THE ARABS OF THE DESERT.
The Moors divide their country into four zones, running north and
south. First, the _Zahel_, or sandy, unwatered, and level ground;
secondly, the _Tiersh_, or deep black land, without trees or mountains,
and composing the centre and chief portion of Morocco; thirdly, the
_Gibellu_, or cultivated portion on the side of the Atlas; fourthly,
the _Tell_[96] (the earth), on the other side. Beside these, there is
the subdivision into _Heloto_ and _Gaba_.
Mr. Parke heard the name Zahel in the interior, and thought it meant
“north country.” Mr. Jackson corrects him. “Zahel,” he says, “signifies
an _extensive plain_. Thus, the plains south of the river of Suz, and
the low country on the coast near Walhadia, are called Zahel; and if
an Arab were to pass over Salisbury Plain he would call it Zahel.” Mr.
Jackson is as much mistaken as Mr. Parke. The word means _a thing that
is easy_. The wealth of the Zahel tribes consists in cattle and flocks:
their sole culture is grain. They produce corn, wool, butter, hides and
skins; they buy nothing except arms and fruit; they treat their money
as they do their corn. This year a fine imposed in consequence of the
recent troubles was paid without difficulty, though equal to several
years of their customary taxes.
The Zahel is one half the year exposed to scorching heat; it is
destitute of trees and water, and could scarcely be cultivated by
people having fixed habitations. The Arabs shifting their domicile to
find pasturage for their cattle sow as they proceed, and return in
like manner to reap. They sow from November to March. The harvest soon
follows. The summer is, so to say, their winter, for the sun is their
Boreas. The seasons are reversed. The flowers that were budding only
on the plains, I found in full blossom on the hills: under the genial
influence of cold, vegetation had re-commenced. Their culture consists
in scraping the light soil in opposite directions with a primitive
plough; a pointed piece of wood unshod with iron and a single handle,
which the ploughman carries a-field upon his shoulder. They do not even
clear the ground of the palm shrub, but plough round it. Sometimes,
indeed, you see the land in very good order, for there are no weeds.
The first idea suggested is that of depopulation. On closer inspection,
one is astonished at the numbers of the people. They subsist on
little. They draw comparatively a great deal from the soil, and the
rudeness of their implement is not unadapted to its lightness. The
tribe does not cultivate in common, but the families do: the daughters
have half portions: they average a plough per tent, some having four or
five, or more, others not even a pair of cattle, but managing one with
another, so that each shall cultivate a plough land. Oxen are generally
employed, but horses are so also: you may see pairs of horses driven
by the reins. Some of their teams are grotesque enough. I have seen a
camel and an ass ploughing together. Whatever animosity there may be
amongst the tribes, whatever insecurity for their cattle, even in the
midst of their encampment, common necessities have consecrated the
standing corn, and every tribe respects its neighbour’s landmark.
They have as little trace of limits, as the dogs of Constantinople,
which maintain their bounds so well; or of laws, as a community of
bees. I have had, however, a terminus pointed out to me between the
Ziaïda and their neighbours. It was a plant of the Silla kind. They
have the custom of “beating the bounds,” and understand it in a literal
sense. The children are taken out and thrashed at appropriate places,
that they may recollect them well. On the other hand, they run no risk
of flogging for a false quantity in a dead language. Behind these
zones, Zahel, Tiersh, Gibellu and Tell, lies the Zahara. Along the
Medelmah the zones run east and west, following the direction of the
coast; but here the first three are wanting; there is only the Tel, and
behind it the Zahara. The regularity, however, of the distribution is
disturbed by the great mountain block of the Cabylie, which lies in the
rear of Algiers, and which is nearly insulated by the Desert.
Adjoining the Moorish Tell, and deeply encroaching on the Desert, is
the Beled-el-Gerid, or oasis of Tafilelt, the inner Moorish kingdom;
and, so to speak, its fountain. This is the land of dates and of
Morocco leather. Here is the inaccessible retreat to which in all
dangers the Moorish princes retire, and from which they issue to
recover their lost power. Here are deposited the treasures accumulated
during seventy years by two thrifty monarchs, and which are estimated
at tens of millions sterling. It is a little world within Morocco,
entrenched behind the Desert and the Atlas. It takes ten days across
the Desert to reach it from the nearest point of the regency of Algiers.
To the south of the neck of the Atlas which runs out to the cape of St.
Cruz, lies the fourth kingdom composing the empire; the parallel zones
are here arrested by the Atlas. The country partakes of the nature of
the Beled-el-Gerid, and is a great oasis, exceeding, indeed, all the
others in richness and variety of produce.[97] It is entirely inhabited
by Shelluk, or southern Brebers, over whom the authority of the Sultan
is held by a very precarious tenure: it was there, however, that the
dominion of the shereffs was first set up, and from it they issued to
conquer Morocco and Fez. Suz and Tafilelt are said to possess resources
not inferior, though hardly different, to those of the other two.
The population has been rated as high as sixteen millions. It is half
Arab, half Breber. The climate is admirable, being tempered by the
westerly breezes and the snows of Atlas. The middle region is composed
of alluvial plains of inexhaustible fertility: the two capitals lie
in tertiary basins resembling those of Paris and London. The fruits
and produce comprise all those of the tropics and the temperate
zones: harbours alone are wanting, but this deficiency is more than
compensated to this people, by the security which the difficulties of
the coast afford.
The first thought on setting foot upon the land of Africa is, of
course, the Desert. When starting on my first journey, I indulged in
the fancy that I was approaching it;--what was my surprise on asking
one of my companions to describe it, to be told, “Look round, this is
the Desert.” Our notion of a moving sea of sand is a delusion; there
is no considerable district where, as in the insulated points in the
Indian and Pacific oceans, man has not found an abode. Africa is not
a vacant and a useless space. Extending from the valley of the Nile
to the Atlantic, and from the narrow slip along the Mediterranean
down to the kingdoms of Guinea and Bourno, &c., it has its mountains
and plains, its valleys and forests, and even its streams and rivers.
One of the men who were with me described the road from Fez by Suz
to Tafilelt, round by the south, a journey of about a thousand
miles, as through a rich, well-watered--or if not well-watered,
well-wooded--country, with the olive, oak, arar or date. On the road
from Tafilelt towards Timbuctoo there is the great oasis of Tuat,
which is distant about two weeks’ journey. There are either trees or
brushwood the whole way. “The map of the Sahara,” says M. Revon, “will
be one day covered with rivers, hills, and an immense number of names
of wells, stations, and countries. The Desert being entirely inhabited,
or traversed by nomade people, they require to designate by particular
names the places that furnish subsistence for their flocks during half
of the year, the countries that they are obliged to avoid and to pass
round, the wells so indispensable to their existence, and the beds of
the rivers, which at certain seasons of the year furnish them with
water.”
This unique country, taken together with that character of the people,
which they must have in order to be able to inhabit it, has preserved
a class of the human race in its primitive state. There are nowhere
resources, so that there should be large accumulations of people to
pass through the various phases which in other portions of the world
humanity has presented. There is not the sea to divide or to conjoin;
they cannot muster in strength (save as dependent upon the northern
country) so as to be formidable abroad, and they are so movable within,
that they are not liable to domestic oppression. Pasturage and rapine
are the two avocations. Culture is not unassociated with the first,
and rapine, as managed here, is not incompatible with traffic and good
faith.[98]
There are four methods of travelling; the regular trade caravans,
small companies on fleet dromedaries, single messengers on foot,
and the peregrinations of the tribes themselves. Of the first, or
the _cafileh_. These are periodically fixed, and connect the three
regencies in the north with the Negro countries of the south, taking in
the two great bases, the Fezzan and Tuat, with Timbuctoo. Their speed
is about twenty to twenty-five miles a-day, and, laden as they are,
they have often to avoid the shortest roads, and to make great circuits
in order to obtain supplies of water.
It is quite a mistake to suppose that the traveller in the Interior
is reduced to dependence upon these caravans. On the dromedary fifty
miles can easily be performed. A tract of three hundred miles without
water, at least where there is insecurity as to finding it, imposes on
a cafileh the necessity of carrying ten days’ supply to a party which
can traverse it. During four days it presents little inconvenience:
being all mounted, they can easily carry water and provision for
themselves for the distance which the dromedaries can travel without
water.
Their provisions consist in barley, roasted and bruised, and, if they
are luxurious, honey and butter. The meal is mixed up with any of
these, that is to say, with either honey and butter or water, the first
being used as the morning meal and the latter for the evening; and this
food not only enables them to do their work, but also to support thirst.
The cafileh must be strong enough to fight its way. Solitary
travellers, or small companies, can only pass by one of two methods,
having with them a saint, or the relative of a saint, or having a
friend or a hired guide, _mehri_, belonging to the tribes through which
they have to pass. These they exchange from tribe to tribe.[99]
Messengers and couriers on foot carry with them their skin of
meal, and, when requisite, their skin of water; and with a similar
protection, will traverse these vast regions at the rate of forty miles
a-day.
Lastly, comes the most interesting of all these movements--a tribe in
march, which is then called _nafla_. Some of these, on the northern
side within the regency of Algiers, where more is known of their
movements, yearly perform a journey of six hundred miles backwards
and forwards, from the date-growing region to the Tell, carrying down
dates, and bringing back grain, and pasturing their flocks as they come
and go. The season so corresponding, they have to come down to the
lowlands for their pasturage at the time of the harvest of grain, and
to return to the south at the time of the harvest of dates. Nothing
can exceed the interest of these ambulatory cities, which carry
everything with them; where are commingled signs of domesticity[100]
and circumstance of war. They are merchants and soldiers, shepherds and
manufacturers, cultivators and wanderers; they carry with them their
children and their law--their judge in peace, their chief in war; they
may be called at any moment to traffic or to fight; they are on the
alert for a verdant plain, sending forth scouts to discover a fountain
or a hostile camp. If suspicious signs appear, then every man falls
into rank, knows his place, and it is a regiment that advances or
encamps. There is the council of the elders, to determine whether it is
war or peace; and a treaty may be signed or a battle engaged. By these
necessities certain proportions are given to these bodies. They must
never be too weak to defend themselves, nor too strong, to devour the
pasturage, or drink up the water.
We know only the discipline of men, but the discipline of the Zahara
extends to the family. The utensils, the home itself, everything is
compact, and all as ready as the people are alert. Our armies are
liable to lose themselves at once, either with the people they subdue
or with the people through whose territories they pass. An invading
Arab carries with him, and plants his home, as we do a standard; and
where it comes it is not a victor’s banner that is reared, but a
hostile roof that is upset. The idea of resisting the shock of such
a horde, could it be let loose on a European community, is not so
much as to be entertained. But M. Thiers thinks the Arabs very bad
soldiers.[101]
Thus is the surface of Africa converted into a plain, covered with
lines along which move, and circles round which revolve, these
planetary bodies. Man lives where it appeared a wilderness, and order
rules where it seemed a chaos. There is no land that is not owned;
there is no pasturage that is not assigned. The fields may appear
deserted, and the space vacant; but, with the times and seasons, they
return, traversing the same vales, drinking at the same fountains,
cultivating the same valleys, and as indestructible in their race as
they are regular in their motions. Like the ocean which guards them,
they will fill, as they have filled, their space; and, like the seasons
they resemble, they undergo the changes of the year; and summer and
autumn will find them again and again at their appointed task and place.
With the beauty of order is associated the drama of life, as if the
planets were moved in their sphere with love or hatred, and propelled
and attracted, or connected with each other. The chords of sympathy are
so stretched, that the dissensions of the most insignificant members
of this vast community in the centre of the Desert may be felt and
responded to on the borders of the Mediterranean or Atlantic.[102]
The people of the town are a distinct nation. On the face of the land
alone is to be seen the stretched canvas of the fleeting sons of the
Desert. From the tent reared and displaced in an hour, what an age is
passed, as you cross the city gateway![103] In the Arab dwelling there
is no sense of age; there is no mark of newness, nor sign of mouldering
decay.
The soil on which they tread, and from which they feed:--carved by no
fosse, confined by no bound, and bearing no load, is a nature--subdued
indeed, but untravestied--and presents the wildness of the Desert
without penury, its freedom without solitude: the gifts it gives are
favours rather of Providence, than fruits of toil.
Pass the yawning barbican and ruined walls--enter the city, the work of
Cyclops or Titan--of Philistine, Hebrew, Lybian, Roman, Goth, Vandal,
Saracen, Portuguese, or Spaniard--and there is man! nothing but man! It
is not, as in other cities, the men and things of to-day, but of old
times and ages. Thinly scattered, these are each a nook in the stream
of time, when the wrecks of successive storms are cast up--a Bantry Bay
in the Atlantic of eternity.
Zahara means resplendent. Zeara, in Hebrew, is round. The first was an
ancient epithet of Venus; the second, a name for the moon.[104] Thus,
the region of death and terror, of the Zamiel and the locust, appears
to them a place of light and splendour. It has the charm of battle for
the brave--of ocean for the rover--of rocks for the mountaineer. But
what need comparison? it is the Desert to the Arab.
It is not the ambition of visiting the mud huts of Timbuctoo which has
led so many European adventurers to peril their lives, and to lose them
in that vain attempt; but it is the indescribable charm of the Desert
life of which they have felt the influence, or caught the contagion.
Without the protection of constituted governments, despite all
obstructions, danger, distance, thirst and hunger, commerce is carried
on nowhere in the world with more regularity, integrity, and security.
There are no internal fluctuations, no international barriers;
_exchange presents no difficulty_, although they have a standard of
value. This is an ideal money, or a coin of account. In the south
it is the “bar,” in the north it is “Pezetta;” in other districts,
“Naia,” &c. A piece of iron, a Spanish coin, a measure of dates--any
other object would serve equally well to constitute this unit, which
represents value with absolute perfection, precisely because it is a
measure--as an inch or a pound.
They do not say a bar is so many pounds, so many ounces, and so many
grains; and this quantity of metal shall be the standard of value; that
is, the value of all things shall be changed to meet the accidental
fluctuations in this quantity of metal; for, according to their
barbarous notions, that would be not an ingenious device to facilitate
business, but a piece of knavery too barefaced to be dangerous. If iron
becomes cheap, two bars of iron go to “_the_ bar;” if it becomes dear,
half a bar of iron goes to “the bar.” The ideal standard is preserved
because it is ideal. Yet, here are barbarians! This subject is at
once the most practical and scientific,--money, arithmetic, commerce,
property! Well may Solomon exclaim, “God made man, but he has found
out many inventions.”
Ebn Khaldoun has a passage which seems at once to throw light on the
origin of the term and the antiquity of the practice. “In the times of
ignorance the Arabs counted by various dirhems; the _tabori_ was the
weightiest, the _bagli_ the lightest.” The Mussulmans fixed a middle
term, and adjusted to it fines, &c. A discussion then arose on the
ancient value of these coins, and as to whether they were, or were not,
known in the time of Mahomet. Ebn Khaldoun decides as follows: “The
valuation of the dirhem was known, but there was no corresponding coin;
nevertheless, judgments were regulated according to the valuation of
that money.”
If any one is curious to know the meaning of the words “currency law,”
he will find it all in this sentence of the late Lord Ashburton: it is
a process by which, “in the event of a deficient harvest (or any other
internal disturbance), _a few shrewd capitalists can so control the
supply of gold as to enrich themselves and ruin the nation_.” This is
all that it requires to know on this subject, to be perfectly happy
and content; for, as to doing anything, that is out of the question.
The “press,” and “public opinion” may upset ministers, and substitute
theory for theory; but, against any deep purpose or design, they can
avail nothing, even supposing that they were not the blind instruments
of the designing, and stormed and ranted against them from Land’s End
to John o’ Groat’s. A pasquinade, stuck at night to a pedestal under
the papal government of Rome, had more effect on the affairs of that
government than all the free press of England thundering together could
have on its government--at least, when the really important points are
concerned, viz. the profits of the capitalists or the service of the
Czar.
[96] This word I at first thought to be a trace
of the Romans, but the word is spread over Asia and
Africa, far out of Roman reach. “_Tel_ is generally
used for _village_ in the Delta; _kom_, in Upper
Egypt.”--WILKINSON’S _Thebes_, vol. ii. p. 76.
[97] “The country is completely cultivated: it is
backed by four regular rows of limestone hills, which
serve as a kind of embankment against the Desert. They
are now cutting the corn, which produces more than
one hundred fold, most of the seeds throwing out four
stems, and some five.”--DAVIDSON’S _Journal_, p. 83.
[98] “Mirum dictû ex innumeris populis pars æqua in
commerciis aut in latrociniis degit.”--PLIN. _Hist. Nat._
vi. 32.
The Arab enjoys the benefits of society, without
forfeiting the prerogative of nature.
[99] “Up to the time that you have reached the
point determined upon, the _mehri_ is responsible for
his companion. Before whom? Before God, without doubt,
who reads the hearts of men. The faithfulness of a
guide is a virtue innate amongst the Arabs.”--_Carette._
[100] “If any people can be justly called happy,
the Arabs on the borders of the Sahara are so.
Confident in the power of their religion to gain them
paradise, creating for themselves no artificial wants,
and perfectly satisfied with what nature provides for
them, they calmly resign themselves to the will of
Providence, and are strangers to all cares. They are
more wild in their appearance, but far more cultivated
than the Arabs of Asia: nearly all of them can read,
and a great many write.”--DAVIDSON’S _Journal_.
[101] “Vous dites qu’il faut que tout le monde soit
soldat à son tour. Savez-vous quelles sont les sociétés
où tout le monde est soldat? ce sont les sociétés
barbares. Chez les Arabes, tout le monde est soldat, et
mauvais soldat. (Interruption.) Oui, dans les sociétés
où tout le monde est soldat, on n’a que de mauvais
soldats.”--_Speech_, October 21st, 1848.
[102] “Often a quarrel in the streets of Algiers
is the echo of one between two tribes in the sand,
three hundred leagues distant, and when the quarrel
becomes animated between the mother tribes, the
distant colonies can no longer inhabit the same
district.”--CARETTE, p. xlvii. _Introduction_.
[103] “Divina natura dedit agros, ars humana
ædificavit urbes.”--VARRO _de Re Rustica_,
lib. iii. 50.
[104] Deuteronomy iv. 19.