PEOPLE OF THE VEIL

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
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TORONTO

PLATE 1

AGELLAL VILLAGE AND MOUNTAINS

[Frontispiece.

PEOPLE OF THE VEIL

Being an Account of the Habits, Organisation
and History of the Wandering Tuareg Tribes
which inhabit the Mountains of Air or Asben
in the Central Sahara

BY
FRANCIS RENNELL RODD

ⵍⵆⵔⵗⵙ
“NAUGHT BUT GOOD”

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1926

COPYRIGHT

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

PREFACE

This book was originally intended to be an account of the people and mountains of Air in the Central Sahara, where I made a journey during most of 1922 with Angus Buchanan and T. A. Glover. The former had visited the area on a previous occasion and had described the people and places he had seen in his book, Out of the World—North of Nigeria. It therefore seemed more profitable to inquire into some of the problems surrounding the inhabitants of the Sahara whom we encountered, and thus deal with Air and its Tuareg population rather less objectively than had my fellow-traveller. In the course of the succeeding years, as I became more and more immersed in considering various scientific aspects of the Sahara, I came to the conclusion that neither had the Tuareg people nor had this vast area of the earth’s surface been at all adequately examined. Most studies had been objective and, as is unhappily the case with this book, confined to one area. A comprehensive account of the history and ethnology of the Sahara still requires to be written.

As a consequence of these investigations, the present work assumed a form for which one journey of nine months in the countries concerned scarcely seems enough justification. That the book was not completed sooner has been due to the impossibility of spending any time continuously either in research or on writing during the three years which have elapsed since I returned. The fact that this book has been the occupation only of such spare time as I have had available accounts for its many conscious deficiencies, which are unfortunately not the more excusable in a volume of the type which it purports to be. If I can feel that it will have served to stimulate the curiosity of students or have assisted them to find their way about the literature on the subject, I shall consider that as a reward calculated to enhance the pleasure which I have derived from writing and reading about this—to me—fascinating topic.

It will be one of my lasting regrets that I was unable to complete with Angus Buchanan his journey across the Sahara from Nigeria to Algiers. The delays which we encountered in Air obliged me to return to resume my duties in that branch of H.M.’s Service in which I was then serving. This is not the place to mention the many things which I owe to Angus Buchanan; perhaps the greatest advantage I derived was the promise we gave one another to travel again together if an occasion should come to him and leisure from another profession to me, whereby we might be enabled to renew our companionship of the road. I am grateful to him for permission to use several of his photographs in the present volume as well as certain information which he collected when we were separately engaged on our different work.

To T. A. Glover, the Cinematographer, whose services Angus Buchanan secured to accompany him, I owe many pleasant memories of days spent together and his excellent advice in taking most of the photographs which are included in this book.

The French officers whom I encountered in the course of my wanderings were as charming and as friendly as perhaps, of all foreign nations, only Frenchmen know how to be. Were the relations between our respective countries always even remotely similar to those which subsisted between us, there would be no room for the suspicion and pettiness which so often mar diplomatic and political intercourse. The mutual confidence in which we lived is illustrated by two events.

On a certain occasion in Air when news was received of a raid being about to fall on the country, I was honoured by receiving a communication from the French officer commanding the Fort at Agades, indicating the locality in his general scheme of defence whither I might lead on a reconnaissance an armed band of local Tuareg from the village in which I was then living by myself. On another occasion, after travelling for some hundreds of miles with a French Camel Corps patrol, the men were paraded and in their presence I was nominated an honorary serjeant of the “Peloton Méhariste de Guré,” a type of compliment which those associated with the French Army will best realise. It is to the officer commanding this unit, Henri Gramain of the French Colonial Army, that I owe the most perfect companionship I have ever had the fortune to experience. I know that when we meet again we shall resume conversation where we left off at Teshkar in the bushland of Elakkos, one evening in the summer of 1922. He and my other friends, Tuareg, British, French, Arab and Fulani contributed to make that year the happiest I have ever spent.

No reader of the works of that great traveller, Dr. Heinrich Barth, will need to be told how much of the data collected in the succeeding pages has been culled from the monumental account of his Travels in Central Africa. This German, who most loyally served the British Crown in those far countries, is perhaps the greatest traveller there has ever been in Africa. His exploits were never advertised, so his fame has not been suffered to compete with the more sensational and journalistic enterprises accomplished since his day down to modern times. But no student will require to have his praises sung by any disciple.

I have to thank the Royal Geographical Society for permission to use the map which was prepared for a paper I had the honour to read in 1923 before a meeting of the Fellows. More especially do I wish to thank E. A. Reeves, their Keeper of Maps, both for the instruction in surveying which he gave me before my journey and for the assistance afforded after my return in checking and working up my results. My cartographic material in the form of road traverses, sketch maps based on astronomical positions, and theodolite computations are all in the Society’s library and available to students. A small collection of ethnographic material which I brought back is at Oxford in the Pitt Rivers Museum, to whose Curator, Henry Balfour, I am indebted both for advice and for plates Nos. 24-26, 37 and 42.

H. R. Palmer, now H.M. Lieutenant-Governor of Northern Nigeria, and Messrs. Macmillan & Co. have given me permission to use a table of the Kings of Agades incorporated as Appendix VI. The list originally appeared in extenso, with the names somewhat differently spelled, in an article which he published in the Journal of the African Society in July 1910. The great learning and sympathetic help which he was good enough to put at my disposal have made me, in common with many others in Nigeria, in whose friendship my journey so richly rewarded me, hope that he may be induced to render more accessible to the public the immense fund of historical and other material which he has accumulated during his long career as a distinguished Colonial servant.

The then Governor of Nigeria, Sir H. Clifford, and the French Ministry of Colonies earned the gratitude of Angus Buchanan and myself by their assistance on the road and in facilitating our journey.

My brother-in-law, T. A. Emmet, was good enough to execute several drawings from rough sketches I had made on the spot. Two of these drawings are reproduced as plates Nos. 38 and 39.

To three persons it is difficult for me to express my gratitude at all suitably. D. G. Hogarth read my manuscript and offered his invaluable advice regarding the final form of the book as it now appears. Many years’ association with him has led others beside myself to regard him in his wisdom as our spiritual godfather in things appertaining to the world of Islam. My father devoted many days and nights to correcting the final draft and proofs of this book. My brother Peter, when his versatile mind perceived certain improvements, rewrote Chapter XII after I had become so tired of the sight of my manuscript that I was on the verge of destroying the offensive object. I owe more to both these two than I can explain.

F. R. R.

New York,
31st December, 1925.

CONTENTS

PLATES

NOTE

The general map at the end of the volume was prepared by the Royal Geographical Society from data collected by the author supplementing existing maps published in France and described in the text of the book. The two drawings (Plates 38 and 39) were executed in England by T. A. Emmet from sketches made in Air. Plates Nos. 2, 15 (lower), 34 are from photographs taken by Angus Buchanan. All the other maps, diagrams, pictures, and photographs were prepared by the author from material collected in 1922.

NOTE

The name “Air” is a dissyllable word: the vowels are pronounced as in Italian according to the general system of transliteration, which follows, wherever possible, the rules laid down by the Committee of the Royal Geographical Society on the Spelling of Proper Names. In the Tuareg form of Berber, t before i or similar vowel, especially in the feminine possessive particle “tin,” very often assumes a sound varying between a hard explosive tch and a soft liquid dental, such as is found in the English word “tune.” This modification of the sound t is written t’, wherever it is by usage sufficiently pronounced to be noticeable. The pronunciation of Tuareg words follows the Air dialect, which often differs from the northern speech. Letters are only accented where it is important to avoid mispronunciation, as in Fadé and Emilía: a final e, as in Assode, which is a trisyllable, should always be pronounced even if not accented.

The nasal n occurring in such words as Añastafidet is written ñ.

The gh (or Arabic غ, ghen) sound is, as in other Berber languages, very common in the speech of the Tuareg. The letter is so strongly grasseyé as to be indistinguishable, in many cases, from r. The French with greater logic write this sound r or r’. Doubtless many names which have been spelled with r in the succeeding pages should more correctly have been spelled with gh: such mistakes are due to the difficulties both of distinguishing the sound in speech, and of transcribing French transliterations.

No attempt has been made to indicate the occurrence of the third g which exists in the Tuareg alphabet, in addition to the hard g and the soft g (written j).

The Arabic letter ع (’ain) does not exist in the speech of the Tuareg; where they use an Arabic word containing this letter, they substitute for it the sound gh.

No signs have been used to distinguish between the hard and soft varieties of the letters d, t and z. The “kef” (Iek) and “qaf” (Iaq) sounds are written k and q.

PEOPLE OF THE VEIL

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Sahara is the name given in modern geography to the whole of the interior of North Africa between the Nile Valley and the Atlantic littoral, south of the Mediterranean coastlands and north of the Equatorial belt. The word “Sahara” is derived from the Arabic, and its meaning refers to a certain type of stony desert in one particular area. There is no native name for the whole of this vast land surface: it is far too large to fall wholly within the cognisance of any one group of its diverse inhabitants. The fact that it is a Moslem area and sharply distinguished from the rest of Africa has made it desirable to find a better name than “Sahara” to include both the interior and the littoral, for even “Sahara,” unsatisfactory as it is, can only be used of the former. “Africa Minor” has been proposed, but the reception accorded to this name has not been so cordial as to warrant its use. The clumsy term “North Africa” must therefore serve in the following pages to describe all the northern part of the continent; specifically it refers to the parts west of the Nile Valley and north of the Sudan.[1] It is an area which is now no longer permanently inhabited by negro races, and which is not covered by the dense vegetation of Equatoria.

To the general public the name Sahara denotes “Desert,” and the latter connotes sand and thirst and camels and picturesque men and veiled women. The Sahara in reality is very different. Its surface and races are varied. Almost every type of physical feature, except permanent glaciation, can be found. The greater part is capable of supporting animal and vegetable life in some degree. Absolute desert where no living thing can exist does not on the whole form a very large proportion of the surface. It has become usual nowadays to differentiate between the cultivated or cultivable areas, the steppe desert and the true desert. The latter alone is devoid of organic life, and is the exception rather than the rule. The mountain groups of the Sahara fall, as an intermediate category, between the cultivated and the desert lands. Generally speaking, animal and vegetable life exist in the valleys, where some tillage is often possible. The density of population, however, is never comparable with that of the cultivated districts, which, except where they fringe the coast, are usually included in the term “oases.”

The mountain groups of the Sahara are numerous and comparatively high. There are summits in the more important massifs exceeding 10,000 feet above the sea. The three most important groups in the Central Sahara are the Tibesti, Air and Ahaggar mountains. In such a generalisation, reference to the Atlas and other mountain masses in Algeria and Morocco may be omitted, since they do not properly speaking belong to the Sahara. The three Saharan massifs are probably of volcanic origin. They have only become known in recent years, and even now have not been fully explored. This is especially the case in regard to Tibesti, an area believed to be orographically connected with Air by the almost unknown plateau of the Southern Fezzan.

The Central Sahara with these three groups of mountains differs materially from the Eastern Sahara. Although our data for the latter are more limited by lack of knowledge, the structure of the surface immediately west of the Nile Valley appears characteristically to be a series of closed basins. The area is covered with depressions into which insignificant channels flow, and from which there appear to be no outlets. Compared with the river systems of the west, the stream beds are small and ill-defined. One valley of some magnitude, the Bahr Bela Ma which Rohlfs tried to find on his famous journeys in the Libyan desert, has been identified either as a dry channel of the Nile running roughly parallel to it, or alternatively as a valley which starts from N.E. Tibesti and terminates near or in the Wadi Natrun depression just west of the Nile and level with the apex of the Delta. The upper part which drains Tibesti has been called the W. Fardi; elsewhere it is the W. Fareg; the shallow depression crossed by Hassanein Bey on his journey from Jalo to Kufra seems to be part of this system. Examples of closed basins separated from one another by steppe or desert are the oases of Kufra, the Jaghbub-Siwa, Jalo and Lake Chad depressions. In these areas cultivation is frequently intense; salt and fresh water are abundant; and the vegetation sometimes develops luxuriantly into veritable forests of date palms such as exist at Kufra. Between these hollows the intervening Libyan desert is probably the largest and most sterile area of its sort in the world.

The Western Sahara, on the other hand, is essentially an area of well-defined river systems with watersheds and dry beds fashioned on a vast scale. The valleys which extend from the mountains of Ahaggar and the Fezzan to the present River Niger have corresponding channels on the other side of the water-parting running through Southern Algeria or Tunisia towards the Mediterranean. There are good reasons for believing that the original course of the Niger terminated in a swamp or marsh north of Timbuctoo, probably the same collecting basin as that west of Ahaggar into which certain rivers from the Atlas also used to flow. The lower Niger from the eastern side of the great bend where the river now turns south-east and south drained the Central Sahara by a great channel which had its head-waters in Ahaggar and the Fezzan, and ran west of Air.

These Saharan rivers have not contained perennial surface water for long ages. In places they have been covered by more recent sand-dune formations of great extension, but they date from the present geological period. Associated with the desiccation of these valleys is the characteristic of extreme dryness which is one of the few features more or less in accord with popular conceptions of the Sahara. The barrenness of the Sahara is less due to the inherent sterility of the ground than to climatic conditions; desiccation has been intensified in the course of centuries by the purely mechanical processes attendant upon an extremely continental climate and excessively high day temperatures. The latter combined with the extraordinary dryness of the air have contributed to the decay of vegetable, and consequently of animal, life wherever man has not been sufficiently powerful, in numbers or energy, to stay the process. Sterility and desiccation are interacting causes and effects. There is no reason to believe that any sudden change of climate has taken place in the Sahara since the neolithic period, or that it is very much drier now than two thousand years ago. Maximum and minimum temperatures, both average and absolute, have a very wide range seasonally and within the period of twenty-four hours. Temperatures of over 100° F. in the shade are common at all seasons of the year during the day: the thermometer frequently falls to freezing point at night during the winter. Ice is not unknown in the mountains of Tibesti, Air and Ahaggar. The rainfall is irregular except within the belt of summer rains which are so characteristic of Equatorial Africa. In Tibesti the cycle of good rains seems to recur once in thirteen years: in many years both here and elsewhere in the Sahara no rain falls at all. But with these adverse climatic conditions the surprising fact remains, not that the Sahara is so barren, but that it is so relatively well-favoured and capable of supporting different races of people in such comparatively large numbers.[2]

The Air mountains, like the Desert steppes, are only sparsely inhabited. The hill-sides are too wind-swept and rocky to support forests or pastures of any value. Many of the valleys are capable of being cultivated, but in practice are only gardened here and there. In certain districts there are groves of date palms which have been imported from the north. Air is in reality a great Saharan oasis divided from the Equatorial belt by a zone of desert and steppe. It differs from the south in its flora and general conditions, though by its position within the belt of tropical summer rains it belongs climatically to the Sudan.

TRADE ROADS

The oases of the desert, like the Sahara generally, have been the subject of much popular misconception. The origin of the word “oasis,” which has reached us in its present form through the classics, may perhaps be found in ancient Egyptian. It seems to be connected with the name of the Wawat People of the West referred to in the Harris Papyrus,[3] and occurs in the names of Wau el Kebir and Wau el Seghir or el Namus, which are oases in the Eastern Fezzan.[4] The term El Wahat,[5] given to one or several of the oases west of the Nile Valley, contains the same root. An oasis is not necessarily a patch of ground with two or three palm trees and a well in the desert. It is simply an indefinite area of fertility in a barren land; it may or may not happen to have a well. There are oases in Southern Algeria and the Fezzan with hundreds of thousands of palm trees, containing many villages and a permanent population. There are others where the pasture is good but where there is neither population nor water. “Oasis” is a term with no strict denotation, it connotes attributes which render animal life possible.

In this sense Air, as a whole, is an oasis situated on a great caravan road from the Mediterranean to Central Africa. The mountains so lie in respect of the desert to the north and to the south that caravan journeys may be broken in their valleys, and camels can stay to recuperate. The mountains mark a stage on the road, the importance of which it is difficult to over-estimate. In the history of North Africa, the principal routes across the Sahara from the Mediterranean to the Sudan have seemingly not changed at all. Since the earliest times they have followed the shortest tracks from north to south whenever there was sufficient water. If the Nile Valley and the routes in the desert adjacent thereto are left out of account as being suorum generum, there are four main caravan roads across North Africa from north to south. The easternmost runs from Cyrenaica by Kufra to Wadai and Tibesti; only within the last century has it been rendered practicable for caravans by the provision of wells along the southern part, which was opened to heavy traffic by the Senussiya sect. The two central routes run respectively from Tripolitania by the Fezzan, Murzuk and Kawar to Lake Chad, and by Ghadames, Ghat and Air to the Central Sudan. The western route runs from Algeria and Morocco across the desert to Timbuctoo. In addition there is the Moroccan road, which roughly follows the curve of the coast to the Western Sudan and Senegal. Of all these the best known in modern times,[6] and culturally perhaps the most important, has been the Air road. It is noteworthy that all three central routes have been or are within the control of the Tuareg race. As the Tuareg were the caravan drivers of the Central Sahara, so were they also responsible for bringing a certain degree of civilisation from the Mediterranean to Equatorial Africa. That has been their greatest rôle in history.

The object of this book is to describe a part of the Tuareg race, namely, those tribes which live in Air and in the country immediately to the south. It will not be possible to examine in any detail the theories surrounding the origin of the race, but certain definitions are necessary if the succeeding chapters are to be understood. The Berbers of North Africa, among whom are usually included the Tuareg, have very disputed origins; for many reasons it is perhaps best to follow the example of Herodotus and use the geographical term Libyans for them. Less controversy surrounds this name than “Berber,” which implies a number of wholly imaginary anthropological connections. Moreover, it is even open to doubt whether the Tuareg are Berbers at all, like the other people so called in Algeria and Morocco. In all this confusion it will be enough to grasp that the Tuareg are a Libyan people with marked individual peculiarities and that they were in North Africa long before the Arabs came. They have been there ever since the earliest times of which we have any historical record, though in more northern areas than those which they now occupy. The population of the Sahara is very diverse and the affinities of the various elements afford many interesting problems for study; but in the present work we shall be concerned with the one race alone.

The Tuareg country may roughly be described as extending from the eastern edge of the Central Sahara, which is bounded by the Fezzan-Murzuk-Kawar-Lake Chad caravan road, to the far edge of the western deserts of North Africa before the Atlantic zone begins, and from Southern Algeria in the north to the Niger and the Equatorial belt between the river and Lake Chad in the south. The Tuareg are so little known even to-day that their very existence is almost legendary. It is with something of a thrill that the tourist in Tunis or Algiers learns from a mendacious guide that a poor Arab half-caste sitting muffled in a cloak is one of the fabled People of the Veil. It is long, in fact, since any of them have visited the Mediterranean coast, for they do not care for Europeans very much. Before the Italo-Turkish War, occasional Tuareg used to reach the coast at Tripoli at the end of the long caravan road from Central Africa; even then they more usually stopped at Ghadames or Murzuk. With the Italian occupation of Tripolitania in 1913 they became apprehensive of intrusion on their last unconquered area; but despite the Italian failure to occupy and administer the interior they have only lately ventured a certain way north once more on raids or for commerce.

Though the Hornemann, Lyons and the Denham, Oudney and Clapperton expeditions in the first half of the last century touched the fringe of the Tuareg country, the first Europeans in modern times to come into contact with the Azger group in the Fezzan were Richardson in 1847 and Barth with Richardson in 1849 and subsequent years. Barth, more particularly mentioned in the story of the penetration of Air, is in some respects even now the most valuable authority for all the Tuareg except the Ahaggaren. The first detailed work of value dedicated to the latter was that of Duveyrier, Les Touareg du Nord, published in 1864 after a journey through the Ahaggar and Azger country and the Fezzan. His systematic study of the ethnology of the Tuareg, his geographical work and his researches into the fauna, flora and ancient history of the lands he visited, were presented to the world in a form which has since been taken in France as the model of what a scientific book should be. Ill health was the tragedy of his life, for it prevented his return, and rendered him, as he remarked in later years, “an arm-chair explorer of the Sahara.” After visiting the Wad Righ and Shott countries in Southern Tunisia, he went to El Golea on the road to Tuat and thence turned towards Ghadames and Tripolitania. He eventually reached Ghat, and returned to the Mediterranean coast by Murzuk and Sokna, taking a more easterly road than Barth’s in 1850. Beurmann in 1862, and Dickson ten years previously, had reached the edge of the same Tuareg country, but what Barth had done for the Tuareg of Air and the south, Duveyrier did for the Ahaggaren and Azger.

In 1881, twenty years after the expedition of Burin to Tuat, the French determined to penetrate the countries of this fabled race. A column under Colonel Flatters, who had already gained a certain reputation in France as a Saharan explorer, marched almost due south from Wargla and Tuggurt in the eastern part of Southern Algeria up the Ighaghar basin and so reached the north-eastern corner of the Ahaggar country. This valley is the drainage system of the north central Sahara towards the Mediterranean; it virtually divides the old Azger country from that of the Ahaggaren. Near the Aghelashem Wells at the intersection of the valley with the Ghat-Insalah road, Flatters turned S.E., intending apparently to follow the Ghat-Air caravan road to the Sudan. This track he proposed joining at or near the wells of Issala, and then to proceed by much the same route as that which Barth and his companions had selected in 1850. But at Bir Gharama in the Tin Tarabin valley, a few days before it was due to reach Issala, disaster overtook the column. The European officers, who assumed that their penetration of the Tuareg country was welcome to the inhabitants, had taken none of the military precautions necessary in hostile country. The vital part of the expedition, the officer commanding and his staff, left camp to reconnoitre a well and became separated from their troops, consisting of about eighty Algerian tirailleurs. The officers were attacked by the Tuareg and killed. After the death of Colonel Flatters and Captain Masson, the remainder of the column under Captain Dianous made an attempt to escape north. After an unsuccessful effort by the Tuareg to destroy the party by selling the men dates poisoned with the Alfalehle plant (Hyoscyamus Falezlez),[7] the column reached the Ighaghar once more at the wells of Amjid. But they found the wells occupied by the enemy, and in the ensuing fight Captain Dianous and nearly all his men were killed.

The circumstances of the disaster, so vividly recounted by Duveyrier to the Paris Geographical Society on 22nd April, 1881, had followed the publication of his account of a people whom he had described picturesquely, but with some exaggeration, as the “Knights of the Desert.” The massacre created a profound impression in France. The Tuareg came to be regarded as an insurmountable obstacle to the French penetration of North Africa, and expeditions into their country were discontinued. The disaster of Bir Gharama remained unavenged until 1902, when a detachment of Camel Corps under Lieut. Cottonest met the pick of the Ahaggar Tuareg in battle at Tit within their own mountains and killed 93 men out of 299 present, the French patrol losing only 4 killed and 2 wounded out of 120 native soldiers and Arab scouts. Despite the small numbers involved, the fight at Tit broke the resistance of Ahaggar, for it proved the vanity of matching a few old flintlocks and spears and swords against magazine rifles.[8] But if it demonstrated the futility of overt resistance, it also established for all time the courage of the camel riders of the desert, who hurled themselves against a barrier of rifle fire, unprotected by primeval forest or sheltering jungle, in order to maintain their age-long defiance of the mastery of foreign people.

Considering the magnitude of the results they achieve, Saharan, like Arabian, battles involve surprisingly small numbers. The size of armed bodies moving over the desert is limited by the capacity of the wells; the output of water not only regulates the mass of raiding bands, but also determines their strategy, as well as the routes of trading caravans, which are compelled to move in large bodies in order to ensure even a small measure of protection. Only the realisation of this rather self-evident fact enabled the French in the course of years to deal with raiders in Southern Algeria by organising Camel Corps patrols of relatively small size and great mobility. The privations which these raiders are willing to endure made it impossible to fight them with a European establishment.

The necessity of imitating the nomad in his mode of life and warfare became obvious to Laperrine from his first sojourn in Southern Algeria, where he made his career as the greatest European desert leader in history with one solitary exception. The encounter of Tit was followed by a number of “Tournées d’Apprivoisement,” patrols to “tame” the desert folk, initiated by Laperrine, and culminating in 1904 in a protracted reconnaissance through Ahaggar, which brought about a final pacification. Charles de Foucauld, soldier, traveller and monk, had accompanied the patrol. He remained on after it was over as a hermit and student among the Ahaggaren until his death in 1916. He had been Laperrine’s brother officer at St. Cyr. Extravagant, reckless and endowed with all the good things of the world, a member of the old French aristocracy in a smart cavalry regiment, the Marquis de Foucauld is one of the most picturesque figures of modern times. After a memorable reconnaissance of Morocco in 1883-4, disguised as a Jew, he became a Trappist monk, and eventually entered a retreat at Beni Abbes, in the desert that he loved too well to leave in all his life. During his years in Ahaggar as a teacher of the Word of God he made no converts to Christianity, but sought by his example alone to lead the people along the way of Truth. It is to be hoped that, in spite of a modesty which precluded it during his lifetime, the knowledge and lore of the Tuareg which he collected in the form of notes will eventually be given to the world in order to supplement his dictionary of the Ahaggar dialect, to-day the standard work on their language, which is called Temajegh.[9]

To implement the Laperrine policy of long reconnaissances, a post was built near Tamanghasset in Ahaggar called Fort Motylinski, after an officer interpreter who was one of the first practical students of Temajegh. Lately the post has been moved to Tamanghasset itself, where Father de Foucauld had built his hermitage, and it is now called Fort Laperrine, in memory of the great soldier who was killed flying across the desert to Timbuctoo in 1919.

Another post was built at Janet not far from Ghat, to watch the Azger Tuareg. Its capture during the late war by the Arabs and Tuareg of Ghat, and the killing of Father de Foucauld by a raiding party from the Fezzan, are incidents in that same series of intrigues which were instigated in North Africa by the Central Empires and carried on with such success in the Western Desert of Egypt, Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, Southern Algeria and as far afield as Air. If the Senussi leaders have not been responsible for as many intrigues as it has been the fashion to ascribe to this puritanical and perhaps fanatical sect, the Germans at least discovered what others are still learning, that the latent force of nationalism in North Africa among the ancient Libyan and Arab-Libyan peoples is powerful still to-day. The spirit of the Circumcelliones and of the opponents of Islam in the eighth century was exploited by the Turks and Germans through the Senussiya, which provided the only organisation available during the Great War, though in fact only few Tuareg and Arabs at Ghat or in the Fezzan were members of, or even friendly to, the sect. These people used the opportunity afforded by the war to procure arms and material through the Senussiya for the consummation of their own ambitions. The new spirit which is abroad in Islam, in Africa as well as in Asia, is an interesting subject of study for the practical politician. There is no occasion to enlarge upon it here.

In consequence of these agitations, a raid came out of the east and fell upon Father de Foucauld’s hermitage on the 1st December, 1916. The hermit was killed, but the raiders were not of the Ahaggaren among whom he had lived, and to whom he had devoted his life; they came from Ghat and the Fezzan. They probably started without intent to murder, but because Charles de Foucauld was the greatest European influence in the desert at that time, they desired to remove him and perhaps to hold him as a hostage. In justice it must be admitted that no one had any illusions regarding the political views of the people of the Fezzan; they were in a state of open warfare with the French posts in Southern Algeria. De Foucauld had played a very great part against them in preventing the Ahaggaren rising en masse against the French; he was an important intelligence centre for the neighbouring Fort Motilynski; he was apparently, well provided with rifles in his hermitage. When surprised by the raid, he disdained to fight, preferring to fall a martyr to his religion and his country. My excuse, if any is needed, for touching on a subject tending to be controversial is the appearance of a number of mis-statements concerning the barbarity of his murder and the treachery of the people to whom Father de Foucauld had devoted the latter part of his life. It is well to remember, in the first place, that the circumstances of his life and his prestige made the attack a justifiable act of war, for he played a definitely political rôle; secondly, that there was no treachery or betrayal; and lastly, that his aggressors were a mixed band of Arabs and of Tuareg from another part of the Sahara which had, for generations past, been on terms of raid and counter-raid with the people of Ahaggar.

When all has been said of the European penetration of the Tuareg country, it is not very much. The world outside the society of those white men who, during the last fifty years, have spent their lives in the Sahara, can know but little of this race or of their country. The modern literature on the subject is small, even in French; in English it is almost non-existent. On the Tuareg of Air there are only two works of any value: the one by a French officer is recent in date and sadly superficial;[10] the other is incorporated in H. Barth’s account of the British expedition of 1849 and subsequent years to Central Africa.[11] There are a few other works in French about the Tuareg of the north and south-west, but I am not aware that anyone has attempted a general study of the whole people, who have been rather neglected by science. The principal object of this volume will have been achieved if it in any measure fills a want in English records or if it arouses sufficient controversy to induce others to undertake a thorough investigation of the race.

The Tuareg are not a tribe but a people. The name “Tuareg” is not their own: it is a term of opprobrium applied to them by their enemies, and connotes certain peculiarities possessed by a number of tribal confederations which have no common name for themselves as a race. The men of this people, after reaching a certain age, wear a strip of thin cloth wound around their heads in such a manner as to form a hood over the eyes and a covering over the mouth and nostrils. Only a narrow slit is left open for the eyes, and no other part of the face is visible. From this practice they became known to the Arabs as the “Muleththemin” or “Veiled People,”[12] while they themselves, in default of a national name, are in the habit of using the same locution in their own tongue to describe the whole society of different castes which compose their community. Whatever the social position of the men, the Veil is invariably worn by day and by night,[13] while the women go unveiled. Few races are more rigidly observant of social distinction between noble and servile tribes; none holds to a tradition of dress with more ritual conservatism.

PLATE 2

ELATTU

The larger divisions of Tuareg have names by which they are known to themselves and to their neighbours: these names designate the historical or geographical groupings of tribes. In each group of tribes the existence of nobles and serfs is recognised; there are appropriate terms to describe these social distinctions. The nobles are called Imajeghan;[14] the servile people, Imghad. But no name other than Kel Tagilmus,[15] the “People of the Veil,” exists to describe the society of nobles and serfs alike, irrespective of group or caste. These details will require fuller examination in due course, but it is important to realise immediately that the name Tuareg[16] is unknown in their own language and is only used of them by Arabs and other foreigners. It has, however, been so universally adopted by everyone who has had to do with them or who has written of them that, although not strictly accurate, it would be pedantic not to continue using it. The Tuareg all speak the same language, called Temajegh, which varies only dialectically from group to group. They have a peculiar form of script, known as T’ifinagh, which also is practically identical in all the divisions of the Tuareg, but is apparently not used by other peoples. Lastly, the Tuareg are nomads by instinct and, save where much intermarriage has taken place, of the same racial type. The conquest of foreign elements in war and their assimilation into servile tribes have, in the course of time, led to some modification of physique and a growth of sedentarism in certain areas. As a whole, however, the nation has survived in a fairly pure state which is readily distinguishable. There is, I think, no justification for considering the People of the Veil a large tribal group of Berbers in North Africa; they are a separate race with marked peculiarities, distinct from other sections of the latter, and, as I believe, of a different origin.

They formerly extended further west almost to the sea-board of the Atlantic; their northern and eastern extension can also be deduced from what is known of their migrations. Their neighbours to the south are the negroid Kanuri, Hausa-speaking peoples,[17] and the Fulani; to the east are the Tebu, and in the west the Arab and Moorish tribes; finally, in the north the nomadic and sedentary Arabs and sedentary Libyans of Algeria, Tunisia and Tripolitania. The N.E. corner of Tuareg territory, the Fezzan, is ethnically of such mixed population as to admit of no summary classification; Arab, Libyan, Tebu and negroid peoples are all inextricably mingled together. The Tuareg wander as nomads over the country generally, the negroes and sedentary Libyans till the ground, and, in addition to a proportion of all those already enumerated, the towns are inhabited by yet another people of noble origin, whose connection with the ancient Garamantes of classical authors may be assumed if it cannot be proved. With the exception of the Fezzan the Tuareg are now predominant within their own country. It includes two great groups of mountains, Air and Ahaggar, together with certain smaller adjacent massifs.

It is unfortunately not possible to deal with Air in history nor with the Tuareg of Air, by considering the mountains and their inhabitants alone. The migrations of the Tuareg of Air have been so intimately connected with that part of the Sudan which we now call Nigeria that the northern fringe of the area and the country intervening between it and Air must receive attention. This intervening steppe and desert, largely overrun by Tuareg, lie on the way which I followed to reach the mountains. The neglect to which these areas have been subjected justifies me in devoting a chapter to them before coming to Air itself. Again, the concluding chapters of this volume will deal as much with the Southland as they do with Air, for the history of the latter cannot be divorced from that of the former.

Since mention will be continually made of the various Tuareg groups as they exist to-day, and of the tribes which they contain, it will be as well to explain that there are to-day four principal divisions of the people, all of whom possess characteristics common and peculiar to the whole race.

The main groups are:—

The first group is held for convenience to include the Tuareg in the Ahnet mountains, the Taitoq, and those north-west of the Ahaggar mountains. The second group is comparatively compact. The third group is the one with which this volume deals in detail, and includes the Kel Geres and other Tuareg generally of the Southland, in and on the fringes of Nigeria. The fourth group should more properly be divided, as it comprises the distinct aggregations of the Aulimmiden, the Ifoghas of the Mountain (Ifoghas n’Adghar),[18] and the Tuareg of Timbuctoo and the Niger.

The country of the Ahaggaren proper is confined to the Ahaggar massif, but there are certain outlying districts to the north and north-west. The confused mass of hills east of Ahaggar towards the Fezzan was, at the beginning of the century, essentially the country of the Azger. In recent years they have tended to move eastwards towards their original homes and away from the influence of the French military posts. The majority of this group now ranges over the country between Ghat and Murzuk. They are the Tuareg who have come least into contact with Europeans. Although there is considerable affinity between them and the Ahaggaren, the Tuareg generally recognise that the Azger do not belong to, or are under the rule of, the Ahaggar chieftains despite the fact that they are all collectively known in Air as Ahaggaren. Those travellers who have known them are at one in considering them to-day an independent division. From the historical point of view the Azger are the most important of all the Tuareg, since from this group, reduced in numbers as it now is, most of the migrations of the race to the Southlands seem to have taken place. They are also probably to-day the purest of the Tuareg stock in existence.

The first description of Air and its people in any detail was brought back to Europe by Barth after his memorable journey from the Mediterranean to the Sudan, on which he set out in 1849 with Richardson and Overweg, but from which he alone returned alive more than five years later. Prior to this journey there are certain references in Ibn Batutah and Leo Africanus, but they do not give us much information either of the country or of the people. From Ibn Batutah’s description, the country he traversed is recognisable, but the information is meagre. The account of Leo Africanus written in the sixteenth century is little better. His principal contribution, in the English and original Italian versions, is a bad pun: “Likewise Hair (Air), albeit a desert, yet so called for the goodness and temperature of the aire. . . .”[19] It is an observation, in fact, of great truth, but hardly more useful than his other statement, which records that the “soyle aboundeth with all kinds of herbes,” in apparent contradiction with the previous remark. He adds that “a great store of manna” is found not far from Agades which the people “gather in certaine little vessels, carrying it, when it is new, into the market of the town to be mingled with water as a refreshing drink”—an allusion probably to the “pura” or “ghussub” water made of millet meal, water and milk or cheese. He states that the country is inhabited by the “Targa” people, and as he mentions Agades, it had evidently by then been founded, but beyond these facts his description is wholly inadequate. He unfortunately even forgets to mention that Air is mountainous.

Although the European penetration of the Western Sahara may date from the Middle Ages, the same cannot be said of Air. Caillé in 1828 was, in fact, not the first European to visit and describe Timbuctoo, nor was Rohlfs in 1864 the first European in Tuat. There are some very interesting earlier accounts which are gradually being unearthed[20] dealing with these countries. It is regrettable that there are apparently no similar accounts of Air.[21] The first information of any value is found only in comparatively recent times. Hornemann[22] in 1798 travelled from Egypt along the Haj Road which runs from Timbuctoo to Cairo. He turned back at Murzuk, but had he continued he would have come to Ghat and eventually to Air. He nevertheless brought back the first modern account of the Tuareg of this country, or rather of a section of them, the Kel Owi, whom he calls the Kolouvey. His information about the Ahaggaren and about the divisions of the Tebu, who lived east and north-east beyond the limits of the country which they now occupy, is worth examining in connection with their ethnological history. After Hornemann’s journey Denham, Oudney and Clapperton[23] collected some further details about Air and its people in the course of an expedition to Chad and Nigeria at the beginning of the last century, and in 1845 Richardson began a systematic study of the Azger and Air Tuareg during a preliminary journey to the Fezzan. But none of these travellers had the first-hand personal experience which, five years afterwards, Barth, Richardson and Overweg obtained on their expedition.

The part played by Great Britain in the exploration of the Central Sahara, testified to by the graves of many Englishmen or foreigners in the service of the British Crown, is little known in this country. Our efforts to abolish the slave trade in Africa and our paramount position in Tripolitania early in the last century led to that initiative being taken, to which the world even to-day owes most of its knowledge of the Fezzan, and which opened the Sudan to commerce and colonisation. While Richardson was apparently the first and only Englishman to visit Air until my travelling companion, Angus Buchanan, went there from Nigeria in 1919, the graves of explorers in neighbouring lands show that we stand second to none in geographical work in the Central Sahara. It was only when, in the partition of North Africa, this vast area fell to the French, that there was any falling off in the numbers of Englishmen who in each successive decade travelled and died there. Their work deserves to be better known: Henry Warrington died of dysentery at the desert well of Dibbela, south of Bilma in Kawar, on his way to Lake Chad with a German, Dr. Vogel. Dr. Oudney died on 5th January, 1824, at Murmur near Hadeija (Northern Nigeria), after accompanying Clapperton and Denham from Tripoli by way of Bilma and Chad to explore Bornu. Tyrwhit, who went out to join them, died at Kuka on Lake Chad, on 22nd October, 1824. Barth’s companion Richardson died in the early part of 1851 at N’Gurutawa in Manga, S. of Zinder, and their companion Overweg succumbed near Lake Chad. Both Barth and Overweg were Germans who had volunteered and were appointed to serve on an expedition sent by Her Majesty’s Government to explore Central Africa and to report on the abolition of the slave trade. Dr. Vogel, another German, who had been sent by Her Majesty’s Government to join Barth and complete his work, died near Lake Chad after his return, while an assistant, Corporal MacGuire, was killed on his way home at Beduaram, N. of Bilma, in the same year. Of those who had opened the way for the Clapperton expeditions, Ritchie had died of disease in 1819 at Murzuk and Lyon had been obliged to turn back before reaching Bornu. Clapperton himself on a second journey lost his life at Sokoto on 13th April, 1827. North Africa has claimed her British victims no less than the swamps and jungles of Equatoria, only they are not so well known, for they never sought to advertise their achievements.

Few people in this country or abroad realise how great was the influence of Great Britain in the Sahara during the lifetime and after the death of that remarkable man, Colonel Hamer Warrington, H.M. Consul at Tripoli from 1814 to 1846. Apart from the fact that he virtually governed Tripoli, our influence and interests may be gauged by the existence of Vice-Consulates and Consulates, not only along the coast at Khoms and Misurata, but far in the interior at Ghadames and Murzuk. The peregrinations of numerous travellers and efforts to suppress the African slave trade had obliged Her Majesty’s Government to play a part in local tribal politics, for it had early become clear that if this abominable traffic was to be abolished the sources of supply would have to be controlled, since it proved useless only to make representations on the coast where caravans discharged their human cargo. At one moment it even seemed as if Tripolitania would be added to the British Empire, and as lately as 1870 travellers were still talking of the French and British factions among the Fezzanian tribes. But Free Trade and other political controversies in England half-way through the century brought about a pause, and the arrest was enough to withdraw public interest from North Africa and to give France her chance. The controversies were the object of much bitter criticism by the idealist Richardson, who saw political dialectics obscuring a crusade on behalf of humanity for which he was destined to give his life. He seems to have been profoundly affected and to have suffered himself to become warped, as Barth on more than one occasion discovered.[24] The inevitable consequence of a British occupation of Tripolitania would have been the active penetration of the Air and Chad roads and a junction with the explorers and merchants who were working north from the Bight of Benin. But French interest in North Africa as a consequence of their occupation of Algeria grew progressively stronger as it declined in this country, while to the same waning appetite must be ascribed the fact that for seventy years no Englishman visited Air. Regrettable as this may appear to geographers, it is even more tragic to realise how few have heard of the German, Dr. Heinrich Barth, than whom it may be said there never has been a more courageous or meticulously accurate explorer. After several notable journeys further north he accompanied Richardson as a volunteer, and on the latter’s death continued the exploration of Africa for another four years on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, which he most loyally served. If in this volume he is repeatedly mentioned, it is without misgiving or apology; it may help in some little measure to rescue his name from unmerited oblivion in these days of sensational and superficial books of travel. The account of his journey and of the lore and history of the countries of Central Africa which he visited from Timbuctoo to Lake Chad is still a standard work.

Barth and his companions entered Air in August 1850, and left the country for the south in the closing days of the same year. Reaching Asiu from Ghat, they traversed the northern mountains of Air, which are known to the Tuareg as Fadé.[25] After passing by the wells in the T’iyut valley and the “agilman” (pool) of Taghazit, they camped eight days later on the northern outskirts of Air proper. During this period their caravan was subjected to constant threats of brigandage from parties of northern Tuareg, and on the day before reaching the first permanent habitations of Air in the Ighazar near Seliufet village, they again narrowly escaped aggression from the local inhabitants. An attack was eventually made on them at T’intaghoda, a little further on, and they only just escaped with their lives after losing a good deal of property. The same experience was repeated near T’intellust, where the expedition had established its head-quarters in the great valley which drains the N.E. side of the Air mountains. When, however, they had once made friends with that remarkable personality, Annur, chief of the Kel Owi tribal confederation, and paramount chief of Air, they were free from further molestation, and thanks to him eventually they reached the Sudan in safety. From T’intellust Barth made a journey alone to Agades by a road running west of the central Bagezan mountains. After his return the whole party moved to the Southland along the great Tripoli-Sudan trade route which passes east of the Central massifs. Crossing the southern part of Air known as Tegama they entered Damergu, which geographically belongs to the Sudan, about New Year’s Day, 1851. In the course of his stay in Air Barth made the first sketch map of the country, catalogued the principal tribes and compiled a summary of their history which is still the most valuable contribution which we possess on the subject.

Some twenty-seven years later, another German, Erwin von Bary, reached Air from the north by much the same road as that which Barth and his companions had followed. He left Ghat in January 1897 and reached the villages of Northern Air a month later. Thence he journeyed to the village of Ajiru, a village on the eastern slopes of the central mountains, and awaited the return from a raid of Belkho, the chieftain who had succeeded Barth’s friend Annur as paramount lord of the country. The unfortunate von Bary was subjected to every form of extortion, and though Belkho, when he returned, compelled his people to restore what they had stolen, the chief himself made life unpleasant for the traveller by taking all his presents and doing nothing for him in return so long as he showed any desire to proceed on his journey southwards. Belkho pleaded such poverty that the explorer nearly died of starvation, but von Bary admittedly had laid himself open to every form of abuse. He had arrived almost penniless, did not understand the courtesies of desert travelling, and seems to have placed undue reliance on his skill as a doctor to achieve his objects. But when he eventually gave up the idea of going on to the Sudan, Belkho treated him well. Although von Bary’s opinion of the Tuareg of Air is not favourable, in reality he owed them a great debt of gratitude. No other people who dislike foreigners so much as they do would have protected him and helped him as they finally did. His quarrels with Belkho seem to have been in part due to his own tactlessness and discourtesy, and in part to his inability to realise that the chief, for political reasons, did not desire him to go to the Sudan. Von Bary returned to Ghat, meaning to try once more to reach Nigeria as soon as he had picked up his stores and some more money, but his diary ends abruptly with the remark that he would be ready to start south again from there in fifteen to twenty days. He died within twenty-four hours of reaching Ghat, on 3rd October, 1877. He had spent a cheerful evening with Kaimakam,[26] and had gone to bed; at 6 a.m. he was breathing peacefully asleep; by ten o’clock he was dead. His death does not seem to have been quite natural. It remains one of the mysteries of the Sahara. Von Bary’s account of Air[27] is very incomplete and his observations are coloured by the hardships which he suffered. With the exception of certain botanical information and notes on one or two ethnological points, his descriptions contain little that had not already been made known by Barth.

Then began that competition among European Powers for African colonies which was soon to reach a critical stage. The Anglo-German Convention of 1890 had proposed to divide Africa finally, but before that date the French had seen one desirable part after the other fall to our lot. They determined before it was too late to take as much as possible of what still remained unallocated. Central Africa, east of Lake Chad, certain tracts of indifferent country on the western coast and the greater part of the Sahara were still unclaimed by any European Power. And so it was that in France the magnificent scheme was conceived of sending three columns from north, west and south to converge on Lake Chad, and formally to take possession of the lands through which they passed in accordance with the stipulations of the Congress of Berlin, where it had been laid down that territorial claims were only valid if substantiated by effective occupation. It was not till 1899, however, that the French plans reached maturity. Three expeditions duly set out from the Congo, the Western Sudan and Algeria to cross Africa and meet on Lake Chad. Their adventures constitute one of the most romantic chapters in Colonial history. The western column, at first under Captain Voulet, who was accompanied by Lieut. Chanoine and others, marched from the Niger along the northern edge of the Nigerian Emirates. Mutiny and murder among the European personnel were experienced. French politics at home, where the Jewish question had become acute, were responsible for all manner of delays; the command changed hands repeatedly. But the northern column and the Congo party were equally delayed; not until a year after the date fixed for the rendezvous on the lake did the three expeditions meet. The military escorts were united under Commandant Lamy, and gave battle to the forces of Rabah, one of the Khalif’s generals, who had crossed half Africa to carve out for himself a kingdom in Bornu and Bagirmi after the débâcle of the Mahdia on the Upper Nile. Lamy defeated him and annexed French Equatorial Africa.

Of these three expeditions, the northern column, known as the Foureau-Lamy Mission, had passed through Air on its way south. The Europeans who accompanied it were in 1899 the first Frenchmen to enter the country and to carry out the plan originally contemplated by Flatters in 1881. The annexation of Air by France may be counted from this date.

The Foureau-Lamy Mission[28] entered the borders of Air from Algeria at the wells of In Azawa; their heavy losses in camels obliged them to abandon large quantities of material, but they eventually reached Iferuan in the Ighazar, not far from T’intaghoda. Here the camp of the expedition was attacked in force by the Tuareg, who were only driven off with great difficulty. The situation was critical. The whole country was hostile to the French; they were so short of camels that on the stage south of Iferuan to Agellal they had to move their baggage in small lots, marching their transport forwards and backwards. Their destiny hung in the balance when friendly overtures were made to them near Auderas by a Tuareg of considerable note, Ahodu of the Kel Tadek tribe, whose fathers and forefathers for five generations had been keepers of the mosque of Tefgun near Iferuan. Ahodu’s political sense has rarely been at fault, either then or since; he saw that the only end possible for his people from protracted hostilities with the Europeans was disaster. He promised the French peace while the column remained in Air. It reached Agades in safety, and the Sultan was obliged to hoist the French flag and provide transport animals and guides. No attack was made near the town, thanks to the efficacy of Ahodu’s presence, but his powers of persuasion were insufficient when the column marched out into the barren area further south. The guide purposely misled the expedition and it nearly perished of thirst, succeeding only with great difficulty in returning to Agades. It eventually started once more and reached the south, where its story ceases to concern the exploration of Air.

Since 1899, then, the fate of Air has been settled in so far as Europe was concerned, for it was recognised as lying within the French sphere; but the country was not effectually occupied until 1904, when a camel patrol under Lieut. C. Jean established a post at Agades. The post was evacuated for a short time and then reoccupied. The exploration of the mountains has proceeded slowly since that date. Sketch maps were gradually compiled in the course of camel corps patrols, and in 1910 the Cortier geographical mission published a very creditable map of the mountains,[29] other than the northern Fadé group, based on thirty-three astronomically determined co-ordinates supplementing the five secured by the Foureau-Lamy Mission. Chudeau in 1905 made a brief geological survey and published some notes on the flora, which remain uncatalogued to this day;[30] very complete collections of the fauna have been made by Buchanan[31] and examined in England by the British Museum (South Kensington) and by Lord Rothschild’s museum at Tring. The ethnology of the country is very superficially discussed in a book published by Jean; Barth’s account remains the one of value. The complete exploration of the mountains and detailed mapping still remain to be done as well as other scientific work of every description.

“Air” as a geographical term for the mountainous plateau does not signify exactly the same thing to the inhabitants of the country themselves as it does to us; properly speaking, it is applied by them only to one part of the plateau, for the whole of which the more usual name of Asben or Absen is used. The latter is probably the original name given to the area by the people of the Sudan before the advent of the Tuareg. It is now very generally used even by them: it is universal further south. Barth has speculated at some length upon the origin of the name Air or Ahir, to take its Arabic form, and concluded that the letter “h” had been deliberately added out of modesty to guard against the word acquiring a copronymous signification. But early Arabic geographers give the form as Akir and not as Ahir, so the laborious explanation of the learned traveller is probably unnecessary.

The boundaries of Air may be defined either as running along the line where the rocks of the area dip below the sands of the desert, or as following certain well-marked basins and watercourses of material size, where disintegrated rock or alluvium has covered the lower slopes of the hills. The mountainous area is some 300 miles long by 200 miles broad. It lies wholly within the tropics and is surrounded by desert or by arid steppe. Owing to the general elevation of the country the climate is quite pleasant.

Drainage of the
CENTRAL SAHARA

In remote ages the rainfall of the Central Sahara was sufficient to create the deep and important river beds which compose the hydrographic system of this part of North Africa. Among these watercourses is one of great size, flowing from the Ahaggar massif towards Algeria, called the Ighaghar. Duveyrier has tried to prove that it was the Niger of Pliny, largely on the grounds that the root “Ig” or “Igh” occurs in both words and in Temajegh means “to run.” The effect of this identification, which is hard to accept, would be to make the classical ethnology of the Sahara less easy to follow, but it has little significance in considering Air, except in so far as it would tend to show that the geographical knowledge of the Romans did not extend as far south as the plateau. Complementary to the Ighaghar but flowing south from the Ahaggar massif is another equally great river,[32] which early in its course is joined by a large tributary from the Western Fezzan. At a certain point this valley is crossed by the roads from Air to Ahaggar and Ghat, branching respectively at the wells of In Azawa or Asiu. The eastern branch is the caravan road to Ghat from the Sudan, the western one finds its way to In Salah in Tuat and to Algeria. This bed runs south and south-west towards the Niger, which it must have reached at some point between Gao and Timbuctoo in the neighbourhood of the N.E. corner of the Great Bend which the French call “La Boucle du Niger.” This river of remote times must have been one of the great watercourses of Africa, extending from the head-waters in 26° N. Lat. to its mouth in the Bight of Benin on the Equator. It is not possible to say whether the interesting terrestrial changes which diverted the Upper Niger at the lagoons above Timbuctoo into the present Lower Niger, and which brought about the desiccation of the upper reaches, took place suddenly or gradually, but the latter is more probable, for a similar diversion seems to be going on in the Chad area. The lake, in reality an immense marsh and lagoon, is much smaller than when it perhaps included the depression noted by Tilho as extending most of the way to Tibesti; some of the waters of the Chad feeders are already believed to be finding their way in flood-time into the Benue, and it is possible that in the course of time a similar process to that manifested in the Niger area will take place; then Lake Chad will dry up into salt-pans like those at Taodenit. The Saharan river, which flows southward to the west of Air, bears various names. Its course has never been accurately determined, but its general direction is known. From Ahaggar to a point level with the northernmost parts of Air it is called Tafassasset. The T’in Tarabin channel from Ahaggar more probably drained into the Belly of the Desert than into this system, but the Alfalehle (Wadi Falezlez) from the Western Fezzan most certainly seems to be a tributary; there are various reasons why it ought not to flow towards Kawar, as used at one time to be thought. West of Air the main bed spreads out into a vast plain-like basin under the name of T’immersoi; further south it is called Azawak. In general I prefer to use the name T’immersoi for the whole until a better one is suggested.[33]

The T’immersoi forms a collector in the west of Air for nearly all the water from this group of mountains. Nowadays only a comparatively small amount ever reaches the basin, as much is absorbed by the intervening plain land of Talak[34] and the Assawas swamp west of Agades. The latter are local basins or sumps covered with dense vegetation where some of the most nomadic tribes in Air pasture their herds. Talak is visited by Tuareg from Ahaggar and from the west for the same purpose. It plays an important part in the economy of the country, for water is always to be found in the alluvial soil however dry the season in the mountains has been. Many of the wells have now fallen into disuse, but the output of those which remain is still plentiful. The last rocks of Air on the west disappear below the alluvium of T’immersoi and in the subsidiary basins of Talak and Assawas. The T’immersoi system therefore forms the western boundary of Air.

The upper part of the T’immersoi, where it is called the Tafassasset, is also the northern boundary of Air. The wells of In Azawa[35] and Asiu in this valley may be regarded as the point where the main roads from the north enter the extreme limits of the country. Further east on another road between Air and Ghat, von Bary fixed the boundary at the Wadi Immidir, which is in the same latitude as In Azawa.[36]

The eastern boundary of Air runs along the line where the last rocks of the group disappear below the sand of the steppe and desert, which extends from north to south between the mountains of the Fezzan and the fringe of Equatorial Africa, and from west to east between the mountains of Air and those of Tibesti with its adjacent massifs. This vast area is crossed by a few roads only, the most important ones being (a) the road from Murzuk along the Kawar depression to Agadem and Lake Chad, (b) and (c), the two principal tracks from Air eastwards to Bilma by Ashegur and Fashi respectively, and (d) the road from Zinder by Termit to Fashi and Kawar. Watering-points are very few, and the habitable oases can be numbered on the fingers of two hands; pasturage is everywhere scarce. This great waste is one of the most unknown parts of North Africa; its eastern portion along the Tibesti mountains as far north as the Fezzan may be said to be absolutely unknown except for two tracks to the mountains whither occasional camel patrols have passed.

Kawar and the other oases along the Chad road appear to be closed basins of the Eastern Saharan type. They seem to have no outlet towards the south either into the Chad or into the Niger systems. The desert east of Air, therefore, contains the eastern watershed of the T’immersoi basin, for the valleys of Eastern Air do not run into the desert as Chudeau has suggested,[37] but turn southwards on leaving the hills, in ill-defined depressions or folds which join the Tagedufat valley or one of the other channels flowing westwards in Tegama or Damergu. One valley to the south of Air, probably the Tagedufat itself, is stated to run all the way from Fashi across the desert.

The southern limits of Air may be placed along the Tagedufat basin, where the rocks of Air disappear below the sand dunes and downs of Tegama and Azawagh steppe desert. The valley is of some size and flows roughly N.E. and S.W. towards T’immersoi, but whether it actually joins this system or the Gulbi n’Kaba, which finds its way into Sokoto Emirate under the name of the Gulbi n’Maradi and thence into the Niger, is not certain. The former hypothesis seems more probable, but I was unable to follow the Tagedufat sufficiently far west to verify it, nor could I discover any data on the French maps;[38] local reports substantiate my supposition. Both systems in any case are in the Niger basin. Air is not on the watershed between Niger and Chad. The choice of the Tagedufat valley as the southern boundary of Air is made on geographical grounds. What may be termed the political boundary is rather further north along the line of the River of Agades.

PLATE 3

DESERT AND HILLS FROM TERMIT PEAK

Commencing within 50 km. of the In Azawa wells, Air is a low plateau of Silurian formation with islands of Archean rock. Through the plateau-plain a number of separate formations have been extruded by, in many cases, apparently quite recent volcanic action. The northernmost massifs of Taghazit and Zelim lie in about latitude 20°. The volcanic period was of considerable duration, but all the recognisable volcanoes and derived phenomena are post-Eocene.[39] Some of the basalt flows, more especially those from Mount Dogam near Auderas in Central Air, are not old, while the Teginjir lava flow appeared to me so fresh as probably to have come into existence during the historical period. The volcanic phenomena take the form of cinder cones with steep sides as at Teginjir (Mount Gheshwa), cumulo-volcanoes, as in the T’imia and probably Bagezan massifs, domes as in the case of Mount Dogam, and basalt flows in various parts, notably in the T’imia valleys.[40] Aggata[40] appears to be another volcanic peak, but the serrated crest of Ighzan is a phenomenon of the rapid cooling of an igneous extrusion rather than an example of erosion. There are numerous volcanic massifs distinct from each other all over Air, more especially in the centre and north; they are nearly all granitic and very rugged. The Auderas basin is of basalt and cinerite.[41] The plateau, which is in the main horizontal, rises in the centre to a step some few hundred feet higher than the north and south and forms a pedestal for the Bagezan and other massifs some 1500 to 3000 feet higher again. The peaks are as much as 4500 feet[42] above the plateau, which varies from 1500 feet above sea level in the south along the River of Agades, to 2000 feet in the Ighazar in North Air. Round Auderas the plateau may be taken as about 2500 feet above the sea, while to the east of the Bagezan massif the plateau is about 3000 feet, sloping gradually away to the south and east. Between Agades and Auderas there is an abrupt ascent on to the central step of the plateau of some 2000 feet; a corresponding descent of about 150 feet takes place near Assada.

The effect of these massifs rising sharply out of the plateau is curious. The Archean or Silurian plain and the volcanic mountain groups are phenomena which have not yet had time to become correlated. The result is that the broad and very gentle valleys of the plateau-plain wander in and out among the disconnected massifs and are fed by deep torrents draining the slopes of impermeable rock. Water erosion has not yet had time to widen or deepen the ravines, while the broad valleys have wide sandy bottoms, where pebbles only rarely occur; their sides are well wooded with pasture on the plains between the beds, except where masses of round basalt boulders, the product of the volcanic disturbances, cover the surface. The massifs have hardly been affected by erosion. The broad valleys between them are the corridors of communication in the country. “Cette superimposition à une vieille pénéplaine usée,” says Chudeau,[43] “de massifs éruptifs jeunes, donne a l’Air un aspect surprenant, presque paradoxal.” And this is the charm of the country that has been called by travellers the Saharan Alps. There is contrast everywhere, but nothing is perhaps more striking than the black patina which the red rocks have assumed. The wind-borne sand has polished them till they shine with a dark metallic gleam, while the sheltered rifts and ravines retain their pink and red surfaces. It is a land of lurid colour, except at midday, when the African sun dominates everything in one blinding glare.

[1]The name “Sudan” is used throughout to indicate the country referred to by the Arab and early European geographers under this name, that is to say, the country inhabited by negroid people north of the purely negro zone and south of the Saharan deserts. The “Anglo-Egyptian Sudan” is more correctly described as the “Nilotic Sudan.”

[2]The geography of the Sahara as a whole is briefly treated in Le Sahara, by E. F. Gautier, Collection Payot, Paris, 1923, and with greater detail in Le Sahara, by H. Schirmer, Paris, 1893, but much recent work is not included in the latter.

[3]O. Bates: The Eastern Libyans (Macmillan), pp. 48-9.

[4]Cf. Rohlfs, Kufra, Chap. VIII.

[5]“Alguechet” in Leo Africanus, Vol. III. pp. 802, 818, etc. (For particulars see beginning of [Chap. IX.])

[6]Until motor-cars began to cross the Sahara further west.

[7]Bissuel, Les Touareg de l’Ouest, p. 63, says: “A plant called locally ‘Bettina’ and not the Alfalehle (Arabic: Falezlez) was used.”

[8]Gautier: La conquête du Sahara, Paris, 1922.

[9]See Life of Charles de Foucauld, by R. Bazin, translated by P. Keelan, and De Foucauld, Dictionnaire abrégé Touareg Français (Dialecte Ahaggar), publié par R. Basset, Alger, 1918-20.

[10]Jean: Les Touareg du Sud-Est, Paris, Larose, 1909.

[11]Barth: Travels and Discoveries in Central Africa, London, Longmans, 1857-8, 5 vols.

[12]From “Litham,” لثام (root لثم), a veil.

[13]The slaves which they possess do not wear the veil. The slave is not a man but a chattel. As soon as a slave is freed and becomes a serf he wears the veil like the noble Tuareg.

[14]In the Air dialect this word is so pronounced. Variations in other dialects are referred to elsewhere. Imajeghan is the plural form of Imajegh. Temajegh is a feminine form of Imajegh.

[15]“Kel” means “People of,” “Tagilmus” is the name of the Veil in Temajegh, the language of the Tuareg.

[16]For an explanation of this term see [Chap. IX.]

[17]The term “Hausa” throughout this volume is not used in an ethnological sense. It is primarily a linguistic division which may or may not also have an ethnic significance.

[18]“Adghar” or “adrar” = mountain in Temajegh. This mountain group between Air and the Niger and south of Ahaggar has no name. It is called the “Mountain of the Ifoghas” (Adghar n’Ifoghas), while the people who live in it are known as the “Ifoghas of the Mountain,” to distinguish them from the Ifoghas tribe in Damergu and the Ifoghas tribe of the Azger.

[19]Leo Africanus: Hakluyt Society edition, Vol. I. p. 127, and Vol. III. pp. 798-9.

[20]Notably by M. Ch. de la Roncière: Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st February, 1923: “Tombuctou au temps de Louis XI.”

[21]M. de la Roncière in a private letter of July 1923 to the author.

[22]The edition I have used is a French one: Hornemann, Voyage dans l’Afrique Septentrionale, edited by my ancestor Rennell. Paris: Dentu, 1803.

[23]Denham and Clapperton: “Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 1822-4,” Murray, 1826.

[24]See Introduction to Richardson’s Travels in the Great Desert of the Sahara, London, 1847, and Barth, op. cit., Vol. II. pp. 219-20.

[25]Barth calls this area Fadeangh, a name not known to-day.

[26]The Governor appointed by the Turks.

[27]Von Bary’s Diary, “La dernier rapport . . . sur . . . les Touaregs de l’Air.” Edited by Schirmer; Paris, Fischbacher, 1898.

[28]Documents Scientifiques de la Mission Foureau-Lamy. Various fascicules.

[29]Carte de l’Air: Mission Cortier (2 feuilles), 1/500,000. Service Géogr. du Min. des Colonies.

[30]Chudeau and Gautier: Missions au Sahara, Paris, Armand Colin, 1909 (Vol. II., Le Sahara Soudanais, by Chudeau).

[31]Buchanan: Out of the World North of Nigeria, Murray.

[32]Where the words “rivers” or “watercourse” are used they must be understood to mean drainage channels which are dry most of the year.

[33]Gautier on his sketch map in Le Sahara uses the name Tafassasset, which, however, is even more of a local name in the north than T’immersoi is in the south.

[34]In Temajegh “Talak” means “clay.” Cf. Chudeau: Le Sahara Soudanais, p. 63, etc.

[35]Meaning in Temajegh “of the Tamarisk.”

[36]Von Bary’s Diary, pp. 108-9. He joined the main road followed by Barth in the T’iyut valley.

[37]In the case of the Tafidet and other eastern valleys of Air, Chudeau, op. cit., p. 62. He supposed, as I think erroneously, that the Air group itself and not the desert was the eastern watershed of the T’immersoi basin.

[38]The country south of Air and north of the limit included in the maps published by the Mission Tilho of the area each side of the Franco-British boundary between Nigeria and the Territoires Militaires du Niger is hardly mapped at all.

[39]Chudeau, op. cit., pp. 263-4.

[40]Vide Plates [23] and [39.]

[41]Vide Plates [13] and [14.]

[42]In the case of Tamgak.

[43]Chudeau, op. cit., p. 57.

CHAPTER II

THE SOUTHLANDS

Until about twenty years ago it was easier to reach the Western Sudan and Central Africa around Lake Chad from the north than from the Gulf of Guinea, notwithstanding a journey of many months across the Sahara, involving all the considerable hardships and dangers of desert travelling. The objectives which Barth, Foureau, Lamy and their predecessors all had in view were not the exploration of the Sahara, but the penetration of the Sudan. By following the trade routes along which slave caravans used to reach the Mediterranean coast, the explorers of the nineteenth century reached the wealthy Niger lands more easily than they would have done had they attempted to pass through the tropical forests of the West Coast. On the sea-board European penetration at that time was confined to the neighbourhood of a few factories on the shore or the estuaries of certain rivers. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did this country, first among the nations of Europe, realise that the potential markets and supplies of raw material which the Sudan afforded were on a scale far surpassing those which had been dreamt of by the early pioneers on the coast. It was about thirty years ago that communication was eventually opened up between the coast and the Moslem interior, but there is no doubt that the accounts of the Sudan in 1850 brought back by Barth after his memorable journey were directly responsible for the British penetration from the coast of those countries which are now called Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Nigeria. The movement reached its culmination in the opening years of the twentieth century, when the northern provinces of Nigeria were occupied under the guidance of Sir F. Lugard, while at about the same time the three French columns had met near Lake Chad. With these years the expansionist period closed and a phase of development, which still continues, commenced. British expansion into Northern Nigeria, coming as it did during the South African war, passed comparatively unnoticed in this country except in official circles, where the campaigns of Sir F. Lugard’s small columns aroused considerable anxiety. But because the policy was successful the public heard little of the operations which formally annexed the outlying Emirates of Kano, Katsina and Sokoto. The new countries which we then acquired were of colossal wealth, and contained a population of many millions of people living as thickly in certain parts as the Egyptians in the Nile Delta. The closing years of last and the first few years of this century involved the addition to the British Empire of some of the greatest of the Sudanese cities, which are the terminal points and therefore the raisons d’être of the two central Saharan trade roads which come from the Mediterranean by way of Kawar and Air.

[To face p. 36.

The Sudan, though geographically in Central Africa, belongs to the Mediterranean civilisation. The great empires of the Niger, Melle and Songhai, the Fulani Empire of Sokoto, the Emirates of Kano and Katsina, and the Empire of Bornu, were all products of contact with the north. Commercially and culturally, the Sudan faced north with its back against an impenetrable belt of tropical forest inhabited by savage negro tribes, through whose dripping and steaming jungles there was little or no access to the sea. This orientation explains the high degree of civilisation which Barth found already past its “floruit” in 1850. It is obviously also the reason why the early explorers came from the north rather than from the nearer coast of the Atlantic between Sierra Leone and the mouths of the Niger.

With the arrival of the Europeans, ways down to the coast were gradually opened up, until finally in Nigeria seven hundred miles of railway were built from Lagos to Kano. As a consequence trade has left the trans-Saharan roads where the Tuareg were masters. It is now carried to Europe and even to the Mediterranean by steamers sailing from Lagos and Liverpool. In more ways than one the advent of the white man in Central Africa has been disastrous for the Tuareg. Camel-borne trade on a large scale is doomed; caravan broking and long-distance desert transport are gone, never to return; even a trans-Saharan railway, whose commercial value must be as unreal as the dream of its advocates among French Colonial authorities, can never hope to compete with sea-borne traffic. Aircraft alone may one day revive the old camel roads, for they provide lines of watering-points along the shortest north and south routes.

If one may judge by the numbers and size of the market cities, which are the termini of the trans-Saharan routes in the Sudan, the Air road was by far the most important of the two in the centre. In Kano and in Katsina and in Sokoto the commercial genius of the Hausa people developed centres for the exchange of the European goods with the products, and more especially the raw materials, of Central Africa. To these cities also came the negro people of the south, to buy and sell or be sold as slaves. In a thickly populated and extremely fertile country the cities grew to immense size. Though in no sense properly a Tuareg country, Northern Nigeria and the neighbouring lands are visited and lived in by the People of the Veil. Every year it is the habit of many of this people to come from Air to Nigeria during the dry season. They earn a prosperous livelihood on transport work between the cities of Hausaland. They feed their camels on the richer pastures of the south when those in the north grow dry. But before the rains begin they move north again to the steppe and desert, for flooded rivers and excessive damp are conditions which the camels of the Veiled People do not relish. Quite large colonies of Tuareg have settled in some of these cities and have adopted a semi-sedentary life, maintaining their characteristics in inverse measure as intermarriage with the negroid peoples has become more frequent. The influx of Tuareg into Nigeria after the 1917 revolution in Air added considerably to the numbers living permanently under British rule. This migration was not as strange a phenomenon or so entirely the product of the Great War as at first sight it appears to be. The various waves of Tuareg which in succession entered Air have each in turn had the effect of driving the earlier populations further south. The trend of migration in North Africa from the earliest days, when the zone of permanent habitation of the negroid races extended as far as the Mediterranean, has always been southward. It has continued in modern times. The temptation of richer lands in Central Africa has always proved irresistible when local political or economic conditions altered in consequence of growing ethnic pressure to the extent of providing just that impetus necessary to overcome the human disinclination to leave homes which have been occupied for generations. The Kel Geres Tuareg left Air to settle in the country north of Sokoto when the mountains became over-populated; masses of Air Tuareg generally took up their habitation in Katsina and Kano after the unsuccessful revolution against the French during the late war. The motives were not strictly similar, but the effects were identical, and have been observable throughout the ages.

AIR
and the
SOUTHLAND

To-day at Kano, a village of some size named Faji, almost entirely Tuareg in population, has sprung up a few hundred yards from the walls of the city. Here the People of the Veil live like the Hausa in mud houses. They are engaged in retail trade or act as agents and brokers for their relations in Air when the latter come down in the dry season. In Katsina a quarter of the town and the country immediately north are thickly populated with Tuareg, for whom the Emir has a marked partiality, largely on account of his commercial propensities, which are powerfully stimulated by the ownership of several fine herds of camels. The Tuareg of Katsina, drawn from almost every tribe in Air, have formed a new tribal unit known as the Kel Katchena,[44] and are rapidly forgetting their older tribal allegiances. The results of these movements have always been much the same. Progressive mixing with the negroid people of the Sudan, the gradual acquisition of sedentary habits, and the cultivation of fat lands where life is easy, are combining to make these People of the Veil lose their characteristics as a northern race; their language cannot compete with Hausa, which is the lingua franca of the Sudan, as Arabic is that of North Africa. The retention of the Veil is the only exception: in fact many southerners associated with them have adopted it, although the rigorous proscription against revealing the mouth and face is being less strictly observed.

North of the country surrounding the great walled cities of red earth, and more or less coterminous with the northern frontiers of the Emirates of Katsina, Daura, Kano and Hadeija, there is a deep belt of country which marks the beginning of the transition between the Saharan and the Equatorial zones.[45] North of the open country around Kano, with its large trees that for a height of some feet from the ground, like those in English parks, have been stripped of leaves by the grazing flocks and herds, the rock outcrops become less frequent and eventually disappear entirely. They give place to scrub, bush and clearings through which the Anglo-French boundary runs. The frontier from Lake Chad to the Niger was delimited in 1907 and 1908 by an international expedition whose work has been described by Colonel Tilho with a wealth of detail which makes one regret that his labours did not extend a little further north, as far as the edge of the desert where the Saharan zone proper commences. The area mapped by Colonel Tilho hardly extends beyond the northern limit of the Hausa-speaking people. Along the roads leading to Air, or in other words along the great trade route, no work was done beyond the southern fringe of the area called Damergu, and there is consequently to the south of Air a considerable depth of unsurveyed country for which no maps are available.

The area between the international boundary and the somewhat arbitrary limits of Algeria and Tripolitania constitutes the French colony known as the “Territoires du Niger,”[46] the southern part of which is divided into provinces or “cercles,” roughly corresponding to the old native Emirates. French colonial policy in this part of Africa, in contrast with the system so successfully instituted by Sir F. Lugard in Nigeria, has been directed towards the removal of the more important native rulers. They have been replaced by a form of direct administration which is only now in process of being organised under French civilian officials. North of Katsina the Emirates of Maradi and Tessawa[47] have been combined into one province, and here almost the last Sultan of the “Territoires” survives, exercising authority only in the immediate vicinity of Tessawa itself. West of this is the province of Tahua; to the east is the old Emirate of Damagarim with its capital at Zinder, and east again is Gure, the northern part of which is known as Elakkos and Kuttus.

Once the belt of thick bush near the frontier is crossed the country resembles Northern Nigeria again, with park bush and broad open spaces, both cultivated and grass-grown. The villages are of the usual Central African type; the groups of conical huts are surrounded by millet stores, raised on legs like gigantic bee-hives, to contain the grain cultivated in the clearings around the settlements. The inhabitants are Hausa and Kanuri, though of late years a number of lower-caste Tuareg from Air have settled there as well. There is a considerable amount of rock outcrop in the form, round Zinder, of low peaks with great boulders, or, near Gure, of hills which terminate abruptly in a cliff of red rock, north of which is the district called Elakkos.

Through this belt of park bush runs east and west the road recently levelled and rendered passable for light cars in the dry season between Lake Chad and the Niger. The nomadic cattle-breeding Fulani come into this zone from the bush to the north and south; Maradi is a Fulani centre of some importance. A certain number of this people also come to Tessawa, but the Hausa population here have been at feud with them for many generations, and only the advent of European control has put an end to continual wars between the two Emirates.

PLATE 4

DIOM IN ELAKKOS

PUNCH AND JUDY SHOW

Tessawa lies in a shallow depression which, like others further north on the way to Damergu, drain into the Gulbi n’Kaba, an affluent of the Niger containing running water only in its lower reaches in the neighbourhood of Sokoto. North of Tessawa and Damagarim the land becomes more sparsely populated and the bush thickens, except in the immediate vicinity of the villages, which now begin to be tenanted in increasing numbers by Kanuri. The bush contains herds of Fulani cattle and a certain amount of game; there are two or three varieties of gazelle, some bustard, guinea-fowl, ostriches and occasionally giraffes. The vegetation becomes more stunted as progress is made northward and large trees are rarer; the soil is sandy; rock outcrop is almost completely absent. The configuration of the ground is difficult to follow in the thick bush; the gentle slopes and valleys appear generally to drain westwards, but shallow closed basins are numerous. Plenty of water is obtainable in any of these depressions a few feet below the ground; the larger groups of wells, usually near the two or three hamlets of straw huts which form a village, are the resort of the Fulani with their cattle during the dry season. The vegetation and the general aspect of the country, however, are still those of the Sudan.

Damagarim differs but little from the Tessawa landscape except that the bush is thicker and there are fewer open spaces. East of the boulder-strewn hills of Zinder the more ambitious elevations of Gure are visible. Zinder itself consists of two contiguous towns; like Tessawa and the Hausa cities further south, they are built of red mud. Zinder is smaller than the analogous Nigerian cities. Since 1921 it has had no Sultan. The French headquarters of the Niger Territories till recently were situated here. In the past Zinder was of some importance; although the main caravan track from the north appears in the early days to have run direct to Katsina, a branch from Damergu went by way of Zinder as soon as Kano grew in importance. But in spite of the number and influence of the Tuareg who used to make Zinder their headquarters, neither Damagarim nor Gure has changed its essentially Sudanese character.

Within a few days’ march of Tessawa on the road north to Gangara in Damergu, several interesting features were observable. At Urufan village the Magazawa Hausa and Kanuri women were wearing the ornament known as the “Agades Cross,” peculiar to the Air Tuareg, in a simple as well as in a conventionalised form. Many of the women exhibited almost Mongolian traits in their eyes and cheek-bones. Their hair was done in what I believe to be a Kanuri fashion, that is to say, in a low crest along the top of the head, tightly matted and well greased, with a parting, or very often a shaved strip on each side, running the length of the skull; over the ears the hair was again tightly plaited and greased. Their dancing was different from the practice in Nigeria: the women dance with bent knees and a crouching body, so that the back is nearly horizontal. They shuffle up to the drum band one behind the other, the woman at the head of the line turning away at the end of each movement to take her place behind. The absence of sedentary Fulani influence is obvious as soon as music starts; the rattles and cymbals made of segments of calabash on a stick, peculiar to the Fulani in Nigeria, are not used.

Ethnically it is a very mixed area. In most cases each hamlet in a village group is inhabited by a different people. Magazawa Hausa, Kanuri from Damergu, and more recent Kanuri from Bornu predominate, but there are also nomadic Fulani and semi-nomadic Tuareg.

This is the edge of the country called Damergu, which, on the direct road from Tessawa, may be said to begin at the village group of Garari in a small valley, tributary of the Gulbi n’Kaba. Just before reaching the southern edge of the valley the thorn bush suddenly ceases. In the hollow are two or three hamlets of Kanuri, Bornuwi, sedentary Tuareg and Hausa with common wells in the valley bottom. Instead of interminable thorn scrub just so high that nothing can be seen above it, an open wind-swept plain of rolling downland covered with yellow-gold grass appears in front. On the sharp African horizon to the N. and N.E. are the blue peaks of Damergu, quite small and humble, but clear cut against the sky-line with all the dignity of isolation in a sea of waving sun-washed prairie.

Damergu begins and ends abruptly: as soon as the belt of bush which surrounds it on all sides is crossed, the ground lies open to the sky and visibility becomes good. There is no more suffocating feeling in the world than marching through Central African bush. The discomforts and disabilities of travelling are not compensated for by any advantage except a ready supply of firewood. The bushland around Damergu is particularly unpleasant. It is never so tall that one may not hope to see over the top of the ugly stunted trees at the next low rise, and never in reality low enough to allow one to satisfy one’s passionate longing. Visibility is limited to a few yards and one’s sense of direction is confounded. It is infernally hot, because the undergrowth effectively shelters one from any breeze. The country is uniformly rolling and unbeautiful. A high proportion of the trees are of the virulently thorny variety which arch over the rare paths and make life on camel or horseback intolerable. Walking is equally distasteful, as the ground is strewn with burr grass which enters every fold of clothing and mortifies the flesh like hot needles. Camels get lost pasturing, game appears in vast quantities and disappears before a shot can be fired. There are scorpions, snakes, centipedes and tarantulas, not to speak of bush folk who have an uncanny sense of their own whereabouts, and of yours as well. They are armed with poisoned arrows, and though I did not suffer from their unkind attentions, the bush through which I passed north of Daura has a bad reputation. There are vast areas with no accessible water in the dry season, but when it rains the trees drip their moisture down your neck. I know the particular and private hell which is in store for me one day for the many misdemeanours I have committed. It will be to wander eternally through Sudan bush in search of the desert, where one may see what will bring happiness or oblivion at a distance and where one may at least face Destiny in the open.

On each separate occasion when I entered Damergu, in the east returning from Termit, in the west going north from Tessawa, and in the north returning home by way of Nigeria, I experienced such a sense of relief and pleasure at emerging from the bush as to dull my perception of the really somewhat monotonous nature of the country. The winding hollows flow more or less aimlessly east or west, except in the Gangara area, where the drainage is definitely westwards into the Gulbi n’Kaba basin. The general level of the country is about 1700 feet above the sea. Except in the hollows around the rain pools the country is devoid of trees or scrub. Every here and there small groups of hills rise 300-400 feet above the surrounding country. They are so far apart that the next system only appears on the horizon. The black ferruginous outcrop forms conical peaks or stretches of pebbly surface, which break the round contours of the prairie. These little hills, set on a rolling golden prairie of very wide prospect, are the great characteristics of Damergu. The land is vast and generous in its proportions.

The hills of Gangara in the west mark the site of a group of four villages called Zungu and Gangara close under the principal peak, Malam Chidam to the east and Karawa to the south. The hills are a series of cones rising a few hundred feet from the plain and are connected at their bases; a series of gullies or ravines clothed with little bushes descends from them; there are no cliffs or great masses of bare rock; the slopes are covered with low scrub. The Gangara hills divide the Gulbi n’Kaba basin from a wide depression on the east which sweeps south towards the cone of Zawzawa near the large village of Kallilua, with Dambida and Mazia not far to the north. North and east of Gangara are the low hills of Dambansa, Birjintoro and Ollelua, while further east again in a confused medley of aimless valleys are Mount Ginea and the triple peaks of Akri. The Akritan[48] hills are a landmark for the towns of Jajiduna, Tanut and Gamram. These various groups are the signposts of Damergu; even a raw traveller can learn them in a short time. Between the more important villages and towns the scattered hamlets are of such frequent occurrence that, once the general lie of the land has been observed, travelling is easy.

It is a country of considerable potential wealth. It was known in the past as the granary of Air; even now great quantities of grain are exported to the north and to the more densely populated Hausa countries of the south. The long, broad downs, usually well fed by the summer rains, are admirably suited for growing millet and guinea corn. The surrounding margin of bush, especially on the northern side within reasonable distances of the plentiful water holes in open places, is full of the cattle of nomad Fulani and the camels of the Damergu Tuareg. The cultivable area to-day is limited only by the scarcity of population and some lack of enthusiasm for work. A periodic cycle of dry years with the inevitable sequels of drought and famine can only be guarded against by administrative measures, which have not been enforced since the fall of the Central African Empires. One after another they dominated this part of the world, but whether Melle, Songhai, Bornu or Sokoto was pre-eminent in the Central Sudan, Damergu remained an appanage of Air, whose destinies it followed and of which it is economically a part. After the first arrival of the Tuareg from the east, a progressive descent of other tribes from the north led to the establishment of a reigning class in the country, recruited among the People of Air. To them the sedentary Kanuri people, who then and since have constituted the majority of the population, were subjected. The Tuareg Sultans of Damergu in the early period of modern history ruled in Jajiduna, Gamram, Tademari and Demmili. Even when they fell under the political influence of Tessawa or of Damagarim or were conquered by Melle, Songhai or Sokoto in turn, they remained in close touch with their relations in the north. The economic necessity of keeping open the great caravan road to Tripoli, which was a source of wealth to the Tuareg and to the south alike, was realised by everyone.

The more intense cultivation and thicker population of earlier days are proved by the profusion of deserted sites all over the country, where the passing of the villages has left no more tangible, if unmistakable, evidence than acres of cleared and levelled ground strewn with potsherds and heaps of stones. The greater population of those days and the administrative ability of the empires of the Sudan combined to counteract the effects of dry years by creating proportionately larger reserves of grain, which were so conspicuously absent just before the late war that a severe drought brought about wholesale emigration to the Southland.

The present-day villages in Damergu are all of the grass hut variety of the usual African type. In the past a few towns appear to have been built of mud. The ruins of old Dambiri show a walled mud-built town, although Demmili, once the seat of a Sultan who probably moved to Gangara when his village fell into decay, must have been wholly built of grass, for it has entirely disappeared. A lonely tree on a barren patch of ground marks its passing. The Gangara villages are all straw built, as are, among the larger settlements which have survived, Mazia and Kallilua. There are mud buildings, I believe, at Tademari and Jajiduna, and certainly at Tanut. The latter is the French centre of the country. It has an important grain market and a fort containing a small garrison of Senegalese troops. The principal native place was Jajiduna, where the first French post was established; but the town has rather declined since the move of the official capital to Tanut, where the water supply for caravans is better. At Jajiduna there is a Senussi “zawia,” one of the few points where the influence of this sect has taken root in Tuareg countries. The principal Senussi “zawia” in the Southland is at Kano, with another smaller one reported at Zinder.

PLATE 5

GAMRAM

North of Jajiduna and north-east of Tanut is Gamram,[49] a town of some importance in the past for the Tuareg, and the seat of one of their rulers of Damergu. Now a small collection of straw huts is surrounded by the ruins of mud walls like any of the towns of Hausaland. Gamram was the Warden of the South on the marches of the desert. As the most northerly permanent settlement of the Sudan on the Tripoli road it became a point of vital strategic importance for the caravan traffic. The town has occupied many sites on the edge of a basin that becomes a lake in the rainy season. The present site is on the north side, but the most important settlement was probably to the south-west. The beauty of Gamram struck Barth very forcibly. It was the first definitely Sudanese settlement to which he had come after the inhospitable deserts and the mountains of the Sahara. He had suffered intense discomfort in the waste called Azawagh, intervening between Damergu and the Sudan, but when he came to Gamram, the rains had filled the lake which laps the feet of some immense acacias that are perpetually green. Their roots live in water, and when the pool dries up, wells only a few feet deep are dug under their shade. The trees are filled with the song of many birds and the sound of running lizards. The gardens around the edge of the basin produce vegetables and luxuries rarely encountered in the Sahara. There are eggs and chickens and milk and cheese in the market. All these things are found at Gamram, not in plenty but in just sufficient quantities to delight the traveller in barren lands. I came to Gamram a day after leaving the impenetrable bush of Elakkos and found it as good as Barth had described.

The town has lost its Tuareg character. It is now a small settlement of a few hundred Kanuri and mixed inhabitants. The Tuareg element in the immediate neighbourhood is accounted for by some sedentary serfs or slaves living in other hamlets near by. The noble Tuareg of the Isherifan tribe who used to possess Gamram wander in the district between this place and the bush of Guliski. They have not counted for very much since they were decimated in a raid by Belkho, the great leader of the Air Tuareg during the latter years of last century. Belkho had complained that the Isherifan at Gamram were interfering with the caravans which crossed Damergu, and as his people were especially interested in the traffic, he demanded an assurance that the annoyance should cease, failing which he would have to take measures. The Isherifan returned an insolent reply and Belkho warned them again. He offered to accept a fine in camels for their misbehaviour, but when this was refused, collected a body of some two hundred to three hundred men and came swiftly down the road from Tergulawen with hostile intent. He reached the town at nightfall. Next morning he fell on the Isherifan, who had prepared for the attack, defeated them, and carried off so many camels that each of the victorious participants, as one explained to me, secured five female beasts for his share. Since then, my informant remarked, “the Isherifan are not.”

Damergu has been the scene of many bloody raids in recent times. At Farak, one day from Gamram, a great assemblage of men and camels from the Southland, bound for Ghat, was caught by the Imuzurak under Danda. Merchandise and camels were looted and the personnel was massacred.

During the four years which elapsed after the journey of the Foureau-Lamy Mission took place in 1900, a series of important events occurred in Damergu which ultimately led to the occupation of Air. In July 1900 the French military territory of Zinder-Chad had come into official existence, with a base of operations under Colonel Peroz at Say, and subsequently at Sorbo Hausa, on the Niger.[50] In February 1901 Colonel Peroz set out towards Lake Chad. Sergeant Bouthel, left in command at Zinder by Lieut. Joalland of the Voulet Mission, entered Damergu, defeated the Imuzuraq tribe of Tuareg at Tademari or Tanamari and killed their chief, Musa. His place was taken by his brother, Danda, who became ruler of the country, while a third brother, afterwards killed at Bir Alali (Fort Pradie) east of Lake Chad, in January 1902, with the assistance of the Senussi organised Kanem against the French. Of all the Air Tuareg, the Kel Owi confederation of tribes alone, on account of their commercial relations with the Hausa countries and with the north, adopted a pacific attitude. The rest of the Air and the local Tuareg in Damergu set about fortifying Tademari, Jajiduna and Gamram and raided as far afield as Zinder. Their defeat by Sergeant Bouthel had so little effect that they soon plundered a Kel Owi caravan at Fall near Mount Ginea. The French in consequence were forced to occupy Gidjigawa near Kallilua in southern Damergu, and finally, when the Farak massacre occurred, Jajiduna itself, where a fort was built and a nucleus of camel corps established. The latter, however, was restricted in its action to a small area north of the post; operations did not even extend to Farak, only thirty odd miles away. The effect of this French expansion was nevertheless to make many of the prouder Tuareg, who would not submit but foresaw the inevitable, move eastwards. Some of them migrated as far afield as Kanem and Wadai, others only to Elakkos. It was the continuation of a movement which had begun after the advent of the Foureau-Lamy Mission. But even east of Chad the ubiquitous white men arrived; the migrants fought the French with conspicuous success at Bir Alali on two occasions, though they were finally defeated. Of these Tuareg of the Exodus, some returned to Air, but the rest moved yet further east to the strange land of Darfur, where they still live in voluntary exile near El Fasher.

The repeated attacks on the north- and south-bound caravans in Damergu induced the French to escort the larger convoys of 1902 and 1903 as far as Turayet on the borders of the Air mountains. The departure of the irreconcilables towards the east, whence only a part was to return after the third encounter of Bir Alali, and the gradual penetration of the Southland, with the consequent pacification of the population, left the Imuzurak alone in Damergu in open defiance of the French. But in the meanwhile a second pillage had taken place at Farak, and, moreover, in Air itself the situation from every point of view was most unsatisfactory. The Sultan of the Air Tuareg was tossed about between the important Kel Owi confederation and their pacific policy on the one hand, and the irreconcilables of Damergu and Air on the other. In Gall in the south-east of Air had become a head-quarters of the raiders, and the Sultan began to find his position intolerable. He concluded by inviting the French to enter and take over. The occupation of Agades took place in the autumn of 1904 by a camel patrol under Lieut. Jean, when the modern history of Air and Damergu commenced.

Osman Mikitan, the Sultan of this critical period, lies buried in a square tomb of mud bricks in the Zungu hamlet of Gangara. He had changed places three times with Brahim as Sultan of the Air people, and died unregretted because he had sold his country to the foreigner.

The Tuareg of Damergu number among their tribes factions of many of the most famous Air clans. The Ikazkazan are represented by the section known generically as the Kel Ulli, the People of the Goats; these tribes include the Isherifan of Gamram and the Kel Tamat, in addition, of course, to many others in Air. The Imuzurak round Tanamari, with the Imaqoaran, Ibandeghan, Izagaran and Imarsutan are tribes which seem to represent the earliest Tuareg stock in the neighbourhood; some of them certainly belong to groups which, when the first migration into the plateau from the east occurred, never reached Air at all. The omnipresent Ifoghas reappear in Damergu near Tanut and roam northward; they are apparently cousins of the great division of the Ifoghas n’Adrar (Ifoghas of the Mountains), whose centre is around Kidal, north-east of Gao on the Niger. These Ifoghas of Damergu also I believe to have been left here in the course of the westward migration of the first wave of Tuareg, though some of them may have returned east after the initial movement. The Tamizgidda of Air apparently also had a section in Damergu in Barth’s day:[51] their name connects them with “the mosque,” and they are said by this explorer to have been regarded by the Arabs in his day[52] as “greatly Arabicised, having apparently been settled somewhere near a town.” A tribe of the same name occurs in the west; they also may be remnants, powerful as they were in Barth’s days, of a westward migration from the Chad area, or possibly of a returning wave which is known to have reached Air. The Tegama in Damergu, says Barth,[53] “form at present a very small tribe able to muster, at the utmost, three hundred spears; but most of them are mounted on horseback. Formerly, however, they were far more numerous, till Ibram, the father of the present chief, undertook, with the assistance of the Kel Geres, the unfortunate expedition against Sokoto. . . .” But this fighting certainly occurred at a more recent date than 1759, when, according to the Agades Chronicle, they were at war with the Kel Geres. Barth adds that they were said originally to have come from Janet, near Ghat, that they were already settled in the south long before the Kel Owi came to Air, and that they are found on the borders of Negroland in very ancient times. Ptolemy speaks of a Tegama people beyond Air towards Timbuctoo and the middle Sudan. Hornemann, from what he heard of them, “believed them to be Christians,” says Barth; though the only reference I can find in this authority is to the fact that they were probably idolatrous. I think Barth’s reference is to a generic group, now called the Kel Tegama, a collective name for the people living in the southern part of the area known as Tegama, which is on the west side of the northern borders of Damergu. Among the Kel Tegama to-day would be classed the Damergu Ifoghas and other tribes already mentioned. I fancy Barth has used a generic local and geographical name as a tribal name.

The belief that they were Christians is, however, particularly interesting. It is possible that these Tegama were not Tuareg at all, and that Barth’s informants may have been referring to the nomadic Fulani who pasture their cattle in the area where he met them, round In Asamed and Farak, though his description of the time spent in their company certainly points to their having in reality been Tuareg. Their “customs showed that they had fallen off much from ancient usages,” for not only did the women make advances to the eminent explorer, but even the men urged him to make free with their wives. He adds that the women had very regular features and fair skins and that the men were both taller and fairer than the Kel Owi, many of them dressing their hair in long tresses as a token of their being Inisilman or holy men (“despite their dissolute manners”), a peculiarity which connects them with the Ifoghas of Azger, who also are a tribe of “marabouts.”[54] His general description of the Tegama, taken in conjunction with their hunting and cattle-herding habits, corresponds so closely with the appearance of the Ifoghas of Damergu to-day that there is little doubt that Barth is referring to them, and that he should consequently more accurately have written, not “the Tegama” but the “Kel Tegama.” He distinctly states that they acknowledged the supremacy of the Sultan of Agades rather than that of the Kel Owi leaders, which will be seen to point to their early origin in the country. Normally resident in Northern Damergu, they move to Tegama and Azawagh after the rains to feed their cattle, goats and camels. The conquests of the later Tuareg immigrants reduced them to a low stage of poverty and degradation, though they have retained their nobility of caste, race and feature to a remarkable degree.

The history of Damergu shows clearly the predominant rôle which the Tuareg played among the lower-caste Kanuri sedentaries and the nomadic Fulani. The prepotency of a noble race among people of inferior class is one of the most interesting phenomena of history. The Kanuri in Damergu are, and probably have always been, numerically the stronger; they are armed with bows and arrows, the weapon par excellence for bush fighting. The Tuareg was less numerous at all times, but everywhere, except in the west, where he has been so long associated with the Sudan as to lose his nobility, disdained any weapon but the sword, knife or spear. Like the knight in medieval Europe, the Tuareg has always held that the armes blanches were the only weapons of a gentleman, yet with all these disadvantages his prestige was sufficient to ensure an ascendancy which would have continued but for the advent of the gun and gunpowder. In Damergu this prestige ensured the maintenance of the Tuareg Sultanates until the advent of the French. In the Southland all legends continue to magnify his prowess.

In Hausaland, at Dan Kaba in Katsina Emirate, a strolling player came one day to give a Punch and Judy show for the delectation of the village people, who were in part Hausa, in part sedentary Fulani, and in part nomadic cattle-owning Fulani. The old traditional play had been modernised, and although it was full of topical allusions to the Nigeria of 1922, enough of the past remained to show the reputation and moral ascendancy which the Tuareg enjoyed in the Southland. The showman’s apparatus was simple: divesting himself of his indigo robe, he arranged it on the ground over three sticks and crouched hidden beneath its folds. He had four dolls in all and worked them like those in our Punch and Judy shows in England. In the place of the squeaky voice of the Anglo-Saxon artist he used a bird whistle to conceal his words; the modulations of tone and inflexion in the dialogues and conversations between the puppets were remarkable. The Tuareg doll is the villain of the piece: his body is of blue rags, most unorthodoxly crowned with a white turban and armed with a huge sword and shield. Divested of the latter and crowned with a red turban, the same doll in the course of the play becomes the “dogari,” or native policeman of the Hausaland Emirs. The King of the Bush is a Fulani man, impersonated by a puppet made largely of orange cretonne with huge hair crest and bow and arrow. He suspects his wife, made of the same material but ornamented with cowries before and behind, of having relations with the Tuareg. She soothes and pets and sings to her suspicious husband, playing music on drums and calabash cymbals. Her mellifluous tones finally persuade him to go out a-hunting in the bush. Needless to say, in Act II she flirts outrageously with the attractive Man of the Open Lands, but is surprised by her husband in flagrante delicto, most realistically performed, whereupon, in the next act, a tremendous fight ensues. The King of the Bush, discarding his bow and arrow, fights with an axe, the Tuareg with his sword. The latter is victorious and kills the King of the Bush. The wife calls in the “dogari” to avenge her husband and to please her Southland audience. In Act V the Tuareg is haled off before the British Political Officer, presented in khaki cloth with a black basin-shaped hat like a Chinese coolie and the face of a complete idiot. In the ensuing dialogue the fettered Tuareg scores off the unfortunate white man continuously, but, as all plays must end happily, he is condemned to death. The execution of the plot is good, the technique admirable, although the performance was unduly protracted for our tastes. The one I witnessed lasted nearly four hours. The predominant rôle is that of the envied and handsome villain, the noble Tuareg. He is glorious in life and fearless in death.

It is unfortunately impossible for lack of space to discuss the Kanuri or Fulani of Damergu. The latter affect the political life of the country but little. They shift continually to fresh tracts of bush or better water for the sake of their great black cattle, which used to be sold in the far north as well as in Hausaland. They do not mix with the Tuareg, though they are recognised by them, as anyone must recognise them, to be of a noble race. Slender, fine-featured, but dark-skinned, with the profiles of Assyrian statues, the Damergu Fulani are of the Bororoji section of this interesting people which, in the course of its sojourn and gradual movement along the fringe of the Sudan from west to east, has provided the ruling class in most of the Hausa States. The recent history of Sokoto, of Katsina and of Kano is their history. Their conquest of power in Hausaland is but another instance of the ascendancy of nobility and a glaring contradiction of the Socialist theory of equal birth. When they came to power they were illiterate and pagan and had no political virtues; their success was due to breeding and caste.

The Bororoji are a darker section of the Fulani than many of the purer divisions in the south. In Northern Damergu they can be seen stalking through the bush with their herds of black kine, naked except for a loin skin and a peaked cap of liberty of embroidered cloth, but patently conscious of their birth. They come and go as they please, and no one interferes with them. Some may settle in towns or villages, living for a time on the produce of sales of cattle, in which they are rich. Most of them have no permanent habitation. A few can be seen in villages like Gangara, where they come to sell an occasional bull and buy a few ornaments or some such luxury as grain. Their women are slender, tall and straight, with fine oval faces and straight, jet-black hair. The triangular form of face from the cheek-bones to the chin is noticeable among the Bororoji as among the Rahazawa Fulani of the Katsina area, but the face is somewhat longer in proportion to the breadth than further south. Their appearance is Semitic, though the nose is never heavy but straight, and this is the case even more among the women than the men. Both sexes wear bead necklaces; the peaked cloth cap is the ornament of the men. The women have anklets and bracelets of copper and as many as six large copper curtain rings in their ears, the only disfigurement of their handsome faces. Of the customs, religion and organisation of the Bororoji little is known. Like their cousins in the south, they anoint the wide-branching horns of their cattle, and when they drink milk, though none must be spilled, a little is left in the bottom of the calabash as an offering to the Eternal Spirit. The Fulani believe that one day they will return to the East, whence their tradition says that they came, but how or why or when they left this unknown home has not been explained. Obedient to tradition, numbers of them are settling year by year in the Nilotic Sudan.

The last belt of bush between the Sahara and Sudan is reached a day’s march from Tanut. The Elakkos bush further east ceases completely in about Lat. 15° 20′ N.; on the road to Termit the vegetation becomes very scanty some way south of a belt of white sand dunes in Lat. 15° 30′ N.: north of them the country is pure steppe desert. The Damergu bush, however, extends as far north as Lat. 15° 50′ to the Taberghit valley on the eastern road to Air, and to Tembellaga on the western road. Damergu forms a salient in the line of the Sudan vegetation.

The belt of sand dunes on the way to Termit is said to run eastward even beyond the Bilma-Chad road south of Agadem well, and gradually to broaden all the way; in the west it hardly reaches the edge of Damergu. Some fifty miles north of Talras in Elakkos the same zone of acacia trees, which occur in the hollows of the dunes on the Termit road, follows a depression called the Tegama valley.[55] The surface, like that of the steppe desert, is of heavy buff-coloured sand in long whale-back dunes.

The Northern Damergu bush is different to the belt which runs along the southern side of the country. The trees and shrubs are principally of the acacia variety. The larger vegetation which is typical of the Sudan has disappeared, but the grasses and ground plants are still characteristic of the south. The burr grass which makes life burdensome to the traveller reigns supreme. The “Karengia” (Pennisetum distichium) grows in clumps or small tufts some fifteen inches in height. In Northern Damergu the ground is densely carpeted with this grass. As soon as the summer rains are over it sheds a little seed with a crown of small sharp spikes. Leather and the bare human skin alone afford the burrs no hold; any other material seems to attract them irresistibly. In the presence of this pest the bush natives have found the only solution, which is to go almost naked; the clothed but unhappy European blasphemes until he is too weary to speak. Water is the only remedy; it softens the little burr and makes it possible to remove it without disintegrating entirely the mesh of one’s apparel, but water in this belt of land is scarce.

The next watering-points after leaving Gamram are Farak, and Hannekar on the Menzaffer valley. The latter is now on the most direct road to Air, since the slightly more eastern track from the former point by In Asamed well to Tergulawen became impossible when the latter well was filled in during the late war. At Hannekar there is a large depression covered with thick undergrowth and small trees standing in a pool of water which lasts for some months after the rains. As the pool dries up, shallow wells are dug in the bed. The water supply at Farak is all contained in shallow wells, but as watering from them is a much slower process than sending cattle and camels to drink at a pool, it is customary for the local Tuareg and Fulani to stay in the Hannekar area as long as they can. After the rains and until the wells are re-dug at Farak there is consequently a period when there is practically no water there at all, as Barth found early in 1851. Nevertheless, since the permanent supply at Farak below the ground is greater than anywhere else in Northern Damergu, it has come to be considered the real starting-point of the eastern road to Air. Its importance as a rendezvous for pasturing tribes as well as for north-bound caravans explains the numerous disasters which have occurred there at the hands of Tuareg and Tebu raiders.

North of Farak is a long hill falling away steeply on the side towards the wells. It gave Barth[56] the impression of forming a sharply defined southern border to the desert plateau between Damergu and Air. The existence of so marked an edge is, however, not borne out in fact, for no similar escarpment exists west of it on the road north of Hannekar, nor yet, as Foureau[57] points out, on the western road to Air, by Abellama. The hill of Farak, like another smaller one at Kidigi north of Hannekar, is an isolated elevation.

Permanent habitation used to extend about one day’s march north of Farak, to the neighbourhood of In Asamed well, but after the latter was filled in, which I understand occurred during the 1917 revolt, when Tamatut well, further east, and Tergulawen on the borders of Air were also destroyed, Farak became the last village of the Sudan. Neither in recent years nor of old, however, did it ever possess the same permanency or importance as Gamram. Farak was always liable to be deserted at a moment’s notice in times of danger. To-day the skin and straw huts of the Ifadeyen and Kel Tamat tribes are scattered about in the dense bush all over the district. The camps change from year to year. When I passed this way there were Isherifan near Guliski and Ighelaf south-east of Gamram, Ifadeyen at Farak, and Ifadeyen and Kel Tamat at Hannekar.

Since the more direct road from Farak by In Asamed to Tergulawen has been abandoned, there is now no water for caravans between that place or Hannekar and the Air plateau except at Milen,[58] which is one day south of the mountains. The present track from Farak, after crossing the Tekursat valley at a point near the site of In Asamed well, inclines slightly west and joins the direct track from Hannekar to Milen, running almost due north and south. The apparent angle made by the Farak-Milen track at In Asamed puzzled me when I came to plot it on paper from a compass traverse, for the extraordinary straightness of these old roads between important points, even in the rough hill country of Air, is very remarkable. I eventually realised that a line from Farak produced through In Asamed was on the direct bearing of the old well of Tergulawen. This disused track is the original southern end of what is called the “Tarei tan Kel Owi,” or Kel Owi road, in other words, of the main caravan track from Tripoli to Nigeria. The road in Air and in the south is usually called among the Tuareg after the confederation of tribes in control of the way. Down this eastern track came Barth and his companions in 1850-1.

In Asamed, meaning in Temajegh “(The Well) of Cold Water,” was just over 100 feet deep; its existence shows that Damergu has been left behind and Azawagh has begun, for the former is a land of rain pools and shallow and seasonal wells, while the latter, north of the last Sudan bush, is a desert country with occasional very deep wells and no surface water. It is called Azawagh, a Temajegh name applied to several semi- or totally desert areas in the Sahara. The fact that it is not confined to the country south of Air must be borne in mind in seeking to identify the various areas referred to under this name by the Arab geographers. There is, for instance, an Azawad, a name corrupted in Arabic for Azawagh, north of Timbuctoo.

North of the broad Tekursat valley, with scarcely any marked channel and sparsely covered slopes, is a low plateau with three small valleys, rejoicing in the uncouth name of Teworshekaken. Beyond is the Inafagak valley, and finally the smaller and probably tributary valley of Keta. From here to the Taberghit valley the bush thins out more and more; patches of bare sand become frequent, and the trees are considerably smaller. In none of these valleys has the rain-water left a definite bed of flow, though dry pool bottoms and short sections of channel may be seen here and there. The valleys are sometimes several miles from side to side; they were probably in the first instance longitudinal depressions between heavy sand dunes formed along the direction of the prevalent wind; the sides are even now of too recent formation and too permeable to spill the rain-water into definite beds along the bottoms.

At the southern edge of the immense Taberghit valley the character of the country changes quite definitely. The surface becomes dotted with little hummocks where the sand has been washed against a small bush or piece of scrub; otherwise the ground is bare. The few trees are grouped in scattered clumps. The ground vegetation is no longer predominantly “Karengia,” but one of several kinds of less offensive and more useful desert grasses impregnated with salt. The best camel fodder, curiously enough, is the true desert vegetation. The animals eat it avidly on account of the salt it contains, and even long periods of drought do not conquer its obstinate greenness. Its nutritive power is greater and it is more wholesome than the luxuriant Southland fodder.

At Taberghit a track runs direct to Agades by way of Ihrayen spring. When both the eastern roads were in use, the Hannekar track was used by people going to Agades, while the more eastern Farak-In Asamed route by way of Tergulawen was frequented by caravans bound for Northern Air.

A day before reaching Milen well you feel very strongly that the Sudan lies behind. The last bush has been left near Taberghit. In front is an open depression perhaps five miles wide and not more than fifty feet deep: it contains no stream bed, but here and there patches of dry cracked mud indicate the formation of short-lived rain pools. East and west the same stark valley runs as far as eye can see. Its course is clearly defined and it is without intersecting basins or tributaries or curves. On the far crest are loose buff-coloured sand dunes and then a few small acacias. The levels gradually rise in a series of folds, one of which contains the closed basin and disused Anu n’Banka[59]; another forms a valley called Kaffardá, which is like Taberghit but on a smaller scale. The folds lie parallel to one another along the line of the prevalent E.N.E. wind which always blows in Azawagh. This wind is one of the peculiarities for which the country is notorious. Both times I crossed this region it was blowing with great violence. In June it was suffocatingly hot; I camped one noonday to rest out of sheer exhaustion in a group of trees on the northern side of Taberghit. There was practically no shade: the leaves of the stunted trees were too thin to shelter even three persons. The temperature was over 110° F. in the shade, and visibility did not exceed a quarter of a mile, owing to the blowing sand and dust. Six months later I returned the same way. The same wind was blowing, but it was so cold at midday that I was unable to keep warm, even walking, with two woollen shirts, a drill coat, a leather jerkin and a blanket over my shoulders. Where a bush or sand dune offered shelter from the wind the sun was quite hot, but that night the thermometer fell to 31° F., after having registered 92° F. at 3 p.m. in a sheltered spot in the shade. It was very unpleasant. Barth’s experience of the wind and cold of Azawagh was much the same as mine. He writes: “The wind which came down with a cold blast from the N.N.E. was so strong that we had difficulty in pitching our tent;”[60] it was responsible for the most “miserable Christmas” he had ever spent. I was there a few days before Christmas in 1922 and can vouch for the accuracy of his verdict. Even the blinding glare and heat of June were preferable to the bleak cold of the winter nights.

One effect of the constant wind is that the longitudinal dunes in Azawagh have retained their characteristic form more generally than further south. Their gentle rounded contours, which the wind tends to restore whenever the rain happens to have modified them, are characteristic. There is, of course, less precipitation here than further south, though it has been sufficient in Tagedufat to produce a considerable growth of desert vegetation along the bottom of the valley, where there are a number of small trees and an abundance of every conceivable type of salt bush and grass. It is said at certain seasons of the year to produce the finest camel fodder in this part of Africa.

All over Azawagh are numerous deserted sites where millet used to be grown on the sandy slopes. The people who cultivated this arid country lived in temporary tents and huts except further north between Tagedufat and Milen, and consequently no trace of their dwellings remains. The evidence, however, of cleared and levelled patches and of broken earthenware is as unmistakable here as in Damergu. Between Keta and Tagedufat there is a succession of such clearings. It is borne in upon one that this heavy buff-coloured sand country where only desert vegetation now appears to thrive is in reality quite fertile so long as it receives any rain at all. The climate has probably not altered enough in recent times to account for the desertion of Azawagh; it seems rather to have been due to a decrease of the population. The Kel Azawagh, according to tradition, were numerous at a time when Damergu was thickly peopled, and there was not enough land available there or in Air to satisfy the needs of a people squeezed between the south and the north, whence the population was constantly being driven into the Sudan. It is clear that the Kel Azawagh who made these millet cultivations in a zone of desert steppe must have been of a fairly sedentary disposition, for a nomad people would have contented itself, as the modern Tuareg inhabitants of Azawagh do, with grazing herds and flocks on the excellent pastures.

In referring to the Kel Tegama a plea was advanced that the name was primarily a geographical one, and one not properly appertaining to a single tribe. The name Kel Azawagh, to which the same considerations certainly apply, is found to some extent interchangeable with Kel Tegama. Now it will be shown later that the Tuareg of Air and Damergu only reached these lands comparatively late in history; consequently an allusion in Ptolemy to a Tegama people appears to refer to a non-Tuareg folk in this or some other area of the same name. I see no reason to doubt that it was these Tegama and Azawagh areas which were meant by Ptolemy, and therefore conclude that before the Tuareg arrived they were possessed by a people to whom the millet clearings and village sites are probably due. The later Tuareg Tegama, or Kel Tegama, as we should more properly say, as well as the Kel Azawagh, were merely a section of People of the Veil who later lived in the areas, and in the course of time were named after them, though it is possible that the name Azawagh was one given by the Tuareg to an area previously called Tegama by its former inhabitants.

We shall see[61] that among the ancient divisions of the People of the Veil in the Hawara group is a Kel Azawagh. The peculiarities of the Hawara clans would not connote any sedentary instinct in this tribe, whether it lived in this or in another area called Azawagh; but when we find in the Tetmokarak tribe of the Kel Geres group now living near Sokoto (whither they migrated from Air through this Azawagh area) a subsection called Tegama, and when we have learnt[62] that the Kel Geres are almost certainly a Hawara people, we can be even more inclined to the view just suggested regarding the use of the names Azawagh and Tegama and the origin of the people at various times living there. As a tribal name Kel Azawagh has now disappeared. The French 1/2,000,000 map displays it in the valley between Agades and the Tiggedi cliff, but out of place, for when still in use it was applicable to an area rather further east. Although it is no longer a proper name, it serves the Ifadeyen who now live in Azawagh for a descriptive term of themselves in accordance with the usual practice regarding local tribal nomenclature.

In the periods between the rains the village sites in the Taberghit or Tagedufat valleys watered at the deep wells of Tagedufat, Anu n’Banka, Aghmat, Taberghit and presumably Tateus, though I know nothing of the last named. All these wells have now become silted up by wind-borne sand, but could easily be cleared if the population returned, as the water has not disappeared.

The whole area between Taberghit and Tagedufat is covered with small mobile dunes; the two valleys themselves are, however, free of them. There is no loose sand at all in the Tagedufat valley, a curious phenomenon probably connected with the eddies formed by the prevalent wind in the channel of a depression between the higher banks. If this were true, the existence of dunes at Kaffarda would conversely point to its being an isolated basin, and this indeed is probably the case. Anu n’Banka is in a little hollow, the sides of which are also covered with small dunes. The bottom itself is clayey and free from blown sand, showing traces of having been a rain-pool at certain seasons. Surrounding the depression are millet clearings and a little rock outcrop. It is the most southerly point in Azawagh where stone occurs, and the outpost of the more conspicuous rock formations of the Tagedufat valley.

Although the first part of the descent into Tagedufat is imperceptible, the appearance of the ground has changed considerably on account of the small crescentic dunes of very fine white sand which overlie the heavier buff-coloured sand of the surface. The crescentic type is characteristic of young dunes in process of formation,[63] their last stage being the long whale-back down of heavy particles which tend to settle or become cemented and eventually to support some vegetation. The Azawagh valleys present a series of interesting examples of the youngest type of dunes, which are still moving rapidly, superimposed upon the oldest fixed dune formations oriented along the line of the prevalent wind. It is curious that at no point has the fine and very mobile sand which is continually being carried in from the great Eastern Desert collected in large masses: the small crescentic bodies, the horns of which, of course, lie down wind, or, in other words, point west to south-west, are neither continuous nor contiguous. The underlying buff-coloured surface is covered with a number of small trees and scattered scrub or grass in isolated clumps. This vegetation becomes covered by the crescent dunes and in time uncovered as the white sand moves westward. Where this vegetation can be seen emerging from the crescentic formations on the windward side it is still alive, pointing to a fairly rapid motion of the body of sand. It is true that some of this desert scrub is sufficiently hardy to withstand a period of, it is said, as much as four years without any rain, and even then it only requires very little moisture in the air or some dew; the numerous small acacias, however, if wholly engulfed for any length of time, would die. Yet at no point is there either a wake of dead vegetation behind the larger crescentic dunes or even an unduly large proportion of dead trees. The progress of the small dunes is therefore undoubtedly rapid, and is due to the constant wind, which should, however, have tended to create larger masses. The crescentic dunes are rarely more than twelve feet high at the most; their individual area is, of course, relatively large owing to the very flat slipping angle of the fine grains. Barth records dunes as far as Tergulawen; but there is no evidence regarding the country east of this point,[64] which is probably too far north of the dune belt on the Termit road to be connected with that zone.

The Tagedufat valley bottom, unlike the Milen and Taberghit valleys, is marked by a more continuous stream bed along which water flows every year for a short time during the rains. The most remarkable feature of the valley is a series of flat bare patches formed by the pools of rain-water; they are of no great size, but the surface is stained bluish-white by chemical incrustation. The Milen and Taberghit valleys, while possessing a few similar rain-pools, none of which survives for more than the briefest period, do not exhibit this complexion. The point is of particular interest in connection with a report given to me by my guide, Sidi, who was with me on the way south. He is a widely travelled and knowledgable man. He stated that the Tagedufat depression extended eastwards across the desert all the way to Fashi, and was marked along the whole of its course by such patches of chemical incrustation. My travelling companion, Buchanan, observed that the ground shortly before reaching Fashi was stained in the manner described. In the open desert, where in the immensity of space it is difficult to determine the direction of a very slightly accentuated valley, such noticeable features are valuable evidence.

Considering the size of the Tagedufat basin south of Milen, the valley shown as extending towards Termit on the French 1/2,000,000 map and called Tegemi (Téguémi), is perhaps a confluent, or even an inaccurate representation, of the main valley itself. A recent Camel Corps[65] reconnaissance from Talras to Eghalgawen possibly followed up one such affluent in the east bank of the main channel of Tagedufat. The importance of the Tagedufat valley from the hydrographic point of view cannot be over-stated.

Directly the Tagedufat valley is crossed the rock outcrop on the north bank becomes a striking feature. Increasing in size towards the west, it falls away below the surface to the east. Crescentic dunes reappear between the outcrops and continue almost all the way to Milen. On the north side of Tagedufat, near the track, for which it serves as a landmark, is a prominent mass of black rock called the Kashwar (Stone) n’Tawa or Tawar. Far away to the N.N.E. the relief becomes bolder, rising to a group of small summits clothed with loose sand, called the Rocks of Oghum. The remains of some stone houses, at one time the southernmost permanent settlement of Air, appear in the loose sand near the hills. North of Oghum in a little depression filled with acacias is Gharus n’Zurru.[66] After a further stretch of dunes a small valley running northwards diversifies the general lie of the ground. It is called Maisumo, and contains another deep well which is still in use. This valley after a short distance runs into the Milen depression, with the conical hill of Tergulawen visible to the east and the little massif of Teskokrit to the west. The northern part of the latter group extends eastwards from the main summits as a steep ridge forming the northern bank of the Milen valley itself.

East of Tergulawen again is a small and almost unknown group of hills called Masalet, where in recent years Kaossen, afterwards leader of the Air revolt in 1917, dug a well. It only yielded brackish water, which, though good enough for camels, proved too medicinal for the Tuareg, who filled it in again. It had been dug for political purposes largely in order to facilitate parties from and for the Southland participating in the yearly caravans which fetch salt from Bilma. Masalet was designed to obviate these parties making a detour along the River of Agades or via Eghalgawen: it provided an easterly watering-point in Azawagh corresponding with Tazizilet further north in Air itself. The unsatisfactory nature of the supply, especially for caravans engaged in crossing the eastern desert, did not, however, justify the risk of leaving so remote a watering-point available for Tebu raiding parties. The fact that Masalet was constructed in recent years is interesting, as showing that the Tuareg have not lost the art of locating deep water.

The western road from Tanut to Agades via Aderbissinat and Abellama runs over much the same sort of country as that which I have just described between Farak and Milen. Aderbissinat well, seventy-five miles from Tanut and ninety-three miles from Agades, is a point of such strategic importance that the French from Zinder built a fort there during the war in order to secure their communications with Air. It has not been garrisoned of late, but proved of paramount importance during the operations of the column which marched from the south to relieve Agades during the rebellion of 1917. With the exception of the deep but copious well of Abellama, there is no useful permanent watering-place between western Damergu and Agades, as the spring of Ihrayen in the Tiggedi cliffs has too small an output to provide for many animals. Nineteen miles north of Aderbissinat the bush ceases. As at Taberghit further east, the country rises some 200 feet to an average level of 1700-1800 feet above the sea. Beyond Timbulaga sand dunes appear on the level buff-coloured steppe, which is covered with the usual scanty vegetation of desert grass in tussocks.[67] The ground then slopes gradually down to the deep well of Abellama in Lat. 16° 16′ 30″ N. and Long. 7° 47′ 20″ E. G. Abellama as a stage corresponds with Milen on the other road.

On the easternmost or Tergulawen road Barth[68] shows that the country is again substantially the same. South of the “spacious” well, which is in a depression “ranging east and west,” with sand-hills on the south side bearing a sprinkling of desert herbage, the country is covered with small dunes on a “flat expanse of sand, mostly bare and clothed with trees only in favoured spots.” To the north is a great sandy plain running as far as the Ridge of Abadarjan, where the level descends to the upper basin of the River of Agades. The area is covered with “hád,” the most nutritious of desert plants and the most characteristic of the desert steppe of Africa. In all parts of the Sahara the distribution of the plant marks the division between the Desert and the Sown. This “hád” of the border line advances or recedes, sometimes from year to year, according to the rainfall. It is the tidal mark of the desert.

The northern part of Azawagh is geographically important, as it contains the transverse valleys which collect the southern rainfall of Air and carry it westwards into the Niger basin. The course of the Beughqot (Beurkot) and Azelik[69] valleys is wrongly shown on the French maps. They do not unite until they have reached a far more southerly point than where they are shown to do so on the Cortier map. Furthermore, when they have joined, they turn S.W. and not S.E. A recent reconnaissance as far as Masalet proved that after these two valleys meet they turn west into a large depression which is probably the same one as that in which the well of Milen is situated, though it might, on the other hand, be the Tagedufat basin; this is a point which must for the moment remain undecided. On a solution of this problem depends the answer to the question as to whether Milen or Tagedufat is the principal basin into which the Air valleys east of Beughqot as far as Tazizilet drain. All that is clear is that they turn southwards and then westwards to join one of the two systems in question, and do not peter out in the desert as Cortier’s map suggests.

West of Milen well the valley in which it is situated eventually joins the lower Tagedufat, which runs on S.W. or W. towards the Gulbi n’Kaba or the Tafassasset-T’immersoi basin. That the Tagedufat system does not enter the River of Agades over the Tiggedi cliff at some point near Ihrayen is probable owing to the fact that all this country has been subjected to a slight southerly tilt. The Tiggedi cliff, the Eghalgawen-T’in Wana massif, the cliff east of Akaraq and its continuation along the great valley, finally represented by the ridge of Abadarjan, as Barth rightly judged, are the northern boundary of this area, which slopes gently from north to south. The River of Agades receives hardly any left-bank tributaries.

Milen well could never be found without a guide. The wide valley, with sand dunes on the south side and a steep north bank where the now omnipresent rock of Air appears, is bare, dry and stony. It shimmers in the heat. Teskokrit appears as a black mass in the west on a bank of milk-white mirage set round a group of trees. The bottom of the valley is a gravel plain with a small patch of bare rock in it which an unwitting traveller would most probably pass unheeding. In this patch of rock is a small hole with a large circular stone near by. The hole, barely three feet across, is the mouth of a well driven through hard sandstone all the way down to the water-bearing stratum, seventy feet below the ground. The mouth can scarcely be seen fifty yards away. The rounded stone is several inches thick and was said to have been used to cover up the mouth of the well to prevent its becoming silted up with driving sand.

I came there in June, after more than forty hours’ march from Hannekar with four tired camels and two men, an Ifadeyen guide and an Arab of Ghat in the Fezzan. We had very little water left, so little, in fact, that it was all used in one pot to cook some rice for us three. The place was deserted and very lonely. The wind was driving the sand so hard that it stung the naked calves of my legs as I stood at the well with Ishnegga the guide, drawing water for the thirsty camels. Camels in hot weather drink a great deal, and hauling water in a two-gallon leather bucket from a seventy-foot well is hard work in a temperature of over 150° F. in the sun. The camels drank interminably. The last and best camel was still thirsty and remained to be watered. The beast was rather weak. It had a bad saddle sore, a hole about the size of a large man’s hand, in its back, and it was festering and full of maggots. We had all just done a journey of over 500 miles from Tanut to Termit and back, in thirty-five days, including nine days of halts, averaging, in other words, nearly twenty miles per marching day for twenty-six days. The camel had begun to drink. Then as we were drawing a full bucket the well rope broke six feet from my hand and fell to the bottom of the well with a splash. A vain hour was spent, while the rice cooked and got more and more full of sand, trying to fish up the rope and bucket with an iron hook made of the nose-piece of a camel bridle fastened to a knotted baggage rope. This too was lost after hooking the tangle, which it joined at the bottom of the well. Prospects looked gloomy as our thirst increased. I have distinct recollections of the sky and valley getting whiter and more metallic and the heat more intolerable. Finally, just enough rope was found by untying all the baggage to ladle up water a half-gallon at a time in a small canvas bucket. But the poor camel had to wait a long time to finish its drink, for the first of the supply to reach the top was used to refill the tanks.

As I was leaving the well two men with three camels came in from the south. They had started to return to their own country in the hills, after an enforced sojourn in the neighbourhood of the fort at Tanut on account of their rebellious propensities in 1917 and 1918. They had no possessions but three young camels, and had started with only enough water in one small skin for half their journey. The two men reached Milen, having drunk nothing for twenty-four hours. They were rather exhausted, but had fully expected to have to do another ten or twelve hours’ march the same night to the nearest water at T’in Wana, as they had only a calabash bottle and no rope with which to draw any more water. They had risked death sooner than stay a moment longer than was necessary in the south, even to collect enough well rope or equipment for a journey which most Europeans would consider difficult. It was very pleasant to give these two men, an old noble and his serf, some especially good cold water from a small canvas cooler which I had prepared. When the serf carried away a pan of icy water, he first offered it to his master, who drank it.

The second time I came to Milen was in December. There was such a crowd of people and of flocks belonging to the Ifadeyen watering that the supply was practically exhausted, and it took me five hours to get enough water for the return journey to Hannekar. But in June the camping grounds were deserted, for there was hardly any pasture during those last few days before the rains.

The deep wells of Azawagh fall into two categories. The narrow wells, like Milen, Aouror, higher up the Milen valley, and Maisumo, are intended primarily for watering flocks. Their output is copious but slow, and not unlimited. Not more than two buckets can draw water comfortably at the same time: for watering flocks where time is not important and the animals can be brought in from pasture in small batches, these wells are adequate. Tagedufat, like Tergulawen, on the other hand, was a caravan well; it was broad and capable of watering a whole caravan rapidly. It became silted up with drifting sand, like the pasture wells, Anu n’Banka and Gharus n’Zurru. Of Aghmat, Tateus and Taberghit I have no details, but when Barth passed this way no stop was made at either of the first two, which were on his road. The supposition is that unless these wells were dug since his day, which is not likely, as the population of Azawagh had by then already decreased, they also were intended for pastoral purposes. They are now all silted up.

The theory that the wells of Azawagh were made by the Ifadeyen, who have only recently come into this area for winter pasturage, was advanced to me, but my informant, who joined my caravan as an unbidden but welcome guest at Milen on my way south, was himself a member of this tribe, so the information is prejudiced. The wells are certainly very old and are probably the handiwork of the denser population which cultivated millet and had its permanent villages in the Taberghit and Tagedufat valleys. The pasture wells were regarded as the property of the tribe in the area, and now, therefore, of the Ifadeyen. The big caravan wells were under the tutelage of the keepers of the great highway to the south, the Kel Owi confederation, and before them, therefore, of their predecessors in Eastern Air. These big wells were always considered to be free for passing caravans to use without let or hindrance at any time, except in the event of a feud being in progress between the Kel Owi and the owners of the caravan. Caravans, on the other hand, using pasture wells, could only do so with the permission of the tribe pasturing in the area. The latter, conversely, had no rights over the great wells. The maintenance of these rights is the origin of confederations like the Kel Owi, for the freedom of the great wells is a vital necessity to a society of caravaneers, and has to be retained by force if necessary. It accounts for such raids as those conducted by Belkho on Gamram, where the Isherifan had interfered with passing caravans just once too often.

One of the Azawagh wells, Aouror, has been the object of much dispute among the Tuareg: there are inscriptions on a neighbouring rock recording the ownership and, to some extent, the history of the well. It would be attractive to think that “Aouror” meant the “Well of the Dawn.” It is not impossible, since Arorá or Aghorá[70] means “dawn” in Temajegh, and Aouror is almost the easternmost well of Azawagh. Like Milen, it is driven through the rock, but is only some four fathoms deep. Like Milen, too, its sides are scored by rope-marks which in places have cut deep into the hard sandstone. Wet ropes covered with sand of course cut into rock quite rapidly, but even so the antiquity of these wells must be considerable. The rock cutting, which no Tuareg to-day is capable of executing, is perfect; the walls are perpendicular and smooth; the plan is a perfect circle.

Abellama and Aderbissinat in the west of Azawagh are deep caravan wells with good water; the former is in friable soil, and has a tendency to fall in.[71] These two, with Aouror, Maisumo and Milen, are the only live wells in Azawagh to-day.

After a short gentle slope up, the ground descends from the ridge on the north side of the Milen valley in a series of long terraces to a basin, the lower part of which is known as the Eghalgawen valley. It joins either the River of Agades at the south-west corner of the T’in Wana massif, or turns south-west towards the Milen and Tagedufat basin; my own impression, based on native sources which are not wholly reliable, inclines to the first view. East of the watering-point of Eghalgawen, the valley runs in a fold, into which flows one of the Southern Air valleys. The actual stream bed is wide and well marked by the heavy annual flood which it carries away from the hills of Eghalgawen and T’in Wana. In character the lower part of the valley along the foot of the hills, with its short tributaries from this little massif, belongs to the Air plateau, and not to Azawagh. The vegetation in the bed is dense and heavy. Dûm palms (Cucifera thebaica) and large trees appear. Geographically and geologically the Air plateau has already commenced at the rocks of Tagedufat: actually, however, it is not reached till the River of Agades is crossed, for Eghalgawen is still held to be in Azawagh.

PLATE 6

RIVER OF AGADES: CLIFFS AT AKARAQ

SHRINE AT AKARAQ

The cliff of Tiggedi, with its continuation eastward for some way beyond the Eghalgawen hills, is the southern shore of a wide valley which serves as a catchment for all the waters of Southern Air that do not escape by the south-east corner of the plateau into the Azawagh valleys previously described. The cliff is a geological phenomenon of great interest. At the point where the Abellama road descends into the valley some forty miles south of Agades the cliff is sheer for a height of over 200 feet. The path down from the general level of the desert to the dry alluvial plain, which forms the bottom of the River of Agades, is steep and rough. Standing at the top and looking east and west, it seems like a cliff on the sea-shore broken by capes and small inlets; the illusion of maritime action is remarkable. Westwards at Marandet, though still a definite feature of the area, it is less abrupt; erosion has broken down the precipice, while the Marandet torrent has eaten away a ravine leading even more gradually up to the level of the desert. Eastwards, on the other hand, the cliff continues unbroken as far as the Eghalgawen and T’in Wana massif, where higher hills above the desert level take the place of the cliff itself. Though they form a salient in the line, their abrupt northern slopes continue the eastward trend until they come to an end near Akaraq, where the cliff reappears. Here again it is absolutely sheer, if somewhat less elevated; it is broken by a narrow inlet where the Akaraq valley, the only tributary[72] of any size on the south bank of the River of Agades, enters the main basin. At this point the cliff assumes the most fantastic form. The sandstone has been shaped by erosion into pinnacles and blocks of the strangest shapes. The Akaraq valley itself runs back like a cove in a cliffbound sea-coast; both banks are nearly vertical, decreasing in height as the level of the bottom gradually rises to the desert, where the bare rock has been deeply cut into by the water, lying in a semi-permanent pool in a very narrow gully. The bottom of the inlet is covered with luxuriant pasture and some fair-sized trees, while at the mouth, in the main valley, stands an island of rock with vertical sides to complete the illusion of a sea-coast.[73] From the top of the cliff you may look across the great broad valley toward the mountains of Air that are scarcely visible in the north. No defined bank appears to limit the far slope of the basin. There is deep green Alwat pasture[74] in the nearer distance, merging imperceptibly into yellow grass and bare sand further away. The blazing glare and shimmering heat wash the feet of the cliff where a shelving beach of loose white sand has been thrown up against the rocks. The plateau at the top of the cliff is quite flat, and covered with a layer of small hard gravel over the rock. It is without any vegetation.

The great valley bears several names. At the Akaraq inlet it is called Tezorigi. Opposite the Eghalgawen massif it is the T’in Dawin, and further west the Araten valley. West again it has no name, but where it finally leaves the mountains of Air for the Assawas swamp on the way to the T’immersoi basin, the natives call it the Ighazar n’Agades, or River of Agades, from the city which stands on its northern shore, and this is the name I have adopted for the whole. How far the cliffs extend eastward I do not know. A great fork in the valley is visible from Akaraq, the channel is divided by a bluff promontory, but the cliff continues along the southern bank of the southern branch until it is lost from sight. The ridge of Abadarjan which Barth crossed north of Tergulawen, I expect, is part of the same formation.

PLATE 7

RIVER OF AGADES LOOKING SOUTH FROM TEBEHIC IN THE EGHALGAWEN MASSIF

EGHALGAWEN MASSIF FROM AZAWAGH

Maritime action is highly improbable as the origin of the cliff. No traces of shells or beaches at different levels, to be accounted for by a receding sea, have been noticed. The supposition that all the Sahara was once a sea-bed is untenable, and in any case maritime action would hardly be limited to a few small areas such as this one. It seems easier to look for another explanation. The cliff and the Eghalgawen massif are a sandstone formation, but the Taruaji mountains of Air opposite the little Eghalgawen-T’in Wana massif are granitic. The cliff represents, I hazard, a fault north of which the igneous formation of the Air plateau has been extruded. The ground to the south slopes gradually away from the edge of the cliff, accounting for the virtual absence of any tributaries on the left bank of the River of Agades. There is apparently no igneous rock south of the basin, there is very little else to the north of it, with the exception of some Archean and very early rock. The fault, occasioned by the volcanic action which formed the massif of Central Air, erected a barrier to the southward drainage of the mountains, and the waters of Southern Air were diverted westward. A larger rainfall than now caused the gradual silting up of the area between the bottom of the fault and the southern part of the mountains. As the ground level rose and became an alluvial plain from which practically only Mount Gadé and the island off Akaraq emerge, the rain floods began to wash along the cliff and eroded the sandstone into the fantastic forms which are now seen. Wind-borne sand from the eastern desert completed the process of shaping the rocks. The accretion of alluvium diminished with a decreasing rainfall in Air, and the surface deposit of wind-borne sand formed what is now in dry weather a hard gravel-covered plain which, in the rainy season, turns into mud-flats and becomes almost impassable. The water flows aimlessly in the alluvium along deep-cut gullies with vertical sides that constantly change their course. The alluvial origin of the plain of the River of Agades is unmistakable.

[44]That is, “The People of Katsina.”

[45]Chudeau has called this transitional area the Sahel Zone, but the name is borrowed from the north and does not seem to be used in the latitudes under discussion: cf. Le Sahara Soudanais, passim.

[46]Now called the “Colonie du Niger-Tchad.”

[47]The natives pronounce the name Tasawa, but “Tessawa” is consecrated by European usage since Barth’s day.

[48]The plural of “Akri” in Temajegh.

[49]Wrongly spelt Gumrek by Barth, op. cit., Vol. I. chap. xxi.

[50]Jean: Les Touareg du Sud-Est, p. 15.

[51]Barth, op. cit., Vol. I. p. 36.

[52]Ibid., Vol. V. p. 554.

[53]Ibid., Vol. I. p. 529.

[54]Vide Duveyrier, op. cit., pp. 328 and 359, et infra, [Chap. XI.]

[55]On the French 1/1,000,000 map. Cf. [Appendix VII.]

[56]Barth, op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 521-2.

[57]Documents de la Mission Foureau-Lamy, Fasc. II. p. 206.

[58]There are other small wells in the immediate vicinity of Milen: cf. infra.

[59]Anu (plural Unan) means “well” in Temajegh.

[60]Barth, op. cit., Vol. I. p. 523.

[61]Infra, [Chap. X.]

[62]Infra, [Chap. XI.]

[63]Cf. V. Cornish: Waves of Sand and Snow (Unwin).

[64]Barth, op. cit., Vol. I. p. 523.

[65]Vide [Appendix III.]

[66]“Gharus” means “deep” in Temajegh, and when thus used of places always signifies a “deep well.” This one, however, was silted up.

[67]Buchanan’s Out of the World, pp. 128-30.

[68]Barth, op. cit., Vol. I. p. 523.

[69]The indications on the Cortier map that the south-eastern and eastern valleys of the Air massif peter out into the desert in the direction of Termit are certainly inaccurate. Cf. 1/500,000 Carte de l’Air, 2 sheets, Service Géogr. des Col., 1912.

[70]This word is believed to have been borrowed by the Tuareg from the Latin. Vide infra, [Chap. IX.]

[71]The French are lining it with concrete.

[72]Unless, as has been mentioned, the Eghalgawen valley also joins the River of Agades, S.W. of T’in Wana.

[73]A similar island, but considerably larger, has been left isolated in the plain by the erosion of the water in the River of Agades; it is a low conical hill, rather similar in shape to the Tergulawen peak, called Mount Gadé, lying between the T’in Wana hills and Agades.

[74]A fleshy plant, growing about two feet high rather like a veitch, and containing as much moisture.

CHAPTER III

THE CITY OF AGADES

The Eghalgawen massif contains a number of watering-points. The pool of Eghalgawen is near the junction of a valley sloping down from the hills, the main valley here assuming the name of the watering-point. Abundant water exists all the year round under the sand in the bed near a low rock on the left bank. It has rather taken the place of Tergulawen well as a point de passage for caravans on the Great South Road, and used in the past to be a favourite resort for caravan raiders. The neighbouring hill, like the one at Tergulawen, is a well-known watch-tower in times of trouble, since both of them command the approaches to a strategic point.[75] T’in Wana, Tarrajerat, Tebehic and some pools in the Isagelmas valley on the southern periphery of the Eghalgawen massif, are watering-points for the camels and flocks of the tribes which range over Azawagh, to-day the Ifadeyen. Their winter camping grounds can be seen all the way from Tagedufat to the River of Agades; they are readily distinguishable from the older permanent settlements of the original Kel Azawagh who grew millet in this area. Besides the Ifadeyen, the Kel Giga section of the Kel Tadek use the Eghalgawen hills and Azawagh pastures very considerably after the rains. The Ifoghas of Damergu rarely come so far north, since, having few camels, they lack incentive to seek these superlative desert pastures. Those members of this tribe whom I saw in Azawagh were typical in possessing only donkeys and goats, which of course will eat almost anything.

After a 560-mile excursion to Termit and Elakkos, I rejoined my travelling companions, whom I had forsaken at Tanut, in the little massif on the south side of the River of Agades. They were camped a short day’s march from Milen, at the famous permanent pool in the T’in Wana valley. Of all pools in Africa it is of T’in Wana that I shall keep the pleasantest recollections. I was greeted by a fusillade of welcome and immediately went for a swim in the deep pool that had recently been filled by the rains. The channel cut by the water in the rock was in places fifteen feet deep. The pool had a sandy bottom, with a rock four feet high at one end for a diving platform. A length of twenty yards was clear to swim in, and then came a succession of smaller pools beneath the arches and overhanging sides of red and black rock. The erosion of the sandstone was most remarkable. There were witches’ cauldrons and buttresses and enchanted caves, with deep crannies in the tall vertical sides. In the wide valley above, masses of green bushes and branching palms seemed to make the place a heaven-sent garden of rest in a hot land. We were all very happy, and the camels were improving fast. Our men were delighted to see the mountains of Air again. My guide from the south, Ishnegga, who was of the Ifadeyen, found relations in a neighbouring valley. There were acquaintances on the road to gossip with and discuss. Poor Ishnegga shot himself accidentally some months later, as I heard from his beautiful old mother, whom I had met at Hannekar and saw for a second time on my way home.

The sides of the T’in Wana ravine were covered with T’ifinagh inscriptions relating to the tribes that had pastured here in their time; they recorded the names of people, messages to and from their friends, and the professions of love of their men and women. The low hills behind were rough and without vegetation or soil; but some mountain sheep, gazelle and sand-grouse subsisted on the coarse grass in the ravines. The sandstone of the massif seemed to have been subjected to volcanic heat. A deposit of fossil trees among the rocks and boulders was found: a specimen piece picked up near Akaraq a few miles north-east had probably been brought from this deposit near T’in Wana. It was identified on my return as a Tertiary conifer, but the siliceous replacement had been too complete to permit of more detailed examination, except by microscope.

A very pleasant camp was eventually broken, and Tebehic, on the north-west side of the hills, with two watering-places, was reached after crossing the Isagelmas valley, a collector for several small rivulets draining the western side of the hills. In spite of an attack of malaria, which overcame me, Tebehic proved most interesting, for I made friends with a family of Ifadeyen who were camping there during the rains. The man had some cows and supplied me with fresh milk, a great luxury after camel’s milk and the condensed sort out of a tin. He was a widower with several children, and quite charming. One of the children was suffering from a severe abscess in the right ear. It had been “treated” by blocking the orifice with a paste made of fresh camel dung and wood ash mixed with pounded leaf of the pungent Abisgi (Capparis sodata) bush. I suppose the mixture was intended to act like a mustard poultice, but the discharge from the abscess being unable to escape had been causing the child acute pain, which it was easy to relieve by clearing out the mess and washing the ear. The abscess having previously opened of its own accord, the pain ceased almost as soon as the “remedy” had been removed. It was the first of my “cures” as a doctor among the Tuareg, and laid the foundations of a great reputation!

PLATE 8