The q’sour of Ouargla is divided into three quarters, inhabited by three tribes, who do not live always on the most friendly terms. In appearance it resembles the Saharan q’sours, which have all a strong family likeness; there are the mosque, and the governor’s residence, and the open market-place, and the narrow squalid streets, often obstructed by heaps of unclean and unsavoury rubbish; and the low dull houses, pierced with holes instead of windows, which have seldom any shutters; so that the traveller, when he penetrates into these dismal quarters, is startled by the contrast which they present to the picture of enchanted palaces full of shade, perfume, and freshness, drawn by his eager imagination. Our poets and romancists have much to answer for. Their ideal East is very different from that actual East, in all its heat, and noisomeness, and glare, which the voyager finds around him, and which seems to have lost much of its beauty along with its grandeur and its power. Pleasant to the fancy is the palm-grove, pleasant the garden with its golden and purple fruitage, but the warm (and often mineral) waters which irrigate, or rather inundate the soil, exhale the most deleterious emanations, so that the unfortunate inhabitants are constantly decimated by fever, blinded by ophthalmic disease, and devoured by insects!
We have already seen that the Desert of Erosion is watered by means of artesian wells, natural or artificial. The latter have been known to the peoples of the Sahara from the remotest antiquity; but the implements and the methods employed to bore or preserve them were, as the reader will suppose, very rude and unsatisfactory. The sides of the well are only supported by a framework of palm-wood, which decays very quickly; the well gets choked; divers descend with baskets to clear away the sand; but after awhile the evil exceeds their power of remedying it. “Then, for want of water,” says M. Martins, “the palms grow sick and perish; the villages are emptied of their population; the oasis contracts its boundaries, and gradually disappears. The Desert resumes possession of the demesne which the labour of man had temporarily won for it.” Fortunately, in the track of the French army have trodden the French engineers, with all the wonderful apparatus that Science places at their disposal, and in numerous places they have excavated true artesian wells, similar to those which supply some of our great towns. And thus many oases which were on the point of perishing have been saved, others have been created, and the conquest of the Desert by modern industry is henceforth no more than a question of time.
The oases of the Sandy Desert, as I have said, are not watered. They only possess such wells as suffice, more or less, for the needs of the poor cultivators. As for the palms, and other nutritive vegetables, they are planted at the bottom of conical excavations some eighteen, twenty-five, or thirty feet in depth; so that at a short distance you only see their crests rising above the sandy soil like large tufts of herbage. The slopes around these hollow gardens are stayed indifferently well by a matting of palm leaves. The well itself is placed in the centre, and its depth does not exceed five-and-twenty feet. Nothing can be more precarious than these oases, which a gust of wind may bury under an avalanche of sand. Yet the men are cleaner in their person, neater in attire, and livelier in spirit—the women are less wretched and less oppressed—and the houses better built and better provided than in the great q’sours of the upper regions. In the Souf, the sandy region of the Eastern Sahara, the industrious inhabitants of these oases remain at peace in the midst of the tumults and insurrections of their turbulent neighbours, and appear fully sensible of the advantages they undoubtedly derive from the firm and impartial rule of the French Government.
CHAPTER VI.
ANIMAL LIFE IN THE DESERT.
THE artist who wishes to represent the broad expanse of Ocean’s “liquid plain,” does not fail to animate it with the white canvas of the labouring ships. If he paints the Desert, his picture would be divided by a horizontal line into two parts—the blue heaven, the yellow sand; the latter, an undulating sea, with a few clumps of palms in the background, and in the foreground, to enliven the too monotonous scene, a group or so of camels. The camel is, in fact, the indispensable accessory of every view of the Desert, as the ship of every marine painting; which justifies once more the Arab designation of “ship of the Desert” or “terrestrial ship” (gouareb el beurr).
In Book the First I have spoken of the Camel properly so-called, or camel with two humps, which is peculiar to Central and Eastern Asia. The camel of Arabia and Africa is the dromedary. The latter is employed conjointly with the two-humped camel in the westernmost countries of Asia: in Egypt, and in Nubia, he is much more widely spread than his congener, which is nearly unknown in the rest of Africa. The dromedary has but one hump. His hair is soft, woolly, moderately long about the body, longer and much thicker on the hump, the head, the neck, and the shoulders. Its colour varies from a reddish-brown to a clear yellow. Zoologists recognize three varieties of this species:—The Brown dromedary, also called, but improperly, the Caucasian dromedary—he is brown, like the Bactrian camel, and his short squat limbs indicate strength rather than agility; the White dromedary, of a very transparent colour, and of slender figure; and the Egyptian dromedary, larger than either of the preceding, and with body and limbs uniformly clothed in short gray hair. But the Arabs distinguish only two races: the Djemel, or camel of burden, which is no other, probably, than the Caucasian dromedary; and the Mahari, or camel for the saddle and war, whose name seems to apply equally to the two other varieties.
The mahari is to the djemel what our chargers are to our carthorses, or, as the Arabs say, what the djend (noble) is to the kheddim (the servant). He has a very sure foot, a free, sustained, and rapid trot; he is sober, enduring, and courageous; a true courser, and the nomade’s inseparable friend and companion. His training is a matter of the highest importance, and skilfully adapted to develop all his best qualities and highest faculties.