FOREWORD
By The RT. HON. LORD SALVESEN, P.C., K.C.
Late President of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society
The author of this book is not merely an intrepid and successful explorer, but an accomplished biologist, who has added many new species of birds and animals to the ever-growing list of nature’s marvels. The desert of Sahara presents to the explorer many points of resemblance to the frozen wastes which surround the Poles, and to which so much attention has recently been directed. Its area is vast, its resources meagre in the extreme, the perils of travel great, and such as to test the highest qualities of the explorer. But here the resemblance ends. In the nature of the experiences and the hazards which the explorer encounters there could be no greater contrast, but oddly enough the man who can endure the one seems also fitted to withstand the other—of this Captain Buchanan is a living proof, for he, too, has been a traveller in Arctic regions.
This book is in no sense a diary of day-to-day travel. Only a single chapter is devoted to the account of the extraordinary journey which Captain Buchanan and his cinematographer, Mr. Glover, made from Kano in Nigeria to Touggourt in Algiers—a journey of over 3,500 miles through the great desert of Africa. Some idea of the hardships which they encountered may be gathered from the fact that, while they started with a caravan of thirty-six camels and fifteen natives, they finished with a single camel and only two natives, after fifteen months of travel. The reader is never wearied by monotonous logs of distances covered day by day or of the countless difficulties overcome on the long long trail. Only the last few days, when victory was in sight, are briefly sketched. But in earlier chapters we have vivid pictures of the perils that are inseparable from travel over vast sandy wastes, where a burning sun beats down with relentless fury, and where the lives of men and beasts alike depend on their finding water at least every six or seven days. One chapter describes one of the sandstorms that all but engulfed the caravan in the shelterless plain—another, the rare experience of torrential rain which may be almost as devastating, but, unlike the sandstorm, is fraught with blessing, for it brings food to the starving mammals that haunt the fringe of the great desert.
The author’s knowledge of the Sahara is not based merely on the one long journey which took him across its widest part. The book is partly based on a previous lengthy visit to the Sahara, during which he studied the fauna of the district as it has never been studied before, and the weird and impoverished races which are found in its habitable areas. The Sahara is not a mere plain of sand—it embraces more than one mountainous and picturesque area as large as Wales, but, unlike that country, arid in the extreme; besides numerous oases where a scanty subsistence is yielded by palms for small communities, and which are largely dependent on the visits of travelling caravans in quest of that most precious of all commodities—water. In these places, isolated by vast seas of desert, dwell the remnants of tribes once more numerous, who migrated thither when conditions were more favourable, for alas! Captain Buchanan’s observations lead him to the conclusion that the constantly accumulating sand-drifts are gradually destroying the already scanty resources of the still inhabited portions. Readers will find interest in his description of the two oases of Bilma and Fachi, both of which derive their subsistence from salt-mines, and whose dwellings and the forts which protect them are built entirely of blocks of salt, now blackened by age.
The perils of the desert are illustrated by the striking story of Rali, which forms one of the most vivid and entrancing chapters of the book. One of the nomad tribe of Tuaregs who lead a roving life amongst the few areas where pasturage of a kind is obtainable for their flocks, he was the victim of a dastardly raid in which his young and beautiful wife was carried off by a band of raiders. His adventures in seeking to recover her and avenge himself on her captors are told with a rare insight into the character of the natives and their mastery of their environment. Strange to say, although the vast majority of the natives are predatory and cruel, the author came across one community of religious pacifists who have never organised any defence against persistent raids. As might be expected, these unhappy creatures live in the direst poverty, for, if they should by hard work accumulate any food or other commodities, they are promptly relieved of them by rapacious bands who live largely on the spoliation of their neighbours.
Naturalists will find ample evidence in the description of Saharan birds and mammals of the remarkable adaptation of the forms there existing to their arid environment. The appendices contain complete lists of the Saharan fauna.
It was in my dual capacity of President of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and of the Zoological Society of Scotland that I had the privilege of making the author’s acquaintance by presiding at the first lecture which he delivered in Scotland on the result of his travels in the Sahara. This book, which embodies them in greater detail, should have a wide circle of readers if the appeal which it made to myself is any index of popular interest.