At the southern edge of the immense Taberghit valley the character of the country changes quite definitely. The surface becomes dotted with little hummocks where the sand has been washed against a small bush or piece of scrub; otherwise the ground is bare. The few trees are grouped in scattered clumps. The ground vegetation is no longer predominantly “Karengia,” but one of several kinds of less offensive and more useful desert grasses impregnated with salt. The best camel fodder, curiously enough, is the true desert vegetation. The animals eat it avidly on account of the salt it contains, and even long periods of drought do not conquer its obstinate greenness. Its nutritive power is greater and it is more wholesome than the luxuriant Southland fodder.
At Taberghit a track runs direct to Agades by way of Ihrayen spring. When both the eastern roads were in use, the Hannekar track was used by people going to Agades, while the more eastern Farak-In Asamed route by way of Tergulawen was frequented by caravans bound for Northern Air.
A day before reaching Milen well you feel very strongly that the Sudan lies behind. The last bush has been left near Taberghit. In front is an open depression perhaps five miles wide and not more than fifty feet deep: it contains no stream bed, but here and there patches of dry cracked mud indicate the formation of short-lived rain pools. East and west the same stark valley runs as far as eye can see. Its course is clearly defined and it is without intersecting basins or tributaries or curves. On the far crest are loose buff-coloured sand dunes and then a few small acacias. The levels gradually rise in a series of folds, one of which contains the closed basin and disused Anu n’Banka[59]; another forms a valley called Kaffardá, which is like Taberghit but on a smaller scale. The folds lie parallel to one another along the line of the prevalent E.N.E. wind which always blows in Azawagh. This wind is one of the peculiarities for which the country is notorious. Both times I crossed this region it was blowing with great violence. In June it was suffocatingly hot; I camped one noonday to rest out of sheer exhaustion in a group of trees on the northern side of Taberghit. There was practically no shade: the leaves of the stunted trees were too thin to shelter even three persons. The temperature was over 110° F. in the shade, and visibility did not exceed a quarter of a mile, owing to the blowing sand and dust. Six months later I returned the same way. The same wind was blowing, but it was so cold at midday that I was unable to keep warm, even walking, with two woollen shirts, a drill coat, a leather jerkin and a blanket over my shoulders. Where a bush or sand dune offered shelter from the wind the sun was quite hot, but that night the thermometer fell to 31° F., after having registered 92° F. at 3 p.m. in a sheltered spot in the shade. It was very unpleasant. Barth’s experience of the wind and cold of Azawagh was much the same as mine. He writes: “The wind which came down with a cold blast from the N.N.E. was so strong that we had difficulty in pitching our tent;”[60] it was responsible for the most “miserable Christmas” he had ever spent. I was there a few days before Christmas in 1922 and can vouch for the accuracy of his verdict. Even the blinding glare and heat of June were preferable to the bleak cold of the winter nights.
One effect of the constant wind is that the longitudinal dunes in Azawagh have retained their characteristic form more generally than further south. Their gentle rounded contours, which the wind tends to restore whenever the rain happens to have modified them, are characteristic. There is, of course, less precipitation here than further south, though it has been sufficient in Tagedufat to produce a considerable growth of desert vegetation along the bottom of the valley, where there are a number of small trees and an abundance of every conceivable type of salt bush and grass. It is said at certain seasons of the year to produce the finest camel fodder in this part of Africa.
All over Azawagh are numerous deserted sites where millet used to be grown on the sandy slopes. The people who cultivated this arid country lived in temporary tents and huts except further north between Tagedufat and Milen, and consequently no trace of their dwellings remains. The evidence, however, of cleared and levelled patches and of broken earthenware is as unmistakable here as in Damergu. Between Keta and Tagedufat there is a succession of such clearings. It is borne in upon one that this heavy buff-coloured sand country where only desert vegetation now appears to thrive is in reality quite fertile so long as it receives any rain at all. The climate has probably not altered enough in recent times to account for the desertion of Azawagh; it seems rather to have been due to a decrease of the population. The Kel Azawagh, according to tradition, were numerous at a time when Damergu was thickly peopled, and there was not enough land available there or in Air to satisfy the needs of a people squeezed between the south and the north, whence the population was constantly being driven into the Sudan. It is clear that the Kel Azawagh who made these millet cultivations in a zone of desert steppe must have been of a fairly sedentary disposition, for a nomad people would have contented itself, as the modern Tuareg inhabitants of Azawagh do, with grazing herds and flocks on the excellent pastures.
In referring to the Kel Tegama a plea was advanced that the name was primarily a geographical one, and one not properly appertaining to a single tribe. The name Kel Azawagh, to which the same considerations certainly apply, is found to some extent interchangeable with Kel Tegama. Now it will be shown later that the Tuareg of Air and Damergu only reached these lands comparatively late in history; consequently an allusion in Ptolemy to a Tegama people appears to refer to a non-Tuareg folk in this or some other area of the same name. I see no reason to doubt that it was these Tegama and Azawagh areas which were meant by Ptolemy, and therefore conclude that before the Tuareg arrived they were possessed by a people to whom the millet clearings and village sites are probably due. The later Tuareg Tegama, or Kel Tegama, as we should more properly say, as well as the Kel Azawagh, were merely a section of People of the Veil who later lived in the areas, and in the course of time were named after them, though it is possible that the name Azawagh was one given by the Tuareg to an area previously called Tegama by its former inhabitants.
We shall see[61] that among the ancient divisions of the People of the Veil in the Hawara group is a Kel Azawagh. The peculiarities of the Hawara clans would not connote any sedentary instinct in this tribe, whether it lived in this or in another area called Azawagh; but when we find in the Tetmokarak tribe of the Kel Geres group now living near Sokoto (whither they migrated from Air through this Azawagh area) a subsection called Tegama, and when we have learnt[62] that the Kel Geres are almost certainly a Hawara people, we can be even more inclined to the view just suggested regarding the use of the names Azawagh and Tegama and the origin of the people at various times living there. As a tribal name Kel Azawagh has now disappeared. The French 1/2,000,000 map displays it in the valley between Agades and the Tiggedi cliff, but out of place, for when still in use it was applicable to an area rather further east. Although it is no longer a proper name, it serves the Ifadeyen who now live in Azawagh for a descriptive term of themselves in accordance with the usual practice regarding local tribal nomenclature.
In the periods between the rains the village sites in the Taberghit or Tagedufat valleys watered at the deep wells of Tagedufat, Anu n’Banka, Aghmat, Taberghit and presumably Tateus, though I know nothing of the last named. All these wells have now become silted up by wind-borne sand, but could easily be cleared if the population returned, as the water has not disappeared.
The whole area between Taberghit and Tagedufat is covered with small mobile dunes; the two valleys themselves are, however, free of them. There is no loose sand at all in the Tagedufat valley, a curious phenomenon probably connected with the eddies formed by the prevalent wind in the channel of a depression between the higher banks. If this were true, the existence of dunes at Kaffarda would conversely point to its being an isolated basin, and this indeed is probably the case. Anu n’Banka is in a little hollow, the sides of which are also covered with small dunes. The bottom itself is clayey and free from blown sand, showing traces of having been a rain-pool at certain seasons. Surrounding the depression are millet clearings and a little rock outcrop. It is the most southerly point in Azawagh where stone occurs, and the outpost of the more conspicuous rock formations of the Tagedufat valley.
Although the first part of the descent into Tagedufat is imperceptible, the appearance of the ground has changed considerably on account of the small crescentic dunes of very fine white sand which overlie the heavier buff-coloured sand of the surface. The crescentic type is characteristic of young dunes in process of formation,[63] their last stage being the long whale-back down of heavy particles which tend to settle or become cemented and eventually to support some vegetation. The Azawagh valleys present a series of interesting examples of the youngest type of dunes, which are still moving rapidly, superimposed upon the oldest fixed dune formations oriented along the line of the prevalent wind. It is curious that at no point has the fine and very mobile sand which is continually being carried in from the great Eastern Desert collected in large masses: the small crescentic bodies, the horns of which, of course, lie down wind, or, in other words, point west to south-west, are neither continuous nor contiguous. The underlying buff-coloured surface is covered with a number of small trees and scattered scrub or grass in isolated clumps. This vegetation becomes covered by the crescent dunes and in time uncovered as the white sand moves westward. Where this vegetation can be seen emerging from the crescentic formations on the windward side it is still alive, pointing to a fairly rapid motion of the body of sand. It is true that some of this desert scrub is sufficiently hardy to withstand a period of, it is said, as much as four years without any rain, and even then it only requires very little moisture in the air or some dew; the numerous small acacias, however, if wholly engulfed for any length of time, would die. Yet at no point is there either a wake of dead vegetation behind the larger crescentic dunes or even an unduly large proportion of dead trees. The progress of the small dunes is therefore undoubtedly rapid, and is due to the constant wind, which should, however, have tended to create larger masses. The crescentic dunes are rarely more than twelve feet high at the most; their individual area is, of course, relatively large owing to the very flat slipping angle of the fine grains. Barth records dunes as far as Tergulawen; but there is no evidence regarding the country east of this point,[64] which is probably too far north of the dune belt on the Termit road to be connected with that zone.