For many months of the year after the rains the true nomads do not even trouble to cluster round a group of wells; living on the milk of their camels and goats, they dispense with water for weeks on end. So long as their camels are only pasturing and the fodder is green they do not require to be watered. They are therefore able to live many days from the nearest wells. In such conditions water is a luxury, for it entails long marches and is not essential to man or beast. In South-eastern Air I came across a small party of Kel Takrizat, who had wandered some distance away from their usual grounds in North-western Air, to an area which had been uninhabited since the war. I was riding out from Tabello on the upper Beughqot valley to look for an old village site of which I had heard. Neither my companion, Alwali, nor I had any baggage, and we were short of water, as the skin I carried was leaky. For a mere two days’ journey Alwali had not thought it worth while to bring any food for himself except a small skin of millet meal milk, which he had finished early the first afternoon. In the evening we entered a wide valley known as Tsabba,[200] where we saw a number of camels pasturing. We discovered that they belonged to a charming man called Ahmadu ag Musa. The valley was about miles broad from lip to lip, very green and full of a veitch-like plant called “Alwat,” which contains much moisture. The bottom under the steep sides lay some 100 feet below the level of the plain, which was covered with round basalt boulders wherever there were not hillocks of bare rock rising above it. It is a very arid country looking out towards the Eastern Desert, where the last rocks of Air are swallowed up in sand some thirty miles further on. Ahmadu’s camp consisted of a few mats spread under two or three little trees. As we reached it he came out to meet us. When he found out who we were, he asked me to spend the night with him; and this, having at the time intermittent fever which was due that evening, I willingly agreed to do, provided he could let me have some water. He regretted that he had no water, as he had not been near a well for three weeks, but his men went to fetch milk. I had barely dismounted and agreed to stay when a man ran up with a mat for me to sit on and a bowl of sour milk to drink. Among the Tuareg, if a man comes as a guest his host is personally responsible for his guest’s life, camels and property, so a slave unsaddled my two camels and hobbled them in the usual way by tying the two fore fetlocks together with the short hobble rope which everyone carries. My animals were driven off to feed with Ahmadu’s herd of piebald cow camels. I thought at first it was part of the famous Tegama herd of Ahmadu of the Kel Tagei, but it turned out to be another Ahmadu.

I met him only that once, and for a few moments two days later at Tabello. I have the pleasantest recollections of a great gentleman. We sat talking of the impending departure of the salt caravan for Bilma. The sun set slowly, and, as the light grew less, the cruel gleam left the basalt and granite of the plateau beyond the eastern lip of the valley. The rocks ceased to look metallic in the dance of the hot air, and became soft red and purple in the green-blue sky. Here and there white sand from the outer desert had been washed up against the hillocks. Mount Gorset, with one slope inundated by the sand flood, lay just north of the valley where we sat surrounded by acacia bushes and “Alwat.” The wind had fallen. More and more food was brought for us to eat, all of it of the sort on which the true nomad lives. Cheese, sweet and sour milk, curdled milk, whey water, some cakes of baked burr-grass seed and a very little millet. We sat down to eat; they thought I wanted to eat alone at first, but became more friendly when they saw that some white men were only human like themselves. A pot of cooked millet meal was set down in the middle; luckily they had added salt to the porridge. Each man in turn ate a mouthful from the big wooden spoon and handed it on to his neighbour. I ate little, having fever, but drank much milk, both sweet and sour. The former arrived during the meal, warm and fresh from the camel. It is best quite fresh; when it gets cold in the night it is good too, but becomes rather salt and thin to the taste. We went on eating slowly in the evening, and suddenly night came with a greenish light in the west behind our backs. Milk was left for me to drink during the night; a slave was told to fill my skin with millet meal and milk for the next day. We went on talking, and then the snuff-box was passed round. The Tuareg in Air do not smoke: their only vice, in the austere life they lead, is to take snuff, when they can get it, or to chew green tobacco mixed with a little saltpetre to bring out the taste. The tobacco and snuff are traded from the Southland: the saltpetre is found in Air, and is also used in cooking, for they say that a pinch in the stew-pot makes the meat cook in half the usual time. Presently I turned over to go to sleep on Ahmadu’s mat, in a blanket which I had brought. He and Alwali went on talking far into the night, for they were old friends: Alwali had travelled with him when he was a boy many years ago.

I thought of how very happy these nomads were. They have no possessions to speak of: a few mats, the clothes they wear, some water-skins, some camel trappings, a few weapons, some gourds and bowls, a cooking-pot or two and their camels. They have no routine of life, and no cares except to wonder if a raiding party will or will not happen on them. Even in their normal centres where their tribes are living more or less permanently they often have neither tents nor covering. At the best their tent is a leather roof made of two or three ox skins carried on a few poles, with brushwood laid across so that the top is dome-shaped. The sides are enclosed with vertical mats, and inside, if they are rich, they have a bed—two poles supported on four forked sticks stuck in the ground, with six transverse poles overlaid with stiff mats, woven of “Afaza” grass and strips of leather. On this bed, which is perhaps eight feet square, the whole family sleeps during the rains. At other times they sleep anywhere, on a mat on the ground. Their smaller possessions are carried in a leather sack of tanned goatskins, dyed and ornamented with fringes. All the belongings of a rich family could be loaded on one, certainly on two camels. So they move about looking for pasture. They are independent of water; their camels and goats provide both food and drink, the grasses of the field a change of diet; a slaughtered sheep or millet porridge is their luxury. When they want a fire they kindle it by rubbing a small green stick cut about the size of, and sharpened like, a pencil on a dry stick; the dust and fibre rubbed off the dry wood collect at one end of the channel which has been rubbed, and when the friction is enough, ignites. They do not even require flint and steel. I am sure they must be very happy, for they want so little and could have so much when the value of their herds often runs into thousands of pounds, but they prefer the freedom of the open world. They are even envied by the village dwellers, whose sole ambition is to make enough money to buy camels and live in the same way as their wandering kinsmen.

[175]This name would perhaps be more correctly written Teouar for the “o” is pronounced as if with a London Cockney accent.

[176][Plate 20.]

[177]For certain reasons the names are fictitious.

[178]See rock drawing at T’imia, [Plate 40.]

[179]Bates, op. cit., p. 126, and Figs. 17, 20 and 24, where the belt and cross are plainly shown.