CHAPTER X
ON DESERTS
What are deserts like?—Camel-riding—Afterglow—Darwin in South America—Big Bad Lands—Plants which train themselves to endure thirst—Cactus and euphorbia—Curious shapes—Grey hairs—Iceplant—Esparto grass—Retama—Colocynth—Sudden flowering of the Karoo—Short-lived flowers—Colorado Desert—Date palms on the Nile—Irrigation in Egypt—The creaking Sakkieh—Alexandria hills—The Nile and Euphrates.
ACROSS the whole of Africa, at its very broadest part, from the dominions of the Emperor of the Sahara at Cape Juby on the Atlantic, and to the very borders of British India, stretches a desert of the most uncompromising character. It is famous in history: the strongest races of man, the great religions of the world, as well as most cultivated plants and domestic animals, have originated in some part of this dreary waste.
One cannot really appreciate deserts unless one has really seen them. But it is necessary to try to describe what they are like.
Sometimes the desert is a wilderness of broken, stony hills covered by angular pieces of shivered rock. In other places the soil is hard, and is everywhere covered by pebbles or shingle. Often it is a mere waste of sand blown into downs and hillocks which look sometimes like the sand dunes by the coast, and elsewhere like the waves of the sea.
One finds valleys in the desert quite like ordinary ones in shape, but instead of water there is only sand in sweeping curves and hollows, like the snow-wreaths and drifts in a highland glen.
Rocks stand out of this, but their projecting faces are polished smooth and glittering or deeply cut by the flinty particles scraping over them continually in storms and hurricanes.
The traveller on camel-back, where his waist has to act as a sort of universal joint giving to every unexpected jolt and wrench of his rough-paced mount, suffers from the heat, for nowhere else in the world are there such high temperatures. He suffers from thirst, and still more from the dust which fills eyes, mouth, nostrils, and ears.
Yet the dry pure air is most exhilarating.
In the evening there is a feast for the eyes in the glorious afterglow when the sun has just set. The light from below the horizon produces an ever-changing, indescribable play of colour from violet to salmon pink and through the most delicate shades of yellow, blue, and rose, until everything fades and there reigns only the mysterious silence of the beautiful starlit night.