Chapter IV: The Great South Road

Twice, in the course of my travels, I have found myself in great wildernesses that gave me no field of comparison until I turned to thought of the boundless sea—and then I had a simile that was almost complete. These wildernesses were: Arctic Canada and the Great Sahara.

With desire to describe the Sahara, and its ocean-like vastness, I have sketched a map that lies before me (see opposite page)—and I am disappointed. It is only some inches square. My Sahara that, for the sake of lucid explanation, I want to represent as the ocean, could be covered with a dinner plate; and might be a duck-pond, or a trout lake with an island or two, if, for a single moment, I forget the niceties of proportion and scale. That, precisely, is an influence on the senses that it is well to guard against because of the possibility of it turning the mind from reality, for, no matter how willing and piercing the scrutiny, this insignificant little sheet of paper can never be the actual Sahara.

And, after all, it is only the _Real_ that matters; particularly to the frontiersman who lives close to the earth and beyond the ken of the subtleties of Civilisation, for he sees, with the eye of the untrammelled, the dominion of the world’s outer ranges and the bigness of things as they are. Wherefore, with pen directed by hand accustomed to rope a load, coax a rein, fondle a rifle, heal a wound, or kindle a camp-fire, I set out, as an awkward man of the outdoor places, without geographical technicalities, to describe the Great Sahara as I have come to read its character in the wake of many a trail over leagues of intimate sands.

Let us first endeavour to picture something of the vastness of the Sahara. In approximate area—excepting the Libyan Desert—it is about eighteen times larger than Britain and Ireland and about half the area of the United States. Large as that may seem, it must be taken into count that there is a sentimental vastness far beyond that—the sentiment of environment. To illustrate this. Suppose that one sets out to travel for a day, or a week, or a month, through rich, inhabited country with good roads, and with the good things of life always closely about one. Is it not the case that the plenitude of the countryside pleases to such a comforting extent that _Distance_ is prone to be unesteemed, and unthought of as a cause for anxiety? Consequently, under such circumstances, all _fear of distance_, and _the significance of overpowering immensity_, do not enter into calculation. But it so happens that that is a tremendously important factor, which must always be reckoned with, in any considered treatment of the Sahara, where conditions are entirely opposite. No one would hesitate to cross America to-day, but could anyone contemplate a journey in the Great Desert without, at once, being confronted with lively dread of its vastness and desolation? Indeed, so strong is this influence that the eventual result, once one enters that mystical land, is that the mind becomes almost disqualified to reckon in terms of numerals. All that one is constantly aware of is, that limitless leagues of drear desolate sand lie ahead, and that, no matter what effort is made, no matter how well the caravan travels, the twenty or thirty odd miles that are the record of a day’s endeavour leave one apparently in the same position as before, with horizon, and sand, and sky no nearer to the vision than from camps that lie on the trail behind.

In that prospect there is, surely, a sentiment of the temperament of the sea, in likeness of boundless, unchanging, unconquerable leagues. But the sea swings and curls and breaks in foam, and is alive; whereas the sands of the desert lie ever expressionless and dead. So that, if we accept that in majestic space the sea and the desert are the same, we still have to admit that the lassitude of the desert multiplies the seeds of desolation to such an extent that, almost tangibly, certainly sentiently, it enlarges its empty vastness.

Wherefore I am confident that it is in all such intriguing influences that we find the very essence of the desert’s desolation and magnitude of space.

That it has a very real vastness that intimidates is borne out, in our everyday life, by the accounts of tourists who have travelled in Algeria, or elsewhere, and who have been a few days south of, say, Biskra by camel, and who return to recount how they have seen the Sahara. How many such tourists have stood on this mere threshold of a mighty sandscape, beneath the Aurès Mountains, and conjectured on the immensity of the Great South Road that points the way to the heart and the mystery of another world, unyieldingly remote, and not as theirs.

And what happens then? Why is it that we do not have record that some of those tourists have got down from this doorstep of Biskra and set out into the Great Desert? If it was a fair land that lay before them most surely they would flock upon the way. But it is not so, and no foot makes the move. They have viewed an awe-inspiring immensity that casts a deadly spell of dread. And, one by one, year by year, they are repelled and go their way; _back through the friendly mountains_. After all, this is far from astonishing of strangers, for they but express something of the deep-rooted, superstitious dread of the desert which is found in the soul of every native who lives anywhere within reach of its borders, or in its interior.

Furthermore, it may be well to remember that the Sahara is a land of great antiquity, that takes one to realms of Biblical times. Steeped in the religion of Islam, it knows little perceptible change to-day, and is not on a plane with the modern world. Wherefore, even if we only set our minds back in keeping with a not very distant period of the past, it is not difficult thus to find another simile to the sea in picturing that it was only a little more than four centuries ago that the Atlantic Ocean probably held a similar dread of immensity before Columbus discovered America.

All those influences are important, for they can never be brought out on any map, and yet they are an intrinsic part of the land. Furthermore, they are a part of the poignant forces that teach the traveller wonderment and awe of the desert when he camps in the mighty company of its gigantic spaces; particularly if he catches a gently poised breath of the Moslem’s “Allah!” which is an indelible part of the mystic sadness it holds.

If we look, now, at the map, and picture that the Sahara is, broadly speaking, a vast sheet of sand with a few island mountains, it will suffice in dealing generally with its boundaries of the past.

It is my belief that the Sahara is increasing in size, and I think there are many conditions that go to prove it. Wherefore I ask you, in the first place, to conceive that the sand in the desert has steadily risen, with consequent result that the shores have become appreciably less. The belt that has been so engulfed all around the margin, or wherever the surface was shallow, may be taken to represent the regions that are to-day pre-Saharan, though, so far as I am aware, such pre-Saharan areas are seldom more than vaguely referred to, and have not been geographically defined.

I will take, as an example, the southern area of the Sahara, because I have visited it more than once and know that region best. Not vastly distant from the shore there is the mountainland of Aïr, standing high above the surrounding country. Let us suppose that, before the Sahara commenced to fill up and change, this particular mountainland was not surrounded by sand, but was a part of a fertile foreland, and that the bushland of the Western Sudan, with its tropical fauna and vegetation and rainy season, either jutted out as a wedge or stretched right across Africa about the 20th degree of latitude, or 5 degrees farther north than obtains, with any solidity, at the present time.[5] If that was the case intimate problems that I have had to contend with would be logically explained.

My primary work in the Sahara was that of a field naturalist, and the following extracts from Dr. Hartert’s paper in _Novitates Zoologicæ_, May 1921, regarding my first journey, have bearing on one of the problems that I wish to deal with:

“The best zoogeographical boundary, apart from the oceans, has hitherto been the Sahara, a wide belt of poorly inhabited and unexplored country. As long as we knew very little about it, this was a very simple question—north of the Sahara palæarctic, south of it Ethiopian. This contention, however, was bound to be shaken to some extent when the Sahara (as it is marked on maps) became zoologically explored. Until the second decade of this century the Great Desert had only been touched by zoological collectors on some of its borders.

“Looking at any map, a somewhat large mountainland, Aïr, or Asben, catches the eye in the middle of the Sahara, on older maps and in textbooks called an ‘Oasis,’ which is, however, a most misleading name for a mountainous country with desert tracks and valleys, towns and villages, and mountains rising up to about 2,000 m. in height.

“Zoologically Aïr remained absolutely unknown until Buchanan’s expedition. We knew already, from Barth’s _Travels_, that Aïr has tropical vegetation, that some valleys are fertile and contain good water, that ostriches, lions, giraffes, birds were seen by him, that near Agades he observed monkeys and butterflies. Jean, in 1909, in his book, _Les Touaregs du Sud-Est, l’Aïr_, mentions lions in the mountains of Timgue and Baguezan, foxes, hyenas, cats, antelopes, monkeys, but he adds that giraffes do not now exist in the country, and that the ostrich is not found north of Damergu.

“Meagre as these statements are, they proved that the fauna of Asben is chiefly, if not entirely, tropical. This is borne out by Buchanan’s collections. Of the birds nearly all—apart from migrants—may be called tropical species or subspecies. The mammals are on a whole Sudanese, and not found in Algeria proper. The Lepidoptera are essentially Saharan, many forms being similar to those found by Geyr and myself in the Sahara between the Atlas and Tidikelt, and the Hoggar Mountains.

“The boundary between the palæarctic and tropical fauna may therefore be regarded as fairly fixed to about the 20th degree of latitude, though it is, of course, not a hard-and-fast dividing line, there being many exceptions—even among birds, which form the main basis of these notes.”

Again, in a further paper in _Novitates Zoologicæ_, March 1924, dealing with my second expedition, Dr. Hartert adds:

“More than ever it is clear that the ornis of Aïr is tropical, as a country where Sunbirds, Barbets, Glossy Starlings, etc., live has a tropical ornis, though there are a number of palæarctic species, to which now a few must be added. On the other hand, these striking tropical families like Sunbirds, Glossy Starlings, Emerald Cuckoos, Hornbills, Barbets, are absent from the Ahaggar (Hoggar) Mountains, and the almost lifeless desert between Aïr and Ahaggar forms the boundary between the palæarctic and tropical African faunas.”

From all this it is clear that Aïr maintains many tropical influences that penetrate northward, like a wedge, far into the Sahara, although its surroundings are foreign to like conditions. For instance, regarding the last remark, if we draw longitudinal lines 200 miles or so clear of either side of the Aïr Mountains, immediately those lines leave the southern shores of the Sahara, about latitude 15°, they enter desert where all tropical influence ceases.

If we ponder over the thought that the Sahara is increasing in sand, and size, is it not conceivable that this mountainland of Aïr is as an island that, because of its altitude, is left high and dry out in the open while the plains surrounding it have been gradually smitten as by a plague that has slowly driven back the line of fertility, while that which remains, as representative of a configuration of the past, is the rugged rock land that still offers a bold front to the advances of time and decay?

I am confident that therein lies the truth—that formerly a wide pre-Saharan region of fertility once reached much farther north than at present; and, when it became flooded over with rising sand, and lost, Aïr still remained, and, behind the shelter of its rocks, retained a good deal of its old characteristics. All around the Sahara I believe that conditions of a similar nature exist.

Wherefore the vast arid interior, made up chiefly of rock and sand, may, to-day, be likened to a pear that has rotted at the core, and that cannot be prevented from increasing the consuming advance of an unhealthy interior that grows outward, and ever larger in circle.

Stern and drastic though they are, I am prepared to accept those theories because they are in keeping with the nature of the country. Moreover, they lead to the solution of problems that ever bring me back to the source that is the cause of every change in the land—which I read to be _decay_.

To make clear this perpetual insinuation of decay, which is everywhere in the atmosphere of the Sahara to-day, I will endeavour to cite a few instances that have bearing on the subject.

First, reverting to the topic of the tropical life in Aïr. In 1850-51 Barth stated that he saw giraffes and ostriches, yet in 1909 we find that Jean wrote that “Giraffes and ostriches _do not exist_ in Aïr.” Both those travellers, however, recorded lions in the region, but in 1922, though I hunted particularly for lion, because of those very records, I could find neither trace nor track of a single specimen. All that my diligent investigations revealed was that one had been killed at Aouderas in 1915, and another, the last, in 1918 by the Chief of Baguezan. I believe them to be extinct in Aïr to-day. To give an opening for the further continuance of this sequence of singular disappearance of wild life, I can state that, at the present time, wart-hog and guinea-fowl live in Aïr—and I have actual specimens to prove it—but I am tolerably sure that travellers who may follow in my footsteps will come to find that both have disappeared within the next half-century or so.

As the people are dying out also, these changes cannot be accounted for on the score of huntsmen. It is, I maintain, the natural result of increasing sand and the drying up and dying out of vegetation. Giraffes and ostriches have departed from a land that can no longer nourish them, and lions have disappeared because the gazelle which they hunted have grown scarce, and open water-holes are a rarity. Eventually the wart-hog and guinea-fowl will vanish from the land for like reasons.

Furthermore, Nature accepts no denial to her whims of devastation, wherever they rule, and, in the Sahara, the sweep of her scythe has taken, in its path, the mowing down of the very people of the land, who depart, like the creatures of the wild, when the struggle for existence becomes no longer possible. Hence, in Aïr alone, there are scores of stone-built villages deserted and in ruins, and steeped in pathos, no longer harbouring a single living soul.

In those, and in other ways, we learn that decay is sure. The elusive problem is to gauge the duration of its reign, which can only be conjectured, since the history of the Sahara is unwritten. It may have set in a very long time ago, and be moving slowly, or it may have been active but a few centuries.

That it has altered the aspect of the land is, to my mind, undoubted. Here is an instance of the kind that sets one thinking. South of Aïr, in country that is now desert, there is a well of astonishing age, named Melen, in a basin surrounded by low hills of bare, rough, stony nature. It is sunk through _solid rock_ to a depth of 70 feet, and is old beyond all calculation. One looks down its depth and speaks in a hushed voice, and the dark chamber booms back a whole volume of sound; a pebble is dropped to the bottom and the splash of it sounds like the lashing of surf on the sea-coast. The wall of the well is seared, in a remarkable way, with deep channels worn in the solid rock by the friction of bucket-ropes that have passed up and down the well—for who knows how long? It seems almost impossible that they have been worn in an era within historic times. The well offers a problem. There is no good grazing around it; no means that would, to-day, enable a band of men to camp there for a prolonged period while they laboured (with rock-drilling implements, of which there is no record) on the tremendous task of sinking the shaft through solid rock. Natives have no knowledge of how the work was accomplished. Therefore I try to set back the hands of Time and look over the land, imagining it as once covered with vegetation for herds of camels and goats, and with pools of water in the low hills. And, as a dreamer, I conjure up a picture of a past when, mayhap, a tribe of happy nomads camped in the hollow, in olden times, with everything in the neighbourhood that they required for themselves and their herds; and the old chief of the camp setting out to keep his slaves employed, at a time of plenty, in drilling this well, maybe partly as a whim, and partly to be assured of water for his people in the height of an over-long summer.

Since visiting Melen I have travelled far in the Sahara, and know many wells in like God-forsaken places, each of which suggests that it belongs to a bygone age when greater fertility made it possible for the nomads to camp where they willed, which—if we take such wells as significant—was sometimes in localities that they cannot camp in now.

Wherefore, in many strange ways, it comes back to one, always, that the Sahara is a decadent land. And that is a steadfast impression, that the traveller is always catching, even when least expected.

And, now, to broadly picture the aspect of the country, the Sahara is not, of course, as is often popularly believed, simply a vast track of desert sand. The “floor” of its vast area is made up, principally, of four types of country, which I describe as follows, along with the names by which they are known to the nomads:

(1) “_Tenere_” (Tamascheq[6]) =Absolute sandy desert.

“_Arummila_” (Arabic)

(2) “_Adjadi_” or “_Igidi_” =Regions of permanent sand-dunes,
(Tamascheq) sometimes barren, sometimes with
scattered vegetation.
“_Erg_” (Arabic)

(3) “_Tanezrouft_” =Regions where the sand is hard
(Tamascheq) and interspersed with plains of
pebbles. Sometimes great gravel
“_Reg_” (Arabic) plains as barren as sand desert
and hence often called _Black
Desert_ by the Tuaregs.

(4) “_Tassili_” (Tamascheq) =Regions of chiefly horizontal,
rough, rocky, much crevassed
“_Elkideà_” (Arabic) ground, often of shelf rock,
where decomposition is very rapid
and outcrops much cracked and
broken apart. The ground surface,
or plateau surface, is usually
as barren as sand desert, but
in deep ravines in such country
there is often a sparse growth of
vegetation.

As a whole all those regions are practically horizontal, and, except in the north, are on a level well above the sea. Between longitude 5° and 10°, from south to north, the altitudes of the Saharan plains, above sea-level, are approximately:

Latitude 15° 1,525 feet (north of Tanout)
1,800 feet (Tanout).
„ 18° 1,000 feet (desert west of Aïr)
1,600 feet (desert east of Aïr)
1,220 feet (Bilma Oasis. Longitude 13°)
„ 20° 1,500 feet (Gara Tindi)
1,350 feet (In-Azaoua)
„ 22° 3,100 feet (Zazir) }
3,700 feet (Tenacurt) }Land rising to the Ahaggar
4,200 feet (Tamanrasset)}Mountains.

„ 30° 350 feet (Hassi Inifel) Land that falls gradually
600 feet (Messedli) away to a low basin in the
El Erg region between the
Ahaggar and Atlas Mountains.

The widespread aspect of the Sahara is of vast desolate plains of rock and sand. But a fact which has been overlooked to an astonishing degree, by popular consent, is that the Great Desert is relieved by some very remarkable mountain groups, chief of which are Aïr, Ahaggar, and Tibesti—each in extent as large as the whole of England, and towering majestically to altitudes of 6,000 to 10,000 feet.

They are mountains that are lost to the world; full of mystical silence, like the rest of the Sahara, and bleak and wild, yet they are vast and rich in rugged grandeur; and the greys and browns of their slopes are a feast to the eyes of traveller weary of scanning limitless plains of sand.

Aïr and Ahaggar I know well; Tibesti I have not visited. The former are, in general, alike, particularly in rocky bareness and eerie desolation; but, of the two, Aïr is the more picturesque and fascinating. Both, accentuated by their desert surroundings, stand out in strong, clear relief, aggressively bold and dominant—majestic in every line, amid unrestricted space of earth and sky.

“They are made up of range upon range of hills, sometimes with narrow sand-flats and river-beds between; massive hills of giant grey boulders, and others—not nearly so numerous—with rounded summits and a surface of apparent overlappings and downpourings of smooth loose reddish and grey fragments, as if the peaks were of volcanic origin, though no craters are there. But it is the formation of the many hills of giant boulders that make these mountains so astonishing, so rugged, and so unique. You might be on the roughest sea-coast in the world, and not find scenes to surpass them in desolation and utter wildness. They are hills that appear, to the eye, as if a mighty energy underneath had, at some time, heaved and shouldered boulder upon boulder of colossal proportions into position, until large, wide-based, solid masses were raised into magnificent being. On the other hand, there are instances where hills appear as if the forces underneath had built their edifices badly, and in a manner not fit to withstand the ravages of Time; and those are places where part of the pile has apparently collapsed, and there remains a bleak cliff face and the ruins of rocks at the foot.”[7]

The slopes and the bastions of the summits of those rugged, gravely picturesque mountains present a sentiment of the sadness that goes with great age; and their dark countenances are the very quintessence of patience. For all time they have stood as over-masters of the Great Desert. Proudly they overlook the far-flung wastes beneath them, where foot-hills die out among black, stony, boulder-strewn plains, and _“lakes”_ of sand, relieved, here and there, by odd-shaped pill-box or church-like kopjes that stand as miniature guardians of the mountains behind them—beyond, right to the faint horizon, nothing but the great dead plains of the desert.

Ahaggar is not, as a whole, so rugged and picturesque as Aïr, though it has many similar summits, especially the bare, disintegrating hills of loose brown stone that are rounded and have no pronounced contour.

The highest point I reached in Ahaggar was 6,000 feet (near Tazeruk), and in Aïr 6,050 feet (Baguezan).

Ahaggar, on the whole, I consider less habitable than Aïr. At the time of my journey, in the months of March and April, the scattered acacias in wadis and mountain valleys were leafless from prolonged lack of rain, and many of them had been completely ruined through natives lopping off all the main branches so as to feed their goats in extremity. Pasturage had completely given out in many places, and herds had left the region to seek grazing ground where life was possible. (Whole families of the _Ehaggaran_ Tuaregs had at that time trekked 500 to 600 miles, to outlying wadis west of Aïr, to keep their flocks and camels alive on _Alwat_, a plant common to some regions, in sandy wadis and among _Ergs_.)

On the other hand, I noted that places of water—wells, and, particularly, oozing surface springs in river-beds, often salt and chemical bearing, were more numerous in Ahaggar than in Aïr, and where such conditions exist there is also more domestic, garden-plot cultivation, executed chiefly by _Zakummeran_ and _Imrad_ tribes, and not by the haughty nomadic Tuaregs.

As a whole, these mountains of the Sahara attract more rain than the desert, on the rare occasions when the rain condescends to fall from the sky. But that advantage is almost momentary, for, owing to the naked, growthless, and soilless slopes, and the quick fall of the intricate network of mountain brooks and river-courses, so soon as rain touches the bare hills it streams down, to be swept away out into estuaries on the desert that drink in water with a thirst that knows no quenching.

Nevertheless, a frugal benefit is left behind, for the passing of mountain torrents leaves some moisture in the river-banks, and pools in the best of deep-gullied streams, and in a brief week green vegetation springs to life in thin lines in places, and grows quickly to maturity. And it is this that is the grazing supply of the year—whether browsed over then or in the long, dreary months that follow, when grass and plants, in scattered tussocks, lie hay-dry and uninviting, but are the best that the country has to offer.

I noted in Ahaggar that clouds were often in the sky; which I had not remarked in Aïr, or, for that matter, anywhere farther south, except at the season of rains (July-August) in the Western Sudan—rains which sometimes move northwards over parts of the Sahara. It may be that out-thrown influences of the northern hemisphere, despatched from the Mediterranean over the Atlas Mountains, reach southward to about the latitude of Ahaggar. Later on, when marching to the north of the Algerian Sahara, I noted in my diary the _coolness_ of north winds, when they blew, and imagined I sensed a tang of the sea in my nostrils. (Born and reared by the sea, my senses are acutely tuned in that respect.)

In conclusion, the Sahara is, in entirety, a vast waste land in its interior; its greater area made up of broken, desolate plains; its features of relief extraordinary mountain-lands of rugged grandeur.

Throughout the whole decay appears insistent and sure, and the increase of sand incessant. It has been shown to be a land containing considerable rock surface, and wherever one goes much of such country is disintegrating and crumbling away; thus forming more and more sand, which accumulates, at the whim of the prevailing wind, to bank up and choke out the plant life of the country. In places one may dig down at the roots of shrubs and plants that are dead and find that the old surface of the ground is a foot or so beneath that of to-day.

[Diagram]

The accompanying diagram is an illustration of rock disintegration in the Sahara.

There is no tangible counteraction to these advances of decay, and it would seem that they are destined irrevocably to continue. But on this score the question of rainfall is intensely interesting, for should the elements ever be kind, and really good and consistent rains fall for two or three years in succession, the whole land would undoubtedly revive its vegetation with astonishing speed. Perhaps such revivals have occurred in the past, and may occur again. But I fear that, at best, they can be but short-lived. Indeed, conditions at the present are the opposite, and the prospect is that they will so continue. One hears from the nomads of regions having no rain for three years, four years, and even seven years; while have I myself seen _had_ dried out and dead, though natives declare that it never dies except when there are more than four rainless years.

The Sahara is not yet devoid of vegetation, but its poverty is advancing. To-day we find the old caravan roads across Africa unfrequented—the Cyrenaican-Kufra-Wadai road, the Tripoli-Bilma-Chad road, the Tunis-Tripoli-Ghat-Aïr-Kano road: all of great antiquity, and from time immemorial the trade routes across North Africa. These roads are still to be seen, ten to fifteen parallel paths, camel-width apart, with undiminished clearness, where they pass over stony ground, powdered down to clean-cut furrows by passage of countless feet. They are steeped in the romance and mystery of the Sahara. Over them have passed hard-won pilgrimages to Mecca, cavalcades of slaves fettered and limb-weary and fearful, and rich caravans of merchandise that reached their goal or were looted—a gamble that made or lost a fortune for the masters who sent them forth. To-day they are unused, and the commerce of the Sahara is dead. And this is comprehensible when the poverty of the land is reviewed and the belief held that growing dearth of vegetation has made it well-nigh impossible for large caravans to live to-day on those roads.

The same melancholy decline is to be found among the people of the Sahara. Its population is scattered and thin, and some regions are uninhabited altogether. We can only approximately estimate the numbers in the interior, which I believe, from data collected, to be about 40,000. Say 200 to 600 in oases here and there at wide intervals; 5,000 in the Aïr region; 5,000 in Ahaggar, and 10,000 Tebu in Tibesti; roughly, about one human soul to every sixty square miles.

In Aïr, and Ahaggar, and, excepting Tibesti, throughout the scattered grazing-grounds of the Sahara the masters or range-holders are chiefly Tuaregs, who are a southern race of Berbers. It is not proposed to deal with their history here, and it will suffice to say that they are a white race, descended from some of the oldest European stocks, and that the love of fighting and adventure that is born in them is an inheritance from forefathers who made their wars historic.

At an early stage in this chapter I stated that to-day Aïr contained scores of deserted villages. They are illuminating as illustrative of the drastic extent of change and decay. They have completely died out.

And what of Agades, which is still alive? Its dwellings are half in ruins. It supports about 2,000 inhabitants, and to-day its surroundings are drear beyond description. Yet it was once a great desert city, on a famous route across Africa of great antiquity, and is said to have once contained 50,000 inhabitants—more than the whole population of the Sahara’s interior to-day.

Verily, ever it comes back to me; the Sahara is a land of decay. To the traveller it holds its principal charm in its strange mystic beauty and wonderful vastness, and in the fact that it is a land of Allah, steeped in inherent sadness.

CHAPTER V

THE TARALUM