Tripolitania, as the regency should properly be called, or Libya, as the Italians have classically renamed it, consists of four more or less distinctly defined divisions: Tripoli, Fezzan, Benghazi, and the Saharan oases. Under the Turkish régime the districts of Tripoli and Fezzan have formed a vilayet under a vali, or governor-general; Benghazi has been a separately administered province under a mutes-sarif directly responsible to Constantinople, while the oases have not been governed at all. The district of Tripoli, which occupies the entire northwestern portion of the regency, is for the most part an interminable stony table-land, riverless, waterless, and uninhabited save along the fertile coast. The stretches of yellow sand which the traveller sees from the deck of his ship are not, as he fondly imagines, the edge of the Sahara, but merely sand dunes blown in by the sea, such as may be seen elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast.
Sloping from these coastal sand dunes up to the barren interior plateau is a zone, averaging perhaps five miles in width, of an altogether remarkable fertility, for its deep ravines, filled with considerable streams during the winter rains, continue to send down a supply of subterranean water even during the dry season. By means of countless wells, round and round which blindfolded donkeys and oxen plod ceaselessly, the water is drawn up into reservoirs and conducted thence to the fields. In this coast oasis it is harvest-time all the year round, for, notwithstanding the primitive agricultural implements of the natives and their crude system of irrigation, the soil is amazingly productive. From April to June almonds, apricots, and corn are gathered in; in July and August come the peaches; from July to September is the vintage season, and the Tripolitan grapes vie with those of Sicily; from July to September the black tents of the nomad date and olive pickers dot the fields, though the yellow date of the coast is not to be spoken of in the same breath with the luscious, mahogany-coloured fruit of the interior oases; from November to April the orange groves are ablaze with a fruit which rivals that of Jaffa; the early spring sees the shipment of those “Malta potatoes” which are quoted on the menus of every fashionable hostelry and restaurant in Europe; while lemons are to be had for the picking at almost any season of the year.
Southward into the Sahara from the southern borders of Tripoli stretches the province of Fezzan, its inaccessibility, its prevalent malaria, and its deadly heat having popularised it with Abdul-Hamid, of unsavoury memory, as a place of exile for disgraced courtiers and overpopular officials, presumably because of the exceeding improbability of any of them ever coming back. Artesian wells and scientific farming have proved in other and equally discouraging quarters of Africa, however, that the words “desert” and “worthless” are no longer synonymous, so there is no reason to believe that the agricultural miracles which France has performed in Algeria and Tunisia on the one hand, and England in Egypt and the Sudan on the other, could not be successfully attempted by the Italians in Fezzan. Arid and inhospitable as this region appears to-day, it should be remembered that its Greek and Roman colonists boasted of it as “the granary of Europe.” What has been done once may well be done again. All that this soil needs, after its centuries of impoverishment and neglect, is decent treatment, and any one who has seen those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads clinging to the rocky hill-sides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is so precious that every inch is tended with pathetic care, will predict a promising agricultural future for an Italian Tripolitania. In its physical aspects, northern Tripolitania resembles Europe much more than it does Africa; its climate is no warmer than southern Italy in summer and not nearly as unhealthy as the Campagna Romana; while its soil, as I have already remarked, holds great possibilities for patient, hardy, frugal, industrious agriculturists of the type of those twenty thousand Sicilians who are forced by poverty to emigrate each year to America or the Argentine. Keeping these facts in mind, one does not have to seek far for the causes which underlay Italy's sudden aggression.
SUNRISE ON THE GREAT SANDS.
For sheer majesty and grandeur, the only thing that is at all comparable with a Saharan sunrise is daybreak in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado.
Reaching Egyptward in the form of a mighty fist is the peninsula of Barka, the Cyrenaica of the ancients, officially known as the Mutessariflik of Benghazi, its many natural advantages of climate, soil, and vegetation making it the most favoured region in the regency, if not, indeed, in all North Africa. While the climate and vegetation of southern Tripoli and of Fezzan are distinctly Saharan, the date-palm being the characteristic tree, Benghazi is just as decidedly Mediterranean, its fertile, verdure-clad uplands being covered with groves of oak, cypress, olive, fig, and pine. Though well supplied with rain and, as I have said, extremely fertile, the Benghazi province, once the richest of the Greek colonies, is now but scantily populated. Scattered along its coasts are Benghazi, the capital, with an inextricably mixed population and one of the worst harbours in the world; Tobruk, which, because of its excellent roadstead and its proximity to the Egyptian frontier and the Canal, Germany has long had a covetous eye on; and the insignificant ports of Derna and Khoms, the lawless highlands of the interior being occupied by hordes of warlike and nomadic Arabs who acknowledge no authority other than their tribal sheikhs.
South by east into the Libyan Desert straggle the Aujila and Kufra chains of oases, marking the course of the historic caravan route to Upper Egypt and presenting the aspect of a long, winding valley, extending from the Benghazi plateau almost to the banks of the Nile. Underground reservoirs lie so near the surface of the desert that all of these sand-surrounded islands have water in abundance, that of Jof, for example, supporting over a million date-palms and several thousand people, together with their camels, horses, and goats.
Such, in brief, bold outline, are the more salient characteristics—climatic, agricultural, and geographical—of the region which Italy has seized. Everything considered, it was not such a long look ahead that the Italian statesmen took when they decided to play their cards for such a stake. Though neither soil nor climate has changed since the days of Tripolitania's ancient prosperity, centuries of wretched and corrupt Turkish rule, with its system of absentee landlords and irresponsible officials, has reduced the peasantry to the same state of dull and despairing apathy in which the Egyptian fellaheen were before the English came. If Tripolitania is to be redeemed, and I firmly believe that it will be, the work of regeneration cannot be done by government railways and subsidised steam-ship lines and regiments of brass-bound officials, but by patient, painstaking, plodding men with artesian-well drilling machines and steam-ploughs and barrels of fertiliser. It may well be, as the Italian expansionists enthusiastically declare, that Tripolitania constitutes a “New Italy” lying at the very ports of old Italy, but it is going to take many, many millions of lire and much hard work to make it worth the having.