Sahara

by Angus Buchanan

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.

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.