There is no known historical period when the Sahara has not been inhabited by man. Most of the other larger forms of animal life, whose abode it formerly was, have become extinct. If we believe the evidence of cave drawings, we can be sure that the giraffe, the hippopotamus and the rhinoceros were once dwellers in the region. The lion has disappeared from North Africa in our own time, likewise the ostrich. Now and then a crocodile is still discovered in some distant, hidden oasis pool, but the occurrence is so rare that when it happens it is a great event. The camel, of course, is not a native of Africa at all, but an importation from Asia, having arrived approximately at the time of the end of the Roman Empire – about when the last elephants were killed off. Large numbers of the herds of wild elephants that roamed the northern reaches of the desert were captured and trained for use in the Carthaginian army, but it was the Romans who finally annihilated the species to supply ivory for the European market.
Fortunately for man, who seems to insist on continuing to live in surroundings which become increasingly inhospitable to him, gazelles are still plentiful, and there are, paradoxically enough, various kinds of edible fish in the water holes – often more than a hundred feet deep – throughout the Sahara. Certain species which abound in artesian wells are blind, having always lived deep in the subterranean lakes.
An often-repeated statement, no matter how incorrect, takes a long time to disappear from circulation. Thus, there is a popular misconception of the Sahara as a vast region of sand across which Arabs travel in orderly caravans from one white-domed city to another. A generalization much nearer to the truth would be to say that it is an area of rugged mountains, bare valleys and flat, stony wasteland, sparsely dotted with Negro villages of mud. The sand in the Sahara, according to data supplied by the Geographical Service of the French Army, covers only about a tenth of its surface; and the Arabs, most of whom are nomads, form a small part of the population. The vast majority of the inhabitants are of Berber (native North African) and/or Negro (native West African) stock. But the Negroes of today are not those who originally peopled the desert. The latter never took kindly to the colonial designs of the Arabs and the Islamized Berbers who collaborated with them; over the centuries they beat a constant retreat toward the southeast until only a vestige of their society remains, in the region now known as the Tibesti. They were replaced by the more docile Sudanese, imported from the south as slaves to work the constantly expanding series of oases.
In the Sahara the oasis – which is to say, the forest of date palms – is primarily a man-made affair and can continue its existence only if the work of irrigating its terrain is kept up unrelentingly. When the Arabs arrived in Africa twelve centuries ago, they began a project of land reclamation which, if the Europeans continue it with the aid of modern machinery, will transform much of the Sahara into a great, fertile garden. Wherever there was a sign of vegetation, the water was there not far below; it merely needed to be brought to the surface. The Arabs set to work digging wells, constructing reservoirs, building networks of canals along the surface of the ground and systems of subterranean water-galleries deep in the earth.
For all these important projects, the recently arrived colonizers needed great numbers of workers who could bear the climate and the malaria that is still endemic in the oases. Sudanese slaves seemed to be the ideal solution of the problem, and these came to constitute the larger part of the permanent population of the desert. Each Arab tribe traveled about among the oases it controlled, collecting the produce. It was never the practice or the intention of the sons of Allah to live there. They have a saying which goes, “No one lives in the Sahara if he is able to live anywhere else.” Slavery has, of course, been abolished officially by the French, but only recently, within our time. Probably the principal factor in the process by which Timbuktu was reduced from its status of capital of the Sahara to its present abject condition was the closing of the slave market there. But the Sahara, which started out as a Negro country, is still a Negro country, and will undoubtedly remain so for a long time.
The oases, those magnificent palm groves, are the blood and bone of the desert; life in the Sahara would be unthinkable without them. Wherever human beings are found, an oasis is sure to be nearby. Sometimes the town is surrounded by the trees, but usually it is built just outside, so that none of the fertile ground will be wasted on mere living quarters. The size of an oasis is reckoned by the number of trees it contains, not by the numbers of square miles it covers, just as the taxes are based on the number of date-bearing trees and not on the amount of land. The prosperity of a region is in direct proportion to the number and size of its oases. The one at Figuig, for instance, has more than two hundred thousand bearing palms, and the one at Timimoun is forty miles long, with irrigation systems that are of an astonishing complexity.
To stroll in a Saharan oasis is rather like taking a walk through a well-kept Eden. The alleys are clean, bordered on each side by hand-patted mud walls, not too high to prevent you from seeing the riot of verdure within. Under the high waving palms are the smaller trees – pomegranate, orange, fig, almond. Below these, in neat squares surrounded by narrow ditches of running water, are the vegetables and wheat. No matter how far from the town you stray, you have the same impression of order, cleanliness, and insistence on utilizing every square inch of ground. When you come to the edge of the oasis, you always find that it is in the process of being enlarged. Plots of young palms extend out into the glaring wasteland. Thus far they are useless, but in a few years they will begin to bear, and eventually this sun-blistered land will be a part of the green belt of gardens.
There are a good many birds living in the oases, but their songs and plumage are not appreciated by the inhabitants. The birds eat the young shoots and dig up the seeds as fast as they are planted, and practically every man and boy carries a slingshot. A few years ago I traveled through the Sahara with a parrot; everywhere the poor bird was glowered at by the natives, and in Timimoun a delegation of three elderly men came to the hotel one afternoon and suggested that I stop leaving its cage in the window; otherwise there was no telling what its fate might be. “Nobody likes birds here,” they said meaningfully.
It is the custom to build little summerhouses out in the oases. There is often an element of play and fantasy in the architecture of these edifices which makes them captivating. They are small toy palaces of mud. Here, men have tea with their families at the close of day, or spend the night when it is unusually hot in the town, or invite their friends for a few hands of ronda, the favorite North African card game, and a little music. If a man asks you to visit him in his summerhouse, you find that the experience is invariably worth the long walk required to get there. You will have to drink at least the three traditional glasses of tea, and you may have to eat a good many almonds and smoke more kif than you really want, but it will be cool, there will be the gurgle of running water and the smell of mint in the air, and your host may bring out a flute. One winter I priced one of these houses that had particularly struck my fancy. With its garden and pool, the cost was the equivalent of twenty-five pounds. The catch was that the owner wanted to retain the right to work the land, because it was unthinkable to him that it should cease to be productive.
Saharan people, 1948. Bowles recalled: “You only had to walk a few steps, go to the car, and people would come and say: Take a photo of us!” (PB)
In the Sahara as elsewhere in North Africa, popular religious observances often include elements of pre-Islamic faiths in their ritual; the most salient example is the institution of religious dancing, which persists despite long-continued discouragement of the custom by educated Moslems. Even in the highly religious settlement of the M’Zab, where puritanism is carried to excessive lengths, the holding of dances is not unknown. At the time I lived there children were not allowed to laugh in public, yet I spent an entire night watching a dozen men dance themselves into unconsciousness beside a bonfire of palm branches. Two burly guards were necessary
to prevent them from throwing themselves into the flames. After each man had been heaved back from the fire several times, he finally ceased making his fantastic skyward leaps, staggered, and sank to the ground. He was immediately carried outside the circle and covered with blankets, his place being taken by a fresh adept. There was no music or singing, but there were eight drummers, each one playing an instrument of a different size.
In other places, the dance is similar to the Berber ahouache of the Moroccan Atlas. The participants form a great circle holding hands, women alternating with men; their movements are measured, never frantic, and although the trance is constantly suggested, it seems never to be arrived at collectively. In the performances I have seen, there has been a woman in the center with her head and neck hidden by a cloth. She sings and dances, and the chorus around her responds antiphonally. It is all very sedate and low-pitched, but the irrational seems never very far away, perhaps because of the hypnotic effect produced by the slowly beaten, deep-toned drums.
The Touareg, an ancient offshoot of the Kabyle Berbers of Algeria, were unappreciative of the “civilizing mission” of the Roman legions and decided to put a thousand miles or more of desert between themselves and their would-be educators. They went straight south until they came to a land that seemed likely to provide them the privacy they desired, and there they have remained throughout the centuries, their own masters almost until today. Through all the ages during which the Arabs dominated the surrounding regions, the Touareg retained their rule of the Hoggar, that immense plateau in the very center of the Sahara. Their traditional hatred of the Arabs, however, does not appear to have been powerful enough to keep them from becoming partially Islamized, although they are by no means a completely Moslem people. Far from being a piece of property only somewhat more valuable than a sheep, the woman has an extremely important place in Targui society. The line of succession is purely maternal. Here, it is the men who must be veiled day and night. The veil is of fine black gauze and is worn, so they explain, to protect the soul. But since soul and breath to them are identical, it is not difficult to find a physical reason, if one is desired. The excessive dryness of the atmosphere often causes disturbances in the nasal passages. The veil conserves the breath’s moisture, is a sort of little air-conditioning plant, and this helps keep out the evil spirits which otherwise would manifest their presence by making the nostrils bleed, a common occurrence in this part of the world.
It is scarcely fair to refer to these proud people as Touareg. The word is a term of opprobrium meaning “lost souls,” given them by their traditional enemies the Arabs, but one which, in the outside world, has stuck. They call themselves imochagh, the free ones. Among all the Berber-speaking peoples, they are the only ones to have devised a system of writing their language. No one knows how long their alphabet has been in use, but it is a true phonetical alphabet, quite as well planned and logical as the Roman, with twenty-three simple and thirteen compound letters.
Unfortunately for them, the Touareg have never been able to get on among themselves; internecine warfare has gone on unceasingly among them for centuries. Until the French military put a stop to it, it had been a common practice for one tribe to set out on plundering expeditions against a neighboring tribe. During these voyages, the wives of the absent men remained faithful to their husbands, the strict Targui moral code recommending death as a punishment for infidelity. However, a married woman whose husband was away was free to go at night to the graveyard dressed in her finest apparel, lie on the tombstone of one of her ancestors, and invoke a certain spirit called Idebni, who always appeared in the guise of one of the young men of the community. If she could win Idebni’s favor, he gave her news of her husband; if not, he strangled her. The Touareg women, being very clever, always managed to bring back news of their husbands from the cemetery.
The first motor crossing of the Sahara was accomplished in 1923. At that time it was still a matter of months to get from, let us say, Touggourt to Zinder, or from the Tafilelt to Gao. In 1934, I was in Erfoud asking about caravans to Timbuktu. Yes, they said, one was leaving in a few weeks, and it would take from sixteen to twenty weeks to make the voyage. How would I get back? The caravan would probably set out on its return trip at this time next year. They were surprised to see that this information lessened my interest. How could you expect to do it more quickly?
Of course, the proper way to travel in the Sahara is by camel, particularly if you’re a good walker, since after about two hours of the camel’s motion you are glad to get down and walk for four. Each succeeding day is likely to bring with it a greater percentage of time spent off the camel. Nowadays, if you like, you can leave Algiers in the morning by plane and be fairly well into the desert by evening, but the traveler who gives in to this temptation, like the reader of a mystery story who skips through the book to arrive at the solution quickly, deprives himself of most of the pleasure of the journey. For the person who wants to see something the practical means of locomotion is the trans-Saharan truck, a compromise between camel and airplane.
There are only two trails across the desert at present (the Piste Impériale through Mauretania not being open to the public) and I should not recommend either to drivers of private automobiles. The trucks, however, are especially built for the region. If there is any sort of misadventure, the wait is not likely to be more than twenty-four hours, since the truck is always expected at the next town, and there is always an ample supply of water aboard. But the lone car that gets stuck in the Sahara is in trouble.
Usually, you can go to the fort of any town and telephone ahead to the next post, asking them to notify the hotelkeeper there of your intended arrival. Should the lines be down – a not unusual circumstance – there is no way of assuring yourself a room in advance, save by mail, which is extremely slow. Unless you travel with your own blankets this can be a serious drawback, arriving unannounced, for the hotels are small, often having only five or six rooms, and the winter nights are cold. The temperature goes to several degrees below freezing, reaching its lowest point just before dawn. The same courtyard that may show 125° when it is flooded with sun at two in the afternoon will register only 28° the following morning. So it is good to know you are going to have a room and a bed in your next stopping place. Not that there is heating of any sort in the establishments, but by keeping the window shut you can help the thick mud walls conserve some of the daytime heat. Even so, I have awakened to find a sheet of ice over the water in the glass beside my bed.
These violent extremes of temperature are due, of course, to the dryness of the atmosphere, whose relative humidity is often less than five percent. When you reflect that the soil attains a temperature of one hundred and seventy-five degrees during the summer, you understand that the principal consideration in planning streets and houses should be that of keeping out as much light as possible. The streets are kept dark by being built underneath and inside the houses, and the houses have no windows in their massive walls. The French have introduced the window into much of their architecture, but the windows open onto wide, vaulted arcades, and thus, while they do give air, they let in little light. The result is that once you are out of the sun you live in a Stygian gloom.
Taghit, Algeria: Bowles described this in his autobiography, Without Stopping, as “Probably the most intensely poetic spot I had ever seen” (PB)
Even in the Sahara there is no spot where rain has not been known to fall, and its arrival is an event that calls for celebration – drumming, dancing, firing of guns. The storms are violent and unpredictable. Considering their disastrous effects, one wonders that the people can welcome them with such unmixed emotions. Enormous walls of water rush down the dry river beds, pushing everything before them, often isolating the towns. The roofs of the houses cave in, and often the walls themselves. A prolonged rain would destroy every town in the Sahara, since the tob, of which everything is built, is softer than our adobe. And, in fact, it is not unusual to see a whole section of a
village forsaken by its occupants, who have rebuilt their houses nearby, leaving the walls and foundations of their former dwellings to dissolve and drop back into the earth of which they were made.
In 1932 I decided to spend the winter in the M’Zab of southern Algeria. The rattletrap bus started out from Laghouat at night in a heavy rain. Not far to the south, the trail crossed a flat stretch about a mile wide, slightly lower than the surrounding country. Even as we were in it, the water began to rise around us, and in a moment the motor died. The passengers jumped out and waded about in water that soon was up to their waists; in all directions there were dim white figures in burnouses moving slowly through the flood, like storks. They were looking for a shallow route back to dry land, but they did not find it. In the end they carried me, the only European in the party, all the way to Laghouat on their backs, leaving the bus and its luggage to drown out there in the rain. When I got to Ghardaia two days later, the rain (which was the first in seven years) had made a deep pond beside an embankment the French had built for the trail. Such an enormous quantity of water all in one place was a source of great excitement to the inhabitants. For days there was a constant procession of women coming to carry it away in jugs. The children tried to walk on its surface, and two small ones were drowned. Ten days later the water had almost disappeared. A thick, brilliant green froth covered what was left, but the women continued to come with their jugs, pushing aside the scum and taking whatever fell in. For once they were able to collect as much water as they could store in their houses. Ordinarily, it was an expensive commodity that they had to buy each morning from the town water-sellers, who brought it in from the oasis.