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.

[Illustration: F. R. del.

Emery Walker Ltd. sc.]

[_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.

[Illustration: AIR and the SOUTHLAND

F. R. del.

Emery Walker Ltd. sc.]

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

[Illustration: DIOM IN ELAKKOS]

[Illustration: 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

[Illustration: 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

[Illustration: RIVER OF AGADES: CLIFFS AT AKARAQ]

[Illustration: 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

[Illustration: RIVER OF AGADES LOOKING SOUTH FROM TEBEHIC IN THE

EGHALGAWEN MASSIF]

[Illustration: 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.

[Footnote 44: That is, “The People of Katsina.”]

[Footnote 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.]

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

[Footnote 47: The natives pronounce the name Tasawa, but “Tessawa”

is consecrated by European usage since Barth’s day.]

[Footnote 48: The plural of “Akri” in Temajegh.]

[Footnote 49: Wrongly spelt Gum_rek_ by Barth, _op. cit._,

Vol. I. chap. xxi.]

[Footnote 50: Jean: _Les Touareg du Sud-Est_, p. 15.]

[Footnote 51: Barth, _op. cit._, Vol. I. p. 36.]

[Footnote 52: _Ibid._, Vol. V. p. 554.]

[Footnote 53: _Ibid._, Vol. I. p. 529.]

[Footnote 54: _Vide_ Duveyrier, _op. cit._, pp. 328 and 359, _et

infra_, Chap. XI.]

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

[Footnote 56: Barth, _op. cit._, Vol. I. pp. 521-2.]

[Footnote 57: _Documents de la Mission Foureau-Lamy_,

Fasc. II. p. 206.]

[Footnote 58: There are other small wells in the immediate vicinity

of Milen: cf. _infra_.]

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

[Footnote 60: Barth, _op. cit._, Vol. I. p. 523.]

[Footnote 61: _Infra_, Chap. X.]

[Footnote 62: _Infra_, Chap. XI.]

[Footnote 63: Cf. V. Cornish: _Waves of Sand and Snow_ (Unwin).]

[Footnote 64: Barth, _op. cit._, Vol. I. p. 523.]

[Footnote 65: _Vide_ Appendix III.]

[Footnote 66: “Gharus” means “deep” in Temajegh, and when

thus used of places always signifies a “deep well.” This one,

however, was silted up.]

[Footnote 67: Buchanan’s _Out of the World_, pp. 128-30.]

[Footnote 68: Barth, _op. cit._, Vol. I. p. 523.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 70: This word is believed to have been borrowed by the

Tuareg from the Latin. _Vide infra_, Chap. IX.]

[Footnote 71: The French are lining it with concrete.]

[Footnote 72: Unless, as has been mentioned, the Eghalgawen valley

also joins the River of Agades, S.W. of T’in Wana.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 74: A fleshy plant, growing about two feet high rather like

a veitch, and containing as much moisture.]