A journey to Central Africa

by Bayard Taylor

Towards noon, on the third day, we passed the last of the “Gates,” and entered the Bahr bela Ma (River without Water), a broad plain of burning yellow sand. The gateway is very imposing, especially on the eastern side, where it is broken by a valley or gorge of Tartarean blackness. As we passed the last peak, my guide, who had ridden in advance dismounted beside what seemed to be a collection of graves—little ridges of sand, with rough head and foot stones. He sat by one which he had just made. As I came up he informed me that all travellers who crossed the Nubian Desert, for the first time, are here expected to pay a toll, or fee to the guide and camel-men. “But what if I do not choose to pay?” I asked. “Then you will immediately perish, and be buried here. The graves are those of persons who refused to pay.” As I had no wish to occupy the beautiful mound he had heaped for me, with the thigh-bones of a camel at the head and foot, I gave the men a few piastres, and passed the place. He then plucked up the bones and threw them away, and restored the sand to its original level.[1]

The Bahr bela Ma spread out before us, glittering in the hot sun. About a mile to the eastward lay (apparently) a lake of blue water. Reeds and water-plants grew on its margin, and its smooth surface reflected the rugged outline of the hills beyond. The Waterless River is about two miles in breadth, and appears to have been at one time the bed of a large stream. It crosses all the caravan routes in the desert, and is supposed to extend from the Nile to the Red Sea. It may have been the outlet for the river, before its waters forced a passage through the primitive chains which cross its bed at Assouan and Kalabshee. A geological exploration of this part of Africa could not fail to produce very interesting results. Beyond the Bahr bela Ma extends the broad central plateau of the Desert, fifteen hundred feet above the sea. It is a vast reach of yellow sand, dotted with low, isolated hills, which in some places are based on large beds of light-gray sandstone of an unusually fine and even grain. Small towers of stone have been erected on the hills nearest the road, in order to guide the couriers who travel by night. Near one of them the guide pointed out the grave of a merchant, who had been murdered there two years previous, by his three slaves. The latter escaped into the Desert, but probably perished, as they were never heard of afterwards. In the smooth, loose sand, I had an opportunity of reviving my forgotten knowledge of trackography, and soon learned to distinguish the feet of hyenas, foxes, ostriches, lame camels and other animals. The guide assured me that there were devils in the Desert, but one only sees them when he travels alone.

On this plain the mirage, which first appeared in the Biban, presented itself under a variety of wonderful aspects. Thenceforth, I saw it every day, for hours together, and tried to deduce some rules from the character of its phenomena. It appears on all sides, except that directly opposite to the sun, but rarely before nine A. M. or after three P. M. The color of the apparent water is always precisely that of the sky, and this is a good test to distinguish it from real water, which is invariably of a deeper hue. It is seen on a gravelly as well as a sandy surface, and often fills with shining pools the slight depressions in the soil at the bases of the hills. Where it extends to the horizon there is no apparent line, and it then becomes an inlet of the sky, as if the walls of heaven were melting down and flowing in upon the earth. Sometimes a whole mountain chain is lifted from the horizon and hung in the air, with its reflected image joined to it, base to base. I frequently saw, during the forenoon, lakes of sparkling blue water, apparently not a quarter of a mile distant. The waves ripple in the wind; tall reeds and water-plants grow on the margin, and the Desert rocks behind cast their shadows on the surface. It is impossible to believe it a delusion. You advance nearer, and suddenly, you know not how, the lake vanishes. There is a grayish film over the spot, but before you have decided whether the film is in the air or in your eyes, that too disappears, and you see only the naked sand. What you took to be reeds and water-plants probably shows itself as a streak of dark gravel. The most probable explanation of the mirage which I could think of, was, that it was actually a reflection of the sky upon a stratum of heated air, next the sand.

I found the Desert life not only endurable but very agreeable. No matter how warm it might be at mid-day, the nights were always fresh and cool, and the wind blew strong from the north-west, during the greater part of the time. The temperature varied from 50°-55° at 6 A. M. to 80°-85° at 2 P. M. The extremes were 47° and 100°. So great a change of temperature every day was not so unpleasant as might be supposed. In my case, Nature seemed to make a special provision in order to keep the balance right. During the hot hours of the day I never suffered inconvenience from the heat, but up to 85° felt sufficiently cool. I seemed to absorb the rays of the sun, and as night came on and the temperature of the air fell, that of my skin rose, till at last I glowed through and through, like a live coal. It was a peculiar sensation, which I never experienced before, but was rather pleasant than otherwise. My face, however, which was alternately exposed to the heat radiated from the sand, and the keen morning wind; could not accommodate itself to so much contraction and expansion. The skin cracked and peeled off more than once, and I was obliged to rub it daily with butter. I mounted my dromedary with a “shining morning face,” until, from alternate buttering and burning, it attained the hue and crispness of a well-basted partridge.

I soon fell into a regular daily routine of travel, which, during all my later experiences of the Desert, never became monotonous. I rose at dawn every morning, bathed my eyes with a handful of the precious water, and drank a cup of coffee. After the tent had been struck and the camels laden, I walked ahead for two hours, often so far in advance that I lost sight and hearing of the caravan. I found an unspeakable fascination in the sublime solitude of the Desert. I often beheld the sun rise, when, within the wide ring of the horizon, there was no other living creature to be seen. He came up like a god, in awful glory, and it would have been a natural act, had I cast myself upon the sand and worshipped him. The sudden change in the coloring of the landscape, on his appearance—the lighting up of the dull sand into a warm golden hue, and the tintings of purple and violet on the distant porphyry hills—was a morning miracle, which I never beheld without awe. The richness of this coloring made the Desert beautiful; it was too brilliant for desolation. The scenery, so far from depressing, inspired and exhilarated me. I never felt the sensation of physical health and strength in such perfection, and was ready to shout from morning till night, from the overflow of happy spirits. The air is an elixir of life—as sweet and pure and refreshing as that which the first Man breathed, on the morning of Creation. You inhale the unadulterated elements of the atmosphere, for there are no exhalations from moist earth, vegetable matter, or the smokes and steams which arise from the abodes of men, to stain its purity. This air, even more than its silence and solitude, is the secret of one’s attachment to the Desert. It is a beautiful illustration of the compensating care of that Providence, which leaves none of the waste places of the earth without some atoning glory. Where all the pleasant aspects of Nature are wanting—where there is no green thing, no fount for the thirsty lip, scarcely the shadow of a rock to shield the wanderer in the blazing noon—God has breathed upon the wilderness his sweetest and tenderest breath, giving clearness to the eye, strength to the frame, and the most joyous exhilaration to the spirits.

Achmet always insisted on my taking a sabre as a protection against the hyenas, but I was never so fortunate as to see more than their tracks, which crossed the path at every step. I saw occasionally the footprints of ostriches, but they, as well as the giraffe, are scarce in this Desert. Towards noon, Achmet and I made a halt in the shadow of a rock, or if no rock was at hand, on the bare sand, and took our breakfast. One’s daily bread is never sweeter than in the Desert. The rest of the day I jogged along patiently beside the baggage camels, and at sunset halted for the night. A divan on the sand, and a well-filled pipe, gave me patience while dinner was preparing, and afterwards I made the necessary entries in my journal. I had no need to court sleep, after being rocked all day on the dromedary.

At the close of the third day, we encamped opposite a mountain which Eyoub called Djebel Khattab (the Mountain of Wood). The Bahr Khattab, a river of sand, similar to the Bahr bela Ma, and probably a branch of it, crossed our path. I here discovered that the water-skins I had hired from Shekh Abou-Mohammed were leaky, and that our eight skins were already reduced to four, while the Arabs had entirely exhausted their supply. This rendered strict economy necessary, as there was but a single well on the road. Until noon the next day we journeyed over a vast plain of sand, interrupted by low reefs of black rock. To the south-east it stretched unbroken to the sky, and looking in that direction, I saw two hemispheres of yellow and blue, sparkling all over with light and heat, so that the eye winked to behold them. The colocynth (called by the Arabs murràr), grew in many places in the dry, hot sand. The fruit resembles a melon, and is so intensely bitter that no animal will eat it. I made breakfast under the lee of an isolated rock, crowned with a beacon of camel-bones. We here met three Ababdehs, armed with long spears, on their way to Korosko. Soon after mid-day the plain was broken by low ranges of hills, and we saw in front and to the east of us many blue mountain-chains. Our road approached one of them—a range, several miles in length, the highest peak of which reached an altitude of a thousand feet. The sides were precipitous and formed of vertical strata, but the crests were agglomerations of loose stones, as if shaken out of some enormous coal-scuttle. The glens and gorges were black as ink; no speck of any other color relieved the terrible gloom of this singular group of hills. Their aspect was much more than sterile: it was infernal. The name given to them by the guide was Djilet e’ Djindee, the meaning of which I could not learn. At their foot I found a few thorny shrubs, the first sign of vegetation since leaving Korosko.

We encamped half an hour before sunset on a gravelly plain, between two spurs of the savage hills, in order that our camels might browse on the shrubs, and they were only too ready to take advantage of the permission. They snapped off the hard, dry twigs, studded with cruel thorns, and devoured them as if their tongues were made of cast-iron. We were now in the haunts of the gazelle and the ostrich, but saw nothing of them. Shekh Ali taught me a few words of the Bishàree language, asking for the English words in return, and was greatly delighted when I translated okam (camel), into “O camel!” “Wallah!” said he, “your language is the same as ours.” The Bishàree tongue abounds with vowels, and is not unmusical. Many of the substantives commence with o—as omek, a donkey; oshà, a cow; ogana, a gazelle. The plural changes o into a, as akam, camels; amek, donkeys, &c. The language of the Ababdehs is different from that of the Bishàrees, but probably sprang from the same original stock. Lepsius considers that the Kenoos dialect of Nubia is an original African tongue, having no affinity with any of the Shemitic languages.

On the fifth day we left the plain, and entered a country of broken mountain-ranges. In one place the road passed through a long, low hill of slate rock, by a gap which had been purposely broken. The strata were vertical, the laminæ varying from one to four inches in thickness, and of as fine a quality and smooth a surface as I ever saw. A long wady, or valley, which appeared to be the outlet of some mountain-basin, was crossed by a double row of stunted doum-palms, marking a water-course made by the summer rains. Eyoub pointed it out to me, as the half-way station between Korosko and Abou-Hammed. For two hours longer we threaded the dry wadys, shut in by black, chaotic hills. It was now noonday, I was very hungry, and the time allotted by Eyoub for reaching Bir Mûrr-hàt had passed. He saw my impatience and urged his dromedary into a trot, calling out to me to follow him. We bent to the west, turned the flank of a high range, and after half an hour’s steady trotting, reached a side-valley or cul-de-sac, branching off from the main wady. A herd of loose camels, a few goats, two black camel’s-hair tents, and half a dozen half-naked Ababdehs, showed that we had reached the wells. A few shallow pits, dug in the centre of the valley, furnished an abundance of bitter, greenish water, which the camels drank, but which I could not drink. The wells are called by the Arabs el morra, “the bitter.” Fortunately, I had two skins of Nile-water left, which, with care, would last to Abou-Hammed. The water was always cool and fresh, though in color and taste it resembled a decoction of old shoes.