BARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUST
Neither T’intellust nor Oborassan, a little further up the valley, deserve any special mention. Annur had houses in both villages, though his official residence was in the latter. They are small settlements of a nomadic people, dependent upon camels and goats for sustenance, and lie near the point where the great valley receives the waters of Gundai by a large tributary from the south. The west side of the mountains of Tafidet also drain into the main basin, the upper part of which eventually turns north-east towards the Taghmeurt n’Afara hills. These mountains are the last barrier which divide the plateau of Air from the desert. The plain north of T’intellust and the right bank of the valley bed are low, rocky and devoid of vegetation. Along the western side of the plain runs the Agwau valley. Agwau village, marked by a white hillock, is the principal settlement of the Kel Agwau section of the Kel Assarara tribe in the Imaslagha group of the Kel Owi. It boasts a number of houses of the “B type,” a small mosque, a few “A type” dwellings and many large circles which were once hut enclosures.
Marching west from Oborassan and T’intellust towards Agwau, there were few landmarks of any note along the north side of the main valley. I gradually left the line of the main bed and skirted some low rocky ground, which reaches for some distance towards the north. Beyond Agwau I crossed a grassy plain in the direction of a big group of bare mountains, one side of which is called the Assarara and the other the Afis massif;[275] it is an isolated southern spur of the great Tamgak formation just visible behind it in the north-west. The Agwau torrent flows down between its eastern side and the plain of North-eastern Air. A road from the great nameless valley runs northwards up its course and eventually leaves the mountains for the desert by Fares and T’iwilmas watering-points.
The most important settlement of this north-eastern basin of Air is Assarara, a small town lying in a cranny between two boulder-strewn peaks which rise suddenly out of the gentle slope of the northern bank of the main valley. Here I spent a night after looting a number of ethnological specimens from deserted houses, mainly of the “B type.” The dwellings were all well built and were still filled with abandoned household goods: several had stucco decorations derived from the older “A type” house decoration which has already been described. There were also a mosque and khan. Thence I returned to Assode by Assatartar village, crossing the Tarei tan Kel Owi as it emerges from the plateau south of the main valley by the little left bank ravine called Azañieres.[276]
By the next day I had again set forth towards the north, halting after the first march at Afis village, not far from Assarara, but on the other side of the Afis massif. There also I saw a number of stone houses and another mosque. The country in a sense was dangerous, because the neighbouring watering-point called Agaragar, has often proved to be the favourite camping-ground for raiders entering Air from the north. It happened while I was taking an astronomical observation during the night at about 1 a.m. that a sudden wind arose in the valley, and the camp woke up with a sense of foreboding. The air seemed filled with impending danger, of which the camels also became aware. Almost at once a camel was seen silhouetted on a ridge against the dark sky. Amadu, my servant, seized a rifle and quickly but silently woke up Sidi and the camel men. They said that a raid was upon us, and with difficulty I restrained them from firing indiscriminately into the night. We took up our positions behind the baggage in the black shadow of a tree under which we were camped. But the camel on the sky-line turned out to be one of my own beasts which had strayed, and calm was restored. We had received a visitation from the great god Pan.
On the following day we crossed the Agaragar valley and wound slowly up a defile towards the upper part of the Ighazar basin. We climbed to a pass over a spur of the Tamgak mountains. The rocks all round were covered with drawings and inscriptions, for the way was very old. It was the road of the Northern Air salt caravan which went to Bilma from Iferuan by Faodet, Agwau, Taghmeurt n’Afara and the pool of Agamgam on the edge of the desert in the far north-eastern corner of the mountains. From Agamgam the caravan used to march by an easier route than the southern track which is now followed to Ashegur well, north of Fashi and from that place to Bilma.
From the pass the road fell steeply to Faodet in an amphitheatre of great hills, a picturesque place, and important on account of a good, deep well. Although the houses were few the site proved interesting by reason of the existence of rectangular grass huts constructed at great labour to preserve the traditional type of the Tuareg house. They provided an excellent example of the tenacity of custom, for the material of which they had been built was totally unsuited to their shape or plan.
The upper waters of the Ighazar basin collect in three valleys which unite between T’intaghoda and Seliufet. On the way down the valley from Faodet, the village and palm grove of Iberkom were passed, whence a fine valley runs up into the heart of Tamgak and provides some degree of communication between T’iwilmas or Fares on the desert, and the villages in the Ighazar. Further on we come to Tanutmolet village, remarkable for a modern elaboration of the “B type” house displayed in the strictly rectangular but many-roomed dwelling shown in [Plate 27.] T’intaghoda is interesting as possessing an early mosque and several fine “A” and “B type” houses covered with a stucco of red earth. Most of the houses had been built on two low hills standing in the bottom of the valley. There are no gardens near them nor any palm grove. The importance of the merchants and holy men who used to live there had made of T’intaghoda the capital of Northern Air. A little further on begins the palm grove of Seliufet, and from there date palms and gardens continue all the way to Iferuan, with a chain of almost contiguous settlements on both sides of the valley bed.
At Iferuan the French established a small fort in 1921 near the site where the Foureau-Lamy expedition had camped and had been attacked some twenty years before. The fort is valueless except for the moral support it may offer to induce the local Tuareg to return to their old villages from the south. The Senegalese soldiers of the garrison are not mounted and would be powerless to do anything in the event of a raid. By the end of 1922 some families, but only a few compared with the numbers who lived there before the war, had returned to their homes.
Iferuan was a very delightful place. The peak of Tamgak stands pointing like a finger to heaven on the edge of the massif. The gardens and the groves of palm trees, some of which, alas! have died through lack of attention during the years of neglect since 1917, give the area a distinctly fertile aspect. It is impossible to say how many palm trees there are in the Ighazar, but they must run into many thousands. There are said to be 4250 at Iferuan alone. This number exceeds the next largest single group at In Gall west of Agades, where there are some 4000 trees, and the former are only a part of the total in the Ighazar.