THE SHIP OF THE DESERT AND HIS OCEAN OF SAND
A camel may be a cumbersome, ungainly and unlovely creature, and may be
destined to be succeeded by the automobile, to which he seems to have
taken a violent dislike; but there is no underrating the great and
valuable part which he has played in the development of the African
provinces and protectorates of France. He has borne most of their
burdens, literally; has ploughed their fields, pumped their water, and
even exploited the tourists, to say nothing of having been the companion
of the Mussulman faithful on their pilgrimages.
The camel caravans which set out across the desert from Tlemcen, Tunis,
and Constantine (there are no camels nearer Algiers than Arba) are in
charge of a very exalted personage,--or he thinks he is. His official
title is _gellâby_. Each and every beast of burden is loaded to the
limit, and pads his way with his great nubbly hoofs across untold
leagues of sand or brush-covered soil without complaint. At every stop,
however, and every time a start is made, he always gives vent to shrieks
and groans; but as this procedure takes place at each end of a day's
journey as well, it is probably pure bluff, as the camel-sheik claims.
To one unused to it the noise seems like the wails which are supposed to
come up out of the inferno.
The camel of Africa, so-called, is really not a camel, _he is a
dromedary_; the camel has two humps, the dromedary but one, _but camel
is the word commonly used_. The two-humped quadruped, then, is a
camel,--the direct descendant of the camel of Asia, whilst that of the
single hump is the dromedary of Africa. The distinction must be
remembered by all who talk or write on the subject, with the same
precision that one differentiates between African and Indian elephants.
The camel has by no means the rude health and strength which has so
often been attributed to him, indeed he is a very delicate beast and
demands a climate dry and hot. Cold and snow and persistent rains are
death to a camel. A camel must be well nourished, and with a certain
regularity, or he soon becomes ill and dies. He is easily frightened and
can spread a panic among his fellows with the rapidity of wild-fire.
For the most part the camel is kindly and temperate, but he can get in a
rage and can be very dangerous to all who approach him on foot.
The camel of the south cannot live in the north and vice versa. They are
not acclimated to the varying conditions. One judges a good camel
(dromedary) by his hump; firm and hard, it is a sure sign of a
good-natured, hard-working, friendly sort of a camel; if flabby and
mangy, then beware.
A camel eats normally thirty or forty kilos of fodder a day, and must be
allowed four hours to do it in. As to drink, once in two or three days
in summer is enough, but in winter he can go perhaps ten days, and his
food bill is increased nothing thereby.
He can carry 150-160 kilos, a parcel hung over each side in saddle-bag
fashion. The _mehari_, or long-distance, fast-gaited camel of the
Sahara, is to the ordinary dromedary what a blooded Arabian is to a
Percheron. He can better stand hunger and thirst, and on an average
needs drink only once in five days; furthermore is not as liable to
fright as is the _djemel_, as the Arab calls the camel, and is more
[Illustration: _The Mehari of the Desert_]
patient and more courageous. Less rapid than a race-horse for short
distances, the _mehari_, well-trained and well-driven, can make his
hundred kilometres a day, day in and day out.
The saddle is called a _rahala_ and has a concave seat, a large, high
back, and an elevated pommel. The rider sits in the bowl-like saddle,
his legs crossed on the beast's neck. The _mehari_ is driven through a
ring in its nose, to which is attached a rope of camel's hair. The beast
is somewhat difficult to drive, more so than the _djemel_, and only its
master can get good results. To mount, the beast kneels as do ordinary
camels.
_En route_ the _mehari_ does not graze, but waits for a decent interval
and takes its meal comfortably. A _mehari_, not accustomed to the sight
of a horse, is often put into a terrible fright thereby. The education
of a _mehari_ is very difficult; it takes a year to break one.
The policing of the great Saharan tracts would not be possible without
troops mounted on _mehara_,--the plural of the word _mehari_,--and
France owes much of the development of her African provinces to the
_mehari_ and the slower-going camel.
The dromedary, or camel, as it is referred to in common speech, was an
importation into Algeria away back in some unrecalled epoch, at any
rate anterior to the Arab invasion of the eleventh century.
The _mehari_ was a warlike beast as far back into antiquity as the days
of Herodotus, Tacitus, and Pliny. Herodotus, recounting the battle of
Sardes, said, according to Pliny: "_Camelos inter jumeuta pascit Oriens,
quorum duo genera Bactriani et Arabici...._"
If an Arab is owner of a thousand camels, he wards off any evil that may
befall them by leading out the oldest and blinding it with a rod of
white hot iron.
A camel that has fallen ill may be cured, many superstitious Arabs
believe, by allowing it to witness the operation of searing the hoofs of
another, tied and thrown upon the ground. This is auto-suggestion
surely, though where the curative powers come in it is hard to see.
When a _bayra_, a female camel, has given birth to five camels, the last
being a male, her ears are bored and she is sent out to pasture, never
more to be put to the rough work of caravaning. Like putting an old
horse to pasture in perpetuity, it seems a humane act, and it solves the
race question in the camel world, or would if the camels only knew the
why and the wherefore.
The camel's feet are admirably made for the sands of the desert; they
form by nature a sort of adapted _ski_ or snow-shoe. The hoof (though
really it is no hoof) is bifurcated and has no horny substance, merely a
short, crooked claw, or nail, at the rear of each bifurcation, a sort of
elastic sole--the predecessor of rubber heels, no doubt--covering the
base. The camel travels well in sand, but with difficulty over stony
ground, where frequently the Arabs envelop his feet with cloths or
leather wrappings.
The camel possesses further four other callosities, one on each knee,
and he uses them all four every time he gets up or lies down. These
callous places are something the beast is born with; they get ragged and
mangy-looking with time, but they are there from birth.
The boss, or hump, of the camel-dromedary is mere gristle; it contains
no bone, and is more or less abundant according to the health of the
animal.
A well-fed and happy camel, starting out on a long march, regards his
well-rounded hump with pride. Excessive travel and forced marches
diminish its shape and size and the beast seemingly becomes ashamed and
literally feels sore about it. But, like the conquered general on a
battle-field who loses his sword, he ultimately gets it all back again,
and a little rest, a change of diet, and a good, long drink--"a camel's
neck," you might call it--makes a difference with the camel and his hump
in the course of a very few days.
A camel gets unruly and cries out at times, and often becomes
unmanageable, but an application of a sticky gob of tar or pitch on his
forehead usually quiets him down.
The baby camels usually come into the world one at a time; and can stand
up on their four legs the first day, and run around like their elders at
the end of a week.
At the age of four years the young camel is put to work, and carries a
rider, two barrels of wine or two gunny-sacks filled with crockery or
ironware indiscriminately. His average life is twenty years, and, as
with the horse, one reckons his age by his teeth.
The Arab gets an astonishing amount of work out of an apparently
unwilling camel. He encourages him with punches, and beatings and oaths
and songs. Yes, the Arab camel-driver even sings to his camel to induce
him to get along faster, and plays a screechy air on the _galoubet_; and
the curious thing is that the flagging energies of a camel will revive
immediately his driver begins to drone. It is a custom which has come
down from antiquity, and soon one may expect every caravan to carry its
own phonograph and megaphone.
The chief of these airs, rendered into French for us by a lisping,
blue-eyed Arab, was, as near as may be:--
"Battez pour nous,
Battez pour nous,
O Chameaux!
Battez pour nous,
Battez pour nous,
Chameaux, pour vos maîtres!"
No very great rhyme or rhythm there, but it suits the camel's taste in
poesy.
To "vagabond" with a camel caravan would be the very ideal of a simple
life. The life of a caravan to-day is as it was in Bible times, except
that one carries a "Smith and Wesson" or a "Colt" instead of a spear.
The following essential facts apply to all the camel caravans making
their respective ways from the coast towns of the northern provinces
down into the Soudan and the Sahara. The caravan usually makes its day's
journey between wells, or at least plans to stop at a source of water at
night rather than push on; this in case one has not been previously
passed by, and every one become refreshed a short time before.
A dozen to thirty kilometres or so a day is the average commercial
caravan journey,--for a part of the outfit walks, it must be
remembered,--and an eight or ten weeks' itinerary is the duration of the
average journey. Such food as is carried is generally of pounded dates
and figs in the form of a paste, which the dry climate more or less
petrifies.
The Arab trader, the chief of the trading caravan, and the city merchant
_en voyage_, be he Arab. Turk, or Jew, is a man of position, the others
are mere helpers, employés or perhaps slaves.
At each important halting-place of a caravan the Sheik's great tent is
unstrapped from its camel bearer and set up on a _pied de terre_ in as
likely a spot as may be found. The Arab tent is no haphazard shack or
shelter; it is a thing of convention, and has its shape and size laid
down by tradition.
The great central post or pillar has a height of two and a half metres,
and the _perches_, or entrance posts, have a height of two metres, and a
considerable inclination, whereas the central one is perpendicular.
The tent proper, the covering, is invariably of
[Illustration: _A Desert Caravan_]
alternate black and brown or brown and white woollen bands, sewn
together with a stout thread of camel's-hair. These bands are called
_felidj_ and have a width usually of seventy-five centimetres.
Within there is no furniture properly called, simply the provision for a
nomad life, sacks of grain, dates, figs or olives, a few pots and pans,
harness, etc., and a few smaller sacks or bags, _cachettes_, where the
womenfolk hide their earrings, corals, and brooches. These last are
usually used as pillows at night. It is a law of somebody--perhaps the
Prophet--that none of the Arabs' tent accessories must be of wood or
iron, save the tent poles, which are of both, being made of wood and
shod with iron; thus all utensils and other furnishings are of skins or
mats, and dishes of woven grass, and all cords are of spun camel's-hair.
A few copper pots and pans there are of necessity, and a few rude
crockery bowls.
The desert caravans form to-day the same classic pictures as of yore as
they thread the trails and paths, obscure and involved enough to the
stranger, but plain sailing to the chief or guide of a caravan who
precedes the following "squadrons" as a Malay pilot precedes his ship.
"At the head of his dusty caravan,
Laden with treasures from realms afar
* * * * *
Through the clouds of dust by the caravan raised
Came the flash of harness and jewelled sheath."
The chief of a tribe, or even a caravan, is a very grand personage among
his fellows, and when he is _en route_ rides apart and sleeps in a
palanquin or _attouch_, an _attouch_ being no other thing than a cabin
on a ship; here a cabin on the ship of the desert.
The _attouch_, to be _à la mode_, must have a tall, chimney-like
ventilator rising in the middle and tipped with ostrich plumes.
Generally this retreat is large enough to shelter two persons,--always
persons of importance in an ostrich-feather-tipped _attouch_, a sheik
and his favourite wife, for example.
The caravans of to-day vary in size from a dozen to fifty camels to a
train of four, five, or seven hundred (in Tripoli). Under certain
conditions, after a long journey, the camel carriers--the
freighters--are usually allowed to rest a matter of days, weeks, or even
months, according to the lack of necessitous conditions for pushing on
and for recuperation. One of the chief trading towns of the Tripoli
caravans to-day in Africa is Kano, a place ruled by a native chief and
inhabited by a black population. The chief, for a consideration, affords
shelter and protection, and the Arabs of the caravan open up shop and do
business in the real county-fair style that they knew before county
fairs were even thought of. Native products are bought or traded for in
return, and such currency as passes is a sort of wampum made of shells
and a few Maria Theresa dollars. Barter, or mere swapping, with a bonus
on one side or the other, is the usual caravan Arabs' idea of
merchandizing, and the European can as often get a native-made woollen
burnous or a camel's-hair blanket by the exchange of a "dollar watch" or
a "Seth Thomas clock," as he can by giving up two or three gold _louis_.
The proper benediction to cast down on the head of any Sheik who may
have shown you a courtesy _en route_ is to say in simple
French:--"_Merci, noble Sheik, de ta générosité. Que la bénédiction
d'Allah descende sur toi, sur tes femmes, tes enfants, tes troupeaux et
ta tribu._" If you can give him a slab of milk chocolate or a piece of
"pepsin" chewing gum, he will appreciate that, too.
The negroes and negresses accompanying the caravans walk, but the Arab
either rides camel-back or horseback, like the veritable king of his
own little kingdom, which, virtually, every Arab is when he is on the
open plain.
The Touaregs, south of Touggourt, one of the real, genuine, Simon-pure
tribes of desert Arabs, are not given to the trafficking and
merchandizing of those who live down on the coast. Their chief, and in
many cases, sole occupation consists in catering for the migratory
caravan outfits, selling them dates and mutton and water, for if a
Touareg can discover anywhere an unworked oasis with a spring, he has
got something which to him is very nearly as good as a gold mine.
Among the Touaregs there are blacks and whites; the whites dress like
the conventional Arabs, but the blacks after a fashion more like that of
the savage blacks further south. The three superimposed blouses are
never too great a weight or thickness for the genuine Arab, even in the
blazing furnace of the Sahara. They ward off heat and cold alike.
One of Napoleon's famous sayings, forgotten almost in favour of others
still more famous, was: "Of all obstacles which oppose an army on the
march, the greatest, the most difficult to remove, is the desert."
One imagines the desert as a great, flat,
[Illustration: THE ILLIMITABLE DESERT]
sandy plain with illimitable horizons, like the flat bed of a dried-out
ocean. This is a misconception of our youth, brought about by too
diligent an application to the precepts of the copy-book and the school
geography. All things are possible in the _vrai désert_. The oasis is
not the only interpolation in the monotonous landscape. There are great
_chotts_ or marsh tracts, even depressions where a murky alkaline water,
unfit for man or beast, is always to be found, vast stretches of rocky
plateau, great dunes of sand and even jutting peaks of bare and
wind-swept rock, with surfaces as smooth as if washed by the waves of
the ocean. These are the common desert characteristics throughout the
Sahara, from the Gulf of Gabès to the Moroccan frontier and beyond.
Occasionally there are the palpable evidences of new-made volcanic soil,
and even granite and sandstone eminences half buried in some engulfing
wave of sand swept up by the last sirocco that passed that way.
Over all, however, is an evident and almost impenetrable haze. At a
certain moment of one's progress in the desert, he sees nothing of
distinction before or behind or right or left, and at the next finds
himself close to a pyramid of rock fifty feet high. Really the desert is
very bewildering and enigmatic, and the Arab who navigates it with his
caravan is like the sailor on the deep sea. He has to take his bearings
every once and again or he is lost and perhaps engulfed.
It is the fashion to write and speak of the mystery of the desert, but
in truth there is no mystery about it, albeit its moods are varied and
inexplicable at times. To the solitary traveller there is an interest in
the desert unknown to seas, or mountains, or even to rolling
[Illustration: _The Sand Dunes of the Desert_]
prairies. Above is a sky of stainless beauty, and the splendour of a
pitiless, blinding glare; the sirocco caresses you like a lion with
flaming breath; all round lie drifted sand-heaps, where the wind leaves
its trace in solid waves. Flayed rocks are here, skeletons of mountains,
and hard, unbroken, sun-dried plains, over which he who rides is spurred
by the idea that the bursting of a water-skin, or the pricking of a
camel's hoof, would be a certain lingering death of torture. The springs
seem to cry the warning words, "Drink and away!" There is nothing
mysterious or dull about such a land, indeed it is very real and
exciting, and man has as much opportunity here as anywhere of measuring
his forces with Nature's, and of emerging, if possible, triumphant from
the trial. This explains the Arab's proverb: "Voyaging is victory." In
the desert, even more than upon the ocean, there is present death;
hardship is there, and piracy, and ship-wreck.
Newcomers to Algeria and Tunisia talk of the monotonous calm of the sand
dunes of the desert; but those who know its silences best find nothing
monotonous about them. It is as the automobilist expresses it with
regard to the great tree-lined "Routes Nationales" of France--"there is
sameness, but not monotony." One does not become ennuied in the desert.
He may be alone within a circle of many miles radius, but each glint and
glimmer of sunlight, each leaping gazelle and Saharan hare--really a
jack-rabbit--keeps him company, and when a camel caravan or a patrol of
Spahis rises on the horizon, he feels as "crowded" as he would in a
"bridge crush" in New York, or on the Boulevard des Italiens on a
fête-day.
Here at one side is a shepherd's striped tent, surrounded by bleating
sheep and goats and tended by a lean, lonesome Arab who is apparently
bored stiff with lonesomeness. His is a lonesome life indeed, like that
of a shepherd anywhere, and when night comes--often drear and chill even
in the Sahara--he slips under his tent flap, pulls his burnous up around
his ears and trusts to luck that no jackal will make away with a kid or
lamb while he sleeps. He is not paid to sleep by the owner of the flock
(a franc and a quarter a day, out of which he feeds himself), but still,
sleep he must. Fatigue comes even to a lazy Arab sheep-herder, and he'd
rather fall sound asleep beside a brazier inside his tent than doze
intermittently before a fire of brushwood in the open. Who would not,
at a franc and a quarter a day; particularly as the day includes the
night! There is no eight-hour day in the desert.
Before he sleeps, he munches a "_pain Arab_" and pulls his _matoui_ from
his belt, from which he fills his pipe with _kif_ and soon smokes
himself into insensibility. Poor sheep and goats, what may not happen to
them whilst their guardian is in his paradise of burnt hemp!
In the little oasis settlements where there are natural springs, and not
at the _Bordjs_ or government posts of relays, one's sight is gladdened
with flowering fig and almond blooms or fruits and bizarre spiny cacti
with pink laurel and palms in all the subtropical profusion of a happy
sunlight land. The chief characteristics of an oasis are the superb
giant palm-trees, their _aigrettes_ reaching skywards almost to
infinity, the azure blue cut into fantastic, fairy shapes, which no
artist can paint and no kodakist snap in all their fleeting grace.
Here dwell a few score of sheep, goat, horse, or camel owning Arabs, who
mysteriously live off of nothing at all, except when they sell a kid or
a baby camel to a passing caravan. It is the simple life with a
vengeance! And the children play about in the shadow of the tents naked
as worms, and, as they grow up, marry, and adopt by instinct the same
idle life. They know no ideas of progress, and perhaps are the happier
for it.
The colour effects in the desert are things to make an artist rave. The
dunes change colour with each hour of the day, and the silver light of
the sunrise and the streaky blood-red and orange of the sunsets are
marvels to be seen nowhere else on earth.
The temperature in the desert frequently changes with a suddenness that
would be remarked in Paris, the place par excellence in Europe where the
changes in temperature are most trying; or in Marseilles, where, from a
subtropical summer sun, one can be transplanted on the breath of the
_mistral_ into the midst of an Alpine winter in the twinkling of an eye.
Fifty degrees centigrade at high noon in the desert may be followed by
ten degrees at midnight. That's a change of seventy-two degrees
Fahrenheit, and that's something.