The Bororoji are a darker section of the Fulani than many of the purer divisions in the south. In Northern Damergu they can be seen stalking through the bush with their herds of black kine, naked except for a loin skin and a peaked cap of liberty of embroidered cloth, but patently conscious of their birth. They come and go as they please, and no one interferes with them. Some may settle in towns or villages, living for a time on the produce of sales of cattle, in which they are rich. Most of them have no permanent habitation. A few can be seen in villages like Gangara, where they come to sell an occasional bull and buy a few ornaments or some such luxury as grain. Their women are slender, tall and straight, with fine oval faces and straight, jet-black hair. The triangular form of face from the cheek-bones to the chin is noticeable among the Bororoji as among the Rahazawa Fulani of the Katsina area, but the face is somewhat longer in proportion to the breadth than further south. Their appearance is Semitic, though the nose is never heavy but straight, and this is the case even more among the women than the men. Both sexes wear bead necklaces; the peaked cloth cap is the ornament of the men. The women have anklets and bracelets of copper and as many as six large copper curtain rings in their ears, the only disfigurement of their handsome faces. Of the customs, religion and organisation of the Bororoji little is known. Like their cousins in the south, they anoint the wide-branching horns of their cattle, and when they drink milk, though none must be spilled, a little is left in the bottom of the calabash as an offering to the Eternal Spirit. The Fulani believe that one day they will return to the East, whence their tradition says that they came, but how or why or when they left this unknown home has not been explained. Obedient to tradition, numbers of them are settling year by year in the Nilotic Sudan.
The last belt of bush between the Sahara and Sudan is reached a day’s march from Tanut. The Elakkos bush further east ceases completely in about Lat. 15° 20′ N.; on the road to Termit the vegetation becomes very scanty some way south of a belt of white sand dunes in Lat. 15° 30′ N.: north of them the country is pure steppe desert. The Damergu bush, however, extends as far north as Lat. 15° 50′ to the Taberghit valley on the eastern road to Air, and to Tembellaga on the western road. Damergu forms a salient in the line of the Sudan vegetation.
The belt of sand dunes on the way to Termit is said to run eastward even beyond the Bilma-Chad road south of Agadem well, and gradually to broaden all the way; in the west it hardly reaches the edge of Damergu. Some fifty miles north of Talras in Elakkos the same zone of acacia trees, which occur in the hollows of the dunes on the Termit road, follows a depression called the Tegama valley.[55] The surface, like that of the steppe desert, is of heavy buff-coloured sand in long whale-back dunes.
The Northern Damergu bush is different to the belt which runs along the southern side of the country. The trees and shrubs are principally of the acacia variety. The larger vegetation which is typical of the Sudan has disappeared, but the grasses and ground plants are still characteristic of the south. The burr grass which makes life burdensome to the traveller reigns supreme. The “Karengia” (Pennisetum distichium) grows in clumps or small tufts some fifteen inches in height. In Northern Damergu the ground is densely carpeted with this grass. As soon as the summer rains are over it sheds a little seed with a crown of small sharp spikes. Leather and the bare human skin alone afford the burrs no hold; any other material seems to attract them irresistibly. In the presence of this pest the bush natives have found the only solution, which is to go almost naked; the clothed but unhappy European blasphemes until he is too weary to speak. Water is the only remedy; it softens the little burr and makes it possible to remove it without disintegrating entirely the mesh of one’s apparel, but water in this belt of land is scarce.
The next watering-points after leaving Gamram are Farak, and Hannekar on the Menzaffer valley. The latter is now on the most direct road to Air, since the slightly more eastern track from the former point by In Asamed well to Tergulawen became impossible when the latter well was filled in during the late war. At Hannekar there is a large depression covered with thick undergrowth and small trees standing in a pool of water which lasts for some months after the rains. As the pool dries up, shallow wells are dug in the bed. The water supply at Farak is all contained in shallow wells, but as watering from them is a much slower process than sending cattle and camels to drink at a pool, it is customary for the local Tuareg and Fulani to stay in the Hannekar area as long as they can. After the rains and until the wells are re-dug at Farak there is consequently a period when there is practically no water there at all, as Barth found early in 1851. Nevertheless, since the permanent supply at Farak below the ground is greater than anywhere else in Northern Damergu, it has come to be considered the real starting-point of the eastern road to Air. Its importance as a rendezvous for pasturing tribes as well as for north-bound caravans explains the numerous disasters which have occurred there at the hands of Tuareg and Tebu raiders.
North of Farak is a long hill falling away steeply on the side towards the wells. It gave Barth[56] the impression of forming a sharply defined southern border to the desert plateau between Damergu and Air. The existence of so marked an edge is, however, not borne out in fact, for no similar escarpment exists west of it on the road north of Hannekar, nor yet, as Foureau[57] points out, on the western road to Air, by Abellama. The hill of Farak, like another smaller one at Kidigi north of Hannekar, is an isolated elevation.
Permanent habitation used to extend about one day’s march north of Farak, to the neighbourhood of In Asamed well, but after the latter was filled in, which I understand occurred during the 1917 revolt, when Tamatut well, further east, and Tergulawen on the borders of Air were also destroyed, Farak became the last village of the Sudan. Neither in recent years nor of old, however, did it ever possess the same permanency or importance as Gamram. Farak was always liable to be deserted at a moment’s notice in times of danger. To-day the skin and straw huts of the Ifadeyen and Kel Tamat tribes are scattered about in the dense bush all over the district. The camps change from year to year. When I passed this way there were Isherifan near Guliski and Ighelaf south-east of Gamram, Ifadeyen at Farak, and Ifadeyen and Kel Tamat at Hannekar.
Since the more direct road from Farak by In Asamed to Tergulawen has been abandoned, there is now no water for caravans between that place or Hannekar and the Air plateau except at Milen,[58] which is one day south of the mountains. The present track from Farak, after crossing the Tekursat valley at a point near the site of In Asamed well, inclines slightly west and joins the direct track from Hannekar to Milen, running almost due north and south. The apparent angle made by the Farak-Milen track at In Asamed puzzled me when I came to plot it on paper from a compass traverse, for the extraordinary straightness of these old roads between important points, even in the rough hill country of Air, is very remarkable. I eventually realised that a line from Farak produced through In Asamed was on the direct bearing of the old well of Tergulawen. This disused track is the original southern end of what is called the “Tarei tan Kel Owi,” or Kel Owi road, in other words, of the main caravan track from Tripoli to Nigeria. The road in Air and in the south is usually called among the Tuareg after the confederation of tribes in control of the way. Down this eastern track came Barth and his companions in 1850-1.
In Asamed, meaning in Temajegh “(The Well) of Cold Water,” was just over 100 feet deep; its existence shows that Damergu has been left behind and Azawagh has begun, for the former is a land of rain pools and shallow and seasonal wells, while the latter, north of the last Sudan bush, is a desert country with occasional very deep wells and no surface water. It is called Azawagh, a Temajegh name applied to several semi- or totally desert areas in the Sahara. The fact that it is not confined to the country south of Air must be borne in mind in seeking to identify the various areas referred to under this name by the Arab geographers. There is, for instance, an Azawad, a name corrupted in Arabic for Azawagh, north of Timbuctoo.
North of the broad Tekursat valley, with scarcely any marked channel and sparsely covered slopes, is a low plateau with three small valleys, rejoicing in the uncouth name of Teworshekaken. Beyond is the Inafagak valley, and finally the smaller and probably tributary valley of Keta. From here to the Taberghit valley the bush thins out more and more; patches of bare sand become frequent, and the trees are considerably smaller. In none of these valleys has the rain-water left a definite bed of flow, though dry pool bottoms and short sections of channel may be seen here and there. The valleys are sometimes several miles from side to side; they were probably in the first instance longitudinal depressions between heavy sand dunes formed along the direction of the prevalent wind; the sides are even now of too recent formation and too permeable to spill the rain-water into definite beds along the bottoms.