TUAREGS.
Without attempting to throw fresh light, or perhaps to add further obscurity to the question, I may remark here, that a certain Berber tribe (we shall see that the Tuaregs are Berbers) calls itself Tarka, whilst a small section of the Awellimiden is known as Tarkai-Tamut, whilst the great Berber conqueror of Spain was named Tarik.
It seems most reasonable to suppose that the Arabs gave to the whole race the name of one of its tribes, probably that with which they were brought into close contact. Does not the very name of Berber, characterizing the whole great race, including not only the Tuaregs, but the Kabyles, the Chambas, and others, itself come from that of but one fraction—the Berbers or Barbers of Morocco?
During the Roman decadence the Berbers, including the Tuaregs, joined the flocks of Saint Augustine and his successors as converts, very half-hearted ones probably, and then after a time of considerable obscurity in their history came the Mohammedan conquest. Rebellious at first, the Berbers ended by accepting the religion of Islam, without feeling any more enthusiasm for the new faith than they had done for the old. As for the Tuaregs, it is said it was not necessary to convert them more than fourteen times!
Now it was these tribes who so loathed a foreign yoke, and fled further and further into the desert before the invaders of their country, who were the forefathers of the present Imochars.
With regard to the Awellimiden, their very name indicates their origin; they are the descendants (uld lemta) of the Lemta or Lemtuma, a Sahara tribe which conquered and finally absorbed all its neighbours of the same stock.
All this may perhaps be called actual history. Now for some of the legends of which the Awellimiden Tuaregs are so fond. Great lovers of the marvellous, they account for their origin thus. I will translate as literally as possible what one of them actually told me:
“I say the ancestors of the Imochars were no other than genii.
“The women of a village called Alkori went one night to dance in the bush, and there they fell asleep.