becoming tedious if it were not that their elegance of form invests them with an eternal beauty—if a glorious radiance did not gild with “refined gold” everything it touches—if, finally, an after-glow of wondrous loveliness, of which the eye and soul can never weary, which whenever seen suggests some new and subtle emotions, did not terminate every day by a crepuscular pomp of indescribable magnificence.
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Vegetable Life in the Desert. 1. Doum-Palm. 2. Date-Palm. 3. Alfa (Stipa tenacissima).
Vegetable Life in the Desert.
1. Doum-Palm. 2. Date-Palm. 3. Alfa (Stipa tenacissima).
The Palm-tree is, in Egypt, as in all the oases, the principal element of the arborescent vegetation. But you also meet there with the banana, the gum-tree, the orange, the jujube, the mulberry, the sycamore, and other tall trees, which were planted by command of Mehemet Ali, and have perfectly succeeded. The green banks of the river are diversified by coppices of acacias and tamarisks. In the Fayoum district bloom impervious hedges of cactus, and plantations of roses for the production of rosewater. Cereals yield four crops a-year; flax, hemp, indigo, cotton, the sugar-cane, prosper admirably; and under a climate where ice, snow, and hail are unknown, not a month but has its burden of flowers and fruits. Abundant crops of vegetables are raised, even as in those days when the Israelites in the wilderness bewailed “the cucumbers and the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlics” of Egypt.
M. Charles Martins classes the Oases of the Sahara under three heads, corresponding to his three sub-regions.[69]
The oasis of the Table Lands is watered by a stream or a copious spring. That of the valleys of Erosion, by natural or artificial Artesian wells. That of the Sandy Desert wants water. In the latter the palm-trees are planted in conical cavities hollowed by the hand of man, that their roots may strike down to the subterranean reservoir which is to nourish them.
Every oasis is composed, in the main, of date-palms, which seem to form a continuous forest; but in reality they are planted in rows, and in gardens separated from one another by walls of earth, which are pierced with an aperture to admit of the entrance of the irrigating rill into the enclosed square. The soil employed in the construction of the walls is removed from the paths, which are consequently below the surface, and can be employed for a double purpose; they facilitate circulation in the oases, and the waters, after having refreshed the gardens and revived the soil, discharge themselves into these hollow ways, whence they flow towards the chotts, or stagnate in swamps, which the lethargic Moslem never thinks of draining. From such hotbeds of infection issues the monster Fever every year, and slays its hundreds.
In case of need, every oasis becomes a fortress. Each “square of flowery ground” is a redoubt; the assailant’s bullet lodges in the earth wall, or if it pierces through, forms a new loophole in which the Arab plants his gun to aim at his enemy. The villages themselves are encircled with walls, flanked by towers, which remind the spectator of the picturesque fortifications of mediæval times.
The Date-Palm (Phœnix dactylifera) is the tree of the Desert; there only will its fruits ripen; without it, the Desert would be uninhabitable and uninhabited. Arab poesy represents it as a living being, created by God on the sixth day, at the same time as man. To express under what conditions it prospers, the imagination of the Saharan exaggerates the true, to render it the more palpable. “This king of the oasis,” he says, “must plunge his feet in the water and raise his head in the fire of heaven.” Science, to a certain extent, confirms this seeming hyperbole; for it needs 5100° of heat accumulated during eight months for the date to ripen its fruit perfectly. If the sum of heat be less, the fruits set, but they do not grow to their full dimensions, remain bitter to the taste, and fail in the sugar and farina, which form their nutritive properties.
These conditions are realized in the climate of the Sahara. The mean temperature of the year averages from sixty-eight to seventy-six degrees, according to the locality. The heat commences in April, and does not cease until October. The thermometer seldom sinks in the cold season more than two degrees below zero, and the date can endure six degrees below zero.
Rain, as already stated, is rare in the Sahara; it falls in winter, and stimulates into a newly awakened life the vegetation which has been drained of vigour by a summer sun. Sometimes they descend in torrents, but these torrents, like our summer showers, are of briefest duration. At Tongourt and Ouraegla whole years pass by without a drop of rain. Does not the reader understand, then, the gratefulness of the Arabs towards a tree which can derive its nourishment from the burning sand, the scarcely less burning airs of heaven, and the brackish waters beneath the soil which are fatal to all other kinds of vegetation—which retains its verdure fresh in the glare of a pitiless sun—which resists successfully the winds that bow to the ground its flexible stem—which provides him with beams and coverings for his tent, cordage for the harness of his horses and camels, fruit to satisfy his hunger and wine to quench his thirst—which is, moreover, “a thing of beauty,” and gladsome to the eye?
What the vine is to the Italian, the oak to the Englishman, the cocoa-nut tree to the Polynesian, is the date-palm to the Arab. And more—far more. This single tree has peopled the Desert. A civilization, rudimentary compared with that of the West, sufficiently advanced if you contrast it with that of the Malay or the South Sea Islander, finds in it its standing-point, its centre, its support. And without it the tribes of the Sahara would cease to be.[71]
The wealth of an oasis is computed by the number of its palm trees. All of them, however, are not fruitful; for the date is diœcious. It has its males and its females. The males have flowers furnished with stamens only, and form a closed-up, folded, grape-like ball, previous to the ripening of the pollen in an envelope called the spathe. The females, on the contrary, bear clusters of fruit also wrapped up in a spathe, but incapable of development until fecundated by the pollen or dust of the stamens. To multiply the date-trees, the Arabs do not sow the kernels of the fruits, though they germinate with extreme facility, for it is impossible to tell beforehand of what sex the tree will be; they prefer, therefore, to detach a slip from the trunk of a female tree, and this becomes fruitful at the expiry of eight years.
The male trees blossom, says Mr. Tristram,[72] in the month of March, and about the same time the case containing the female buds begins to open. To impregnate these, a bunch of male flowers is carefully inserted and fastened in the calyx. Towards the beginning of July, when the fruit begins to swell, the bunches are tied to the neighbouring branches.
The dates are ripe in October, at which time any premature rain is fatal to the crop, though the roots require a daily watering. Not less injurious are east winds in March and April. The tree when it begins to bear is about seven feet high. Each year the lowest ring of leaves falls off, so that the age of a palm may be roughly computed from the notches on its stem. Its fruit begins to decline after a century, and the tree is then cut down for building purposes; but it will live for at least a couple of hundred years. Some trees produce as many as twenty bunches, but the average in a favourable season is from eight to ten bunches, each weighing from twelve to twenty pounds. Before the dates ripen, each proprietor is bound to set apart one tree in his garden, whose fruit is consecrated for the service of the mosque and the use of the poor.
From the juice of the date the Arab obtains a sweet fermented liquor, called “laguni,” of which he is inordinately fond. He makes an incision in the top of the tree, taking care to strike home to the centre. A funnel is attached, by which the sap flows into a vessel at the rate of about three quarts every morning for ten to sixteen days. The incision requires to be opened afresh daily.
The cabbage, or soft pith and young unfolded leaves at the summit of the stem, in taste approaching the chestnut, is also eaten, but only when the tree has fallen or been felled, as the loss of its crown invariably destroys it.
There are fifteen varieties of dates, of which the dghetnour is considered the best for keeping, and three other kinds are preferred fresh.
The crest of the full-grown trees rises about fifty feet above the ground. The air circulates freely under the leafy canopy formed by their interlacing branches, but the sun’s rays do not penetrate. Shade, air, and water—these three elements permit the most varied cultivation in the palm-gardens, despite the scorching heats of summer. The fruit trees which flourish are the fig, the pomegranate, the apricot; less frequently, the vine and the olive; still more rarely, the peach, the pear, and the orange. Vegetables are commonly cultivated during winter; such as turnips, cabbages, onions, carrots, beans, and pimento (Capsicum annuum), an indispensable condiment for those Arab sauces (merga) destined to stimulate the digestive energies of a people who abstain from alcoholic liquors. You may also remark pumpkins, gourds, and water-melons; small squares of lucerne, which yield as many as eight crops yearly; the henna (Lawsonia inermis), which tints with yellow the nails of the Arab women; and tobacco (Nicotiana rustica), cultivated most largely in the Souf. In winter you may refresh your eyes in the clearings of the oasis with verdurous fields, green with barleys and early wheats springing vigorously from the earth. The cultivation of cotton, though considerably stimulated by the failure of the usual supply from the Southern States of America, is still in its infancy. There can be little doubt, however, that with improved methods of irrigation it will be considerably and successfully developed.
The oases of the table-land region, fertilized, as we have already seen, by the streams of fresh water which flow down from the mountains and spread abroad in natural or artificial channels, are much the most fertile, and also the most healthy. They possess, moreover, the inestimable advantage of being but a short distance from the Mediterranean region, in a country less arid and less desolate than the remainder of the Desert. I may name, among these oases, those of El-Kantara, Biskra, and El-Outaïa, which form a sort of chaplet, and are watered by the same river.
The oasis of El-Kantara is the first we encounter on quitting the Mediterranean region to penetrate into the Sahara through the gloomy and precipitous ravine entitled “The Mouth of the Desert.” It is situated 1800 feet above the sea-level. Its length is 5000 yards. Fournel, the first geologist who examined it (in 1864), christened it the Hyères of the Sahara. Its temperature is cool and equable, and does but just suffice to enable the dates to ripen. It possesses upwards of 76,000 palm-trees, sheltering under their leafy shadow legions of apricots, pomegranates, and fig-trees. In the centre of this pleasant and fruitful shade houses of brick, with flat roofs and narrow loop-holed windows, surround a square tower. The ancient watch-towers have fallen into decay. Before France took under its “protection” the peaceful Berbers who cultivate the oasis, these towers were useful as posts of observation whence to descry the approach of the wandering Arabs, who resort in summer to the pastures of the mountains, and in winter to those of the Sahara.
As a type of the oasis of the Desert of Erosion, let us take that of Ouargla, the last which submitted to the French in South Algeria.
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A Street in Ouargla.
A Street in Ouargla.
It is situated in a profound hollow. In form it is elliptical, with its major axis measuring about five thousand yards, and its minor about three thousand. The palms are planted at the rate of ten to eleven hundred a hectare (two acres); they attain to extraordinary dimensions, and their dense foliage over-arches a small world of fruit trees. Outside the gardens grow some wild date-palms, which yield a smaller crop, but whose fruit is much more savoury. Two avenues, or clearings, bisecting the forest from north to south, lead to the q’sour, or village, of Ouargla. This q’sour, like every other, is built of sun-dried earth, and surrounded by a circular rampart in very bad condition, six to thirteen feet in height, and four and a-half feet thick at the base. It is flanked with loop-holed towers, and encircled externally by a muddy moat, crossed by six causeways leading to as many gates.
Before some of these gates are planted the small entrenched camps, wherein the Arab shepherds of the neighbourhood take refuge with their flocks what time the oasis is menaced by an enemy.
The q’sour of Ouargla is divided into three quarters, inhabited by three tribes, who do not live always on the most friendly terms. In appearance it resembles the Saharan q’sours, which have all a strong family likeness; there are the mosque, and the governor’s residence, and the open market-place, and the narrow squalid streets, often obstructed by heaps of unclean and unsavoury rubbish; and the low dull houses, pierced with holes instead of windows, which have seldom any shutters; so that the traveller, when he penetrates into these dismal quarters, is startled by the contrast which they present to the picture of enchanted palaces full of shade, perfume, and freshness, drawn by his eager imagination. Our poets and romancists have much to answer for. Their ideal East is very different from that actual East, in all its heat, and noisomeness, and glare, which the voyager finds around him, and which seems to have lost much of its beauty along with its grandeur and its power. Pleasant to the fancy is the palm-grove, pleasant the garden with its golden and purple fruitage, but the warm (and often mineral) waters which irrigate, or rather inundate the soil, exhale the most deleterious emanations, so that the unfortunate inhabitants are constantly decimated by fever, blinded by ophthalmic disease, and devoured by insects!
We have already seen that the Desert of Erosion is watered by means of artesian wells, natural or artificial. The latter have been known to the peoples of the Sahara from the remotest antiquity; but the implements and the methods employed to bore or preserve them were, as the reader will suppose, very rude and unsatisfactory. The sides of the well are only supported by a framework of palm-wood, which decays very quickly; the well gets choked; divers descend with baskets to clear away the sand; but after awhile the evil exceeds their power of remedying it. “Then, for want of water,” says M. Martins, “the palms grow sick and perish; the villages are emptied of their population; the oasis contracts its boundaries, and gradually disappears. The Desert resumes possession of the demesne which the labour of man had temporarily won for it.” Fortunately, in the track of the French army have trodden the French engineers, with all the wonderful apparatus that Science places at their disposal, and in numerous places they have excavated true artesian wells, similar to those which supply some of our great towns. And thus many oases which were on the point of perishing have been saved, others have been created, and the conquest of the Desert by modern industry is henceforth no more than a question of time.
The oases of the Sandy Desert, as I have said, are not watered. They only possess such wells as suffice, more or less, for the needs of the poor cultivators. As for the palms, and other nutritive vegetables, they are planted at the bottom of conical excavations some eighteen, twenty-five, or thirty feet in depth; so that at a short distance you only see their crests rising above the sandy soil like large tufts of herbage. The slopes around these hollow gardens are stayed indifferently well by a matting of palm leaves. The well itself is placed in the centre, and its depth does not exceed five-and-twenty feet. Nothing can be more precarious than these oases, which a gust of wind may bury under an avalanche of sand. Yet the men are cleaner in their person, neater in attire, and livelier in spirit—the women are less wretched and less oppressed—and the houses better built and better provided than in the great q’sours of the upper regions. In the Souf, the sandy region of the Eastern Sahara, the industrious inhabitants of these oases remain at peace in the midst of the tumults and insurrections of their turbulent neighbours, and appear fully sensible of the advantages they undoubtedly derive from the firm and impartial rule of the French Government.
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THE artist who wishes to represent the broad expanse of Ocean’s “liquid plain,” does not fail to animate it with the white canvas of the labouring ships. If he paints the Desert, his picture would be divided by a horizontal line into two parts—the blue heaven, the yellow sand; the latter, an undulating sea, with a few clumps of palms in the background, and in the foreground, to enliven the too monotonous scene, a group or so of camels. The camel is, in fact, the indispensable accessory of every view of the Desert, as the ship of every marine painting; which justifies once more the Arab designation of “ship of the Desert” or “terrestrial ship” (gouareb el beurr).
In Book the First I have spoken of the Camel properly so-called, or camel with two humps, which is peculiar to Central and Eastern Asia. The camel of Arabia and Africa is the dromedary. The latter is employed conjointly with the two-humped camel in the westernmost countries of Asia: in Egypt, and in Nubia, he is much more widely spread than his congener, which is nearly unknown in the rest of Africa. The dromedary has but one hump. His hair is soft, woolly, moderately long about the body, longer and much thicker on the hump, the head, the neck, and the shoulders. Its colour varies from a reddish-brown to a clear yellow. Zoologists recognize three varieties of this species:—The Brown dromedary, also called, but improperly, the Caucasian dromedary—he is brown, like the Bactrian camel, and his short squat limbs indicate strength rather than agility; the White dromedary, of a very transparent colour, and of slender figure; and the Egyptian dromedary, larger than either of the preceding, and with body and limbs uniformly clothed in short gray hair. But the Arabs distinguish only two races: the Djemel, or camel of burden, which is no other, probably, than the Caucasian dromedary; and the Mahari, or camel for the saddle and war, whose name seems to apply equally to the two other varieties.
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1. The Mahari. 2. The Djemel.
1. The Mahari. 2. The Djemel.
The mahari is to the djemel what our chargers are to our carthorses, or, as the Arabs say, what the djend (noble) is to the kheddim (the servant). He has a very sure foot, a free, sustained, and rapid trot; he is sober, enduring, and courageous; a true courser, and the nomade’s inseparable friend and companion. His training is a matter of the highest importance, and skilfully adapted to develop all his best qualities and highest faculties.
The Arabs of the Tell assert that the maharis accomplish in one day ten times the march of a caravan, or a hundred leagues; but the best in blood and breeding do not generally exceed a daily journey of from thirty-five to forty leagues.
The young mahari has his place in the Arab’s tent. The children play with him; he is a recognized member of the family; custom and gratitude attach him to his masters, whom he divines to be his friends.
If the djemel be not as noble as the mahari, he is not less useful. Without him, all relations would be suspended between the peoples of the Sahara; the Soudan, wide, populous, and fertile as it is, would be a terra incognita; he is the sole means of intercommunication possible in the arid wastes of the Desert.
Alike living and dead, he is the fortune of his master.
Living, he carries the tents and the provisions; he makes war, he carries on commerce; that he might be patient, God (say the Arabs) created him without gall; he fears neither hunger nor thirst, fatigue nor heat; his hair is woven into the burnous and the tent-stuff; the milk of the female nourishes rich and poor, and fattens the horses; it is “a spring which does not dry up.”[73]
Dead, all his flesh is excellent eating; his hump (deroua) forms the daintiest dish at the banquet; in the bottles made of his skin, the water is neither consumed by wind nor sun; the shoes fashioned from it may tread unhurt upon the viper, and will save the traveller’s feet from burning wounds (haffa); denuded of its hair, afterwards soaked in water, and simply applied to a wooden saddle, without nails or pegs, it adheres to it, like the bark to the tree, and communicates to the whole a solidity which will defy war, the chase, and the foray.
The superiority of the mahari consists in this, that to all his own peculiar qualities he adds those of the djemel. His inferiority arises from the difficulty of his training, which consumes for more than a year all his master’s time without compensation, and from the fact that animals of his race are few in number.
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Striped Hyænas of the Sahara.
Striped Hyænas of the Sahara.
If we turn to the poet or the artist for a picture of the Desert, we find it peopled with animals of a very unsatisfactory character: the lion, the leopard, the panther, in quest of prey, seeking whom they may devour, or troops of hyænas and jackals, tearing with keen teeth the corpses of men and animals.