and not a few pictured to themselves a body of troops visiting these
sands half a century later, and finding the bones of Cavaignac's army
scattered here and there over the plains.
Hitherto the atmosphere had always been perfectly clear, but now it
was thick and cold, the horizon wearing that gray, heavy aspect which
in Europe precedes a fall of snow. No one, however, ventured to
pronounce this word; it appeared an occurrence so unlikely in the
plain, at such a season and under such a latitude. What, then, was our
surprise, on awaking on the morning of the 19th of April, to find the
tents covered with a thick sheet of snow, and to see the vast expanse
of the desert white to the verge of the horizon, like the frozen
steppes of Siberia! The general ordered the camp to be raised
immediately, for the bivouac afforded very scanty materials for fire,
and he hoped there might be wood in the mountains if he could reach
them. The snow continued to fall in large flakes; the troops, anxious
and sorrowful, described a thousand circuits and made a thousand
useless turnings, for our Arab guides were utterly at fault. During
three or four months previous to the expedition, Cavaignac had been
selecting and retaining as guides whatever Saharians he could find
acquainted with that part of the desert he intended to traverse. The
Arabs are gifted with remarkable dexterity in steering without
compass, recognising a footstep imperceptible to the common eye,
scenting the water at a distance, and finding their way by marks which
would escape the most observant European. A Saharian once affirmed to
Colonel Daumas: 'I am not considered remarkably sharp-sighted, but I
can distinguish a goat from a sheep at the distance of a day's
journey; and I know some who smell the smoke of a pipe, or of broiled
meat, at thirty miles! We all know each other by the track of our feet
in the sand, for no one tribe walks like another, nor does a wife
leave the same footprint as an unmarried woman. If a hare has passed,
we know by its footprint whether it is male or female, and, in the
latter case, whether it is with young. If we see the stone of a date,
we know the particular tree that produced it.'
Our conductors, though not pretending to all this sagacity, were
nevertheless far in advance of some of us who proudly called ourselves
'old Africans,' and considered ourselves wonderfully expert in
tracking the desert paths. But now the landmarks on which they
depended had disappeared beneath the snow; and the atmosphere was so
surcharged with it, that the mountain summits could no longer be
descried. At length the guides abandoned the hopeless effort, and
declared that they had entirely lost the way, and knew not in what
direction to proceed. At this juncture, Cavaignac, remembering that
the mountains had appeared due south on the preceding evening, seized
his compass, and boldly ordered the troops in that direction. It was
the only hope; but the march became so fatiguing, and the natives gave
so little encouragement to the expectation of finding the mountains
wooded, that a halt was ordered, and a bivouac on the snowy plain.
Many were the miseries that attended this encampment. The rattling of
arms was heard on every side, for the soldiers were shivering to such
a degree that they could not hold their guns steadily. What would they
not now have given for some of the wood they had so wantonly destroyed
in the forests of the Tell! But the bivouac was not even supplied with
chiah--one of the commonest plants in Sahara, having a ligneous root,
which had hitherto served us for fuel when everything else failed.
Nothing was to be found but halfa, green, and steeped in snow; and the
most skilful kindlers succeeded only in amusing themselves for a time
with poor, little fires, that emitted more smoke than flame. The men,
of course, could not make their soup; but the general ordered them
rations of biscuit and coffee. For my own part, not being able to make
a fire of wet halfa, I was looking disconsolately at a bit of biscuit,
and a little morsel of cheese, which was to compose my dinner, when
Lieutenant N---- sent word that his fire-makers had been more
successful, and that they offered me a corner. In a few minutes, I sat
down to two boiled eggs, which appeared delicious. Meanwhile, the
night drew on. The soldier's bed out-of-doors is a sheepskin laid on
the bare ground, under a tent so small that he cannot stand upright in
it. Now, as the earth was very damp, those who did not take the
precaution of choosing a little mound, and removing a portion of the
wet soil, soon found themselves literally in the mud, and were obliged
to get up, and walk about all night.
The snow continued to fall thick and fast, the thermometer marking 7
degrees below the freezing-point during the night. Some days before,
it had been 125 degrees Fahrenheit in the sun; so that we were doomed,
as in the Purgatory of Dante--
A sofferir tormenti caldi e geli;
from which, by the way, Milton has obviously borrowed his idea of
infernal torment:
---- And feel by turns the bitter change
Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce,
From beds of raging fire, to starve in ice
Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine
Immovable, infixed, and frozen round,
Periods of time, thence hurried back to fire.
At the sound of the morning watch-gun, the camp presented a most
distressing spectacle. The Arabs and negroes of the convoy were lying
motionless in the open air, rolled in their burnooses. Many of these
poor creatures were but lightly clad, and had the lower limbs entirely
naked. They were so benumbed and stupified with cold, that they
refused to rise and load the camels; they begged to be allowed to lie
still and die in peace. The cattle also were in a sad condition, not
only from cold, but hunger; for the snow-covered ground afforded them
no pasture. As part of the provisions had been damaged, it was now
asked in dismay, what would become of the army if the beasts should
perish? The recollection of the disaster at Boo-Taleb, where the
column of General Levasseur left so many men in the snow, occurred to
the stoutest hearts. But even darker shades mingled in the prospects
of our troops; for 'General Levasseur,' said they, 'was only thirty
miles from a post occupied by French troops, and the neighbouring
tribes raised and reanimated those whom they found alive, though
benumbed on the plain; but we, in the midst of the desert, far from
any human dwelling, what will become of us? Hunger, thirst, and the
enemy, will soon finish the remains of our unfortunate army.'
But the officers are on foot, setting the example of vigorous
exertion, and striving to comfort and encourage the men; while the
calm and quiet prudence of the general inspires every one with
confidence in endeavouring to obey his orders, as the only hope of
deliverance. We begin our march: the snow is now falling only at
intervals; it lies two feet deep in the hollow plains, and above a
foot on the level and rising ground.
Some of the men, however, remained as if nailed to the soil--not only
their limbs benumbed, but their mental energies so paralysed as to be
incapable of acting on the physical; the mind inaccessible to moral
incentives, and the body insensible to the influence of outward
stimulants. By and by they found energy to beg that they might be
hoisted on the arm-chairs; but this was peremptorily refused. Since
Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, and the recent work of Dr Shrimpton on
the disaster at Boo-Taleb, every one knows the consequence of
indulging this deceitful stupor.
But we found we must do more than talk; so we set the drums and
trumpets about the ears of the sleepers, and made their comrades shake
them with all their might. It was not till after an hour's march, in
which coaxing, scolding, and pushing, stimulants to laughter and
provocatives to anger, had been incessantly employed in turn, that the
vital powers appeared to be in tolerably full play. There was one man
more obstinate than the rest, who, in order to get a place on one of
the cacolets, threatened every minute to lie down on the ground. I
slid among the ranks, and began telling one of his comrades all the
horrible stories I knew of those who, yielding to sleep in the cold,
had awaked no more; adding, with affected indifference: 'I am afraid
we shall have to leave some of our poor men as a supper for the hyenas
to-night. There are two or three of them so benumbed and stupified,
that they will perish if they halt for a single instant.' In a few
minutes, I learned that the soldier had done begging to be carried; he
said his strength was returning.
In the midst of so much human distress, it seems almost like trifling
to advert to the poor swallows. On awaking in the morning, I had found
two under my bed-cover. They allowed themselves to be taken, and
either could not, or would not fly away when I tried to banish them.
So I put them in the hood of my cloak, and allowed it to fall down my
back, while I raised over my head that of the ample burnoose which I
wear in the cold above all my other garments. The swallows travelled
thus for several hours, and gradually recovered in their warm nest.
When the sun emitted some genial rays, I took them out, and set them
free. They fluttered for some time round my horse, uttering a little
cry, which I took for an expression of gratitude before taking flight
into the mountains.
Other companies of them had taken shelter under the matted hair which
hangs from the flanks of the camel; and when the pitiless driver
persisted in dislodging them, they departed with a plaintive cry, to
seek an asylum with a camel whose driver was more hospitable. A
sentinel had found one in his pocket during the night, but it paid
dearly for its lodging--he roasted it for his supper! These poor birds
had fled from the rigours of a European winter, to find cold as severe
in the heart of Africa. Alas! how many of us felt that, like the
swallows, we had exiled ourselves to improve our fortunes, and were
now in danger of perishing. How gladly would we have resigned all our
hopes of glory and advantage for the fireside of the modest paternal
dwelling!
But before night we encamped in the shelter of the mountains; the
chiah, which grew in abundance around us, enabled us to kindle fires,
and a salutary reaction took place in the spirits of the troops.
According to a common practice of mine, I invited to supper the man
whose life I had saved by frightening him into exertion. After
swallowing a glass of warm wine, well sugared, and spiced with
tincture of cinnamon, he licked his lips, sucked the edges of his
glass, and said: 'Thank ye, doctor; but for you I should have been
dead,' with a naïveté which I can never forget, and which even now
mingles pleasing associations with the thoughts of those days of
suffering.
The next day nearly 200 of the men were affected with partial or total
blindness. Some had merely a sensation like fatigue of the visual
organs, with heaviness, watering, and inflammation of the conjunctive
membrane. But with others the pain was acute, the eye much inflamed,
and the cornea covered with minute ulcerations. Those who were more
slightly affected, marched like persons enveloped in a cloud of smoke,
and trying to see their way out of it; they took a few steps with
their eyes shut, then half opened them with evident pain to
reconnoitre the ground before them, and quickly closed them again. But
many had for the time wholly lost their sight; they stumbled on the
tufts of halfa, and rolled on the ground, so that we were obliged to
hoist them on the cacolets. The general, in a state of much
uneasiness, called a council of such members of the military corps of
health as were found in his column. Some were of opinion that this
epidemic was occasioned by the sudden cold, others that it was
attributable to the smoke of the chiah; but the truth is, that, both
before and after this period, we had experienced nearly as great
extremes of heat by day and cold by night without any such
consequences, and that some, who had not approached the chiah fires
were as severely affected as those who had. It was concluded, with
every appearance of reason, that the real cause was the dazzling light
reflected from the snow during our march on the 20th of April. I
recollect one artilleryman, who was conducting his gun, when suddenly,
as the sun broke out afresh, he stopped, rubbed his eyes, turned his
head in every direction, and exclaimed: 'I cannot see; I am quite
blind!' Although we had not expected snow in the plains of Sahara, the
general had anticipated the effects of the reflection of light from
the sand, and the possibility of small particles of it getting into
the eyes; and with this view each man had been provided with a green
gauze veil. But the soldier dislikes anything out of his regular
routine as much as the most ignorant peasant; so when the order was
given that these veils should be worn,[3] the soldiers wore them to
be sure--in their pockets. I insisted that each man should fasten his
on his helmet, and this, too, was done; but it was allowed to fly like
a streamer behind, instead of being drawn over the eyes. Happily the
epidemic was but temporary, and none permanently suffered the loss of
sight as the punishment of his folly.