Linked to Biskra and civilization by the slender thread of steel which the French have thrown across some two hundred kilometers of dusty desert, Touggourt, the dark-green mass of its palm-groves floating betwixt the sky and the tossing dunes, suggested a boat moored to the shore by a long hawser. Cut that hawser, and Touggourt would, you feel, drift away upon the sea of sand, for it is the southernmost rail-head in the Algerine Sahara.

Until very recent years Touggourt was to all intents and purposes an island, a port of call for caravans plying between Algeria and the Niger territories, to be reached only by a five days’ voyage on a swaying “ship of the desert.” But with the completion of the railway its age-long isolation has become a thing of the past, and it is visited each winter by an increasing number of hardy tourists, who, foregoing for a time the bath-tubs, table-d’hôtes, and gaming-tables of Biskra, summon up the courage to brave the hardships of the eight-hour journey by narrow-gage railway in order that they may send picture post-cards to their friends at home from what it pleases them to term “the heart of the desert.”

When I first went to Algeria, more than twenty years ago, the journey to Touggourt was a real adventure, to be undertaken only with the consent of the French military authorities and with an adequate escort from the Camel Corps. The oasis was as remote from the beaten paths of travel as Baghdad, or Addis Ababa, or Khiva. But to-day it is only an excursion, to be made by unaccompanied women in comparative comfort and perfect safety. That is what comes from civilization. It is ruining the world for those of an adventurous turn of mind. The motor-car has crossed the Desert of Gobi to Urga; the mysterious mountains of Abyssinia resound to the hoot of the locomotive; seats in the Cairo-Baghdad mail-planes are booked for months in advance; the radio has become a commonplace to the sophisticated savages of the Upper Congo; motor-buses rumble through the jungles of Cambodia; Cooks sell through tickets, meals and rooms included, from Cairo to the Cape. For the Outer Lands are almost all exploited; the work of the pioneer and the frontiersman is nearly finished, and in a few more years, a very few, we shall see their like no more.

Forming a lofty hedge of green between the mud-brown town and the encircling desert is a vast forest of date-palms—nearly a quarter of a million of them—whose amazing luxuriance is due to the fact that Touggourt lies in the valley of the Oued Rir, the largest of that system of unseen rivers which drain the southern slopes of the Aurés and which has rewarded the efforts of the well-drillers with a supply of artesian water that has made this one of the most fertile and prosperous regions in the whole Sahara.

From an architectural point of view, Touggourt is one of the most curious towns in Africa, the labyrinthine native quarter being penetrated by long, dim tunnels, just large enough to permit the passage of camels, and running beneath the houses themselves. In places the walls of these subterranean passageways are honeycombed with little booths and shops, just as in New York establishments of a more pretentious order open on the subway. The houses, their walls unwhitewashed and unpierced by windows, are built of blocks of sun-dried mud, wisps of the straw used in their manufacture still protruding from them, with domed roofs of the same material. Seen from the top of one of the numerous minarets, the maze of tortuous lanes and alleys, the black mouths of the tunnels, the hundreds of earth-brown domes, and the mud walls, of the same monotonous color, give the impression that one has wandered into a town inhabited by some gigantic species of mole.

The native town is indescribably filthy, unkempt, and foul of smell, its streets littered with refuse, swarming with whining mendicants, scrofulous children, and great numbers of savage yellow dogs. But the French quarter is very neat and clean, with broad sandy streets lined by double rows of palm-trees; the inevitable Grande Place, deep in dust and with rather discouraged-looking vegetation; a sprinkling of European cafés and trading-establishments; and two hotels; a well-appointed and comfortable one operated by the Transat and a considerably less pretentious establishment called the Oued Rir.

For the blasé tourist, fresh from the casinos, dance-halls, and cafés chantants of Biskra, Touggourt holds few attractions, though one may take some really delightful rides through the extensive date plantations, the most fascinating vistas unfolding themselves at every turn of the road. The horses, however, far from being the beautiful Arab steeds of which the poets sing, are poor gaunt creatures, hard of gait and mouth, while the high, broad-seated native saddles, with their small stirrups and short leathers, might have been used with great effectiveness as instruments of torture by the Spanish Inquisition.

It so happened that we found ourselves in Touggourt in the fasting month of Ramadan, when no devout Mohammedan permits either food or water to pass his lips between sunrise and sunset for a period of thirty days. When the shadows began to lengthen with the approach of nightfall, we were wont to climb to the lofty platform atop the minaret of a disused mosque, from which could be obtained a superb view of the whole oasis and the adjacent desert. Just as the upper edge of the blood-red sun coincided with the western sky-line, an ancient field-piece, posted in the square below, crashed in smoke and flame. As the reverberations died away the white figures of the muezzins appeared on the balconies of their minarets, as the little figures pop out of Swiss clocks when they strike the hour, and over the waiting city rolled the high-pitched call to evening prayer: “Al-lah-hu il Al-lah ... Al-lah Ak-bar!” At the eagerly awaited signal the covers were tossed from the steaming cooking-pots, the sellers of cous-cous and sweetmeats were suddenly besieged by clamorous customers, and the entire population of Touggourt fell to with knives and fingers, ravenous after the day-long fast.

My daughter is passionately fond of animals, so, when she came upon two Arabs boys tormenting a desert fox cub which they had captured, she became its owner for a small consideration. It was an amusing little creature, as soft and furry as a chow puppy, and quickly became domesticated, following her about on a string. She announced at dinner that she intended taking it back to America with her, remarking that as a pet a Saharan fox would be much more chic than a sheep-dog or a Pomeranian. I did not attempt to dissuade her; I knew better. She retired happily, with the cub, a pile of blankets, and a bowl of milk. But when she appeared for breakfast it was obvious that she had passed a restless night.

“I didn’t sleep a wink,” she greeted us. “That fox is the most exasperating creature I have ever seen. He kept me awake until long after midnight with his barking. I fed him some milk, and he went to sleep for a time, but a little later I heard a noise under the bed. He was busy chewing the toes of my best dancing-slippers. I put him back in the blankets and tried to snatch a little sleep, but when I woke up he was gone. After looking everywhere for him, I finally found him hidden under the bath-tub. I’m through. A bull terrier for mine. It may not be as romantic as a Saharan fox, but it couldn’t possibly be as troublesome.”

One afternoon, for want of something better to do, we rode out to Temacin, a pretty little oasis, fifteen miles to the south of Touggourt, with white houses peering out from amid the palm-groves and the inevitable marabout’s tomb. Though it was an insufferably hot day, with the mercury hovering around 120 in the sun, the first two or three miles were delightful, for the road led through the date plantations, with the great leaves forming a canopy of green overhead and in our ears the pleasant sound of running water. But when we debouched upon the desert, to strike one of the seven main caravan-routes which cross the Sahara, it seemed as though we were riding upon the top of a stove at white heat and that we would be broiled alive.

The great trade-track on which we now found ourselves was very wide, a broad swath trodden below the level of the desert by the heart-shaped pads of the camels which have followed it since long before recorded history began. When half-way to Temacin we met a caravan coming up from the south; five months out of Timbuktu, our guide informed us after a brief colloquy with the leader; an endless file of men and animals plodding slowly across the burning waste. Some of the camels bore huge, round, tent-like arrangements, called bassourabs, in the privacy of which the women rode, protected alike from the sun and from the eyes of men. Atop of the bassourabs were curious wooden frameworks, six or eight feet high, resembling the lattice masts of battle-ships or miniature Eiffel Towers. The tops of these towers must have been fully sixteen feet above the ground, and from them fluttered colored rags or streamers, which were visible long before the camels themselves had appeared above the sky-line. I could not even hazard a guess as to their use, but the guide informed us that they were for purposes of identification, like the numerals at the bows of a destroyer or the emblems painted on the under wings of a battle-plane. His French was very sketchy, but, as nearly as I could make out, every tribe, or every caravan—I am not certain which—can be recognized by the shape of its camel-towers and by the color of the rags which flutter from them. This is a wise precaution, for in the vast stretches of the Sahara, where life is none too safe at best, it is essential that the leader of a great convoy, responsible for hundreds of lives and millions of francs’ worth of merchandise, should be able to determine before they come within rifle-shot whether those he sees approaching are enemies or friends.

When Nature fashioned the camel she must have had the peculiar requirements of the Arab in mind, for without the ungainly beast life in the desert would be impossible. It frequently attains an age of fifty years; it is capable of carrying a burden weighing up to half a ton, though six hundred pounds is usually the maximum; because of the structure of its stomach it can, as every one knows, go without water for several days on end; it finds ample pasturage in regions where a horse would die from starvation; and the fleet méhari, or racing-camels, such as are used by the Touareg, can, when pushed, cover incredible distances without resting. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, were it not for the camel, vast tracts on the maps of Africa and Asia would still be labeled “unexplored.”

The term “camel,” strictly speaking, should be used to designate only the single-humped dromedary of Africa, Arabia, and India, though it is also frequently applied to the two-humped Bactrian species found in Central Asia. Though motion-picture producers frequently use animals of both species in the same scenes, this is an amusing solecism, for their habitats are as widely separated as those of the bison and the buffalo. Of the Arabian camel there are almost as many breeds as there are of the horse; the clumsy, lumbering, moth-eaten beasts of burden made familiar to stay-at-home Americans by the circus have about the same relation to the slim, graceful, cream-colored méhari as a draft-horse has to a thoroughbred.

On desert journeys camels are expected to carry their loads about twenty-five miles a day for three days without drinking, being watered, however, on the fourth; but an animal of the fleeter breeds will carry its rider fifty miles a day for five days without water; while a Bedouin whom I once employed to carry an urgent message for me in Arabia covered 120 miles of desert in about eighteen hours.

The training of the camel as a beast of burden begins in its fourth year, when it is taught to kneel or rise at a given signal, and is gradually accustomed to bear increasing loads, which, in the case of exceptionally sturdy animals, sometimes weigh a thousand pounds. When too heavily laden, however, the camel, which can be as stubborn as a mule, refuses to rise—it was the last straw, you remember, which broke the camel’s back—but on the march it is exceedingly patient, yielding beneath its burden only to die. When relieved from its load it does not, like other animals, seek the shade, but prefers to kneel beside its burden in the full glare of the sun, seeming actually to enjoy the red-hot sand, a peculiarity which it shares only with the salamander. Overtaken by a sand-storm, the camel kneels with its back to the wind, and, stretching its long neck flat upon the ground, closes its eyes and nostrils and remains to all intents and purposes inanimate until the storm has passed, while its driver, muffled in his burnous, crouches in the lee of the beast, whose great hump affords some measure of protection from the blast.

The camel is the only animal in the world that provides its owner with transportation, food, drink, clothing, shelter, and fuel. The flesh of the young camel, particularly the fat of the hump, is considered a great delicacy, though camels are rarely slaughtered for eating purposes save on occasions of ceremony. The Arabs either drink its milk or curdle, strain, and press it into small balls, which are dried in the sun and provide a sour but sustaining beverage when crushed and mixed with water. Its long hair is made into the garments with which the folk of the desert clothe themselves, the carpets on which they sleep, and occasionally into tents, though goat’s-hair is more commonly used for the latter purpose; while the hide is tanned into an extremely durable leather. In those regions where wood is unobtainable, the camel’s dung is used for fuel, and from it the Arabs of Upper Egypt and the Sudan extract sal ammoniac for export. Given a camel and a date-palm, the desert holds no terrors for the Arab.

Though classified as a domestic animal, the camel is by nature a wild and savage beast. During the rutting-season male camels become exceedingly dangerous, evincing their anger by a curious bubbling sound, half-snarl, half-roar, engaging in fierce struggles with other males, and frequently attacking their drivers. Once, while crossing the Syrian Hamad, I saw a camel almost sever the arm of an Arab who had incautiously approached it; and on another occasion, in Mesopotamia, I was called upon to treat a Bedouin whose whole face had literally been smashed flat by a blow from the foot of an infuriated camel.

A great deal of sentimental nonsense has been written about the camel, which, as a matter of fact, is the stupidest, the most ungrateful, and the most ill-tempered of all domesticated animals. “If,” says Sir Francis Palgrave, “docile means stupid, well and good; in such a case the camel is the very model of docility. But if the epithet is intended to designate an animal that takes an interest in its rider so far as a beast can, that in some way understands his intentions, or shares them in a subordinate fashion, that obeys from a sort of submissive or half-fellow-feeling with his master, like the horse or the elephant, then I say that the camel is by no means docile—very much the contrary. He takes no heed of his rider, pays no attention whether he be on his back or not, walks straight on when once set a-going, merely because he is too stupid to turn aside, and then should some tempting thorn or green branch allure him out of the path, continues to walk on in the new direction simply because he is too dull to turn back into the right road. In a word, he is from first to last an undomesticated and savage animal rendered serviceable by stupidity alone, without much skill on his master’s part, or any coöperation on his own, save that of an extreme passiveness. Neither attachment nor even habit impresses him; never tame, though not wide-awake enough to be exactly wild.”

In the desert, about two hundred and fifty kilometers east-southeast of Touggourt, lies a group of seven small oases, the largest of which is Ghardaia. This archipelago is the home of a confederation of Berber tribes known as Mozabites, or the Beni-M’zab, to give them their proper name. The Mozabites, who number only about forty thousand, are not Arabs, but one of the ancient Berber races which lived in North Africa long before the Arabs came. Nearly all of them read and write Arabic, but in conversing among themselves they employ the Zenata dialect of the Berber tongue, for which, in common with the other branches of the old Berber stock, such as the Riffi and the Kabyles, there survives no written form. Though Moslems they belong to a sect of extreme dissenters, branches of which are also found in Oman and Zanzibar, being shunned by orthodox Mohammedans as the worst of heretics. Their creed is based on the precepts of Abdallah-ibn-Ibad, the assassin of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, and hence the traditional hatred in which they are held by the conventional followers of the faith, who refer to them as Khammes, “the Fifth,” because they are outside the four great branches of Islam. In their form of government, their extreme austerity of life, and their intolerance of other beliefs, as well as in their energy, industry, and commercial integrity, they strongly resemble the Puritans who settled on the shores of New England three hundred years ago. Like the Puritans, they went into exile in a remote land for the sake of their faith, while still another point of resemblance is found in their form of government, which is by a body of elders, called the Assembly. The laws promulgated by this body are as strict and as rigidly enforced as were the Blue Laws of early New England, a Mozabite found guilty of drinking wine or coffee, of smoking, or of frequenting houses of ill fame being punished by flogging.

The most direct route from Touggourt to the country of the Beni-M’zab lies straight across the desert, via Guerrara, which is also a Mozabite community; but should you be traveling by twelve-wheeler, in which case a few score miles or less do not greatly matter, it will repay you to take the somewhat longer road through Wargla—or Ourgla, as the French spell it—which, barring breakdowns and sand-storms, can be reached from Touggourt quite easily in a day.

Ourgla, said to be the oldest town in the Sahara, has a curiously medieval aspect, due, no doubt, to its being encircled by a massive wall pierced by six bastion-flanked gates. For centuries it was independent, a sort of Saharan counterpart of the free cities of the Hanseatic League; but, unable successfully to resist the aggressions of the desert tribes, it eventually was driven to seek the protection of the sultans of Morocco. Moorish protection proved but nominal, however, and about the middle of the last century Ourgla was occupied by the forces of France’s Arab allies, though French authority was not effectively established in the oasis until 1872, since when it has been an important outpost on the Algerine frontier and a base for military operations against the Touareg. In the old, bad days, Ourgla was a thriving trade mart on the trans-Saharan route to the Niger countries, its slave-market crowded with blacks brought from Central Africa and with buyers from all parts of Barbary, but its importance rapidly declined upon France’s suppression of the trade in “black ivory.” In recent years, however, it has regained a considerable measure of its ancient prosperity through the efforts of the French engineers, who, by sinking numerous wells, have expanded the area and enormously increased the fertility of the oasis.

Ghardaia, the Mozabite capital, lies about a hundred miles to the northwest of Ourgla, in the middle of the Wadi M’zab, nearly eighteen hundred feet above the level of the sea. It is one of the most picturesque towns in the entire Sahara, its square, flat-topped houses, which are built on the flanks of a hill, rising in terraces, one above another, so that the place bears a certain resemblance to the New Mexican pyramid-pueblo of Taos. Crowning the hill is the kasbah, an ancient fortress with enormously thick ramparts, above which, like a slim white finger pointing toward heaven, soars the tapering minaret of the Grand Mosque. It is a profoundly impressive thing, this minaret, unusual in shape and clearly visible from every quarter of the city and from far off in the desert, as it rises in lonely majesty against the hot blue sky.

Unlike most Saharan towns, whose houses are built of sun-dried mud-blocks, the buildings of Ourgla are substantially constructed from sandstone. They are, as a rule, of a blinding whiteness, by reason of repeated applications of lime-wash, but the dazzling monotony is broken here and there by house-owners, more original-minded than their neighbors, who have painted their dwellings lemon yellow, pale pink, cobalt blue. Wandering through the narrow, tortuous lanes, one frequently notices, pressed into the plaster above the lintels of the doors, the imprint of a hand painted in red or blue; this represents the hand of Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet, an emblem which is supposed to bring good luck to the household, like the horseshoe in Occidental countries.

Ghardaia is divided by walls into three districts: the eastern quarter belongs to the Jews, of whom there are several hundred families in the town; the western is occupied by the Metabia, an Arab tribe from the Djebel Amur; while the central quarter, which contains the kasbah and the Grand Mosque, is the home of the ruling race, the Beni-M’zab, to whom the gardens also belong. The Jews and the Arabs are regarded by the Mozabites as inferior peoples and have virtually no voice in the affairs of the community, the government of which, as I have already remarked, is directed by an assembly composed of Mozabite elders.

Of all the Berber tribes the Mozabites have remained the freest from foreign admixture, their persistent refusal to have social intercourse with other tribes having produced so pronounced a type that even a Mozabite child is recognizable at a glance. They are usually of small and wiry figure, with very short necks, high, somewhat rounded shoulders, and under-developed legs which are frequently bowed. They are further distinguished from their Arab neighbors by flat faces, short noses, thick lips, and pale, almost sallow, skins, while one not infrequently sees a Mozabite with the red beard and blue or gray eyes which Genseric and his Vandal hordes left as a reminder of their visit to Berber Africa.

Unlike the Arabs, whose burnouses are invariably white or a dirty brown, the Mozabites array themselves in garments of many colors. The dress of the common people consists of a sleeveless woolen shirt, as short and full as kilts, called gandourah, with tassels of camel’s-hair hanging from their broad belts, their lower faces concealed by loosely bound haiks, a necessary precaution in that torrid country. The costumes of the emirs, caïds, and sheikhs are frequently of exceeding richness, however, their enormous turbans, containing yards and yards of fine material, bound with agals of gold thread; their high, soft boots of scarlet Moroccan leather; their delicately colored silk gandourahs girt with broad, silver-studded belts from which protrude the ivory and gold-inlaid hilts of a miniature armory of weapons. As they sweep by astride their splendidly caparisoned horses they seem to have ridden straight out of the pages of the Arabian Nights.

While wholly lacking the cleanliness, the sociability, and the charm of manner of the Arabs, the Mozabites far surpass them in industry, in commercial enterprise, and in dependability, their integrity being proverbial in matters where money is concerned. It is said of them, as it is of the Montenegrins, that their word, once given, is never broken, and that they will die rather than betray a trust. In consequence of this enviable reputation, though they are detested by the Arabs for religious reasons, the Arabs will unhesitatingly intrust them with their last franc.

A warlike tribe, one of the last to submit to France, most of them have now settled down as peaceful and prosperous agriculturists, cultivators of dates and breeders of live stock, though their other industries have not been neglected, the burnouses and carpets manufactured in the M’zab finding ready purchasers throughout North Africa. Industrious and enterprising, as successful at money-making as the Armenians or the Jews—it is said that a Jew has to work with his hands in the M’zab—they are prone to seek their fortunes outside their native land, finding ready employment in the cities along the Barbary coast all the way from Tangier to Tripoli, where many of them occupy positions of trust and responsibility in banks and mercantile houses or are engaged in businesses of their own. The men usually leave home to engage in commercial pursuits as soon as they attain their majority; but, once they have succeeded in amassing what passes for a fortune among the desert folk, they return to their wives and families in the M’zab, where they settle down to enjoy the fruits of their labors, while the eldest son goes north in turn to carry on his father’s business.

So strict are the rules of the caste that any intercourse with non-Mozabites, save in the way of trade, is rigorously forbidden; nor may a Mozabite take his wife, or a child under ten years, away from his own country; nor may he marry elsewhere for any reason whatsoever. Those of other cults, including orthodox Moslems, may not set foot within Mozabite places of worship, while Beni-Isguen, the holy city of the Mozabites, not far from Ghardaia, is held in such sanctity that no outlander, none but a born Mozabite, is permitted to sleep in it. Until the French intervened, the Mozabites refused to bury any member of their sect, no matter where he died, except in the sacred soil of the homeland, the bodies of those who died abroad being kept by their relatives or friends until there came an opportunity to ship them by caravan to the M’zab. The Arabs will tell you that, until the French authorities put an end to the practice for sanitary reasons, there was a corpse in the back room of every Mozabite shop in Biskra.

The market-place of Ghardaia, a great sun-baked square surrounded by whitewashed arcades, and packed with men and animals, is one of the most interesting spots in all North Africa, for to it are drawn caravans, merchants, and traders from all the countries bordering on the Sahara to dispose of their peculiar wares. Here come fat, greasy Jewish merchants to tempt the spendthrift, splendor-loving Arabs with the magnificent red saddlery manufactured in the souks of Tunis; commerçants from Oran and Algiers to purchase dates for the European market; furtive, shifty-eyed Moorish gun-runners, who, evading the desert patrols, have slipped through the passes of the Atlas with cases of rifles and ammunition concealed beneath bales of innocent merchandise; smart-looking cavalry officers in quest of horses for the Algerian remount stations; sun-darkened men who have come with caravans of salt from the far-off Hills of Air; masked Touareg with their brindled, white, or piebald camels, and, occasionally, a rare and valuable beast of the tawny reddish-buff variety, so prized for speed and endurance; hawk-nosed Arab horse-dealers from the Ziban and the slopes of the High Atlas; wild-looking shepherds of the Fringe, driving great flocks of sheep, their wool dyed in various vivid colors for purposes of identification; ubiquitous Levantines from the littoral, hawking the tawdry European articles which the desert people prize; and, mingling with these men of business, stalwart Senegalese tirailleurs; swaggering goumiers in enormous turbans and voluminous blue cloaks; hard-eyed soldiers of the Foreign Legion, whose pipe-clayed helmets and linen uniforms seem several sizes too large for them; dignified, richly appareled emirs from regions as widely separated as Tibesti and Mauretania; marabouts, clothed in rags and sanctity, pleading for alms; negro clowns from the Sudan, drums slung about their necks and ostrich-plumes in their fuzzy hair, who have accompanied some caravan across the dreary desert miles; dervishes, snake-charmers, sand-diviners, story-tellers ... all these, and many more, make of Ghardaia’s market-place a panorama of Saharan life inconceivably rich in interest, variety, and color.

Upon leaving the capital of the Mozabites, two routes offer themselves to the traveler bound for Algeria. If impatient for the food, the music, and the lights of the hotels of Mustapha Supérieur, he had best turn straight northward, through Laghouat, a prosperous border town of some size but no particular interest, to Djelfa, the southern terminus of the railway to Algiers. Djelfa, by the way, is the best starting-point for an excursion into the mountains of the Ouled-Naïl, the home of that highland clan from whose dusky, dashing daughters are recruited half the prostitutes and dancing-girls of French North Africa. Time permitting, I should have liked to visit these ladies of easy virtue on their native heath, but I knew that Harvey and the Cadillac had been for some days at Biskra and that awaiting us beyond the Atlas were peoples and places equally colorful and strange. So, bidding farewell to the Mozabites, we mounted our twelve-wheeled Pegasus and, turning our back upon Ghardaia and its tall white tower, purred out across the desert toward the dawn.