After leaving Assa the vegetation had almost entirely disappeared. Low gravel-strewn hills on the right obscured the view to the east. The T’inien valley soon made a right-angle turn to the north, closing to a narrow cleft, which became even rougher. The track was a series of steps between huge granite and quartz boulders, among which the camels kept on stumbling. Their loads required constant readjustment and there was no room to kneel them down. The way was really only fit for unloaded camels or riders on urgent business. There had not been a tree or bush for hours. We climbed some 600 feet in about a mile, almost to the very top of the jagged peaks on the left that marked the summit of the T’inien range. By 11.15 a.m. I was beginning to despair of finding a camp site before the rain was due, as I foresaw a similar unpleasant descent on the other side of the col which had so long been looming ahead. Then as I reached the gates of the pass a view over the whole of Central Air suddenly burst upon me in such beauty as I can never forget.
The ground sloped imperceptibly to the east. It fell away only about a hundred feet to the north, where a row of small crags, the continuation of the T’inien range, cut off the western horizon. Straight in front in the distance, piled mass upon mass, the blue mountains of Central Air rose suddenly out of the uplands, soaring into the African sky. Between the bold cliffs and peaks of the Bagezan mountains and the long low Taruaji group to the right, a few little conical hills of black rock broke the surface of the vast plain which rolled away to the east. From so great a distance the plain seemed tolerably smooth, veined like the hand of a man with watercourses winding southwards from the foot of the mountains. Black basalt boulders covered the flat spaces between lines of green vegetation and the threads of white sand, where the stream beds were just visible. Over the whole plain the new-born grass was like the bloom on a freshly-picked fruit. To the south-east stood the blue range of Taruaji itself, flat-topped and low on the horizon. Either side of the hills the curve of the world fell gently away towards the Nile.
I camped a mile or so north of the pass in a valley below the precipitous cliffs of a rock called Okluf, which has a castellated crown several hundred feet high. The rocks shone blue-black, with their feet in a carpet of green that seemed too vivid to be real. There were plenty of guinea-fowl and many other birds in the palm woods and thorn groves, and such grass as I thought only grew in the water meadows of England. I shall never forget the beauty of Central Air on that noonday in the rains, though I have it in me to regret the fiendish temper in which the day’s march had left me. The flies in the evening and the fast-running things upon the ground at night only made it worse. I had hurriedly and laboriously pitched a tent, and it never rained after all.
PLATE 14
MT. TODRA FROM AUDERAS
On the following day I ascended the T’ilisdak valley which flows into the Telwa, and reached Auderas village, where some huts had been prepared for us by the chief Ahodu, a man who soon became my most particular friend. The T’ilisdak valley is renowned for its excellent grazing and for some mineral springs where men, camels and herds go after the rainy season to take a “cure” of the waters.[115] Near Okluf there are the remains of several hut villages, and some with stone foundations of a more permanent character. They belong to a servile tribe of Southern Air called the Kel Nugguru, who at present are living somewhat further west.
Air proper may be said to begin at the head of the T’ilisdak valley. The part of the plateau I had traversed was therefore still in Tegama, which includes the whole area south of Bagezan and Todra as far as the River of Agades, as well as the Taruaji massif, but not the country east of the latter and of Bagezan. Most of the villages in Tegama have gardens, and some have groves of date palms. That they are inhabited by serfs is, of course, natural, since the cultivation of the soil, in the estimation of the noble Tuareg, is not a worthy occupation for a man. When, however, in a nomad society agriculture is relegated to an inferior caste of people, it is inevitable that the practice should undermine the older allegiances. It becomes possible for the settled and therefore originally the servile people to accumulate wealth even in bad times when the profit from raiding or caravaning is denied to the upper classes of Air. The social effects of the disruption caused by the 1917 revolution may be observed in the village organisations, where people of different tribes are now tending more and more to live in association under the rule of a village headman, who for them is displacing the authority of their own tribal chiefs. The village headmen, it is true, are sometimes themselves the leaders of the tribes in whose area the village is situated, but more often they are merely local men acting on the delegated authority of the tribal chief, who in Tegama is probably the head of an Imghad or servile tribe dependent in turn upon some noble tribe living in a different part of Air. But in time the population of a village may become known collectively as the people of such and such a place, and so reference to the old tribal allegiance of the inhabitants disappears.
Tuareg tribal names deserve close investigation. They are of two categories: those which begin with “Kel” (People of . . .) and those which begin with “I” or sometimes “A.” This “I” or “A” may be quite strongly pronounced, but often represents the so-called “neutral vowel,”[116] which is very difficult to transliterate. Thus the word “Ahaggar” might as correctly be written “Ihaggar”; the initial vowel indeed is so little emphasised that the French have come to write simply “Hoggar” or “Haggar.” On the other hand, in the name Ikazkazan, an Air tribe, the “I” is marked; in the Azger tribe, again, the Ihadanaren, it is so lightly accentuated that Barth writes “Hadanarang.” This point, however, is of little moment: what matters is the question of the type of prefix to the name. To simplify reference I propose to call these two types “Kel name” and “I name” tribes. After examining the two categories at length, a distinction seemed to me to stand out clearly; I believe it holds good among other Tuareg as well as those of Air. The primary tribal divisions have names of the “I” category, except in certain cases where they are nearly always known to have been forgotten; the subdivisions of these tribes have “Kel names.” The former are proper names; the latter are derived either from the place where the people usually or once lived, or from some inherent peculiarity. The word “Kel” is also used to cover generalisations of no ethnic importance: the “I name,” on the other hand, is scarcely ever geographical or adjectival. The generalisation will be clearer for a few examples, chosen among the Air tribes. The noble tribe called Imasrodang has for sub-tribes the Kel Elar, Kel Seliufet and Kel T’intaghoda, called after the villages where they lived in Northern Air. Again, the Ikazkazan have one section or group of sub-tribes called the Kel Ulli—the People of the Goats—who are themselves subdivided into other factions bearing “Kel names.”
Certain other “Kel names” like Kel Ataram or Kel Innek are often heard in Air, but are not proper names at all; they were erroneously regarded by Barth as tribal names, but simply mean the “People of the West” and the “People of the East” respectively, and have no inherent ethnic significance. In Air the former term logically includes, and is meant to include, the Arab as well as the Tuareg tribes of the west.[117]