The same melancholy decline is to be found among the people of the Sahara. Its population is scattered and thin, and some regions are uninhabited altogether. We can only approximately estimate the numbers in the interior, which I believe, from data collected, to be about 40,000. Say 200 to 600 in oases here and there at wide intervals; 5,000 in the Aïr region; 5,000 in Ahaggar, and 10,000 Tebu in Tibesti; roughly, about one human soul to every sixty square miles.
In Aïr, and Ahaggar, and, excepting Tibesti, throughout the scattered grazing-grounds of the Sahara the masters or range-holders are chiefly Tuaregs, who are a southern race of Berbers. It is not proposed to deal with their history here, and it will suffice to say that they are a white race, descended from some of the oldest European stocks, and that the love of fighting and adventure that is born in them is an inheritance from forefathers who made their wars historic.
At an early stage in this chapter I stated that to-day Aïr contained scores of deserted villages. They are illuminating as illustrative of the drastic extent of change and decay. They have completely died out.
And what of Agades, which is still alive? Its dwellings are half in ruins. It supports about 2,000 inhabitants, and to-day its surroundings are drear beyond description. Yet it was once a great desert city, on a famous route across Africa of great antiquity, and is said to have once contained 50,000 inhabitants—more than the whole population of the Sahara’s interior to-day.
Verily, ever it comes back to me; the Sahara is a land of decay. To the traveller it holds its principal charm in its strange mystic beauty and wonderful vastness, and in the fact that it is a land of Allah, steeped in inherent sadness.
CHAPTER V
THE TARALUM
CHAPTER V
THE TARALUM