The nomades of the Southern Sahara have not, like the Bedouins, preserved in its purity the Shemitic type, but they have fostered and developed the spirit of adventure and rapine which characterizes the Arab of the desert, and they have added something of the ferocity of the still barbarous tribes of Ham, with whom they have intermarried. These nomades form two principal groups—the Tibboos on the east, and Touaregs (Touarick, Touereug, or Tawarik) on the west. The former, according to Humboldt, are called “birds,” on account of their agility; they are still imperfectly known to Europeans, despite of the labours of Richardson, Clapperton, and Barth. The second are divided into the Touaregs of Aghadez and the Touaregs of Tagazi. It was not until 1862 that the French army, crossing the Sahara from north to south, entered into direct relations with these fierce children of the desert. In the same year their ambassadors attracted the curiosity of ever-curious Paris. They are the despots, the tyrants of the southern Sahara. The charge of their lean flocks is their least occupation. They are, it is true, skilful and enthusiastic hunters; but their veritable industry is the exploration of the desert: an exploration which changes in form according to circumstances. For a proper remuneration they undertake the guidance and protection of the caravans; but whoever has not purchased their safeguard they treat as an enemy, and if not adequately ransomed sell into slavery. The Berbers of the oasis not unjustly regard these marauders with alarm. For they pitilessly exact from the peaceful cultivator a share of his harvest, which is always the lion’s share; the right of the strongest being the only right they recognize, and each man for himself the only principle they respect. A troop of Touaregs, for instance, descends upon an oasis, and summons its inhabitants to deliver up immediately a certain number of bags of dates. In case of refusal they withdraw, but the people of the oasis may prepare to defend themselves with arms, for the dreaded blow will very shortly be delivered. The Touaregs, leaving their maharis and their baggage at a convenient distance, penetrate at night into the palm-gardens, scale the walls, and, unless very energetically repelled, seize upon the tribute they had demanded.
Nothing is there to be remarked in the Arabs of the q’sours but their misery and degradation. A French officer, M. Tremblet, has described with exactness and force their physiognomy, manners, character, ideas, and history.[78] One rises from the perusal of his book with a painful impression. In the narrow and pestilential streets of the q’sours, where vermin are as numerous as men and women, in those mud palaces where the sultans are enthroned in rags, the same passions, the same ambitions, the same all-potent appetites, the same struggles, intrigues, and crimes prevail, as occupy so large a place in the history of the great states of Europe and Asia.
Among the inhabitants of the Desert I would include the possessors of the great Egyptian oasis,—that ancient cradle of civilization—that strange and mysterious land which, after throbbing with so full and brilliant a life in the days of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies, slumbered for centuries under the leaden domination of the Moslem. Let us note only that the Egyptian people have undergone no special modification; the features of the fellahs of to-day are exactly those which we trace in the pictures that cover the walls of palace and tomb, the monuments that carry us back in imagination to the erection of the Pyramids or the glories of hundred-gated Thebes. It is the old Egypto-Berber race, wherein we recognize the mixture of the black and Shemitic blood, or perhaps the still incomplete result of the influences which have transformed into negroes the whites who emigrated, some thousands of years ago, from Western Asia into Africa.
The Egyptians establish, very clearly, the transition between the Shemites and the population of Nubia and Ethiopia. With the latter the skin is black or of a deep bronze; but the form, the features, the hair, approach much more nearly the Caucasian than the Negro type. The Nubian women especially exhibit a grace and dignity of movement which reveal the nobleness of their origin. “It is in these far lands,” says Trémaux, “we meet with the modern Rebecca, attired with the antique Biblical simplicity, and carrying the water vessel on her head. Their air, at once easy and reserved, their black modest eyes, recall those images of the holy history which every one has seen; only, instead of a cotton stuff gaily coloured, imagine a piece very dirty and often in tatters, and you will have the portrait of the Nubian woman; this garment is otherwise so naturally draped and so proudly worn, that it yields in nothing to the ancient models.”