Along all its hundreds of miles, the Maghreb is determined by Mount Atlas, or rather, the Maghreb is Atlas itself standing huge between the Sahara and the sea. It is a bulk of mountains so formed that one may compare it to a city wall with a broad top for fighting men to move on and a parapet along both the inner and the outer edges. The outer parapet, which is called “The Little Atlas,” runs along the Mediterranean shore: the inner parapet, which is called “The Great Atlas,” runs along the desert, and is usually the higher of the two chains. These two chains do not run quite parallel, but converge towards Tunis and spread apart towards the Atlantic; the tableland between them, which is called “The High Plateaux,” and is in some places three thousand feet above the sea, broadens therefore from less than a hundred to well over two hundred miles across; but at either end it somewhat changes its character, for at the Tunis end it is too narrow to be a true plateau and becomes a jumble of mountains where the Greater and the Lesser Atlas meet, while in Morocco it becomes too broad to maintain its character and is diversified by continual subsidiary ranges. But in between these two extremities it is a true tableland with isolated summits rising here and there from it, and at their feet shallow and brackish lakes called Shotts, round which are rims of marshy reeds and, in summer, gleaming sheets of salt. For there is no drainage away from the tableland to the desert or to the sea, save where, here and there, a torrent (such as the Chélif or the Rummel) digs itself an erratic gorge and escapes through the coast range to the Mediterranean. These exceptions are very rare and they do not disturb the general plan of the country, which is everywhere constructed of the Atlas running in two ranges that hold up between them the plateau with its salt lakes and isolated groups of hills.
|The Tableland|
If, therefore, one were to take a section anywhere from north to south, from the Mediterranean to the Sahara, one would get some such figure as this:
where the perpendicular shading on the left is the Mediterranean slope and drainage, the horizontal shading on the right, the desert slope, and where the Little Atlas is marked A, the Great Atlas B (falling down to E, the dunes of the Sahara), where at C is one of the isolated hills of the tableland, and at D and D a couple of those salt lakes which add so strongly to the desolation of these upland plains.
The High Plateaux, which, empty as they are, make up the body of the Maghreb, are not only a reality to the geographer: their peculiar character is also apparent to every traveller who crosses them. The rise up to them from the Mediterranean, though confused, is observable; the fall from them to the Sahara is violent, and, through its central part, dramatic. It is not unusual for a man who has traversed this tableland upon more than one voyage to recall clefts in the southern and the northern ranges so placed that they were like windows through which one could look down upon the lower world.
These clefts resemble each other strangely. From the one a man sees the steps of limestone, the desert cliffs, touched rarely and more rarely by the green of palm-trees and ending southward, glaring and arid and sharp, against the extremity of the horizon. From the other, he sees the woods of the coast, dense and well watered, mixing with the rocks about him, and right beyond the valley the pleasant line of the sea. But each of the views he carries in his mind has this in common, that he has seen it from a height, and looked down suddenly from a mountain tableland upon a flat below: to the north upon a level of waves over which went the shadows of clouds: to the south upon a level of sand stretching under a small and awful sun.