The Wells of Kidal
About every third day camels are brought to the wells to drink. In the hottest season these animals can, if well trained, exist eight to ten days without water, but they rapidly lose their powers of endurance after the third or fourth day. The camel standing up, on the left, has just arrived from a long desert trek; it will be noticed how his ribs stand out. The camel squatting in the foreground, on the other hand, has drunk his fill, as is, indeed, indicated by his big barrel and general air of contentment.
The southern portion of Adrar affords some interesting relics of the Stone Age. The wells have probably been in existence for many centuries, and at one or two places we found some curious little stone implements, such as arrowheads, miniature axes, etc. There seems to be no doubt that all this country must have been inhabited at one period by a sedentary population, thus further strengthening the theory that the Sahara was not always the barren waste it now is. In the neighbourhood of Es-Souk, some eighty miles north-west of Kidal, there are unmistakable evidences of much later civilization. Ruins of buildings are there found in the sand. This place is supposed to have been one of the northernmost parts of the Sonrhay Empire, as late as the twelfth century. Mahomed told me that he had on a previous occasion found stone implements near one of the wells in Southern Adrar, but he had, of course, not taken much interest in the discovery or pursued it any further.
In the country between the Niger and Southern Adrar one occasionally observed tumuli, with remains of pottery, and I had been told, although I had myself never seen any, that granite and porphyry pestles and grindstones had been found, with similar evidences of vanished villages.
It is easy to conjure up pictures of former nations inhabiting prosperous townships in this portion of the Sahara in olden times, when the conditions were probably so different from what obtain at the present day. How strange it is to think that this vast stretch of country should now be turned into an arid desert. Instead of a nation dying out as it became effete, in this case it was the land which, for some unknown causes, became so unproductive as to be a country in which man could not settle for any length of time, and he was therefore forced to withdraw to more promising lands. When all the “oueds” flowed, as presumably they must at one time have done, the Adrar must have been a well-watered land, as must also the whole region between the Niger and the Ifora country. To all intents and purposes the Sahara is now a dead world, and although many theories have been started, and experiments tried, for reclaiming small portions of it, it can hardly be said that, so far, they have met with much success even in the circumscribed limits in which they have been given the most exhaustive trials. However, something new in science is always being done, and is it not possible that one day this dead world may be made to live again; that by some ingenious process water may be made to flow once more in dried-up “oueds,” and that the country may be refertilized and repopulated?
CHAPTER XXI
The camel’s reserve store — Variations of temperature — The Sahara by moonlight — Halley’s Comet — Wells of Abeibera — Tea in the desert — Difficult bargaining — Enduring donkeys — Saharan game — A dry well — Missing camels — In Ouzel — An indifferent boundary — Unpleasant recollections — A change in the desert — Saharan shrubs — Welfare of the camel.
THE camels I had now were far superior animals to those I had previously hired at Gao. I had particularly stipulated for animals in the best of condition. Our lives might depend on the state of the camels on this long trek across the Sahara to Insalah, a distance of about 950 miles. Besides, this portion of the desert was a much more serious affair than the part traversed between Gao and Kidal; it entailed crossing a very large tract with exceptionally limited resources, even for the camels, and a region, called the Tanezrouft, in which there was no water for a distance of 200 miles. Should our camels fail us in the middle of this great waterless tract we should indeed be in a sorry plight. I therefore was most careful to see that on starting our camels were as fit as could be expected for the time of year. They were fat and had big humps, both of which are unmistakable signs of good condition in a beast. The hump is the reserve of fat in a camel. When he is in his pasturage he first of all begins to put on flesh, and after this he puts on fat in his hump, which until now has been small and flabby. The hump gradually increases in size until it has swollen to the normal dimensions for an animal in the pink of condition. When a camel is on the march, even when he is getting plenty of good grazing daily, he draws to a certain extent on his hump, which diminishes slowly in size as he uses up this reserve. When a camel is without food on the march, as sometimes happens for short periods at a time, the reserve contained in his hump is drawn upon entirely to keep him going, and this gets expended very rapidly. As his hump gets smaller the camel loses condition rapidly, every day his powers of endurance are diminished, until eventually he can no longer march at all and dies.
The first part of our march, lying as it did through the comparatively productive regions of the Adrar, entailed no great hardships on the camels of the caravan. There was good pasturage available every day, and every third day we could be sure of coming to a well, where the camels could drink; but in spite of all this, in a few days it was noticeable that one or two were deteriorating in condition. This was probably due to the heat. The time of year was now at its very hottest. In the vicinity of the tropic of Cancer from the middle of May to the middle of June the temperature is at its highest, and the sun’s rays are more powerful than at any other time of the year.
In consequence of the heat I did a good deal of marching at night. The hours of march were usually from about 3 p.m. to 10 or 11 p.m., and then a halt and sleep till 4 a.m.; after this we used to march till about 10 a.m. Marching hours, however, perforce varied with the state of the country, and the necessity for having the light of a moon or not.