I went forward with the intention of greeting T’ekhmedin, but was met with a look of disdainful inquiry which said more clearly and forcibly than words could express, “Who the hell are you and what the devil do you want?” He is one of the most remarkable men in Air, and the greatest of all the guides to Ghat on the northern roads of Air. Now barely forty years old, he has done the journey from Iferuan to Ghat, which is some four hundred miles in a straight line on the map, more than eighty times. He knows every stone and mark on all the alternative tracks over this terrible desert, as well as one may know the way from Hyde Park Corner to Piccadilly Circus. He is famous all over the Central Sahara, among the hardest travellers of the world, as the surest and toughest guide alive. His birth is noble, his spirit uncompromising. He has fought against the French on many occasions: his activities at Ghat in connection with the capture of the French post of Janet are known to all who followed events in North Africa during the war. He continued to fight against the French when Kaossen came to Air, and was imprisoned after the termination of that revolution; the fetter-marks round his ankles will endure until he dies. He had lost all his property; the rags on his back were pitiful to see, but his leather tobacco bottle and sheath knife, though almost falling to pieces, were of a quality which betokened affluence in the past. When I saw him he had nothing in the world but a small garden at Towar, which he had been reduced from high estate to cultivate like a mere slave. He seemed to be half starved. He was certainly over-worked, trying to grow enough food to keep life in his wife and small boy. The French at Agades have offered him pay to join their Camel Corps as a guide, but T’ekhmedin would have none of them. I wanted him to come with me as a guide, for his knowledge of the Central Sahara would have been invaluable to me in my researches, but he refused to come for pay. After I had broken the ice and explained my purpose in desiring to see him, T’ekhmedin began to thaw, and eventually became more affable. In time I learned to know him well, but in all our relations he never modified his independent attitude. He said: “I will come with you when my wife is provided for out of the harvest from my garden, and when I have placed her in the hands of my relations in T’imia. Then I will come with you for a month or for a year, but only because I want to come, and not for pay: if I come, I will go anywhere you want, but I will not come as your servant. You may give me a present if you like; you must feed me because I am poor, and give me a camel to ride, but I will not be paid for any service. I will come only as your friend because I, I myself, want to come.” On a second trip to Towar I had occasion to nurse him when he had fever. He was thus one of the few men I ever saw without the veil, and as he is so typical of the pure Tuareg, I will copy the description of his appearance which I recorded in my diary at the time. “On reaching Towar I found the whole village laid low with malaria due to the proximity of stagnant wells in the gardens on the edge of the settlement. So I delivered a lecture on the desirability of moving the huts further away, and set to work to dose T’ekhmedin with quinine, the only drug I had with me. He was very bad, and had been ill ever since he left me at Auderas ten days before. I persuaded him to come away with me again; he came, but had a rotten time riding in the heat of the sun, and arrived rather done up. Thanks to good food and quinine he is better now. He is a handsome man, say six feet tall, of slight build, with a small beard and clipped moustache which, like his hair, is just steeled with grey. His domed forehead joins a retreating skull running back to a point behind. He has heavy eyebrow bones and the characteristic Libyan indentation between the forehead and root of the nose, which from that point is straight to the flat extremity. The nostrils are moderately flat and wide, but thin. The lips are not at all everted, rather the reverse. The upper lip is of the type which is very short, but in his case is not unduly so. There is an indentation between the lower lip and chin, which is very firm, very fine and very pointed. The cheek-bones are prominent but not high, and from here, accentuating their prominence, the outline of the face runs straight down to the chin. The ears are small, thin and flat. The profile is somewhat prorhinous; it is not at all prognathous. His hands and ankles are as slender as those of a woman; his body and waist are also slender; as is the case among all Tuareg, there is no superficial muscular development.”
T’ekhmedin’s colleagues on the north roads, Kelama, who is nearly blind, and Sattaf, together with Efale, in the Eastern Desert, enjoy enormous respect in Air and indeed among all Tuareg. As a race the People of the Veil are all born to travel, but anyone among them who has a specialist’s knowledge is as important as a great scientist is in Europe. In general the topographical knowledge of Air and the surrounding countries has declined since raiding ceased, for this pastime was as much a sport as anything else. It is now confined to the people of those areas which are not under European control, that is, most of Tibesti, all the Fezzan and southern parts of Tripolitania and the interior of the Spanish colony of the Rio de Oro. Some of the exploits of the raiding bands from these areas sound so fantastic that they would hardly be credited were they not established facts. The Arab and Moorish tribes from Southern Morocco and from the Rio de Oro, for instance, when they have finished cultivating their scanty fields, turn out nearly every year for the especial purpose of lifting camels from the salt caravans between Timbuctoo and Taodenit, but the parties do not confine their operations to this area if they miss their objective. They have, on several occasions, gone on until they have found elsewhere a sufficient number of camels to make their journey profitable. Thus they have come as far as Damergu and Tegama, south of Agades, a journey from the Atlantic half-way across North Africa and back. Once, with consummate humour, a band stole all the camels of a French Camel Corps patrol in the Tahua area north of Sokoto. These people usually start out in as large a body of men as they reckon can water at the wells by the way, and break up into small parties as soon as they have looted some camels, returning home by different routes. Although they often lose a part of their booty and suffer casualties at the hands of the French Camel Corps, their tactics make them very hard to catch.
The Tebu and Tuareg from the Fezzan raid Kawar and Air. Their procedure varies considerably, and it is impossible to know which way they will come or return. One year a party from the north-east entered Air by the western side and left in an E.S.E. direction. The raiding season begins as soon as the rains have fallen, when there is plenty of water all over the Southern Sahara even in the most inaccessible places. Outlying watering-points which can rarely be visited are their favourite haunts. The wireless stations at Agades and Bilma are a serious handicap, for intercommunication enables the French Camel patrols of different areas to obtain a start, and very often some idea of the possible roads which the raiders are following. Yet even so the two Camel Corps platoons in Air have let many bands slip through their fingers. It is generally recognised as impossible to prevent a raid reaching its objective; at the most the raiders can be followed up and brought to action or forced to abandon their loot on the way home. The latter politically is the end kept in view, for it exposes the raiders to the ridicule of failure rather than the sympathy of defeat. One of the great difficulties of defensive operations in the deserts of the Territoires du Niger is the use of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais as Camel Mounted Troops. The negro of the coast is not, and never will be, a good camel-man, and his efficiency cannot compare with that of the natives used by the French authorities in Southern Algeria, where tribesmen who have been born and bred in the saddle are enlisted as volunteers. Here, there is nothing to choose between the capacity of the raider and his opponent.
The technique of raids is interesting. The size of the bodies attacking Air must always be limited by the capacity of the outlying watering-points, which, except in Damergu and Azawagh, are small. Bands of as few as ten men sometimes operate; a raid of one hundred men is considered large. They travel astonishing distances on practically no food or water: a few dates and a little water serve them for several days. If I were to record the periods of time for which men have lived without water in the lands of the People of the Veil, I would be accused of such mendacity that I will refrain from risking my good name. I will only say that seventy-two hours without water is an occurrence just sufficiently common not to pass as unduly remarkable. Similarly the distances ridden by raiders are fantastic. A hundred miles in the day have been covered by a band of a few hard-pressed men. Individual performances are even better. A messenger quite recently rode from Agades to In Gall in one day and back the next on the same camel, which therefore covered not less than one hundred and forty miles as the crow flies in forty hours, and probably one hundred and sixty by road. Another man, on a famous camel it is true, rode from the River of Agades near Akaraq to Iferuan, a distance of not less than one hundred and sixty miles, in just over twenty-four hours. The two messengers who brought the news to Zinder in 1917, that the post of Agades was besieged, covered over four hundred kilometres in under four days. And such instances could be multiplied. A raiding party, however, will not usually average more than thirty-five miles a day, and even so the hardship is considerable if this rate has to be kept up for many days. The bands are often made up of more men than camels, some of them in turn having to walk until they can loot more mounts. The Tuareg on raids are generally well-behaved towards each other. They do not kill unless the looted tribe or village puts up a fight, for it is an unwritten law among them that on ordinary raids, as opposed to real warfare, only live-stock is taken. Houses are not destroyed and villages are not burnt. This forbearance is, of course, largely due to the fact that there is nothing of any weight worth removing, such wealth as the Tuareg possess being principally in flocks and herds, of which only the camels can readily be driven off. But secrecy is essential, and when, therefore, a stray wanderer is met on the road who might give warning of the arrival of a raiding party, he may be made to accompany the robbers, or, if his presence is inconvenient, he may have to be killed. The Tuareg do not capture each other as slaves unless they are at war, though to steal someone’s slaves is, of course, as legitimate as to steal his camels. Descents on French patrols, posts, and tribes known to be engaged in assisting them are considered legitimate, but they generally have had serious consequences. For here more than raiding is involved—it is war. At the end of last century raiding from Air was frequent: lifting camels from the Aulimmiden had, in fact, become so common a pastime that it was proscribed by the Holy Men, who decided that even though no killing of Tuareg was taking place, the People of the Veil should leave the People of the Veil alone and turn their attentions to the Tebu, who were legitimate enemies. With the latter the Air Tuareg neither give nor expect to receive mercy. Raiding eastward at the end of last century became popular, but fraught with more serious consequences. On one such occasion the expedition turned out so badly that Belkho’s own people, the Igermadan, after successfully lifting camels and taking many prisoners in Kawar, were virtually exterminated. They were surprised at night in their over-confidence and massacred, a reverse from which the tribe to this day has never recovered.
In his youth Ahodu accomplished some very successful raids in the east. His greatest adventure was when he captured a big Arab caravan bound from Murzuk to Bornu, some thirty years ago. He told the story as follows, with Ali of Ghat sitting near him on the floor of my hut. Now when a Tuareg tells a story he always draws on the sand with his fingers to show the numbers of his camels and men and the direction of his march, and when he counts in that way he marks the units by little lines drawn with two or three fingers at a time till he has reached ten, and then marks up a group of ten with a single line to one side.
“That was nearly thirty years ago,” he said, and drew:
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“I was one leader and Ula with the Ifadeyen people was the other. There were” (rubbing out the first marks with a sweep of the hand):
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(that is) “twenty-five of us and about I I I thirty of the Ifadeyen.