Sahara

by Angus Buchanan

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.