The palms produce dates, which ripen in the autumn, and the gardens principally wheat, millet, tomatoes, and onions in sparing quantities. All the work of cultivation is done by hand.
The dwellings of the desert oases have the character of towns, not villages. In a sense that designation may appear overdrawn, insomuch that many oases are no larger than the tiniest of villages, but against that should be set an environment that is so appallingly blank that any society of dwellings takes on the glamour of urban life. The market-places have their bazaars and their movement of people, the sandy streets are tolerably well laid out, while the clay-built buildings are compact and complete, and sometimes ornamental.
But they are few and very widely scattered, and vary greatly in standard. Some are mere hovels, others towns in the full sense of the word; and these latter are chiefly in the Algerian Sahara near to Arab civilisation, though Bilma, Fachi, and like outstanding ports in the desert should on no account be overlooked.
The sedentary havens among mountains such as Ahaggar and parts of Aïr are different from the desert oases. They are in character villages, and the life is entirely rural, as a place is rural that herds flocks about its doors and lives, for the most part, in grass-covered hutments.
In Aïr in particular, and in some cases in Ahaggar, these permanent villages are occupied by Tuaregs who, having fallen on evil days and lost their camels and means of getting about, have taken to semi-sedentary life with bitterness in their hearts. Those have their slave-people, who, besides doing all the manual work in camp, labour at cultivation, as in the oases, when water permits of cultivation. But such harvest as they gather is meagre indeed, and insufficient to serve the needs of the community, since there is little scope for cultivation in the narrow, stony valleys between the slopes of the mountains; and lack of water adds a further drawback. On that account, also, only a few date-palms are planted near such villages.
SEMI-SEDENTARY
A TUAREG OF THE EGUMMI TRIBE
On the whole, there is poor encouragement to toil because of the adverse conditions, and prolonged spells of idleness have no doubt developed the spirit of laziness that is prevalent in all these places.
Tuaregs are the authoritative owners of the villages, and have a definite residence there; though every now and again a family or two, with their herds, wander away on the open trail for a time, giving expression to the restless spirit that hungers for the life of the untrammelled wilderness.