This was the boundary of his travels along the coast, from which he now turned towards the interior, and arrived upon the shores of the Lake of Marko, the Palus Tritonis of the ancients. This lake is about sixty miles in length, and in some places about eighteen in breadth; but it is not one unbroken sheet of water, being interspersed with numerous islands, one of which, though uninhabitable, is large, and covered with date trees. The inhabitants, who have a tradition for every thing, say that the Egyptians, in one of their expeditions into this country, encamped some time upon this island, and scattering about the stones of the dates which they had eaten, thus sowed the palm groves, which at present abound there; and hence, perhaps, the lake itself acquired the name of the “Plains of Pharaoh.” To direct the marches of the caravans across this shallow lake, a number of trunks of palm-trees are fixed up at certain distances, without which travelling would be extremely difficult and dangerous, as the opposite shores are nearly as level as the sea, and even the date trees which grow upon them are too low to be discovered at more than sixteen miles distance. At Tozer, on the western bank, a great traffic in dates is carried on with the merchants of the interior, who bring slaves from the banks of the Niger to be exchanged for fruit.
Proceeding to the west from the Lake of Marko, our traveller next traversed a barren and dreary waste, the haunt of robbers and murderers; and as he passed along he saw upon the ground the blood of a Turkish gentleman, who, he afterward learned, had been murdered two days before. Immediately after he had left this ominous spot, five of the assassins, mounted upon black horses, and closely muffled in their burnooses, or loose cloaks, suddenly made their appearance; but observing that his companions were numerous and well armed, they met them peaceably, and gave them the salaam. Continuing his journey westward, without meeting with any further adventures, he returned to Algiers.
Dr. Shaw seems, after this expedition into Tunis, to have remained quiet for several years, occasionally making excursions into the interior, and proceeding westward, in 1730, as far as the river Mulloviah. Having already travelled over the whole of these provinces, from the sea to the desert, when following the track of Leo Africanus, it will be unnecessary to pursue the footsteps of Dr. Shaw. He remarked, however, during his excursions among the ridges of Mount Atlas, an extraordinary race of mountaineers, with light complexions and yellow hair, which seems to have escaped the researches of Leo and all other travellers. These people he with great probability supposes to be descended from the Vandals, who, in the time of Procopius, were said to be dispersed among the native tribes, though it is more probable that they took possession of these fastnesses, of which the rude inhabitants were never able to dispossess them. In the city of Kosantina he observed a second Tarpeian rock, from which, since the foundation of the city, such criminals as might be condemned to capital punishment have been precipitated into the river Ampsaga, which dashes along at its base.
In his inquiries into the natural history of these countries, our traveller bestowed particular attention upon the palm and the lotus-tree, the latter of which, though greatly celebrated in ancient authors, is still comparatively little known. From the descriptions of Herodotus, Theophrastus, and Pliny, he infers the identity of the lotus of the ancients with the seedra of the Arabs, which is a shrub of common occurrence in the Jereed, and other parts of Barbary; and has, he observes, the leaves, prickles, flower, and fruit of the ziziphus or jubeb; except that in the lotus the fruit is round, smaller, and more luscious; while the branches, like those of the paliurus, are neither so crooked nor so much jointed. The lotus fruit, which greatly resembles gingerbread in taste, is still in great repute, and is sold in all the markets of the southern provinces of Barbary. Among the beasts of burden in use at Algiers is the kumrah, an animal produced between the ass and the cow, and having the single hoof of the former, with the tail and head of the latter, though without horns.
The prodigious clouds of locusts which sometimes infest the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and the tremendous devastations which they commit, have been described by many travellers; but by no one, I think, has a more vigorous picture of their movements and appearance been given than by Dr. Shaw in the following passage:—“Those,” says he, “which I saw in 1724 and 1725 were much bigger than our common grasshoppers, and had brown spotted wings, with legs and bodies of a bright yellow. Their first appearance was towards the latter end of March, the wind having been for some time from the south. In the middle of April their numbers were so vastly increased, that in the heat of the day they formed themselves into large and numerous swarms, flew in the air like a succession of clouds; and, as the prophet Joel expresses it, they darkened the sun. When the wind blew briskly, so that these swarms were crowded by others, or thrown one upon another, we had a lively idea of that comparison of the Psalmist, of being tossed up and down as the locust. In the month of May, when the ovaries of those insects were ripe and turgid, each of these swarms began gradually to disappear, and retired into the Metijiah and other adjacent plains, where they deposited their eggs. These were no sooner hatched in June than each of the broods collected itself into a compact body, of a furlong or more in square; and, marching afterward directly forwards towards the sea, they let nothing escape them, eating up every thing that was green and juicy; not only the lesser kinds of vegetables, but the vine likewise, the fig-tree, the pomegranate, the palm, and the apple-tree; even all the trees of the field; in doing which they kept their ranks like men of war, climbing over, as they advanced, every tree or wall that was in their way; nay, they entered into our very houses and bed-chambers, like so many thieves. The inhabitants, to stop their progress, made a variety of pits and trenches all over their fields and gardens, which they filled with water; or else they heaped up therein heath, stubble, and such-like combustible matter, which were severally set on fire at the approach of the locusts. But this was all to no purpose; for the trenches were quickly filled up, and the fires extinguished by infinite swarms succeeding one another; while the front was regardless of danger; and the rear pressed on so close that a retreat was altogether impossible. A day or two after one of these broods was in motion, others were already hatched to march and glean after them, gnawing off the very bark and the young branches of such trees as had before escaped with the loss only of their fruit and foliage. So justly have they been compared by the prophet Joel to a great army; who further observes, that ‘the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness.’
“Having lived near a month in this manner, like a sword with ten thousand edges, to which they have been compared, upon the ruin and destruction of every vegetable substance that came in their way, they arrived at their full growth, and threw off their nympha state by casting their outward skin. To prepare themselves for this change, they clung by their hinder feet to some bush, twig, or corner of a stone; and immediately, by using an undulating motion, their heads would first break out, and then the rest of their bodies. The whole transformation was performed in seven or eight minutes; after which they lay for some time in a torpid and seemingly in a languishing condition; but as soon as the sun and the air had hardened their wings, by drying up the moisture that remained upon them after casting their sloughs, they reassumed their former voracity, with an addition both of strength and agility. Yet they continued not long in this state before they were entirely dispersed, as their parents were before, after they had laid their eggs; and as the direction of the marches and flights of them both was always to the northward, and not having strength, as they sometimes had, to reach the opposite shores of Italy, France, or Spain, it is probable they perished in the sea: a grave which, according to these people, they have in common with other winged creatures. The locust, I conjecture, was the noisome beast, or the pernicious destructive animal, as the original words may be interpreted, which, with the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, made the four sore judgments that were threatened against Jerusalem. The Jews were allowed to eat them; and, indeed, when sprinkled with salt and dried, they are not unlike in taste to our fresh-water crayfish.”
Among the fish on the coast of Barbary the most curious is the penna marina, or sea-feather, which the fishermen sometimes find entangled in the meshes of their nets; and which, during the night, is so remarkably glowing and luminous as to enable the fishermen to discover by their light the size and quantity of the other fish which may happen to be enclosed within the same net.
In his remarks upon the moral condition of the inhabitants of Tunis and Algiers, he informs us that the sciences which were formerly so assiduously cultivated by the Moors are now neglected or despised: but they have still, as of old, a passion for poetry and music, and many a wandering dervish, like the Αοιδοί [TN], or chapsists of antiquity, excites the admiration and generosity of the Moorish Arabs, by his enthusiastic improvisatores, accompanied by the rude notes of the Arabelbah, or bladder and string. Wild nations, whose feelings and passions are allowed a freer play than ours, are far more susceptible than we are of the delights which nervous poetry and simple melody are calculated to produce; and the Moors, whose tunes our traveller describes as merely “lively and pleasant,” are so deeply affected by music, that, in the warmth of their imagination, they lend their own sensations to inanimate objects, affirming seriously that the flowers of mullein and mothwort will droop upon hearing the mizmoune played.
Provisions, in the time of Dr. Shaw, were exceedingly cheap, a large piece of bread, a bundle of turnips, or a small basket of fruit, being to be purchased for less than a quarter of a farthing. A fowl might be bought for a penny or three halfpence; a sheep for three shillings and sixpence; and a cow and a calf for a guinea. The usual price of a bushel of the best wheat was fifteen pence. Bruce, whose fate it has been to have his testimony upon several important points called in question by ignorant conceited persons, has been ridiculed for asserting that the flesh of lions is commonly eaten by a tribe of African Arabs. Our traveller himself, who had been laughed at for making the assertion in conversation, introduced it timidly into the appendix of his first edition; but in the second it was restored to its place in the narrative, where it is said that “the flesh of the lion is in great esteem, having no small affinity with veal, both in colour, taste, and flavour.”
The majority of persons appear to believe, with Shakspeare, that the Moors are a black, ill-favoured people; but, on the contrary, the Moorish women would be considered beautiful even in England, and the children have the finest complexions in the world. The men, from constant exposure to the sun, are generally swarthy, but never black; and the fine olive tinge they thus acquire only renders their complexions the more agreeable to the eye, as Heber observes of the Hindoos. In these countries, as in Southern Asia, women are nubile at a very early age, being very frequently mothers at eleven, and grandmothers at twenty-two. The circumstance which renders the seclusion of women necessary in such countries is, that the age of puberty precedes the age of discretion; for the passions reaching their maturity long before the reason, they stand in need of being directed by the reason of others until their own is ripened, and when it is they have lost the habit of consulting it. The ancient custom of hiring old women, who, as the prophet Amos expresses it, “are skilful in lamentation,” to perform at funerals, still prevails in Barbary; and so powerful is the effect of this scenical representation of sorrow, that when they are ἀλαλάζοντας πολλά, or “wailing greatly,” expressing their mimic grief by sound, gestures, and contortions of countenance, they seldom fail to work up the bystanders to an ecstasy of sorrow, so that even the English, who know it to be artificial, are deeply touched by it.