From North Pole to Equator: Studies of Wild Life and Scenes in Many Lands

by Alfred Edmund Brehm

For our own part, we swing ourselves into the saddle with the agility of natives. Urging on our steed with a few strokes of the whip, and keeping it in due check by means of a fine nose-rein, we hasten after the leader. Our camel, a lank, loosely-built, long-legged creature, falls at once into that uniform, persistent, long-stepping, and most effective trot, to which it is trained from earliest youth, and which raises it high above all beasts of burden, and closely follows the leaders. The small head is stretched far in front; the long legs swing quickly backwards and forwards; behind them sand and small stones rise into the air. The burnooses of the riders flutter in the wind; weapons and utensils clatter together; with loud calls we spur on the beasts; the joy of travel seems to give our spirits wings. Soon we overtake the caravan of baggage-camels which had preceded us; soon every trace of human settlement disappears; and on all sides there stretches in apparent infinitude—the desert.

Sharply defined all around, this immense and unique region covers the greater part of North Africa, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic, from the Mediterranean to the Soudan, including whole countries in its range, embracing tracts of fertile land; presenting a thousand varieties, and yet always and everywhere the same in its essential features. In area, this wonderful region is nine or ten times larger than the whole of the German Empire, and three or four times larger than the Mediterranean. No mortal has thoroughly explored or even traversed it; but every son of earth who has set foot on it and crossed some part of it, is in his inmost heart impressed with its size and grandeur, its charm and its horror. Even on the most matter-of-fact Northerner who sojourns in the desert a lasting, ineffaceable impression is left by the glowing splendour of the sunlight and the parching heat of its days, by the heavenly peacefulness and the magical phantoms of its nights, by the witchery of the radiant atmosphere, by the dreadfulness of its mountain-moving storms; and many a one may have experienced, what the children of the desert so acutely feel—a longing to return, to breathe its air for a day, an hour, to see its pictures again with the bodily eye, to experience again that “unutterable harmony” whose echoes the desert awakens in the poetic soul. In short, there is a home-sickness for the desert.

It is literally and truly “El Bahhr bela maa”—the sea without water—the sea’s antithesis. To the sea the desert is not subject as are other parts of the earth; the might of the vitalizing and sustaining element is here annulled. “Water silently embraces all things”—the desert alone excepted. Over the whole earth the winds bear the clouds, the sea’s messengers, but these fade away before the glow of the desert. It is rarely that one sees there even a thin, hardly perceptible vapour; rarely can one detect on a leaf in the morning the damp breath of the night. The flush of dawn and the red glow of sunset are indeed seen, but only, as it were, in a breath which is scarce formed when it passes away. Wherever water gains the mastery, the desert changes into fertile land, which may, indeed, be poor enough, but the limits between them are always sharply defined. Where the last wave of the sacred Nile, raised above its level by man’s ingenuity, loses itself in the sand, the contrast is seen; the traveller, whose way lies from the river to the hills adjacent, may stand with one foot on a field of sprouting grain, and with the other touch the desert. It is not the sand itself which hinders the growth of plants, but solely the scorching heat which radiates through it. For, wherever it is irrigated or periodically watered, there, amid the otherwise plantless desert, a green carpet of vegetation is spread, and even shrubs and trees may grow.

Fig. 50.—An Encampment in the Sahara.

Barren, pitifully barren is the desert, but it is not dead—not, at least, to those who have eyes to see its life. Whoever looks with a dull eye sees nothing but sandy plains and rocky cones, bare low grounds and naked hills, may even overlook the sparse reed-like grasses and shrubby trees of the deeper hollows, and the few animals which occur here and there. But he who really wishes to see can discover infinitely more. To the dull-eyed the desert is a land of horrors; they allow themselves to be so depressed by the glowing heat of the day that the blissfulness of the night brings them no comfort or strength; they ride into the desert trembling, and leave it shuddering; their sensations are all for the terrible, their feelings for the annoyances attendant on the journey; for the infinite sublimity of the desert such hearts are too small. But those who have really learned to know the desert judge otherwise.

Barren the desert is, we confess, but it is not dead. Thus, although the general aspect is uniform, the nature of the surface varies greatly. For wide stretches the desert is like a rocky sea, with strangely-shaped cones, abrupt precipitous walls, deeply-riven gorges, sharp-angled ridges, and wondrous towering domes. Over these the ceaselessly-blowing wind drifts the sand, now filling up hollows, now emptying them again, but always grinding, polishing, hollowing out, sharpening, and pointing. Black masses of sandstone, granite, or syenite, more rarely of limestone or slate, and here and there of volcanic rock glow in the sun, and rise in expressively-outlined ranges. On one side the wind robs these of every covering, driving the fine sand uninterruptedly over their summits, completely enveloping them in a veil in times of storm, and leaving no particle of sand at rest until it has been blown across the ridge. On the lee side, protected from the wind, lie golden yellow beds of the finest rolled sand, which form terraces one above another, each about a yard in height. But they also are in ceaseless movement, continually displacing one another from above downwards, and being renewed from the other side of the range. Strikingly contrasted with the black walls of the exposed side, these terraces of sand are visible from afar, and in certain lights they sparkle like broad golden ribbons on the hills. We may venture to call such ranges the regalia of the desert. No one unacquainted with the glowing South can picture the marvellous wealth of colour, the splendour and glamour, and the infinite charm which the overflowing sunlight can create on the dreariest and wildest mountains of the desert. Their sides are never clothed with the welcome green of woodland, at most the highest peaks bear a scant covering of bushes, to which the precipitation of vapour at this height allows a bare subsistence and a stunted growth. One misses the whispering of the beeches, and the rustling of the firs and pines; there is none of the familiar murmuring, or joyous chatter, or echoing roar of running water, which lays silver ribbons on our mountains at home, fringing them here with verdure, while in another place the sun shining upon rushing waterfall and whirlpool enhaloes them with rainbow colours; there is no mantle of ice and snow which the sun can transfigure into purple at dawn and sunset, or into glowing brightness at noon; and there is no fresh green from any mead. In short, all the witchery and charm of Northern mountain scenery is absent; and yet the desert mountains are not deficient in wealth of colour, and certainly not in majesty. Every individual layer and its own peculiar colour comes into prominence and has its effect. And yet, brilliant as may be the brightly-coloured and sometimes sharply-contrasted strata, it is on the continuously sand-polished, grandly-sculptured cones, peaks, gullies, and gorges that the light of heaven produces the finest play of colour. The alternations of light and shade are so frequent, the flushing and fading of colours so continuous, that a very intoxication of delight besets the soul. Nor do the first and last rays of the sun fail to clothe the desert mountains in purple; and distance sheds over them its blue ethereal haze. They, too, live, for the light gives them life.

In other regions the desert is for wide stretches either flat or gently undulating. For miles it is covered with fine-grained, golden-yellow sand, into which man and beast sink for several centimetres. Here one often sees not a single stem of grass nor living creature of any kind. The uniformly blue sky roofs in this golden surface, and contributes not a little to suggest the sea. In such places the track of the “ship of the desert” is lost as it is made; they are pathless as the sea; for them as for the ocean was the compass discovered. Less monotonous, but not more pleasant, are those regions on which loose, earthy, or dusty sand forms a soil for poisonous colocynth-gourds and the wholesome senna. Long low hills alternate with shallow and narrow hollows, and a carpet of the above-named plants, which from a distance seems green and fresh, covers both alike. Such places are avoided by both man and beast, for the camel and his driver often sink a foot deep into the loose surface-soil. Other tracts are covered with coarse gravel or flints, and others with hollow sand-filled balls, rich in iron, which look almost as if they had been made by human hands, and whose origin has not yet been very satisfactorily explained.[75] On such stretches, where the camel-paths are almost like definite highways, thousands of quartz crystals are sometimes exposed, either singly or in groups, like clusters of diamonds set by an artist hand. With these the sun plays magically, and such stretches gleam and sparkle till the dazzled eye is forced to turn away from them. In the deepest hollows, finally, the dust forms a soil, and there one is sure to find the reed-like, but very hard, dry, sharp, dark-green alfa, umbrella-shaped mimosas, and perhaps even tom-palms, pleasant assurances of life.

But of animal life also there is distinct evidence. To think of the desert as a dead solitude is as erroneous as to call it the home of lions. It is too poor to support lions, but it is rich enough for thousands of other animals. And all these are in a high degree remarkable, for in every respect they prove themselves the true children of the desert.

It is not merely that their colouring is always most precisely congruent with the dominant colour of the ground, that is generally tawny, but the desert animals are marked by their light and delicate build, by their strikingly large and unusually acute eyes and ears, and by a behaviour which is as unassuming as it is self-possessed. It is the lot of all creatures born in the desert to be restless wanderers, for sufficient food cannot be found all the year round at one place, and the children of the desert are endowed with incomparable agility, indefatigable endurance, untiring persistence; their senses are sharpened so that the pittance which is offered is never overlooked, and their clothing is adapted to conceal them alike in flight or in attack. If their life is perhaps somewhat hard, it is certainly not joyless.