The scenery is perhaps finer here than anything else we have seen on the Niger. The mighty dunes look as if they had never been disturbed by man, for the wind at once obliterates all trace of the footsteps of passers by. There is a melancholy poetry about them, and their outlines are rather marked than disguised by the thin line of green bush at the edge of and in the water. How well I understand the effect produced on the traveller by the Sahara in spite of its apparent monotony. It exercises on those who gaze on it for long at a time something of the hypnotic attraction of the sea. I am not the only one who feels in this way about the dune of Africa, for Baudry one day read us the following sonnet he had composed on the subject:—
THE DUNE.
Vague summits on the dim, far distance rise;
Then wâdys, mirage, and that northern pass
Where flocks in summer seek the mountain grass;
Next, this long sand-hill that outstretchèd lies;
Nought else! Six æons long the solar dyes
Have steep’d the dune with ochreous gold and brass;
Flash’d in the silica like broken glass,
And dried the courses dug by wrathful skies.