[Every attempt has been made to replicate the original book as printed.
The footnotes have been located at the end of the etext. Some
typographical errors have been corrected. A list follows the etext. No
attempt has been made to correct or normalize printed botanical names.
The footnotes have all been moved to the end of the etext. Some
illustrations have been moved from within paragraphs for ease of
reading. (etext transcriber's note)]
THE DESERT WORLD.
"For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity."
WORDSWORTH
THE DESERT WORLD.
FROM THE FRENCH OF ARTHUR MANGIN.
Edited and Enlarged
_BY_
_THE TRANSLATOR OF "THE BIRD, BY MICHELET."_
WITH 160 ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. FREEMAN, FOULQUIER, AND YAN DARGENT.
LONDON:
T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW;
EDINBURGH; AND NEW YORK.
1869.
Preface.
The area of our present work would be very limited if we understood the
word _Desert_ in its more rigorous signification; for we should then
have only to consider those desolate wildernesses which an inclement sky
and a sterile soil seem to exclude for ever from man's dominion.
But, by a license which usage authorizes, we are able to attribute to
this term a much more extended sense; and to call _Deserts_ not only the
sandy seas of Africa and Asia, the icy wastes of the Poles, and the
inaccessible crests of the great mountain-chains; but all the regions
where man has not planted his regular communities or permanent abodes;
where earth has never been appropriated, tilled, and subjected to
cultivation; where Nature has maintained her inviolability against the
encroachments of human industry.
Thus understood, the picture we are about to trace assumes not only vast
proportions, but an infinite variety of aspects.
Here and there, it is true, our eyes will rest on the gloomy spectacle
of rugged solitudes, where the soil churlishly refuses almost every kind
of product, where the boldest traveller cannot penetrate without a
shudder, and where the very beast of prey is rather a visitor than an
inhabitant: lugubrious regions, on whose threshold one might write the
legend written, according to Dante, on the gates of hell--
"Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate."
(All hope abandon, ye who enter here.)
But, on the whole, these true Deserts offer ample material for the
admiration of the artist, the meditations of the thinker, the researches
of the naturalist and the physician. Theirs is that kind of beauty which
borders on the sublime, and which impresses us so powerfully in the
Ocean. And, like the Ocean, they awake in the soul the feeling of
infinity. They render it forgetful of the tumultuous regions which are
perturbed by petty passions, and vexed by the contentions of ephemeral
interests, and transport it to the boundless space and the eternal
spheres, or allow it to draw back within itself and muse upon its future
destiny.
Finally, what grave problems does the Desert place before the man of
science! And first, why do life and fertility prevail elsewhere,--here,
sterility and death? Why does an irrevocable curse seem to weigh upon
certain parts of the world, while others rejoice in Nature's fairest
gifts? It is by examining the constitution of the soil and the character
of the climate that we discover the key to this enigma, and recognize in
this apparent anomaly a necessary effect of the harmonious laws of the
universe. Then the Desert has a geology and a meteorology of its own; is
the theatre of special phenomena, which we do not observe in more
favoured regions. Life itself is not completely absent from it;
specimens of the organic kingdoms are rare, no doubt, but for this very
reason are the more interesting.
And if, from the Desert properly so called, we pass to those countries
where the genial air and the abundant waters favour the action of the
productive forces, the interest increases with the increasing
development of life. The picture changes every moment, and every moment
grows more animated. The scenes of the savage world unfold before our
eyes like a moving panorama; unexpected incidents and dramatic episodes
multiply one upon another. Every region appears before us with its
primitive aspect, its grand and picturesque landscapes, its
characteristic fauna and flora--frequently, also, with its tribes of
white, or tawny, or black, or copper-coloured men, whose singular
manners, brutal instincts, fierce passions, and wretched condition
offer, in all its mournful reality, the spectacle of that "state of
nature" celebrated by a great writer as the ideal of virtue and
happiness.
* * * * *
To conclude: the task which I here pursue is the same which I recently
commenced by the publication of my "Mysteries of the Ocean;"[1] to
invite and prepare the general reader and the young for the study of the
physical and natural sciences, by bringing before them the most
interesting results of the discoveries and the observations with which
these sciences have been enriched. Only, this new essay is entirely
descriptive, and has no didactic pretensions. I have contented myself
with sketching the physiognomy of the great regions not yet conquered by
civilization, with indicating the more remarkable features they present,
the peoples by whom they are inhabited, and the important plants and
animals they nourish.
THE AUTHOR.
[The TRANSLATOR has only to add, that he has made copious additions to
the original work, with the view of rendering its scope more
comprehensive and complete, and of adapting it specially to the
requirements of the English reader. He has also corrected and confirmed
M. Mangin's statements by reference to the best and most recent
authorities, without, he would hope, any injury to the original scheme,
or any detriment to the value of M. Mangin's agreeable and highly
interesting chapters.]
A.
Contents.
BOOK I.
THE DESERTS OF EUROPE AND ASIA:--THE LANDES, THE DUNES, AND THE STEPPES.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE DESERT IN FRANCE:--THE LANDES OF BRITTANY, 13
II. THE LANDES OF GASCONY, 24
III. THE DUNES, OR SAND-HILLS, 32
IV. WILD SCENES OF ENGLAND:--DARTMOOR AND THE FEN COUNTRY, 39
V. THE STEPPES:--THE DESERT IN RUSSIA, SIBERIA, AND TARTARY, 46
VI. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE STEPPES:--THE WILD HORSE AND THE CAMEL, 51
VII. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE STEPPES:--WILD RUMINATING ANIMALS,
RODENTS, CARNIVORA, BIRDS, 64
VIII. INHABITANTS OF THE STEPPES:--TARTARS, COSSACKS, KALMUCKS,
KIRGHIZ, MONGOLS, 78
BOOK II.
THE DESERTS OF SAND:--THE DESERTS OF EUROPE AND AFRICA.
I. THE RAINLESS DESERT--THE BED OF A SEA--THE DEAD SEA, 95
II. ARABIA DESERTA AND ARABIA PETRÆA, 106
III. THE NUBIAN DESERT--THE GREAT SAHARA--DESERTS OF AFRICA, 118
IV. PHENOMENA OF THE DESERT, 134
V. VEGETABLE LIFE IN THE DESERT--THE OASES, 148
VI. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE DESERT, 162
VII. THE MEN OF THE DESERT, 174
BOOK III.
PRAIRIES, SAVANNAHS, PAMPAS, AND LLANOS.
I. WILD PLAINS OF THE OLD WORLD:--THE AFRICAN INTERIOR, 186
II. DESERTS OF THE NEW WORLD:--PRAIRIES, PAMPAS, LLANOS, 207
III. THE AUSTRALIAN INTERIOR, 231
IV. VEGETABLE LIFE IN THE AFRICAN PLAINS, 240
V. VEGETABLE LIFE IN THE PRAIRIES, PAMPAS, AND LLANOS
OF THE NEW WORLD, 258
VI. FLORA OF THE AUSTRALIAN PLAINS, 273
VII. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE PRAIRIES OF THE OLD WORLD:--HERBIVOROUS
ANIMALS, 281
VIII. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE PRAIRIES OF THE OLD WORLD--CONTINUED:--THE
CARNIVORA, 300
IX. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE PRAIRIES OF THE OLD WORLD--CONTINUED:--BIRDS AND
REPTILES, 317
X. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE PRAIRIES OF THE NEW WORLD:--HERBIVORA, INSECTIVORA,
AND CARNIVORA, 328
XI. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE PRAIRIES OF THE NEW WORLD--CONTINUED:--BIRDS AND
REPTILES, 353
XII. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE AUSTRALIAN PRAIRIES, 366
BOOK IV.
THE FORESTS.
I. THE VIRGIN FORESTS, 379
II. VEGETABLE LIFE IN THE FORESTS OF THE OLD WORLD, 397
III. VEGETABLE LIFE IN THE FORESTS OF THE GREAT ISLANDS, 412
IV. VEGETABLE LIFE IN THE FORESTS OF THE NEW WORLD, 428
V. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE TROPICAL FORESTS:--THE ELEPHANT--THE
RHINOCEROS, 447
VI. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE VIRGIN FORESTS:--THE GREAT APES, 463
VII. THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC
APES:--ORANGS--GIBBONS--CHIMPANZEES--GORILLAS, 472
VIII. ANIMAL LIFE IN THE FORESTS:--THE CEBIDÆ, OR MONKEYS OF
AMERICA--THE LEMURS--THE SLOTHS--THE SQUIRRELS, 487
IX. MAN IN THE SAVANNAHS AND THE FORESTS:--ANTHROPOPHAGY, 502
X. MAN IN THE SAVANNAHS AND THE FORESTS:--THE SAVAGE RACES--THE
NEGROES, 514
XI. MAN IN THE SAVANNAHS AND THE FORESTS:--THE MALAYS--POLYNESIANS--THE
NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS, 526
BOOK V.
THE POLAR DESERTS--THE MOUNTAINS.
I. THE POLAR DESERTS, 543
II. ANIMAL LIFE AND VEGETABLE LIFE IN THE POLAR DESERTS, 555
III. THE INHABITANTS OF THE ARCTIC WILDERNESSES:--THE LAPLANDERS,
SAMOIEDES, OSTIAKS, KAMTSCHATDALES, ESKIMOS (OR ESQUIMAUX), 569
IV. THE MOUNTAINS, 579
V. VEGETABLE LIFE AND ANIMAL LIFE IN THE MOUNTAINS, 598
[Illustration]
THE DESERT WORLD.
BOOK I.
_THE DESERTS OF EUROPE AND ASIA: THE LANDES, THE DUNES, AND THE
STEPPES._
CHAPTER I.
THE DESERT IN FRANCE:--THE LANDES OF BRITTANY.
To those whose imaginations have been kindled by glowing pictures of the
African Sahara and the Arabian wilderness, it will be, perhaps, a matter
of surprise to learn that even fertile and civilized Europe includes
within her boundaries regions which are scarcely less cheerless or
desolate, though, happily, of far inferior extent.
Thus, it would be possible for a Frenchman whom the engagements of
business, the pressure of limited means, or the ties of home, prevented
from undertaking any distant voyages, to obtain a vivid conception of
the great Deserts of the World without crossing the confines of his own
country.
In France, so richly cultivated, so laborious, and so blessed by genial
Nature, there are, nevertheless, a few districts where her sons may
wholly forget--may almost disbelieve in the existence of--her cities
stirring with the "hum of men," her vineyards and her gardens, her
grassy pastures, her prolific meadows, her well-ordered highways, and
those "iron roads" which are the incessant channels of such restless
energy, movement, and vigorous life.
Bare and desolate enough, and as yet unconquered by advancing
civilization, are the mountains of France: among its gigantic ranges of
the Jura, the Vosges, and the Cevennes,[2] the traveller may still
ascend precipitous rocks, may hearken to the deafening roar of foamy
torrents, may contemplate with astonished gaze the masses of stone
upheaved in some convulsion of the ancient world, may listen to the
hoarse cry of the eagle, a s
"Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world he stands."
In the Alps, profaned as they now-a-days are by noisy tourists; in the
Pyrenees, whither Alpine clubs have not yet extended their
encroachments, he who ascends some 8000 or 9000 feet may still wander
among ice and snow which the sun's rays never loosen, and gather in his
mind's eye a picture of the colossal peaks of Asia and the New World, of
the virgin summits of the Himalaya and the Cordilleras. There you may
follow with entranced vision the swooping wing of the lammergeyer; or
trace the nimble feet of the shy chamois; or, like Manfred, muse and
wonder, while
"The sunbow's rays still arch
The torrent with the many hues of heaven,
And roll the sheeted silver's waving column
O'er the crag's headlong perpendicular."
Mayhap, if favoured by Fortune, you may even find yourself face to face,
in the abrupt bend of some obscure ravine, with a bear, which, calm and
unsuspicious, looks on as you pass by, as if he were ignorant of men,
and had never heard the ringing echoes of the hunter's rifle.
[Illustration: A PYRENEAN LANDSCAPE.]
It is less easy--in France, at least--to discover the old shadowy,
leafy, almost impervious forest. The most celebrated--that of
Fontainebleau--despite its enormous trees, its rudely broken surface,
its stags and roebucks reserved for imperial sport, despite its few
adders and problematical vipers, is now little better than a rendezvous
for amateur artists and listless idlers. Its well-kept avenues resound
with rapid wheels, and you can scarcely stir a step without finding the
associations of the place interrupted by the stalls of vendors of cakes
or the apparatus of itinerant gamblers. This profanation is surely to be
regretted, for the Forest exhibits many landscapes of surpassing
interest, as the rocks of Franchart, the glens of Apremont, and, above
all, that Sahara in miniature, the sands of Arbonne. Nor would one
willingly forget the historical memories which immortalize the famous
palace where Francis I. received his after-time conqueror, Charles V.;
where the wayward and half-insane Christina of Sweden listened with
cruel delight to the groans of the murdered Monaldeschi; where Madame Du
Barry lavished her shameless graces; where Pope Pius VII. lingered
through two years of gilded captivity; and where Napoleon bade farewell
to his dreams of universal empire.[3]
Among the uncultivated regions of France we may mention the marshes of
the Bresse, of Forez, of the Sologne, of Upper Brittany, and of Picardy.
The greater portion of these marshes, owing to the peat which forms
their bed, is vigorously and not unsuccessfully worked. They are
traversed by trenches dug at right angles, and on whose border are
placed the turf-cutter's little hut, and the furnace in which the peat
is baked. Their lagoons, and the canals which connect them, swarm with
flat-bottomed boats. Man, in a word, has taken possession of them;
braving the unhealthy vapours which enfeeble his frame and shorten his
life, he builds his squalid abode on the rising ground left uncovered by
the waters. The largest of these peat-bogs are those of Montoir and the
Grand Brière, near Savenay, in the department of the Loire Inférieure.
They occupy a considerable area of a vast desolate plain, where a few
lean sheep crop an insufficient food from the scanty herbage, and whose
sole product is turf. "This country," says Jules Janin,[4] "has no other
harvest, no other wealth than its peat; neither fruit, nor flowers, nor
corn, nor pastures, nor repose, nor well-being; the earth is wild, the
sky one of iron. It is a region of stagnant waters, pestiferous
exhalations, decrepit men, famished animals."
The swampy levels of Montoir form the natural vestibule to the Armorican
Peninsula, which of all the French provinces has the longest and the
most vigorously withstood the advance of civilization, its ideas, and
its modern institutions, and has the most rigidly preserved its
primitive character. There are many nooks and corners in Brittany
scarcely changed in outward aspect or inner life since the remote days
when it was a valued appanage of the English crown. They seem to have
been plunged in a sleep of centuries, from which the shrill whistle of
the steam-engine is only just awakening them. The country is undulating
and broken; in the central districts it assumes quite a mountainous
character. It is true that its heights are only of moderate elevation,
the loftiest not exceeding 2000 feet; but they are barren, rude, and
sombre in appearance. The coast is picturesque enough to delight the
most zealous artist, bordered with high and abrupt cliffs, and lined, as
it were, with a beach where the waters of the Channel ever break in
floods of spray and foam, and where masses of rock lie scattered of
immense size and the most fantastic forms.
Geologically speaking, Brittany may be regarded as a prolongation of our
English mountains, to which, like all the north-west coast of France,
they were anciently united. In some remote era a vast convulsion opened
in the solid land a chasm through which the oceans poured their meeting
waters, and separated our beloved island from the European continent;
the sole condition under which, perhaps, it was possible for the English
people to have accomplished their destiny. Anchored amid the protecting
seas, we are able to regard from afar, like a watchman from a tower, the
convulsions that sweep across the face of Europe. Like the watchman, we
cannot refuse to be moved by the spectacle, by the stir and the tumult;
but it is only considerations of duty that can induce us to descend from
our security, and mingle in the fray.
Brittany belongs to what geologists call the primitive and intermediary
formations. It is divided into three belts or longitudinal trenches:
those of the north and south consist of primitive rocks, granite and
porphyry; the central appertains to a more recent formation, to the
group of intermediary or secondary rocks, composed in the main of
schists and mica-schists, quartz, and gneiss. Schist prevails over a
considerable area, and is prolonged to the very extremity of the
peninsula. These hard, compact, impervious rocks, are entirely bare in
many places; elsewhere, and over a great extent, they are covered but by
a thin layer of clayey and sandy earth, where the sudden slopes of the
soil do not allow the rains to settle.
Here are the plains, often of considerable dimensions, which, bristling
with rocks, and broken up by ravines, water-courses, and marshes,
constitute the Landes of Brittany. True deserts these, relieved at
distant points by an isolated hut, or by a wandering herd of swine, lean
cows, and meagre-looking horses, which obtain a scanty subsistence from
the heathery soil, sown here and there with tufts of furze, broom, and
fern.
Under a sky of almost continual sombreness, like that which impends over
the pottery districts of England, these landes present a sufficiently
sinister and uninviting aspect. The traveller, as he crosses their
sepulchral wastes, will hardly marvel that they were anciently a chosen
seat of Druidical worship. Like Dartmoor, they would seem to have
offered a peculiarly fitting arena for the rites and ceremonies of a
creed which we know to have been mysterious in character and sanguinary
in spirit. They are covered with its gray memorials: the masses of
granite of different shapes known as _Maen hirs_, or "long stones," and
_peulvens_, which appear to have been employed as sepulchral monuments;
_dolmens_, or "table-stones;" and _cromlechs_ (_crom_, bowed or bending,
and _lech_, a stone), which antiquaries are now agreed to regard as the
remains of the ancient cemeteries or burial places. At Camae, near
Quiberon Bay, may be seen a truly remarkable example of the
_Parallelitha_, or avenues of upright stones, forming five parallel
rows, which extend for miles over the dreary moorland. What were their
uses it is impossible to determine, for there seems little ground to
believe, as some writers would have us believe, that they were "serpent
temples," where the old Ophite worship was celebrated. We can only gaze
at them in wonder: mile upon mile of gray lichen-stained stones, some
twenty feet high, laboriously fashioned and raised in their present
places by the hand of man some twenty centuries agone.[5]
On these very _dolmens_, where the priests of the Tentates were wont to
immolate their human victims to their unknown god, the mediæval
sorcerers and sorceresses celebrated the Black Mass, or Mass of Satan,
in terrible burlesque of the Roman Catholic sacrament, concocted their
abominable philtres, and performed their dreary incantations. Alas for
human nature! In every age it is a prey to the wildest credulity. Even
in the present day more than one superstition hovers around the
monuments of the Celtic epoch. The Bretons believe them haunted by
demons called _poulpiquets_, who love to make sport of the passing
stranger, but will sometimes give both counsel and encouragement to
those who know how to address them in the prescribed formulas; who, like
the Ladye in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," at their bidding can bow
"The viewless forms of air."
For, in the Breton mind, the superstitions of Druidism have not been
wholly uprooted by the teachings of Christianity, still less by those of
science and reason. Many a dark and dismal legend flourishes in the
lonely recesses of the landes.[6]
[Illustration: CELTIC MEMORIALS IN BRITTANY.]
Brittany, like England, has its _Cornouaille_, or Cornwall, and it is
here, particularly in North Cornwall, that we see it under its most
desolate aspect, with its chains of black treeless hills covered with
heath and furze; with its deserts of broom and fern, its ruins scattered
along the winding roads, its attenuated herds wandering at their will
across the moors, and its savage, ignorant, and scanty population. The
Bretons of Cornwall, according to a French writer, are elevated but a
little above the true savage life. Those who dwell upon the coast live
on the products of their fishing, except when the fortunate occurrence
of a wreck provides them with temporary abundance. At bottom, they
possess the qualities and defects of characters strongly tempered, but
absolutely uncultivated. They are as hard and bare as their own granite
rocks. Persevering, courageous, resolute, they make excellent sailors,
the best which France can find; the sea is for them a second country.
Progress, which they do not understand, inspires them with a sort of
terror, a gloomy mistrust. When the railway surveyors first intruded
upon their solitudes, these rigid conservatives assailed them with
volleys of stones, and when the railroads were laid down flung beams
across the lines to overthrow the hissing, whirring trains which
threatened to disturb their prescriptive barbarism. They asked but to be
let alone--to be suffered to live as their forefathers lived--to be
spared the ingenuities, successes, vices, and virtues of the New World.
But modern civilization, like Thor's hammer, or Siegfried's magic sword
Balmung, will break down the last barriers raised by ignorance and
superstition. It will shed its light upon the wilds and wastes of
Brittany, and compel their inhabitants in the course of years to
acknowledge its value and accept its benefits.
CHAPTER II.
THE LANDES OF GASCONY.
The Breton "Cornwall" has been called by a popular French writer, "the
Arabia Petrea of Brittany." But we might, perhaps, with greater justice
apply to this sombre region, peopled as it is with fantastic visions,
the name of "Land of Fear," which the Arabs bestow on the Great Desert.
Less vivid, it may be, but graver and more profound is the impression
produced by the Landes and Dunes of Gascony. These deserts of the south,
which Michelet terms "the vestibule and threshold of the Ocean," appeal
less powerfully to the imagination. They are haunted by no historical
memories, no traditions or marvellous legends in which man has rudely
embodied his dim conceptions of the mysteries of nature; they are
crowded with no monuments of antiquity to revive the shadows of the
heroes and priests of ancient Gaul; and when these are wanting, what
shall supply their place? But ample scope exists for the assiduous
labours of the naturalist, who here may see at work those unresting
forces which have inspired every revolution of the globe's surface; who
may contemplate here the phenomena that occur with the same regularity
as in the days when man had not been fashioned after his Maker's image--
"Him framing like himself, all shining bright;
A little living sun, son of the living light."[7]
These despoiled plains, these inhospitable wilds, alternately dry and
marshy; these sullen pools, these mountains of shifting sand, speak
forcibly to his mind of their past history, which is not one of the
least curious episodes of the history of the physical world.
The department which borrows its name from the Landes of Gascony is
divided by the Adour into two wholly dissimilar parts.
[Illustration: THE SHEPHERDS OF THE LANDES.]
To the south of the river lies a rich, undulating, vine-bearing country,
rich in pasturage and harvest, sown with pleasant villages and smiling
country houses, and watered by full streams and little rivers. To the
north, the appearance of the country changes abruptly. When the
traveller has crossed the alluvial zone of the Adour he sees before him
a thin, dry, sandy level of a comparatively recent marine formation. Its
only products are rye, millet, and maize; its only vegetation, forests
of pines and scattered coppices of oaks; beyond these, and they do not
extend far, all cultivation ceases, and the soil is stripped of verdure;
you enter upon the Landes--seemingly vast as a sea--occupied by
permanent or periodical swamps; and where, over a space of several
square leagues, in an horizon apparently boundless, you perceive nothing
but heaths, sheepfolds or steadings for the flocks of sheep that
traverse these deserts, and shepherds keeping mute watch over their
animals, living wholly among them, and having no intercourse with the
rest of humanity, except when once a week they seek their masters'
houses to procure their supply of provisions. It is these shepherds only
(_Landescots_ and _Aouillys_), and not, as is generally supposed, all
the peasants of the Landes, who are perched upon stilts, so as to survey
from afar their wandering flocks, and to traverse more safely the
marshes which frequently lie across their path.
Wild and uncouth are the figures which these stilt-walkers present, as
they move rapidly over the country, often at the rate of six or seven
miles an hour; occasionally indulging in an interval of rest, by the aid
of a third wooden support at the back (curved at the top, so as to fit
the hollow of the body), while they pursue their favourite pastime of
knitting. The dress of the Landescot is singularly rude. His coat or
paletôt is a fleece; cuisses and greaves of the same material protect
his legs and thighs; his feet are thrust into sabots and coarse woollen
socks, which cover only the heels and instep. Over his shoulder hangs
the gourd which contains his week's store of provisions: some mouldy
rye-bread, a few sardines, some onions and cloves of garlic, and a flask
of thin sour wine. From sunrise to sunset he lives upon the stilts,
never touching the ground. Sometimes he drives his flock home at
eventide; sometimes he bivouacs _sub jove frigido_, under the cold
heaven of night. Unbuckling his stilts, and producing his flint and
steel, he soon kindles a cheery fire of fir-branches, and gathering his
sheepskins round him, composes himself to sleep; his only annoyances
being the musquitoes, and his fears of the evil tricks of wizard or
witch, who may peradventure catch a glimpse of him in the moonlight, as
they ride past on their besom to some unholy gathering or demon-dance.
An English traveller has sketched in vivid colours the landscape of the
Landes. Over all its gloom and barrenness, he remarks, over all its
"blasted heaths," its monotonous pine-woods, its sudden morasses, its
glaring sand-heaps, prevails a strong sense of loneliness, a grandeur
and intensity of desolation, which invests the scene with a sad, solemn
poetry peculiar to itself. Emerging from the black shadows of the
forest, the pilgrim treads a plain, "flat as a billiard-table,"
apparently boundless as the ocean, clad in one unvaried, unbroken garb
of dusky heath. Sometimes stripes and ridges, or great ragged patches of
sand, glisten in the fervid sunshine; sometimes belts of scraggy young
fir trees appear rising from the horizon on the right, and sinking into
it again on the left. Occasionally a brighter shade of green, with
jungles of willows and water weeds, giant rushes, and "clustered marish
mosses," will tell of the "blackened waters" beneath--
"Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarlèd bark;
For leagues no other tree doth mark
The level waste, the rounding gray."[8]
The dwellings which stud this dreary, yet not wholly unpoetic landscape,
are generally mere isolated huts, separated oftentimes by many miles.
Round them spreads a miserable field or two, planted with such crops as
might be expected on a poor soil and from deficient cultivation. The
cottages are mouldering heaps of sod and unhewn and unmortared stones,
clustered round with ragged sheds composed of masses of tangled bushes,
pine-stakes and broad-leaved reeds, beneath which the meagrest looking
cattle conceivable find a precarious shelter.[9]
The Landes are divided into the Little Landes, near Mont-de-Marsan; and
the Great Landes, stretching to the north and west of the department of
which that town is the capital, and uniting uninterruptedly with those
that occupy the vast country situated south of the Gironde. The total
superficial area of these plains is estimated at upwards of 2,400,000
acres, of which two-thirds belong to the department of the Landes, and
the remainder to that of the Gironde.
Yet the reader must not believe this country to be a desert in the
popular acceptation of the word; it has its forests of pines, where the
extraction and preparation of resinous matter are carried on with
considerable activity. It has its small towns, its pretty villages, its
factories, and even its handsome villas. Finally, modern industry has
cut the Landes in two by the Bordeaux railway, which traverses them from
north to south, and bifurcates at Morans to throw off a line to Bayonne,
and another to Tarbes.
In shape, the Great Landes may be compared to an immense rectangular
triangle, having for its base the coast, which, from the mouth of the
Gironde to Bayonne, or for a length of more than sixty leagues, is
almost rectilineal. But they are separated from the sea by a long
parallel chain of lakes and water-courses--a waste of shallow pools--a
labyrinth of gulfs and morasses, and then by the continuous chain of the
Dunes, of which we shall speak in the following chapter.
That which is commonly called the Great Lande is bounded on the north by
the _étang_, or lake, of Cazau. It is a sandy, treeless plain, and upon
which, for a traject of several leagues from east to west, not one
habitation worthy of the name is perceptible until the traveller arrives
at Mimizan, near the southern point of the lake of Aureilhan. This lake
on the south-west pours its waters into the sea. To the north it
communicates, through the canal of St. Eulalie, with the lake of
Biscarosse, which is itself connected with that of Cazau. East of this
chain of lakes lies the Lande; west of it stretches the range of
_Dunes_, or sand-hills.
The lake or pool of Cazau is a small sea of fresh water, perfectly
clear, profoundly deep, and fourteen to fifteen thousand acres in
extent. It has its whirlwinds and its tempests, so that in certain
seasons it is perilous to embark on its surface. And were its banks
clothed with rich woods, or raised aloft in irregular or precipitous
cliffs, it would surely attract as great a throng of tourists as the
mountain-tarns and lochs of Scotland or Cumberland, or the Arcadian
waters of Northern Italy. The lake of Biscarosse, in form a triangle,
with one side formed by the Dunes, covers about twelve thousand acres.
It derives its name from a village situated at its northern angle, on
the bank of the canal which connects it with the lake of Cazau. The lake
of Aureilhan is the smallest of the three; the St. Eulalie canal, which
links it to the preceding, traverses a series of peat-bogs bounded
eastward by gloomy pine-forests, and westward by the interminable Dunes,
which, by arresting the flow of the rain-waters, have really created
these so-called lakes and extensive swamps. Enormous quantities of rain
fall every year in the Landes,--which district the Romans would
certainly have dedicated to Jupiter Pluvius,--and find beneath the thin
superficial stratum or crust of sand and earth, a sub-soil of _tufa_ and
_allios_--in other words, of compact chalk and sand agglutinated by a
ferruginous sediment. Frequently this _tufa_ possesses all the hardness
of stone, and its imperviousness is its fundamental property. Hence it
follows, that a portion of the heavy annual rainfall remains in the
receptacles provided by the hollows and depressions of the soil, and in
due time accumulates into marshes and lagoons, until gradually
evaporated by the heat of spring.
When of old the scared peasants beheld the irresistible advance of these
strange ministers of destruction, they had no other resource than to
fell their woods, abandon their dwellings, and surrender their "little
all" to the pitiless sand and devouring sea. What could avail against
such a scourge? Efforts were made to repel it. It is said that
Charlemagne, during a brief residence in the Landes, on his return from
his expedition against the Saracens, employed his veterans, and expended
large sums of money in preserving the cities of the coast from imminent
ruin; but whether the means employed were insufficient, or whether the
imperial resources failed, and other urgent needs diverted the
population and their leaders from this struggle against nature, the
works were wholly abandoned.
Of late years they have been resumed, and with greater success, by a
skilful agriculturist, M. Desbiey, of Bordeaux, and an able engineer, M.
Bremontier, who have called in nature herself to assist man in his war
against nature. Their system consists of sowing in the driest sand the
seeds of the sea-pine, mixed with those of the broom (_genista
scoparia_), and the _psamma arenaria_. The spaces thus sown are then
closely covered with branches to protect them from the action of the
winds. These seeds germinate spontaneously. The brooms, which spring up
rapidly, restrain the sand, while sheltering the young pines, and
thenceforth the Dune ceases to move, because the wind can no longer
unsettle its substance, and the grains are held together by the roots of
the young plants. The work is always begun on the inland side, in order
to protect the farmer and the peasant, and to withdraw the infant forest
from the unwholesome influence of the ocean-winds. And, in order that
the sown spaces shall not themselves be buried under the sands blown up
from the shore, a palisade of wicker-work is raised at a suitable
distance, which, reinforced by young plants of sandwort (_psamma
arenaria_), check the moving sands for a sufficiently long time to
favour the development of the seeds. Finally, the work is completed by
the construction of a substantial wall, or rather an artificial cliff,
which effectually prevents the further progress of the flood, or directs
it seaward, to be arrested on its course by the barrier of the
sand-hills. Unable to force a passage through these natural ramparts,
they have excavated certain basins, more or less extensive, more or less
deep, which have formed into inland seas, communicating with the
Atlantic by one narrow issue.
It is a noteworthy fact that, owing to the encroachment of the Dunes,
these lakes have been constantly forced back upon the inland country.
Fortunately, this menacing invasion of the sands has been checked by the
great engineering works executed a few years ago; which, on the one
hand, have fixed, and, as it were, solidified the Dunes, and, on the
other, have provided for the regular outflow of the waters. The Landes
have thus been opened to the persevering labours of the cultivator. The
culture of the pine, and the manufacture of resinous substances, have
largely extended, and the time, perhaps, is not far distant when these
deserts will almost completely disappear; when these desolate and
unproductive plains will pleasantly bloom, transformed into shadowy
woods or verdurous meadows.[10]
To so fortunate a result nothing will more powerfully contribute than
the embankment of the Dunes. These have been, in reality, the true
scourge of this country; these were the moving desert, the constantly
ascending sea, which had already engulfed forests, villages, even towns,
under its billows of sand, and driven before it the terrified
inhabitants of the coast.
CHAPTER III.
THE DUNES, OR SAND-HILLS.
The Dunes form the extreme line of the Brittany coast for nearly two
hundred miles, from the Adour to the Garonne. They are hills of white
sand, as fine and soft as if it had been sifted through an hour-glass.
Their outline, therefore, changes every hour. When the wind blows from
the land, millions of tons of sand are hourly driven into the sea, to be
washed up again on the beach and blown inland by the first Biscay gale.
A water hurricane from the west will fill up with sand square miles
of shallow lake, driving the displaced waters into the interior,
dispersing them in shining pools among the "murmurous pines," flooding
and frequently destroying the scattered hamlets of the people, and
inundating their fields of rye and millet.[11]
[Illustration: A FLOOD IN BRITTANY.]
Their origin is due to the prevalence of the sea-winds on those points
of the coast which are not protected by rock and cliff, and whose slopes
of sand descend very gradually to the margin of the waves. Their
formation is easily explained. The sand of which they are composed is a
silicious material, reduced to minute grains, generally rounded, by
trituration. These grains, nevertheless, are often too big and too heavy
for the wind to take them up and scatter them afar, like the dust of the
highways or the ashes of volcanoes. But at low tide the sand, dried by
the sun's rays and the action of the wind, offers to the latter a
sufficient _holdfast_ to be dragged up the slopes which descend seaward,
and deposited at a certain distance. This process being constantly
repeated, the heaps are daily increasing in dimensions.
It will easily be understood that this accumulation along the shore
cannot have taken place where the force and direction of the sands
experience periodical or capricious changes; for then the sands cast
upon the beach by the winds of the north and west would be driven back
into the sea by the winds of the south and east. This is noticeable in
many places where the nature of the coast is favourable for the
production of such a phenomenon. But on other shores--as on the Atlantic
littoral of France--the winds which blow most frequently and most
violently are from the west and south-west. And it is there we encounter
the Dunes. Those of Gascony are by far the most remarkable. Northward,
they extend as far as the Point de Grave, which shuts in the mouth of
the Gironde; southward, to the bank of the Adour, and even further, to
the cliffs of Béarn. Here the basin of Arcachon constitutes one vast
hollow; and some openings exist, moreover, in the department of Landes,
between that basin and the Adour, for the overflow of the waters which
descend from the interior. To the north and south of the Teste de Buch
the chain of sand-hills measures from 4400 to 6600 feet in width. At
other points it is still wider; but it narrows towards its extremities,
and both at the Point de Grave and near Bayonne does not exceed 450
yards.
Owing to their extreme shiftiness of soil, the Dunes can attain no
considerable elevation. The sand deposited by the wind on the summit of
the hill is always in a state of precarious equilibrium. It has a
constant tendency to be precipitated down the other side; and the higher
the summit the greater is this tendency, so that there comes at last a
moment when no further accumulation in height is possible. The Dune may
then extend its basis, may even increase twofold in dimensions, but it
no longer rises.
Let us note, moreover, that owing to its density the sand cannot be
carried even by the most violent winds into the higher regions of the
atmosphere; and that the Dunes, when they have reached a certain
elevation, oppose to them an insuperable obstacle. This circumstance
would consequently have a salutary effect, and the accumulation of sand
would be determined by a law of its own, if the Dunes, once formed, had
time to cohere. But this is not the case. Incessantly does the wind undo
or modify its work; and the loftiest hills being the most exposed to its
violence, are quickly reduced to the common level. In general, the
greatest elevation of the Dunes corresponds to their greatest breadth.
Thus the culminating point of those of Gascony is found in the belt
situated between the lakes of Cazau and Biscarosse, where the chain is
from 7500 to 9000 yards across. Their average height is 180 feet to 200
feet above the sea-level; but some of the hills in the forest of
Biscarosse attain an altitude of 320 feet. In the neighbourhood of the
mouths of the Gironde and the Adour, where the chain is considerably
narrowed, the height of the Dunes is only thirty to forty-five feet.
The reader must not suppose that the Dunes consist of a single series of
sand-hills ranged along the shore. He will, however, have conjectured,
from our statements respecting their width, that they really compose a
chain of several more or less regular ridges. The hills are separated
from one another by valleys, locally named _laites_ or _lettes_. These
valleys, where the pluvial waters flow and accumulate, exhibit a
striking contrast, in their freshly-blooming verdure, to the naked,
barren Dunes. The general aspect of the landscape may, therefore, be
compared to that of the ocean. There is the same broken surface, the
same extent of undulation, the billows of sand being upheaved by the
wind like the billows of the sea, and sharing in their mobility. You
must see, says a writer, in order to form an idea of those colossal
masses of fine sand, which the wind incessantly skims, and which travel
in this way towards the inland country: you must see their contours so
softened that they look like mountains of plaster of Paris polished by
the workman's hand, and their surface so mobile that a little insect
leaves upon it a conspicuous track; their slopes, at every degree of
inclination; their everlasting sterility--not a blade of grass, not an
atom of vegetation; their solitude, less imposing than that of the
mountains, but still of a truly savage character. You must see, from the
summit of one of these ridges, the ocean on your right hand, and on your
left the extensive lakes which border the littoral; and, in the midst of
this tumultuous sea of tawny sand, green grassy valleys, rich and
fertile pastures, smiling oases of verdure, where herds of horses graze,
and cows half-wild, guarded by shepherds scarcely less wild than
they.[12]
The marked characteristic of the Dunes, as we have already said, is
their mobility, which renders them a constant menace for the
neighbouring populations. To the wind which creates them they owe their
frequent changes and their inland movement. While the sea eats into the
coast, assisted by the breezes which gradually sweep clear the ground
before it, the Dunes extend, and drive before them the shallow lakes:
these in their turn encroach upon the Landes, and until now man has been
constrained to recoil, step by step, before his threefold enemy. It is
in this phenomenon, rather than in the ungrateful soil of the Landes,
that we must seek the cause of the curse which has seemed so long to
rest upon this country-side. You must go back some twenty centuries to
trace the origin of the Dunes of Gascony. Fourteen or fifteen hundred
years ago the coast north of the Adour was inhabited, and comparatively
flourishing. Mimizan was then a town and a sea-port, from which were
exported the resinous products of the neighbouring forests. The Normans
disembarked there on several occasions. Under its walls, in 506, was
fought a great battle between the allied Goths and Ostrogoths on the one
side, and the Béarnais, commanded by a bishop of Lescar, on the other.
Both town and port to-day are buried under the sands. "Full fathom five"
lie church and convent, and the busy street, the noisy mart, and the
once peaceful home. The present village has nearly perished: the Dune
was not three yards from the church when its progress was recently
arrested. Other cities, laid down in old charts of the country, but of
which not a trace remains, have in this manner disappeared, and entire
forests have been ingulfed, now under the sands of the Dunes, now under
the sands and waves of the sea.
Some parts of the chain have been rendered to a great extent immovable
by the vegetation which has gradually covered them, and these have
opposed a formidable obstacle to the encroachments of the sands. Yet
here and there the barrier has been defied. For example, in the forest
of Biscarosse the movable Dunes, actually sweeping over the ancient
hills, have not only filled up the valleys, but ingulfed a great number
of pines, and raised themselves several yards above the crest of the
oldest trees, planted on the summit of the highest hills.
In whose favour, in this struggle of science against the elements, will
the victory eventually be decided? The question is one which the future
alone can resolve.[13]
CHAPTER IV.
WILD SCENES OF ENGLAND:--DARTMOOR AND THE FEN COUNTRY.
Crossing the Channel, and surveying the limited expanse of our own
"beloved England," we become aware of certain districts which belong to
the Desert World. Through the ceaseless energy of our race, and the
introduction of mechanical inventions which economize time and labour
and treble the reproductive power of capital, almost all England has
been transformed into a rich and radiant garden, where the waste places
are "few and far between," where the solitude of desolation is scarcely
known; yet, as already observed, there are districts which retain much
of their ancient wildness of character.
Such a region is Dartmoor, the extensive and romantic table-land of
granite which occupies the south-western part of the county of Devon. In
its recesses still linger the eagle, the bustard, and the crane; its
solitudes are broken by the hoarse cries of the sparrow-hawk, the hobby,
and the goshawk; and the Cyclopean memorials of Druidism which cover its
surface--cromlechs and kistvaens, tolmêns and stone-avenues--invest it
with a peculiar air of mysterious awe. It extends in length about
twenty-two miles (from north to south), and in breadth twenty miles
(from east to west). Its total area exceeds 130,000 acres. It rises
above the surrounding country like "the long, rolling waves of a
tempestuous ocean, fixed into solidity by some instantaneous and
powerful impulse." A natural rampart is cast around it. Deep ravines,
watered by murmuring streams, diversify its aspect, and lofty hills of
granite, locally called _tors_, of which the principal, Yes Tor, has an
elevation of 2050 feet above the sea. Its soil is composed of peat, in
some places twenty-five feet deep; underneath which lies a solid mass
of granite, occasionally relieved by trap (a volcanic rock), and
traversed by veins of tin, copper, and manganese.[14]
Nearly in the centre of this dismal wilderness lies an immense morass,
whose surface is in many places incapable of supporting the lightest
animal, and whose inexhaustible reservoirs supply the fountains of many
a river and stream--the Dart, the Teign, the Taw, the Tavy--all clear as
crystal in the summer months, but after heavy rains running redly
through the "stony vales." The roaring of these torrents, when angry and
swollen, is sublime to a degree inconceivable by those who have never
heard the wild impressive music of untamed Nature.
The tors are remarkable for their quaint fantastic outlines, which, like
the clouds, suggest all manner of strange similitudes--to dragons, and
griffins, and hoary ruins, and even to human forms of gigantic size,
apparently confronting the traveller as the lords and natural denizens
of the rugged waste. The principal summits are Yes Tor, Cawsand Beacon,
Fur Tor, Lynx Tor, Rough Tor, Holne Ridge, Brent Tor, Rippen Tor, Hound
Tor, Sheep's Tor, Crockern Tor, and Great Mis Tor. Not only must their
variety of form delight the artist, but his eye rests well pleased on
their manifold changes of colour; purple, and green, and gray, and
blue--now softened by a delicate vaporous shadow, now glowing with
intense fulness in the sun's unclouded light.
Dartmoor is traditionally reputed to have been anciently clothed with
forest. The sole relic now existing is the lonely _Wistman's_ Wood,
which occupies a sombre valley, bounded on the one side by Crockern Tor,
on the other by Little and Great Bairdown; the slopes being strewn with
gray blocks of granite in "admired disorder," as if the Titans had been
at their cumbrous play. Starting from this chaos of rocks, appears a
wood or grove of dwarf weird-looking oaks, interspersed with the
mountain-ash, and everywhere festooned about and garlanded with ferns
and parasitical plants. None of these trees exceed twelve feet in
height, but at the top they spread far and wide, and "branch and twist
in so fantastic and tortuous a manner as to remind one of those strange
things called mandrakes." Their branches are literally covered with ivy
and creeping plants, and their trunks so thickly embedded in a coating
of moss that at first sight, says Mrs. Bray, "you would imagine them to
be of enormous thickness in proportion to their height. Their whole
appearance conveys to you the idea of hoary age in the vegetable world
of creation; and on visiting Wistman's Wood it is impossible to do other
than think of those 'groves in stony places' so often mentioned in
Scripture as being dedicated to Baal and Astaroth."[15]
That heathen rites were celebrated here in the pre-historic era seems
very probable, the best etymologists agreeing that the name is a
corruption of _Wise-man_, or _Wish-man_; that is, of the old Norse god
Woden, who is still supposed to drive his spectral hounds across the
silent wastes of Dartmoor. Celtic or Cymric memorials, as we have
previously hinted, are very abundant and very various. There are
cromlechs, where the Britons buried their dead; stone pillars, with
which they commemorated their priests and heroes; avenues of upright
stones leading up to the circles, where, perhaps, their priests
celebrated their religious rites; kistvaens, or stone-chests, containing
the body unburned; tolmêns, or holed stones, whose meaning cannot be
determined, but which may probably have had some astronomical uses;
bridges, huts, and walled villages, all bearing traces of the handiwork
of our "rude forefathers." There is no spot in England so thronged as
this with the shadows of a remote, a mysterious, and an irrecoverable
past.
* * * * *
From Dartmoor our wanderings take us to the eastern coast, and the
district of THE FENS, now so rapidly yielding to the labour of the
agriculturist as to exhibit but rare glimpses of their ancient
"savagery." It extends inland, around an arm of the North Sea called the
Wash, into the six counties of Cambridge, Huntingdon, Lincoln, Norfolk,
Northampton, and Suffolk, with an area of upwards of 420,000 acres.
Inland it is bounded by an amphitheatral barrier of high lands, and
touches the towns of Bolingbroke, Brandon, Earith, Milton, and
Peterborough. Into this great basin flow the waters of the greater part
of the drainage of nine counties, which gather into the rivers Cam,
Glen, Lark, Nene, Great and Little Ouse, Stoke, and Welland, these being
linked together by a network of natural and artificial canals.
Anciently, the Fens were pleasant to the eye of the lover of the
picturesque; for they contained shining meres and golden reed-beds,
haunted by countless water-fowl, and strange, gaudy insects. "Dark-green
alders," says Kingsley,[16] "and pale-green reeds stretched for miles
round the broad lagoon, where the coot clanked and the bittern boomed,
and the sedge-bird, not content with its own sweet song, mocked the
notes of all the birds around; while high overhead hung hawk beyond
hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as far as eye could
see." What strange transformations must this wild region have undergone!
There was a time, in all probability, when a great part of the German
Ocean was dry land, through which, into a vast estuary between North
Britain and Norway, flowed together all the rivers of North-eastern
Europe--Elbe, Weser, Rhine, Scheldt, Seine, Thames, and all the rivers
of east England, as far north as the Humber. Meanwhile, the valleys of
the Cam, the Ouse, the Nene, the Welland, the Glen, and the Witham, were
slowly "sawing themselves out" by the quiet action of rain and rivers.
Then came an age when the lowland was swept away by the biting,
corroding sea-wash still so powerfully destructive on the east coast of
England, as far as Flamborough Head. "Wave and tide by sea, rain and
river by land; these are God's mighty mills in which he makes the old
world new." And as Longfellow says of moral things, so may we of
physical,--
"'Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though he sit and wait with patience, with exactness grinds he all.'"
These ever-active causes have converted the dry land into the fens. The
mud brought down by the rivers cannot get away to sea; and, with the
_débris_ of the coast, is constantly swept southward by tide and
current, and deposited within the great curving basin of the Wash,
between Lincolnshire and Norfolk. There it is kept by the strong barrier
of shifting sands coming inwards from the sea; a barrier which also
confines the very water of the fens, and spreads it inland into a
labyrinth of streams, shallow meres, and bogs. The rainfall, over the
whole vast area of dull level, has found no adequate channels of escape
for centuries; and hence we may understand how peat--the certain product
of standing water--has slowly overwhelmed the rich alluvium, and
swallowed up gradually the stately forests of fir and oak, ash and
poplar, hazel and yew, which once spread far and wide over the blooming
country.
"Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of misery,"
sings Shelley; and this dreary outcome of mudbank and bog and mere had
its wooded isles, very fair and lovely to behold, redeeming the
desolation of the landscape. Such were Ramsey, Lindsey, Whittlesea,
whose names remind us of their whilome characteristics (_ea_, _ey_, an
island). In these green places the old monks loved to build their quiet
abbeys, rearing their herds in rich pastures, feeding fat fish in their
tranquil streams, and dreaming in the shadow of green alder and stately
ash.
But these Eden-isles were few, and the surrounding marsh was black and
dismal enough to scare the boldest spirit, and pestilential enough to
sap and undermine the strongest frame. The Romans had attempted to drain
and embank it, and their _vallum_ may still be tracked along the surface
of the marsh-lands, marked to this day by the names of Walsoken, Walton,
and Walpoole. In the Middle Ages, however, it returned to its primeval
desolateness--a waste and wilderness, haunted by the foul legends of an
unwholesome superstition. In the immediate neighbourhood of the great
monasteries of Crowland and Ely, and of the thriving towns, the good
work of drainage went on slowly; but elsewhere the land was given up to
the bittern and the heron.
No comprehensive scheme was adopted, however, until Russel, Earl of
Bedford, cut the great Bedford River, twenty-one miles long, and rescued
from the desert the rich tract known by his name--the Bedford Level.
"Erst
A dreary pathless waste, the coughing flock
Was wont with hairy fleeces to deform;
And, smiling with its lure of summer flowers,
The heavy ox, vain struggling, to ingulf;
Till one, of that high-honoured patriot name,
Russel, arose, who drained the rushy fen,
Confined the waves, bade groves and gardens bloom,
And through his new creation led the Ouse
And gentle Camus, silver-winding streams."[17]
The work was continued by William Earl of Bedford, who added, in 1649,
to his father's old "Bedford River" that noble parallel river the
Hundred Foot, both rising high above the land to allow for flood water.
It was carried on at a later period under the direction of Government
surveyors. Then came Rennie, the great engineer, whose operations
effectually shut out the desert, and handed over to the agriculturist
nearly the whole level of the Fens, some seventy miles in length. Works
are now in progress for rescuing a further portion of the basin of the
Wash, to be formed into a new county, and named after the Queen. So that
now, in tracts once covered by the sea, or knee-deep in reedy, slushy,
pestilential slime, the grass grows luxuriantly, the crops wave in
golden abundance, or the breeze takes up and carries afar--
"The livelong bleat
Of the thick-fleecèd sheep from wattled folds."
But the dominion of labour has not yet been established over the whole
Fen-district. There are still dreary nooks, and gloomy corners, and
unproductive wastes; wild scenes there are, which few Englishmen have
any conception of as contained within the boundaries of their own
"inviolate isle." Romantic scenery, remarks Mr. Walter White, must not
be looked for on the Lincolnshire coast. In all the journey from the
Wash till you see the land of Yorkshire, beyond the Humber, not an inch
of cliff will your eyes discover. Monotonous is the prospect of--
"A level waste, a rounding gray"
of sand-hills, which vary but slightly in height, and bristle with
_marum_. "But tame though it be," continues our authority,[18] "the
scene derives interest from its peculiarity. Strange perspective effects
appear in those irregular hills: yonder they run out and form a low
dark, purple headland, against which the pale green and yellow of a
nearer tongue look bright by contrast. Here for a few furlongs the range
rises gray, cold, and monotonous; there it has a warmth of colour
relieved by deep shadows, that change their tint during the hours that
accompany the sun while he begins and ends his day. Sitting on the
summit of those dry hills, you will remark the contrasted landscape: on
the one side, the level pasture land, league after league of grassy
green, sprinkled with villages, farms, churches, and schools, where work
and worship will find exercise through ages yet to come; on the other,
league after league of tawny sand, sloping gently outwards to meet the
great sea that ever foams or ripples thereupon. On the one hand, a
living scene bounded by the distant wolds; on the other, a desert, sea
and shore alike solitary, bounded only by the overarching sky. More
thoughts come crowding into the mind in presence of such a scene than
are easy to express."
CHAPTER V.
THE STEPPES:--THE DESERT IN RUSSIA, SIBERIA, AND TARTARY.
Hitherto we have only been speaking of miniature deserts, of the more
limited of the world's wildernesses, where some degree of victory seems
to reward man's arduous struggle with nature. Those which we have
hitherto described are open to the "breath of civilization." The pilgrim
who visits them incurs no danger; he has nothing to dread from beasts of
prey; the men he meets with obey the same general laws as himself; he is
carried into their furthest recesses by the all-embracing railroad. He
sees on every hand the efforts of science to confine the desert within
ever narrower boundaries; to reclaim the moor, and the fen, and the
sandy waste; to reap from the once barren soil an abundant harvest. But
if he pass from England or France to Germany, and thence across the
provinces of unhappy Poland, he will find himself daily advancing into a
country of more and more savage aspect. He will observe that vegetation
loses its happy variety; that the cultivated fields become scarcer; the
morass and forest more frequent, and of greater extent; the population
poorer, more squalid, and less numerous. Wide and dreary intervals
separate the different towns; here and there, surrounded by gloomy
woods, are scattered the melancholy-looking villages. Travelling becomes
difficult, for the roads are ill-kept; he has left behind him the modern
magician, the engineer; wild wolves haunt his path; and he has good
cause to fear the robber's knife. Civilization here has left barbarism
for centuries to itself; we are approaching the great Deserts, the
Steppes of Northern Asia.
The Steppes commence near the thirty-fifth degree of longitude, east of
the Dnieper, as soon as we quit the fertile plains of the Ukraine to
enter the country of the Don Cossacks. They are the characteristic
feature of the immense zone which starts from the north-eastern shore
of the Sea of Azov, stretches to the foot of Caucasus, between the Black
and Caspian Seas, and is thence prolonged beyond the Ural range, to the
north and south of the metaliferous Altaï; but mainly between the latter
and the Thian-Shian mountains, to the seas of Okhotsk and Jesso.
The word _Steppe_, supposed to be of Tartar origin, primarily signifies
an uncultivated plain, a prairie.
The Steppes, in short, are ordinarily plains of very considerable extent
interrupted at intervals by chains of hills or mountains; but, on the
whole, of a level, monotonous character, and with a considerable part
below the level of the ocean. Their area may be roughly computed at
4,200,000 square miles.
Occasionally, in traversing them, we meet with lakes or brackish ponds,
with forests of pines, even with patches of cultivated ground. Sometimes
they form lofty and extensive plateaux, as in the case of the plateau of
Gobi, also called, but most inappropriately, _Scha-mo_, or the Sandy
Desert, and _Scha-ho_, or the Sandy River.
The Gobi begins upon the confines of Chinese Tartary, and thence extends
over thousands of leagues in a vast expanse of sterile wilderness
towards the coast of the Pacific. It chiefly consists of bare rock,
shingle, and loose sand, alternating with firm sand, sparsely clothed
with vegetation. But a large portion of the country, though not less
leafless and monotonous, assumes in the spring season the appearance of
an undulating ocean of grass, supplying pasturage to the flocks and
herds of the Mongolian nomades, who wander at will over its vast prairie
grounds, and encamp wherever they find a stream of water or sheltering
crag. The general elevation above the sea is probably not less than 3500
feet. The Gobi was crossed by Mr. Grant, in 1863, and, soon afterwards,
by Mr. Bishop, a correspondent of the _Times_.
Though their general aspect is chill and dreary, the Steppes are not
without their romantic landscapes, and their vegetation is more varied
as well as more abundant than is generally believed. You may find among
them wide meads with a soil of sufficient fertility to produce corn in
great quantities, although too thin to permit the development of plants
which have need of a certain depth. "The most agreeable portion of these
plains," says Humboldt, "is adorned with small shrubs of the family
_Rosaceæ_, tulips, and the _cypripedium_. Just as the Torrid Zone is
distinguished by the tendency of all its plants to become trees, so some
of the Asiatic Steppes in the Temperate Zones have the peculiar
characteristic that all their flowering herbaceous plants attain to a
remarkable height, such as the _Saussurea_ and other synantheraceæ, the
leguminous shrubs, and, above all, an infinite variety of astragals. If
the traveller attempts to go forward, in the small Tartar chariots,
across these pathless, trackless prairies, he must keep standing, to
ascertain his direction, and he will see the plants, interlaced as in a
dense forest, bend before his wheels. Some of these Steppes are grassy
plains; others are covered with saline plants, fleshy, articulated, and
always green. Often, too, one sees afar the glitter of saline
efflorescence, like lichens, spreading unevenly over the glassy soil,
like newly-fallen snow."[19]
Comparing the Asiatic Steppes with the Pampas of South America, Humboldt
does not hesitate to declare that the former are far the richer. "In
that part of the Steppes, inhabited by the Kirghiz and the Kalmucks,
which I have traversed," he says, "that is to say, from the Don, the
Caspian Sea, and the Oural (Jaïk), to the Obi and the Upper Irtysh, near
Lake Dsaisang, over a space of forty degrees of longitude, one can never
discover, even at the most distant limit, a phenomenon frequent in the
Llanos, the Pampas, and the Prairies of America; that horizon vague and
boundless as the sea, which seems to support the vault of heaven. Seldom
in Asia was the spectacle offered me of even a single side of the
horizon. The Steppes are traversed by numerous chains of hills, or
covered with forests of conifers. The vegetation of Asia, even in the
richest pasturage, is nowhere confined to the families of the
_Cyperaceæ_. A great variety prevails there of herbaceous or frutescent
plants. In the spring season, small rosaceæ and amygdalaceæ, with rosy
or snow-white blossoms--Spiræa, cratægus, prunus spinosa, amygdalus
nana--present a graceful appearance. I have elsewhere spoken," he adds,
"of the vigorous growth of Synanthers, such as _Suassurea amara_ and
_salsa_, the _artemisias_ and blue _centaureas_, which grow profusely in
these deserts, and the leguminosæ, which are there represented by
different species of astragal, cytisus, and _caragana_. The fritillaria
ruthenica, meleagroides, cypripedium, and tulip, delight the eye with
the brilliance of their colours."[20]
This almost exclusively herbaceous, but abundant and various, vegetation
of which Humboldt speaks, is conspicuous in the spring, in the least
favoured Steppes, after the rainy season. But it is there of a brief
life. In the month of June the heat grows intense, and the dryness
excessive. Then every herb perishes, cut down by the sun's keen-smiting
rays, like the Greeks before Troy by the arrows of Apollo.
"Bent was his bow, the Grecian hearts to wound;
Fierce as he moved, his silver shafts resound."[21]
The dust is whirled off the ground by the wind, and swept about in
revolving tornados. The Steppes situated in a comparatively low latitude
thus alternately assume the most discordant aspects. In winter the heavy
rains inundate them, and transform them into impracticable marshes;
spring clothes them with a thick carpet of grasses and other herbaceous
plants, so that they reveal to the eye leagues upon leagues of
delightful sward cropped by numerous flocks. In summer they undergo a
third metamorphosis, and are converted into parched and sun-scathed
deserts like those of Nubia or Arabia.
These periodical transformations are especially remarkable in the
Steppes of the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Caspian Sea; where
winter comes attended with abundant snows and terrific tempests. No
obstacle can arrest the fury of the gale, which accumulates the driven
snow in fearful avalanches, and like the demon in the old German
legend, drives before it the wild horses in an access of violence. Half
frozen by the cold, and exhausted with hunger, they fly in a complete
panic. Oftentimes their giddy headlong course carries them forward upon
the crust of ice which gathers over the waters close to the shore; it
cracks, it breaks, and hundreds perish! The melting snow and heavy rains
at the end of winter drown the plains under vast sheets of water, which,
however, quickly evaporate in the first rays of the sun. Rain, in
summer, is extremely rare, and as there are neither brooks nor springs
to refresh the thin layer of earth in which the herbs and shrubs take
root, all these plants enjoy only a butterfly existence; they bloom,
they fade, they die, with startling rapidity.
The hurricanes are neither less numerous nor less furious in the hot
than in the cold season; dust, however, takes the place of snow, when,
as is sometimes the case, no tremendous deluge of rain follows in the
track of the mighty wind. To sum up: the spring and summer of the
Steppes are compressed (so to speak) into two months; all the rest of
the year seems given over to desolation. Two months in the year of
bloom, and sunshine, and colour, and beauty, are all that Nature grants
the wandering Mongolian.
Such being the general configuration of the Steppes, one may easily
imagine how stern and gloomy is the aspect of these immense plains, with
no other interruptions of the soil than their tumuli, no other boundary
than the sea. He who has not been habituated from youth to their
monotony finds himself wholly unable to struggle against its depressing
influence. Their dismal solitudes are in truth an immeasurable prison,
where he wanders to and fro without hope of escape. In vain does he
interrogate the north and south, the east and the west; in vain does he
turn from one side to the other; it is always the same uniformity, the
same immovability, the same solitude.[22]
CHAPTER VI.
ANIMAL LIFE IN THE STEPPES:--THE WILD HORSE--THE CAMEL.
Reference has been made to the numerous troops of wild horse which haunt
the Steppes on this side of the Oural. Similar troops of these animals
wander over the whole extent of the Steppes of Central Asia, which the
most accredited modern naturalists repute to be the original cradle of
their race.
[Illustration: THE TARPAN, OR WILD HORSE.]
These horses are called _tarpans_, a word undoubtedly derived from the
Tartar. Shall we look upon them as the representatives of the primitive
breed, whence have sprung all the varieties known at the present day; or
shall we see in them, as well as in the wandering horses of the prairies
and pampas of the New World, the descendants of individuals which had
escaped from the thraldom of man? This latter hypothesis seems to be the
most probable. But there is good ground for believing that, living a
wild life, these animals are gradually returning to the primitive type.
They have lost the harmonious graces of form, the beauty, and the vigour
which we admire in the high-bred steed, perfected by the assiduous care
of man. There seems as great a difference between the Arabian horse and
the wild horse of the Steppes as between the accomplished European
gentleman and a Malagasy savage. They are of small stature; their limbs
are lank; their coat is coarse, woolly, rude, and rough. With the
tarpans of the northern Steppes it is thick, flaky, and frizzled. Their
mouth and nostrils are garnished with long hair, not unlike a goat.
Their colour is generally brown, of the shade called _Isabelle_, after a
certain Queen of France who, in fulfilment of a vow, wore her linen
unchanged for a considerable period. A few are black or white. They have
a large head, with the forehead projecting above the eyes; a straight
chamfer; and long ears, customarily laid back close to the head.
The troops of the tarpans are subdivided into groups of twenty to thirty
individuals, each group usually living apart, and only uniting in a
compact phalanx when a common danger threatens, or a necessity arises of
migrating from one region to another. The gaunt grim wolves, which
hunger drives from their neighbouring forests; and man, who hunts them
hotly, either to reduce them into subjection, or kill them for their
flesh, are almost the only enemies they have any reason to dread. The
warlike nomade tribes of the Black and Caspian coasts, and of Central
Asia, have no other breeding-grounds than the steppe which they inhabit.
Thither come Cossack, and Mongol, and Kirghis, and Kalmuck, to choose
their chargers. They catch them by means of a lasso, which they throw
with surprising dexterity, and in a few days train them into a suitable
docility. When in want of their hide or flesh, the nomades hunt them
with gun, arrow, or spear; for hippophagy, which a few zealous amateurs
are now endeavouring to popularize in France and England, has been
practised from time immemorial by the inhabitants of the Steppes.
[Illustration: WILD HORSES TERRIFIED BY A STORM.]
These barbarians, however, respect the life of their domestic animals,
or sacrifice them only in cases of pressing need. They treat them also
with a gentleness unknown to our European grooms and horse-dealers. With
them, as with the Arabs, the horse is a friend rather than a slave; he
is, in truth, one of the family; and it is with great difficulty that
his master consents to part with him. Our travellers describe the
Tartar, Mongol, and Kirghiz horsemen as realizing the celebrated fable
of the Centaurs,--as becoming, so to speak, one with their horses. The
exigencies of their wandering life require that they should be
constantly on horseback; it is almost their home, their abode, their
dwelling-place; there they are mounted day and night; there they sleep,
prepare their food, and take their repasts. True that their cooking is
of the rudest and simplest, and their taste not so fastidious as that of
an European epicure! If, for example, they would make ready a piece of
meat, they insert it between the saddle and the horse's skin, and in
this impromptu oven leave it for a few hours, while it undergoes the
processes of heat, pressure, and frequent friction, serving in some
degree to cook it; then a pinch of salt for seasoning; and lo! a dainty
titbit which our cavalier devours with the best appetite in the world.
But it is to the inhabitants of the Steppes of the Black and Caspian
Seas that the horse renders the most estimable services. To make use of
a phrase of Buffon's, "He shares with them the fatigue of war and the
glory of battle;" he provides them with the best and swiftest means of
transit; he nourishes them with his flesh, and the mare quenches their
thirst with her milk. In _their_ dairies mares take the place of our
European milch-cows, and are regularly milked once or twice a-day. The
milk, warm, is employed as a medicine. It is thicker and more saccharine
than that of ruminating animals, and this, undoubtedly, is the reason
that the Cossacks, Tartars, and Kalmucks have succeeded, by
fermentation, in distilling alcohol from it, and procuring vinegar by
acetifying it. They prepare with it an intoxicating liquor (_koumis_),
to which they are very partial, and with which the wealthiest among them
consider it an honour to be largely provided.
By the side of the horse, we naturally place his humble congener and
compatriot, the _Ass_.
Nor need we be ashamed to devote a few lines to this useful animal,
though civilization has appointed to it a very different lot from that
of the horse.
While man has devoted his utmost efforts to ennoble, as it were, and
aggrandize the latter, to perfect his capabilities, develop his
qualities, embellish and vary his form, for the former he has had
nothing but contempt and harsh treatment. He has made the horse the
companion of his campaigns, the minister to his sumptuous pleasures, the
instrument of his grandest labours. He has dismissed the poor ass to the
fields to carry the heaviest burdens, to share in the toil and privation
of the peasant. In these different conditions, who will wonder that
while the horse has become a strong, graceful, and proud-spirited
animal, the ass, on the other hand, remains bowed and bent, with a rough
coarse hide, lanky limbs, a heavy head,--always drooping, as if under
the weight of continual lassitude and unconquerable melancholy,--and
long ungraceful ears, which give his physiognomy an air of ridicule.
Everything in him bears the impress of degradation. How has he merited
so obscure a destiny? Alas, he is the victim of an iniquitous caprice of
man. For see him in his natural condition; contrast with the well-worn
servant of civilization the _Onagra_,[23] the free wild ass of the
Steppes, with the Tarpan, and the parallel will be wholly to the
advantage of the former. The onagra is at least of the same size; his
ears are short; he carries aloft a well-proportioned head; his skin, of
a handsome gray or yellowish-brown, is sleek and shining; his limbs are
long, delicate, and nervous. He lives in very numerous troops, and
migrates from north to south, and south to north, according to the
season. The Tartars employ him as a beast of transport and the saddle
rather than as a beast of burden. They eat his flesh, preferring it to
that of the wild horse. Even the domestic ass of the East differs
notably from the slow, dogged, ill-used animal of European notoriety.
Under a more favourable climate, and in the free life of the desert, he
has preserved his tall stature, his vigour, and the haughtiness of his
bearing. The wealthiest and most distinguished personages do not disdain
to mount him or harness him to their carriage. He has a keen eye, a
quick scent, a sure foot, a mild and resolute aspect. He accomplishes
with ease from six to eight miles an hour; and, lastly--a fact worthy of
notice--his life, which with us seldom exceeds fifteen years, in Asia is
frequently prolonged to thirty or thirty-five. He is less subject to
sickness than the horse, and he almost equals the camel in sobriety,
docility, and endurance of hunger and fatigue.
[Illustration: ONAGRA, OR WILD ASS.]
Whether the Tartars and Kalmucks, who use mares' milk as a medicine,
attribute, as we do, certain therapeutical virtues to the milk of the
ass, we are unable to say; but it is certain that this milk forms a
portion of their daily food. On account of the strong proportion of
saccharine _serum_ which it contains, it is well adapted for the
preparation of the fermented drink already spoken of, known to the
Tartars under the name of _Koumis_ or _Kamuis_. Mr. Atkinson speaks of
the large leathern _koumis_ sack or bottle, as an important piece of
Mongolian furniture. One which he saw was five feet eight inches long,
and four feet five inches wide, with a leathern tube at the corner about
four inches in diameter, through which the milk is poured into the bag,
and the _koumis_ drawn out. A wooden instrument is introduced into this
bag, its handle passing through the tube, not unlike a churning staff;
with this the _koumis_ is frequently agitated. The Kirghiz begin making
it in April, and its due agitation and fermentation occupy about
fourteen days.[24]
* * * * *
The horse, and a few flocks of sheep and herds of horned cattle, amply
suffice for the wants of the warlike tribes in the south of Asiatic
Russia. These tribes have almost entirely abandoned the use of the
camel. But as we advance eastward, we find these gigantic and mis-shapen
ruminants in great numbers, the faithful companions and indispensable
auxiliaries of the nomades of the East. They wander freely about the
Steppes, in troops of several hundreds, browzing indifferently on the
grass of the wide pastures or the foliage of the bushes. They are
without fierceness, and the traveller who intrudes upon their immense
domains seems only to inspire in them a benevolent curiosity. "It is
impossible to describe," says Madame Hommaire de Hell, "the astonishment
they exhibited as we passed them. As soon as they caught sight of us,
they ran with all speed towards us, and then stood motionless, with
heads turned towards our cavalcade, until we had got to such a distance
as to be no longer distinguishable."
"Gold and silk," says Buffon, "are not the true wealth of Asia. The
_camel_ is the treasure of the East." It is a fact that this animal is
wonderfully adapted to supply the wants of the desert races. It may be
said to supply them with every object of primary necessity; food,
clothing, and even habitation, fire, and the means of transport.
The flesh of the young camel, though inferior to beef or mutton, is
savoury and easy of digestion; the she-camel yields an abundance of milk
as substantial and agreeable to the taste as that of the cow. The
camel's skin is, it is true, a coarse wool, but long, tenacious, and
readily wrought. The Mongols make it into tissues and cord. Out of the
tissues they weave their clothing, coverings, and tents; with the cord,
which is of various thicknesses, they fabricate the harness of their
horses and other objects of equipment. Camel-leather is not inferior in
suppleness and solidity to that which we make use of in Europe. The dung
of these animals, dried in the sun, serves as fuel not only for cooking
food, but even for working metals. Finally, as a beast of burden, the
camel surpasses every other in strength, swiftness, endurance of
fatigue, and, above all, in that proverbial sobriety which enables him
to accomplish a journey of several successive days without taking either
food or drink. From nature he has received a special organization, which
well justifies his Arab name of "the ship of the desert." It consists
essentially in the structure of his feet, in that of his stomach, and in
the species of hunch or hump which he carries on his back.
We know, in the first place, that the camel's foot does not resemble
that of other ruminants; it is bifurcated, but the two toes, very strong
and much elongated, are furnished not with a hoof, but with a short
nail, adhering only to the final phalange; they are, moreover,
_palmated_; that is to say, reunited near the extremity by a carneous
membrane, which is supplied underneath with a veritable thick and horny
_sole_. The foot can thus plant itself on a wide surface, and seems
expressly adapted to the shifting sandy soil which the camel usually
traverses.
As for the stomach, beside the four compartments into which the stomach
of all ruminants is divided, we notice, on the sides of the paunch, a
mass of cubic cells, or partitions, always containing a quantity of
tolerably pure water, very drinkable, and kept as a kind of reserve
supply; so that more than one traveller, when crossing the desert, and
perceiving neither fountain, well, nor stream in which to quench his
devouring thirst, has preserved his life at the expense of that of his
camel, by killing the poor animal, and opening his reservoir to drink
its contents.
[Illustration: BACTRIAN CAMEL.]
The hump, of which the Arabian camel, or dromedary, has but one, while
the Bactrian, or camel properly so called, has two, is, in truth, "a
storehouse of solid nutriment, on which he can draw for supplies long
after every digestible part has been extracted from the contents of the
stomach: this storehouse consists of one or two large collections of fat
stored up in ligamentous cells supported by the spines of the dorsal
vertebræ. When the camel is in a region of fertility, the hump becomes
plump and expanded; but after a protracted journey in the wilderness it
becomes shrivelled and reduced to its ligamentous constituent, in
consequence of the absorption of the fat."[25]
To be deprived of drink for from eight to ten days is no hardship to the
camel. Accredited authorities testify that without any serious
inconvenience he can go without drink for twenty-three and even
twenty-five days. In the way of solid food, a ball of cake weighing from
a pound to a pound and a quarter, will suffice him for a whole day.
Often when he has set out on his journey fasting, he contents himself
with browsing on the way a few green or dry bushes, and in the evening
sups on a handful of dried beans. But this singular abstemiousness is
not his sole good quality; his vigour, his docility, his swiftness
render him equally valuable.
The ordinary burden of a small camel is from 600 to 800 lbs.; a large
camel will carry 1000 lbs. or upwards, from thirty to thirty-five miles
a-day; but the _maharis_, or those which are used for speed alone, will
travel daily from twenty to thirty leagues.
The camel of the Steppes, in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, is, as I
have already hinted, the Bactrian or camel strictly so called. This
animal differs from his African congener in several very important
physical characteristics, and perhaps also in some moral peculiarities.
His two humps are smaller than the one hump of the dromedary. He is a
little larger than the latter; his average stature is from six feet and
a half to seven feet. His hair, of a deep chestnut brown, almost woolly
on the humps, the head, and the upper part of the neck, is short and
smooth on the body, and hangs in long fringes below the neck and around
the fore-legs. He endures without inconvenience the most opposite
temperatures, great heat and extreme cold, so that his habitat naturally
ranges over an immense extent of country. He is found throughout the
zone of the Steppes, even to the confines of Siberia, on the borders of
Lake Baïkal; he was formerly still more common in Hindostan, but has now
almost disappeared, owing to the great consumption entailed by the
military expeditions of our East Indian Government.
The camel is an excellent traveller, but his gait is rough and awkward,
and almost insupportable by those who have not been long habituated to
it. In this relation we may borrow an anecdote from Madame Hommaire de
Hell:[26] Her dragoman, a Frenchman, named Antoine, curious to essay
this new species of equestrian practice, begged a Kalmuck in the escort
to lend him his camel. The request being readily granted, he perched
himself on the extremity of the saddle, in "measureless contentment"
with his lofty post, and by no means mindful of the malicious smiles
exchanged between the Cossacks and the camel-drivers. Scarcely had the
beast advanced four paces, however, before his face turned pale, and he
clung to the saddle, with a most pitiful countenance, and imploring help
in the most agonizing tones. "One need be a Kalmuck," says Madame de
Hell, "to be capable of enduring the trot of a camel. His jerky gait
shakes the body so severely, that a long journey is a positive
punishment, even for the Cossacks. The unfortunate Antonio, left some
distance behind by the escort, made a vain effort to overtake us; he was
compelled, willy-nilly, to retain his steed as far as the Caspian Sea,
where he arrived about two hours after ourselves. I have never seen a
man more _demoralized_. His groans, when he was lifted off the camel,
were so lamentable, that we really hardly knew what to think of his
condition."
As for the camel's moral qualities, the same lively writer furnishes a
very different estimate to what we gather from the majority of
travellers. She represents him as idle, pettish, and very vindictive.
"All that we had read," says she, "of the rapidity of these ships of the
desert; their insensibility to fatigue, to hunger, to thirst; their
tractability to the will of man exceeding the obedience of the leaf to
the wind, was completely contradicted by the conduct of these
quadrupeds, little careful to maintain their reputation for agility.
Despite of a stout cord passed through one of the nostrils, and which
caused them a sharp pain every time they became refractory, they would
not march more than two successive hours without flinging themselves on
the ground. We had to battle with them incessantly to rouse them from
their torpor, and prevent them from biting one another. Whenever a
camel-driver pulled a little roughly his animal's guiding-string, we
heard a succession of cries, all the more frightful from their
resemblance to the human voice. In a word, these camels behaved so ill
during their short journey, that we entirely lost the good opinion our
great naturalist (Buffon) had given us of their species, in descriptions
more poetical than true."
Notwithstanding Antoine's discouraging experience of camel-riding,
Madame de Hell, a few days afterwards, essayed the same experiment, with
the result that, like her poor dragoman, she made a vow never to repeat
it. Somewhat later, she had an opportunity of witnessing a very curious
illustration--and one very amusing to the lookers-on--of the natural
vindictiveness of these rough steeds. We give the adventure in her own
words:--
"Everybody knows that the camel possesses the faculty of ruminating the
food already stored in one of his stomachs, and that he willingly enough
grants himself this pleasure when he has nothing to eat; but it is not
generally known, perhaps, that he possesses sufficient malice to make,
when an opportunity arises, this prerogative a means of vengeance.
"I had noticed in the morning that one of our camel-drivers appeared on
bad terms with his beast. He vainly tried to master him by punishment,
pulling with all his might the cord which passed through the animal's
nostril; the latter was obstinate, and threw himself every moment on the
ground, a proof of rebellion. The Kalmuck, irritated by the struggle,
profited by a halt to dismount, and inflict severe chastisement on the
recalcitrant; but the camel, disdainfully raising his long neck,
followed with so malicious an eye all his tyrant's movements, that
without doubt he was revolving some project of revenge in his head. And
so it happened that he quietly waited until the Kalmuck stood opposite
to him; then, opening his great mouth, he ejected full in the
camel-driver's face a double volley of masticated herbs, mixed with
slaver and all sorts of filthiness. It would be impossible to describe
the air of satisfied vengeance with which the camel raised his neck, and
moved his head from one side to another, as if in quest of applause.
What astonished me most in this affair was his master's moderation after
undergoing such an outrage. He wiped himself coolly, remounted his
saddle, and caressed the neck of the ill-bred animal, as if he had
received the most flattering compliment. A good understanding being thus
strangely re-established, they went on their way peaceably, without
giving another thought to what had taken place."
CHAPTER VII.
THE ANIMAL LIFE OF THE STEPPES:--WILD RUMINATING
ANIMALS--RODENTS--CARNIVORA--BIRDS.
Besides those species of which we have just spoken, and which man has
subjugated to his service, the Steppes nourish a host of other animals
which seem for ever destined to a savage life. Some are spread through
the entire zone of the Steppes, and include representatives of the
genera or species belonging to the temperate latitudes of Europe. But
most of them are circumscribed in more or less limited habitats, out of
which they would not meet with the conditions of climate or provision
that are essential to their existence.
The mammalia which are found in the plains of Eastern Europe and Central
Asia belong principally to the orders of _Ruminants_,[27] _Rodents_, and
_Carnaria_.
Cuvier divides the ruminants into two great sections: one comprising the
ruminants without horns (genera, _camel_, _lama_, and _chevrotain_); and
the other, those _with_ horns. The latter he again divides into
ruminants with decaying or wooden horns (these are the _cervidæ_ of the
new nomenclature), ruminants with membraneous horns (as the giraffes),
and ruminants with hollow horns (oxen, goats, antelopes, sheep).
* * * * *
[Illustration: THE ELAND (_Antilope oreas_).]
The section of Ruminants without horns is represented in the Steppes by
the camel. Of the three groups of horned ruminants, one only is wanting
in this region of the Old Continent--namely, that of the ruminants with
membranous horns; but we meet there with varieties of all the species
included among the cervidæ, except the reindeer, which is confined to
the glacial countries of both continents. The common European stag is
found on this side of the Oural, in the Steppes bordering on the
forests, where he prefers to seek an asylum. The _ahu_, or roebuck of
Tartary, inhabits the valleys and plains which stretch to the north of
the Himalaya and along the chain of the Thian-Chan. Deer wander in
troops, or in isolated couples, in all the temperate and fertile
portions of the zone of the Steppes, and the eland is spread over all
Asia between the 45th and 41st degree of latitude. The latter is the
largest of all the cervidæ. It ordinarily attains, and sometimes
exceeds, the stature of the horse. His antlers, spread out
perpendicularly to the axis of his head, take at first a nearly
horizontal direction, then spring upwards in an abrupt curve. At their
extremity they terminate in a broad palm, set with sharp snags around
its outer edge. Their weight, for adults, averages from fifty-five to
sixty-five pounds. The eland has a short robust neck, which is necessary
to enable him to support the burden of his branching honours; but which,
joined to the projection of his shoulders, and the disproportionate
length of his fore-legs, gives him a very ungraceful aspect. Nor can he
browse the herbage without making a great digression or falling on his
knees. The male, moreover, under the throat has a sort of goître, or
swelling, garnished with a rude pointed beard. The female wears a beard,
but has no goître. The neck is surmounted with a short, stiff, blackish
mane. The rest of the hair is of a pronounced gray.
The eland inhabits the marshy plains and banks of rivers; he dreads the
heat, and to escape it will often remain during the long summer days
plunged up to his neck in the cool waters. He lives with his comrades in
tolerably numerous herds. The first birth of the female is only one;
afterwards she produces two at a time. Frequently the eland attains a
prodigious stature. An individual killed in the Altaï measured four feet
and a half in height to the shoulder, and four feet and a third in
length. His flesh is said to be light and nourishing; his hide excellent
for making shoulder-belts; and his antlers are converted to the same
uses as the horns of the stag.
* * * * *
Among the hollow-horned ruminants I may mention the _Saiga_, a kind of
antelope which inhabits the Asiatic Steppes, and is met with even in
Poland. In figure he takes the poetical elegance of the gazelle; his
horns are of a clear yellow colour, and of a transparency which rivals
that of tortoise-shell. His forehead is covered with transversal folds;
he has no muzzle, properly speaking, but a kind of snout like that of a
hog. It is said that he drinks through his nostrils. The saigas travel
in herds of about two thousand each, of whom a certain number keep
always some distance in advance, in the rear, and on the flanks of the
main host, so as to watch over their security.
* * * * *
Another kind of gazelle, the _Dseren_, is peculiar to the Mongolian
Deserts, and named by the inhabitants the _yellow stag_. His stature is
little inferior to that of the deer. The female is without horns.
* * * * *
The _Moufflon_,[28] the original of our domestic sheep, sometimes strays
into the plains of Central Asia, but prefers the solitude of the
mountains. His general size is that of a small fallow deer, but though
clothed with hair instead of wool, he bears a closer resemblance to the
ram than to any other animal. In summer his hair is close, but in winter
it becomes rough, wavy, and slightly curled. On the upper part of the
body it is brown, but the under part and insides of the limbs are
whitish. The hair is considerably longer under the throat, and about the
neck and shoulders, than elsewhere.
We may refer, in this connection, to the _Egagra_, or wild goat, which
Cuvier considers to have been the original stock of the numerous races
of goats spread over various regions of the globe.
* * * * *
The Steppes nourish two species of _Rodents_: the Varying Hare (_Lepus
variabilis_), so called because he changes from tawny gray in summer to
white in winter; and a gray squirrel, which is probably only a variety
of our common European squirrel. He is not a climber and a "haunter of
the woods," like his congener. He abounds in the Mongolian Steppes,
where he lives in holes excavated under the earth, like the rats and
rabbits. He is, however, much more ingenious than the other
troglodyte-rodents; he shelters the entrance to his abode under a domed
roof, skilfully constructed of dry herbs woven together, and covered
with clay. These works closely resemble the mounds upheaved by moles.
* * * * *
The Carnaria of the _Felidæ_, or feline family, are wanting, or nearly
so, in the immense zone which we are considering. Except a species of
lynx, the _Chilason_ or _Chulon_, whose existence has been recognized in
the north of Tartary; and a few tigers which adventure into Mongolia, we
may say that the Asiatic Steppes, and, therefore, also those of Europe,
are exempt from these inconvenient guests. The most dangerous, and
almost the only enemy which man and the herbivora have reason to dread,
is the _Wolf_. This animal, now very rare in Western Europe, where his
race will soon disappear, is still found in great numbers in the wild
Lithuanian forests, in Russia, and all Northern and Central Asia. To
him, as to other animals of the _Canidæ_, cold appears more favourable
than heat, and it is in countries where the average temperature seldom
rises high he attains his greatest dimensions. In Lithuania wolves are
often met with which measure three feet and a half in length, without
the tail. Those of Northern Asia are also of a great size and nerve, of
terrible strength and audacity; they have been seen to pounce on a
sheep, and carry it off at full speed. They intrude in quest of victims
into the towns, the villages, and the encampments; combat to the last
with their enemies; and when vanquished die without a groan. Generally
they lurk in the woods and forests; but hunger, according to the
proverb, drives them forth from their lairs. Then they assemble in vast
hordes; they pursue, they assail, they defend, with ingenious tactic,
skilfully availing themselves of the disposition and accidents of the
ground. Their manoeuvres vary according to the nature of the game or
the enemy. In general, if a man preserve an upright bearing and a bold
countenance, they will not attack him; they follow him stealthily,
however, prepared to pounce upon him if, unhappily, he should stumble or
falter. But the wolves of Tartary, far from sharing in this deference
towards the lord of creation, display a singular bitterness against him.
"It is remarked," says the Jesuit missionary Huc, "that the Mongolian
wolves attack man more willingly than any animals; one sees them
sometimes galloping through innumerable flocks of sheep, without
inflicting any injury, in order to dash upon the shepherd. In the
neighbourhood of the Great Wall they frequently descend upon the
Tartar-Chinese villages, enter the farms, turn aside with contempt from
the domestic animals which they encounter, and penetrate even into the
interior of the houses to select their victims, seizing them invariably
by the throat and strangling them. Not a village in Tartary but has
every year to deplore some calamity of this kind. One might say that the
wolves of this country sought specially to avenge themselves on men for
the blood-thirsty war the Tartars wage against them." And it is true
that in their pursuit of these animals the inhabitants of the Steppes
display not only an ardour which would be legitimate, but a fierce and
uncontrollable cruelty.
[Illustration: CAPTURE OF A WOLF BY A KIRGHIZ HORSEMAN.]
"They pursue them everywhere _à outrance_," remarks M. Huc; "they regard
them as their chief enemy, on account of the terrible losses they
inflict upon their flocks. The news that a wolf has made his appearance
in the neighbourhood is for everybody a signal to 'mount and ride away.'
And as each cavalier has always two or three saddled horses in waiting
near his tent, the plain is speedily covered, as if by enchantment, with
a cloud of eager horsemen. Their weapon is a long rod.[29] Thus, in
whatever direction the wolf may seek to escape, he encounters a band of
determined adversaries, whose cry, as they precipitate themselves upon
their traditional foe, is 'No quarter!' There are no mountain-sides so
rugged or so difficult, that the nimble horses of the Tartars cannot
pursue him thither. The cavalier who finally overtakes the beast, flings
a lasso round his neck as he passes at full gallop, and drags him in his
rapid track to the nearest tent. There they firmly bind up his muzzle,
that they may proceed to torture him with impunity, closing up the
tragic scene by flaying him alive, and then setting him free. In the
summer the miserable animal will live in this condition for several
days; but in winter, exposed without his furry coat to the rigour of the
season, he dies almost immediately, frozen to death."[30]
It is generally considered that the wolf is an animal as cowardly as he
is fierce, because he flies before man when man does not retreat before
him, and because he kills unoffending animals. But we forget that man
acts in a precisely similar manner. Numerous experiments, and especially
those of Cuvier, have clearly proved that the wolf is fully capable of
being domesticated, is very sensible of kindly treatment, and will as
readily grow familiar with, and attached to, his master, as the best of
dogs. We must, therefore, refer his ferocity to the instinct of
self-preservation and of a vengeance too frequently excited; just as at
the Cape of Good Hope, the unfortunate Bosjesmen, formerly treated like
beasts by the Dutch colonists, though naturally of a peaceable
disposition, became active and cruel aggressors, and daring assailants,
against the enemies who had exhausted their patience.
* * * * *
Two other wild beasts of the dog genus, the _Korsak_ and the _Karogun_,
are eagerly hunted by the Tartars, especially by the Kirghiz. But the
chase, in this instance, is carried on for industrial purposes. The fur
of these animals is very valuable, and the Kirghiz hunters carry
thousands every year to the great market of Orenburg. The korsak is a
species of fox. In colour he closely resembles the jackal; but he has a
long tail, with a black tuft at the tip, and on each side of the head a
brown stripe extends from the eye to the muzzle. He ranges over all the
Steppes of Tartary, and lives in burrows like the foxes. The natives
pretend that he never drinks. He is a very handsome animal, and when,
towards the close of the sixteenth century, several individuals were
brought to Europe, he became quite the fashion. All the great ladies of
the court were desirous of possessing one, which they tended in their
chambers, and when promenading in the parks, often led about like a
spaniel. The mania was of brief duration, but it clearly showed how
easily the animal could be tamed and reared.
Buffon has confounded the karogun with the isatis or polar fox, and
other animals with the korsak. He is equally distinct from the one as
from the other, and the Kirghiz never make a mistake, though they hunt
for both in the same districts. His skin is of an ashen gray on the
back, and a pale yellow under the belly. His fur is not less precious
than that of the korsak.
* * * * *
The wild Ornithology of the Steppes comprises some migratory palmipedes,
a few gallinaceæ, and some predatory birds of the falcon family. Gulls,
wild ducks, herons, curlews, and especially pelicans, people the shores
of the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Caspian, with the banks of
the rivers that flow into them, and the neighbouring pools. The Cossack
and Kalmük chiefs, who now ardently cherish the love of falconry that
was so marked a trait in the character of the mediæval nobles, hunt
these birds with much enthusiasm, save, indeed, the pelican, whose flesh
is not edible.
The _herons_ form, in the order _Grallatores_ and the tribe
_Cultirostres_ (knife-like beak), a family (_Ardeidæ_) composed of
numerous species, several of which inhabit or frequent the marshes,
lakes, and streams of the region of the Steppes.
"O'er yonder lake the while,
What bird about that wooded isle,
With pendant feet and pinions slow,
Is seen his ponderous length to row?
'Tis the tall heron's awkward flight,
His crest of black, and neck of white,
Far sunk his gray-blue wings between,
And giant legs of murky green."[31]
The most remarkable species is the great white heron (_Ardea alba_), or
yellow-billed white egret, clothed in plumage of snowy white, with a
long yellow bill, long lank limbs, and black feet; length about forty
inches. On the nape and the croup his feathers are long and flexible,
wavy, and with tapering ends; they are eagerly sought after for purposes
of adornment. We may also mention the great bittern, the "bird of
desolation" (_Botauris stellaris_)--which the French expressively name
_eau-mère_, or "water-mother," and which derives its zoological
appellation from the Latin words _bos_ and _taureau_, in allusion to the
booming, bellowing sound of his hoarse voice. His plumage is of a pale
yellow, marked with brown and nest-coloured zig-zag patches and shades.
From the fulness of the feathers about his neck, he presents a very
quaint, and even ridiculous appearance; but he is a bird of courage, and
even of ferocity, striking with keen bill at the eyes of his antagonist.
When attacked by dogs or other carnivora, he will throw himself upon the
ground, and fight with both claws and bill unto the very last.
[Illustration: 1. Great Bittern. 2. White Heron or Egret. 3. Curlew.]
The _curlew_ is allied to the ibis, differing from it only in secondary
particulars, and notably in the form of his bill, which is thinner, and
rounded in its whole length. His tail resembles the hen's; the plumage
of the head, neck, and fore part of the back, is light reddish-gray,
streaked with dark-brown; the hind part of the back is white, with dark
narrow longitudinal markings; the tail, breast, and abdomen are white,
the former crossed with black bars, and the latter with dark marks and
spots of a similar shape to those on the back. The female lays four
excessively large pyriform eggs, about three inches long. The cry of the
curlew is loud, wild, and plaintive. These birds assemble in numerous
flocks, and live on the sea-coast and the marsh-border, feeding on worms
and molluscs. At breeding-time they separate into pairs, and haunt the
wild hills and dreary moorlands,--
"Remote from human sight,
In lonely pairs their vernal flight
They speed o'er heathy mountain rude,
On some waste marsh's solitude,
To the tall grass or bristling reed
Their wild unnestled young to breed."
The species of _Pelican_ which inhabits the shores of the Black and
Caspian Seas is the Common (_Pelicanus Onocrotalus_). We must not pass
unnoticed this well-known wader, which has for ages been invested with
an atmosphere of song and fable, and which is specially remarkable for
the bright yellow membranous pouch attached to the lower mandible of his
long robust bill. This pouch, says Broderip, will hold a considerable
number of fish, and thus enables the bird to dispose of the superfluous
quantity which may be taken during fishing excursions, either for his
own consumption or for the nourishment of his young. "In feeding the
nestlings--and the male is said to supply the wants of the female, when
sitting, in the same manner--the under mandible is pressed against the
neck and breast, to assist the bird in disgorging the contents of the
capacious pouch; and during this action the red nail of the upper
mandible would appear to come in contact with the breast, thus laying
the foundation, in all probability, for the _fable_ that the pelican
nourishes her young with her blood, and for the attitude in which the
imagination of painters has placed the bird in books of emblems, with
the blood spirting from the wounds made by the terminating nail of the
upper mandible into the gaping mouths of her offspring."
It is usually in the evening or the morning that these birds gather
about the lonely shores to fish in company, like a party of sociable
Izaak Waltons, and proceeding, as Nordmann remarks, upon a systematic
plan, which is apparently the result of a kind of concerted agreement.
They select a suitable station--a shallow bay with a smooth bottom.
There they arrange themselves in a half-circle, the bill turned towards
the ground, and keeping at a distance of from ten to twelve feet. With
their wings they beat the water hurriedly, and sometimes plunge in up to
their middle, gradually wading towards the beach, and driving the fish
before them into a very narrow channel. Now the feast commences, and
other birds never fail to profit by the ingenious labours of the
pelican. Nordmann counted, on one occasion, forty-nine pelicans fishing
together in this fashion on the shores of the Black Sea.
"Besides these forty-nine," he adds, "there were assembled on the heaps
of algæ, confervæ, and shells cast ashore by the sea, hundreds of
sea-mews, sea-swallows, sea-daws, preparing to snatch the fish out of
the water, and to divide amongst themselves the remains of the banquet.
Finally, several grebes swimming in the area circumscribed by the
semicircle of fishers, while this space was still sufficiently broad,
played their part at the welcome feast, frequently plunging after the
scared and terrified fish."
The _bustard_ and the _grouse_, or heather-cock, are common enough in
the prairies of Central Asia. Crows and numerous birds of prey also
flock thither in search of their dead or living prey. Travellers speak
of a _black eagle_ of Mongolia which the Mongols and Kalkas train to
hunt the _moufflon_, the yellow goat, and the saiga. We cannot find the
bird described under this name by any naturalist, nor can we determine
whether he is an eagle properly so called, or whether he is not rather
the cosmopolitan black kite (_milvus ater_), which rises so fiercely on
his plumed wings,
"And hunts the air for plunder."
We may mention, as also proper to Central Asia, the _Aquila bifasciata_
of Dr. Gray, and several species of buzzards, hawks, and falcons. These
_Raptores_ live very peacefully in the desert solitudes, where none
disturb them; and so little do they fear man, that they venture into the
Mongol encampments and carry off the provisions destined for the
travellers' refreshment. An incident of this nature is recorded by the
Abbé Huc, who, with his companions, was at the time preparing to sup on
a quarter of a kid skilfully "dished up" by their Tartar neophyte,
Samdadchiemba.
"We had just seated ourselves," says M. Huc, "in a triangle on the
grassy sward, having in our midst the lid of the pot which served
instead of a dish, when suddenly a noise like thunder broke over our
heads. A great eagle fell like an arrow on our supper, and rose again
with the same rapidity, carrying off in his claws some slices of kid.
When we had recovered from our surprise, we had nothing better to do
than laugh at the adventure. However, Samdadchiemba could not laugh, not
he; he was exceedingly wroth, not on account of the stolen kid, but
because the eagle, in flying off, had insolently buffeted him with the
tip of his wing....
[Illustration: THE EAGLE OF THE STEPPES, AND THE ANTELOPE SAIGA.]
"The eagle," adds our author, "is found almost everywhere in the deserts
of Tartary. You see him sometimes hovering and wheeling round and round
in the air; sometimes, perched upon a hillock in the middle of the
plain, he remains there for a long time as motionless as a sentinel.
Often we encounter him on the ground, apparently larger than an ordinary
sheep; when we draw near, he is compelled, before he can rise into the
air, to make a long detour, agitating his heavy wings; after which,
succeeding in lifting himself a little above the ground, he soars aloft
at pleasure."
* * * * *
The Erpetological fauna of the Steppes is little known, and is probably
very scanty. Unfortunately, this region has not been explored by
scientific naturalists, and the unprofessional travellers who have
visited it do not appear to have met with any reptiles which seemed to
them worthy of detailed notice. Atkinson, however, speaks of the stony
ridges of the plain as "swarming with _serpents_."--"I observed," he
says,[32] "four varieties: A black one, three feet eight inches long,
and about one inch and an eighth in diameter. Another was of slaty-gray
colour, from two to three feet long, and smaller in diameter than the
black snake. This breed was numerous, and often difficult to see, they
so nearly resembled the colour of some of the rocks. We also found some
of an ashy-green and black, with deep crimson specks on the sides; as
they moved along in the sun the colours were most brilliant." Another,
which Mr. Atkinson's companions killed, was of a dark-brown, with
greenish and red marks on the sides, and evidently very venomous. He
measured five feet two inches and a half without his head, and four
inches and a quarter round his body.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE INHABITANTS OF THE STEPPES:--TARTARS, COSSACKS, KALMÜKS, KIRGHIZ,
MONGOLS.
The Steppes of Tartary and Mongolia, interrupted, says Humboldt,[33] by
chains of mountains of various aspects, separate the ruder peoples of
Northern Asia from the primitive races, which have been for ages
civilized, of Hindostan and Thibet. Their existence has influenced the
destinies of mankind in various important ways. They have rolled back
the populations towards the south, and more than the Himálaya, more than
the snow-crowned peaks of Serinagur and Goorkha, have raised an obstacle
to the alliances of peoples, while opposing, in the north of Asia,
insuperable barriers to the refinement of manners and the genius of the
arts.
But it is not only as barriers that History should regard the plains of
Central Asia; they have several times let loose on earth a torrent of
calamity and devastation. The pastoral races of the Steppes--Mongols,
Getæ, Alans, and Huns--have convulsed the world. If, in the course of
ages, intellectual culture has directed its course from east to west,
like the vivifying light of the sun, Barbarism at a later period has
followed in the same track, when threatening to plunge all Europe into
darkness. A people of tawny shepherds, Tou-Kin (that is to say, Turkish)
in origin, the Hioung-Nou, inhabited, under tents of skin, the elevated
Steppe of the Gobi. Long formidable to the Chinese power, a horde of the
Hioung-Nou was driven back towards the south into Central Asia. The
impulse which they gave spread uninterruptedly even into the native
country of the Fins, on the borders of the Oural, and thence the Huns,
the Avars, the Chasurs, and various mixtures of Asiatic races, poured
forth in furious violence. The Hunnish hosts first appeared on the
banks of the Volga, then in Pannonia, and finally on the banks of the
Marne, and on those of the Po, ravaging the beautiful fields where, from
the days of Antenor, the genius of man had accumulated its glorious
monuments. Thus from the Mongolian deserts blew a pestiferous wind,
which choked even in the Cisalpine plains the delicate blossom of art,
the object of such tender and continual cares.
Our English traveller, Atkinson, has called the Steppes "the cradle of
invasions;" and this not only because from their solitudes issued the
hordes which devastated Europe in the first centuries of the Middle
Ages, but because Russia and Austria have found therein those truculent
soldiers of repulsive aspect who, in their hands, have become, even in
our own day, the scourge of the free and civilized nations they would
fain have subjugated.
In the present day the Steppes of Eastern Europe and of Asia are still
the asylum of savagery, if not of barbarism. The tribes scattered over
them are more or less closely allied to that fraction of the human
family which ethnographists designate under the name of the "Turanian."
Those of the East belong exclusively to the Mongolian branch, and those
of the West partly to the Mongolian and partly to the Turkish, more or
less modified by their mixture with the Slave branch of the great
Caucasian family. To all these peoples we commonly apply the term
Tartaro, or Tartars, which originally "was a name of the Mongolic races,
but through their political ascendancy in Asia after Chingis-Khan (A.D.
1227), it became usual to call all the tribes which were under Mongolian
sway by the name of Tartar."[34] It now really belongs to the small
tribe of Turkic origin which, after occupying Turkistan, has spread even
into the Crimea. We must distinguish from it, however, the Cossacks, or
Kosaks, who inhabit the Ukraine, the banks of the Don and the Dnieper,
and who are more closely related to the Slave family than the Mongolian
race.
We shall pass in rapid review the principal hordes which inhabit the
Steppes, from the western border to the eastern extremity of these
deserts.
The first tribe which we encounter on the shores of the Sea of Azov and
the Black Sea is that of the Tartar-Nogáis, who formerly lived
north-east of the Caspian. "Pressed by the Kalmüks, or Mongolic tribe,
the Nogáis advanced westward as far as Astrachan. Peter I. transferred
them thence to the north of the Caucasian mountains, where they still
graze their flocks on the shores of the Kuban and the Kuma." Of late
years, however, they have begun to settle themselves in permanent
habitations, owing to the exertions of a French emigré, Count Maison,
who was appointed their governor in 1808.
They now occupy (according to Madame Hommaire de Hell) all the territory
comprised between the Sea of Azov and the river of Malochnia-Vodi. They
number about 32,000 souls, spread over seventy villages. Their huts are
small, with a roof constructed of beams of timber, covered with reeds,
which are afterwards loaded with clay and ashes. They occupy themselves
wholly in rearing horses and cattle. The horses of the Kalmük-Kirghiz
breed are of moderate stature, but nimble and robust. All the year round
they roam across the plains, and in winter seek their provender beneath
the snow. The horned cattle are small and puny, the cows yield but a
poor supply of milk, and are of scarcely any value.
The aged Nogáis shave the hair entirely off; the young people preserve a
single tuft on the top of the head. This custom compels them to wear
constantly a bonnet of wool or lamb's skin. A short caftan over a shirt
of cotton or woollen, bound round the waist by a leather belt; loose,
wide trousers; in winter a pelisse of sheep's skin and a kind of hood
enveloping the head and shoulders, compose the dress of the males. As
for the women, they wear above the chemise a caftan of cloth, girded
about the form by a large belt ornamented with great metal buckles; they
likewise figure in Turkish trousers and slippers, with a long white veil
fastened round the head, and allowed to fall upon the shoulders; small
silver rings adorn the fingers and the nose; heavy ear-drops hang from
their ears, the two being frequently linked together by a chain passing
under the chin. The young girls dress their hair in a multiplicity of
curls, and instead of the veil wear a small red fez, garnished with
pieces of metal and all kinds of trinkets.
The Nogáis are Mohammedans, of the sect called Sunnites (or believers in
the "Sunna," the sayings and aphorisms traditionally attributed to the
Prophet). Their name is derived from that of their first chief, the
grandson of Chingis-Khán, who, about 1260, declared himself independent
of the Kapchakian empire, and established himself with his warriors on
the borders of the Black Sea.
* * * * *
The Kosaks (or Cossacks) are, as we have said, Slaves rather than
Tartars. They have blue eyes, red hair, thick lips, a flat nose. Nimble,
robust, indefatigable, skilful horsemen, they furnish the Russian army
with a formidable host of irregulars. Some have fixed their homes in the
towns, but the majority inhabit the villages or _stanitzas_ scattered
over the Steppes. Very few are agriculturists. Either they devote
themselves to breeding horses and cattle, or live on the small pension
allowed them for their military services. Nearly all the young and hardy
of the males have no other trade but that of arms. The Cossack
chieftains, their Hetmans, or Attamans, derive their authority directly
from the Czar. Their religion is that of the Russian Greek Church; and
they are, we believe, the only Christians in the entire zone of the
Steppes.
Bold and resolute robbers in time of war, the Cossacks "at home" are
peaceable, kindly-natured, and more honest than the Russian Mongiks. The
erroneous ideas which still prevail respecting their character are
mainly due to French prejudices, excited by the disastrous events of
1814 and 1815, when the jingle of their arms resounded in the streets of
Paris. But they are not really so black as they have been painted. The
traveller passes through the country which they inhabit with the utmost
security, and is received in their stanitzas with a hospitable welcome.
These stanitzas, if we may credit Madame Hommaire de Hell, present a far
more agreeable appearance than the Russian villages. They consist of
small wooden houses, gaily painted. There is but one story, which is
surrounded by a miniature gallery, and seems expressly constructed to
please the eye. The interior is exceedingly neat and pretty, indicating
an intelligence and an idea of comfort which the Russians never exhibit.
You will find it enriched with towels, dishes of delft ware, forks, and
all the most necessary utensils. Usually two huts are built in one
block; the first, which we have just described, is occupied for a summer
residence; it contains, generally, one room hung with paper of a lively
design, and adorned with images, flowers, and trophies of arms, which is
reserved for state occasions and the entertainment of strangers. The
second hut, built of dried clay, resembles the Russian _kates_,
consisting of a single chamber, where all the household huddle together
during the winter to shelter themselves from the cold.
The traveller seldom sees in these stanitzas any but women and children.
With the exception of a few gray veterans, who have purchased by forty
years of service the right of dying under the home-roof, the entire male
population is under arms. Thus all the work falls upon the shoulders of
the women, who must repair the houses, cleanse and dry the furs, take
care of the children, and watch the cattle.
The Cossack soldiers, regulars and irregulars, are the guardians of the
Steppes. To them is intrusted the security of the traveller, who is much
exposed to the attacks of nomadic Turkomen, whose only occupation is
robbery. The surveillance of these immense plains is not so difficult,
however, nor does it necessitate so large a force as you might suppose.
Small watch-posts, or platforms, of extreme simplicity of design, are
raised at intervals on the higher grounds; they consist of four long
stout poles planted in the earth, and supporting a timber floor, which
is sometimes sheltered by a roof of timber. These are the observatories,
the prospect-towers of the Cossacks, who can thus obtain a survey over
an immense sweep of country, and exchange signals with one another. The
horsemen always remain stationed under the platform, ready to leap into
the saddle and to gallop wherever their presence may be required.
* * * * *
[Illustration: COSSACK HORSEMEN IN THE STEPPES.]
In the Steppes of the Caspian Sea the Cossacks give place to the
Kalmüks, or Olöts, a people of the Mongolic race, who originally
inhabited Turkistan, but abandoned that country, in 1778, for the banks
of the Volga. Their life is wholly nomadic. They encamp under tents
called _kibitkas_, formed of a trellis-work of wood covered with thick
felt. In stature they do not often exceed the middle height; they are
thin and ugly, with a swarthy skin, a large flat countenance, little
eyes, broad nose, thick lips, and frizzled beard. They are inoffensive,
hospitable like all Eastern people, but idle and cunning. Their costume
differs but little from that of the Tartars-Nogáis. They profess the
Lamaii religion, and obey the chiefs whom they themselves elect, and who
bear the title of khans. The Russian Government levies among the Kalmük
tribes encamped on its territory a body of irregular troops, whom it
employs in the defence of its eastern and southern frontiers.
According to Madame de Hell, the Kalmüks are as friendly as the Cossacks
in their reception of a stranger. "The last encampment," she says,
"where we passed the night, appeared to us one of the most considerable
which we had hitherto met with. The country, almost transformed, was no
longer saddened by the great sandy plains of the Caspian Sea and the
Manitch.... Herds of horses, camels, and oxen furrowed the surface of
the Steppe, announcing the wealth of the hordes to which they belonged.
No hostile manifestation on the part of the latter occurred to disturb
our security. Happy in receiving us in the very midst of their tents,
these good Kalmüks never attempted to rob us even of the most trifling
article. Their desires and their wants are so limited! To tame a wild
horse, to roam from one Steppe to another on their camels, to smoke, and
to drink _koumis_, to shut out the cold airs of winter with smoke and
ashes, and to observe devoutly the superstitious practices of a religion
which they cannot understand--such is their whole life."
At intervals, the traveller who crosses the Steppes of the Caspian
encounters with astonishment, in the most dreary localities, far from
every Cossack village and Kalmük kibitka, a group of men, women, and
children with bronzed complexions, with features strongly defined,
covered with squalid and grotesque rags, dragging their naked feet over
the damp and burning soil, and leading small vehicles loaded with
implements and utensils of every kind. He easily recognizes in these
beings of sinister mien, audacious mendicants, skilful thieves,
musicians, blacksmiths, conjurers--what shall I say?--the _débris_, in a
word, of that once great, and perhaps powerful race, now so degraded and
corrupt, whose problematical history is the despair of the scholar. The
scorn and mistrust of every nation--impatient of all discipline, all
education--without law, without religion, without country--these men
speak a language which none can understand. Of their real name they are
themselves ignorant, and they accept with indifference that which is
imposed upon them in different countries: in the East, _Romany_; in
Moldavia, _Tsiganes_; in Italy, _Zingari_; in Spain, _Gilanos_; in
France, _Bohemians_; in England, _Gipsies_.[35] The Germans call them
_Zigeuner_; the Dutch, expressively but intolerantly, _Heathens_; the
Persians, _Sisech_; the Hindus, _Kavachee_; the Danes and Swedes,
_Tatars_; and the Arabs, _Haramé_. Their origin has been a theme of
speculation for centuries, and all that seems certain, after a vast
amount of research and discussion, is, that the cradle of the race was
India. To what Indian people they should be affiliated is still
doubtful; whether to the Zuts or Djalts of the north; the Tshingani, who
dwelt near the mouth of the Indus; or the Tshandalas, chronicled by name
in the laws of Menou.
We know that their first immigration into Europe occurred about the
close of the tenth century, for we find them referred to in a paraphrase
of the book of Genesis, written by an Austrian monk, about 1122. They
are there spoken of as "Ishmaelites and braziers, who go peddling
through the wide world, having neither house nor home, cheating the
people with their tricks, and secretly deceiving mankind." In the
fourteenth century a considerable body settled in Wallachia, Hungary,
and the island of Cyprus. Next, they invaded Germany, broke into
Switzerland, and appeared in Bologna and other Italian cities. Like a
besieging army they set down before Paris in 1427, but were not suffered
to enter its precincts. A few years later they crossed into England, and
gradually they overspread the whole of Europe. Their own account of
themselves represented that they came from "Little Egypt;" that about
four thousand of their number had been compulsorily baptized by the
king, and condemned to seven years' wanderings, while the remainder had
been slain. At first, their wealth, their pomp, and their supposed
penitence secured them a favourable reception; but when their wealth
was dissipated, their pomp decayed, and their penitence discovered to be
a sham, a storm of obloquy broke over their heads. Every European
government levelled the most arbitrary decrees against them, which
continued in force down to the middle of the eighteenth century. Various
attempts have since been made to civilize and incorporate them with the
general body of the population, but these have obtained a very limited
success. They still remain a race apart, with their own language (Romany
Tschib), their own traditions, their own customs, their distinct
personal characteristics. They still remain a race cursed with the curse
of perpetual restlessness; a mysterious impulse constrains them to
wander; they live secluded from all other peoples; an atmosphere of
secrecy enshrouds their inner life, their language, and their creed.
They are gifted with a remarkable love of and capacity for music, and a
strange wild charm invests their own gipsy-melodies. Their character is
a grotesque combination of the most opposite qualities; for they are
brave and yet cowardly; revengeful, yet loyal; treacherous, yet capable
of the most passionate attachment; indolent, yet energetic; chaste, yet
fond of licentious songs and dances. In a word, they are a problem to
the ethnologist, the moralist, and the historical student; and fence
themselves about with so impenetrable a reserve, that we may well doubt
whether the full truth respecting them will ever be ascertained.[36]
The Tsiganes or Romany are very numerous in Southern Russia. They pass
from town to town, from village to village, sometimes begging or
stealing, sometimes exercising their peculiar trades and industries, and
providing for their wants more honestly. They never establish themselves
permanently in any place. They halt wherever the evening shades may
chance to overtake them, stretch a few fragments of woollen stuff across
the poles of their vehicles to serve for tents, kindle a fire with
herbs, twigs, and dry branches, partly to cook their food, and partly to
scare away the wild beasts, and fling themselves down pell-mell to
sleep on mats or the naked earth. When morning dawns, they resume their
life-long march--giving no thought to the future, no dream to the
past--without object, hope, or purpose.
[Illustration: NIGHT ENCAMPMENT OF GIPSIES IN THE STEPPE.]
The Steppes of the interior of Asia, from the Aral river to the Ala-Tau
mountains, are occupied by the great nation of the Kirghiz, who have,
from time immemorial, been divided into the Great, Middle, and Little
Hordes. To the former belongs the territory north of the Ala-Tau, with
portions of China and Tartary. They are subject to the sovereigns of the
countries in which they dwell. The Middle Horde inhabits the district
between the Ishim, Irtish, Lake Balkhush, and Khokan. The Little (and
far most numerous) Horde wanders over the grassy plains bounded by the
Yamba and the Ural, Turkistan (now a Russian province), and the country
of the Middle Horde (or Siberian Kirghizes). Altogether, the Kirghizes
number upwards of one and a quarter million of souls. They are of
Turco-Tartaric origin, and Southern Siberia is their mother country.[37]
Though owing a nominal allegiance to the Russian Czar and the Chinese
Emperor, they are virtually independent, and obey only their sultans or
chiefs. They are frequently at war. Many live wholly by brigandage;
suddenly descending, under cover of night, upon the richest _aouls_, or
villages, slaying all who resist, and carrying off horses, cattle, and
all objects of value, and men, women and children, whom they sell as
slaves. These nocturnal razzias are designated, in the Kirghiz language,
_barantas_.
The _yourt_, or tent of these nomades, resembles the kibitka of the
Kalmüks. We borrow a description of one belonging to a Kirghiz chief
from Mr. Atkinson's entertaining pages.
"It was formed," he says,[38] "of willow trellis-work, put together with
untanned strips of skin, made into compartments which fold up. It was a
circle of thirty-four feet in diameter, five feet high to the springing
of the dome, and twelve feet in the centre. This dome is formed of bent
rods of willow, one and a quarter inch diameter, put into the
mortice-hole of a ring about four feet across, which secures the top of
the dome, admits light, and lets out the smoke. The lower ends of the
willow-rods are tied with leathern thongs to the top of the trellis-work
at the sides, which renders it quite strong and secure. The whole is
then covered with large sheets of _voilock_, made of wool and camel's
hair, fitting close, making it water-tight and warm. A small aperture in
the trellis-work forms a doorway, over which a piece of _voilock_ hangs
down and closes it; but in the daytime this is rolled up and secured on
the top of the _yourt_.
"The furniture and fittings of these dwellings are exceedingly simple;
the fire being made on the ground in the centre of the _yourt_, directly
opposite to the door _voilocks_ are spread: on these stand sundry boxes,
which contain the different articles of clothing, pieces of Chinese
silk, tea, dried fruits, _ambas_ of silver (small squares, about two and
a half inches long, one inch and a half wide, and about three-tenths of
an inch thick). Some of the Kirghiz possess large quantities of these
_ambas_, which are carefully hoarded up. Above these boxes are bales of
Bokharian and Persian carpets, some of great beauty and value. In
another part of the _yourt_ is the large _koumis_ sack, completely
covered up with _voilock_ to keep it warm and aid the fermentation.
"And near this bag stands a large leathern bottle, sometimes holding
four gallons, often much ornamented; so are the small bottles made to
carry on the saddle. In another place stands the large iron caldron, and
the trivet on which it is placed when used for cooking in the _yourt_.
There are usually half-a-dozen Chinese wooden bowls, often beautifully
painted and japanned. These are used to drink the _koumis_ from; some of
them hold three pints, others more. On entering a Kirghiz _yourt_ in
summer, one of the Chinese bowls full of _koumis_ is presented to each
guest. It is considered impolite to return the vessel before emptying
it, and a good Kirghiz is never guilty of this impropriety.
"The saddles are placed on the bales of carpets. Rich horse-trappings
being highly prized by the wealthy Kirghiz, many of their saddles are
beautiful and costly. If of Kirghiz workmanship, they are decorated with
silver inlaid on iron, in chaste ornamental designs, and have velvet
cushions; the bridles and other trappings covered with small iron plates
inlaid in the same manner.
"Leathern thongs and ropes made of camel's hair are hung up on the
trellis-work, common saddles, saddle-cloths, and leathern _tchimbar_.
This part of a Kirghiz costume is frequently made of black velvet,
splendidly embroidered with silk, more especially the back elevation."
Such is the dwelling of a Kirghiz chief in the Steppe.
[Illustration: KIRGHIZ AOUL OR VILLAGER.]
The national garment of the Kirghiz is the _khalat_, a kind of pelisse,
very long and very full, with large sleeves, in silk or cashmere, and of
the most dazzling colours; but the poorer warriors substitute for this
state dress a horse-skin jacket. Breeches fastened below the hips by a
girdle of wool or cashmere, high-heeled madder-coloured boots, and a
fox-skin cap, rising into a cone on the top, and lined inside with
crimson cloth, complete his costume. His weapons are the spear, the gun,
the axe, and the cutlass. The women wear a long and copious robe, and a
veil of numerous folds, surmounted by a lofty calico head-dress, a part
of which falls over the shoulders and covers up the neck.
The Kirghiz are fierce, cunning, and often cruel, but the life of a
guest is esteemed sacred. They have not so much respect, however, for
his property, and do not always resist the temptation of plundering him
of any article which suits their fancy. Equestrian exercises and
falconry are their favourite amusements. They love the chase, indeed,
with a true sportsman's passion; they love it for itself rather than for
the game it secures, for they have no greater dainty than a dish of
mutton. Their mode of preparing this viand is exquisitely simple. They
content themselves with skinning the animal, cutting it into quarters,
and plunging it into a pot, where they keep it boiling in a great
quantity of water for a couple of hours. Generally, to prevent the loss
of any portion, they cook with the meat the animal's intestines, without
even taking the trouble of cleaning them. The guests arrange themselves
in a circle on carpets of felt; the men in the foremost rank, the women
and children behind them. The smoking quarters of mutton are removed
from the pot; each man draws his knife, slashes off a slice, eats a
portion, and passes the remainder to his wife and children, who speedily
finish it. The dogs come in for the bones. Afterwards, bowls of the
liquor in which the meat has been boiled are handed round, and not a
Kirghiz but swallows the greasy broth with delight. This broth, koumis,
and tea are his customary drink; the tea is not made in the European
fashion, but becomes a veritable soup, prepared with milk, flour,
butter, and salt. In every well-to-do aoul the women keep constantly
upon the fire a vessel full of this beverage, which they offer to
visitors, just as the Turks serve up coffee, the Spaniards, chocolate,
and the French, wine.
* * * * *
To the north of the Great Horde, in the government of Irkutsk (Siberia),
we meet with the Agro-Mongolian people of the Buriäts, numbering about
35,000 families. They are given to Chamanism, an idolatrous worship
widely spread through Eastern Siberia. Their supreme divinity inhabits
the sun, and reigns over a host of lesser gods.
* * * * *
Finally, between Lake Baïkal and the Altaï Mountains to the north, the
Ala-Tau mountains west, the Great Wall of China south, and the sea east,
stretches the immense territory commonly known as Mongolia, and
inhabited in part by the tribes which represent the Mongol type in all
its primitive purity. This great desert, where grassy lands alternate
with dry and sandy or saline plains, was formerly the seat of a
flourishing empire, established by Chingis-Khán in 1227, which gave
birth to the three Mongol kingdoms of Krim, Kasan, and Astrachan.
Mongolic empires, at a later period, arose in China, Turkistan, Siberia,
Southern Russia, and Persia. The Mongolian dynasty lost its hold on
China in 1360, and a century later was driven out of Russia. In Central
Asia it was rehabilitated in 1369, by the illustrious Timur; but a
hundred years afterwards the empire was again crushed by its own weight.
Baber, a descendant of Timur, conquered India, and erected there a
Mongolian throne, which endured until the soldiers of Great Britain
defeated Tippoo Saib and captured Delhi. Most Mongolic tribes are now
under the rule of the nations whom they once had conquered, the Tungusic
sovereigns of China, the Russian Czars, and the Turkish Sultans.[39]
The ruins of Mongolian grandeur are still visible in those solitary
cities, which the traveller in the desert discovers half overwhelmed in
sand. "We met," says the Abbé Huc, "with an imposing and majestic
memorial of antiquity. It was a great city, desolate and abandoned. The
crenellated ramparts, the watch-towers, the four great gates, situated
at the four cardinal points, were all in perfect preservation; but all
was buried three-fourths deep in the ground, and covered with a thick
sward. We entered its vast precinct with a profound emotion of awe and
melancholy. We saw neither _débris_ nor ruins, but only the outline of a
beautiful and spacious city, wrapped in grass and weeds as in a funeral
shroud." Similar relics of the past are scattered over the deserts of
Mongolia, but everything connected with their origin is enveloped in
shadow.
The Mongolian family includes several branches, each subdivided into
tribes, obeying chiefs of unequal rank. The most numerous people are the
Kalkas, who occupy all the northern districts. The Mongols of the south,
dwelling near the Great Wall, have been affected in their habits and
manners by the neighbourhood of the Chinese; they have become
industrious, and engage eagerly in commercial affairs. But the Kalkas,
and the other tribes of the Great Gobi, are still nomadic, reckless, and
indolent. Their religion is Buddhism; they profess for its head, the
living Buddha or Great Lama (Dalai-lama, or Ocean-priest--_i.e._, wide
as the ocean), a reverence and a blind obedience, which they also pay to
the inferior lamas. "Under an external aspect of savagery," says Huc,
"the Mongol hides a character full of mildness and kindly feeling; he
passes suddenly from the wildest and most extravagant gaiety to a
sadness which has nothing forbidding. Timid to excess in his ordinary
life, when impelled by fanaticism or revenge, he displays an
irresistible impetuosity of courage. He is simple and credulous as a
child, and passionately loves stories and legends of the marvellous."
The Mongols are ugly in feature, of the middle height, agile and robust;
their sight is wonderfully keen, their hearing of an extraordinary
acuteness.[40] Their wants are restricted to the indispensable
necessities of life; of luxury they have no conception; their few
pleasures are easily enjoyed; their instincts lead them rather in the
path of good than of evil, and their defects, to use an expression of M.
Huc's, are those of ill-trained children. They need, perhaps, but a
well-directed impulse to develop their intellect, and guide them onward
to a far higher civilization. In the great human family, it is true that
as yet they do but fill the children's place, and it is impossible to
say whether their national genius is capable of any great or lasting
work.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
BOOK II.
_THE DESERTS OF SAND:--THE DESERTS OF EUROPE AND AFRICA._
CHAPTER I.
THE RAINLESS DESERT--THE BED OF A SEA--THE DEAD SEA.
The Sandy Deserts may with equal, nay, with greater accuracy, be
entitled Salt Deserts, Rainless Deserts, Seas of Sand; for they present
at one and the same time all these characters, and the three last,
though less generally known than the first, are the most essential.
The soil is generally covered with a thick stratum of sand; but in
several places it also exhibits great walls of rock, and in others
masses of rolled or shattered pebbles. The subsoil is nearly always of a
gypseous or calcareous nature, rarely clayey; wherever it is porous and
permeable, it is impregnated with salt, which rises to the surface, or
is held in solution in the subterranean basins of water, the thermal
springs, the ponds, and the lakes. The saline efflorescences of the
deserts of Persia and Oriental Asia not only suffice for the wants of
the inhabitants, but supply the great Asiatic caravans with their
principal article of exportation.
The atmosphere of the Deserts is not less dry than their sands and
rocks. The sky wears a perennial azure, more or less veiled in haze, or
rather spotted with a few clouds. Johnstone represents them, in his
admirable "Physical Atlas," by two white unequal bands, characterised
as "Rainless Districts." Of these the larger occupies all the northern
region of Africa, and the greater portion of Arabia, Syria, Persia, and
Beloochistan, embracing an area of 80° of longitude over 17° of
latitude. The other extends over the table-lands of Thibet and the Gobi.
It is in form an irregular ellipsis, obliquely inclined from south-west
to north-east. Its length is about 1100 leagues; its width, 450. From
the former it is only separated by a narrow belt. In the region marked
by these two species rain is an extraordinary phenomenon; several years
will pass without the clouds shedding a single drop of water. This
permanent, and nearly absolute, aridity, establishes a very marked
difference between the Deserts properly so called, and the Landes,
Steppes, and Prairies, condemned as these are during the hot season to a
deadly dryness, but in winter inundated with rain or covered with snow;
and in spring converted into immense marshes, where an exuberant
vegetation makes its appearance, frequently capable of resisting the
action of the summer sun and the withering winds.
In the Rainless Districts vegetation is a nullity; it becomes reduced to
a very small number of saline plants and dwarf bushes, nourished by the
brackish waters which, the soil conceals. Finally, the desert region may
not only be compared to a sea in its aspect and immensity, but it is a
true sea, or at least the bed of an ancient sea, which formerly
communicated, and, perhaps, was confounded with the Mediterranean, and
whose drying up, though still incomplete, took place at a recent
geological epoch. We may reasonably conclude that, owing to a series of
gradual upheavals, this sea was at first broken up into vast lagoons;
that most of these successively disappeared, but not without leaving
some certain evidences of the primitive submersion of the continent. "If
we might hazard a conjecture," says a recent writer,[41] "it would be
that the same convulsions and upheavals which at the close of the
tertiary epoch indented the southern coasts of Europe, at the same time
drained the ocean which hitherto had rolled over the plains of the
Sahara, and submerged the low-lying lands, which probably united the
Canaries and Madeira to the mainland." To a similar cause must be
attributed the existence of the subterranean waters, springs, ponds, and
salt lakes, of which I have already spoken, and of the inland seas--the
Caspian, the Sea of Aral, and the Dead Sea; while the Black Sea and its
offshoots, the Sea of Azov and the Sea of Marmora, must have had the
same origin. I shall discuss this subject further when describing the
Great Sahara.
In Eastern and Central Asia, the Sandy or Salt Deserts alternate with
the Steppes, and with lands susceptible of a certain amount of
cultivation. The vast region which geographers designate the Great Gobi,
or the Shamo, is intersected by many grassy Steppes and even by fertile
fields, where the sedentary Mongols, and especially the Artons, yearly
sow and gather hemp, millet, and buckwheat. The sombre picture of "a
barren plain of shifting sand blown into high ridges where the summer
sun is scorching, no rain falls, and when thick fog occurs it is only
the precursor of fierce winds,"[42] is true only of special districts,
such as the Han-hai, or "Dry Sea," or the Desert of Sarkha. There, for
instance, we meet with no other vegetable than the salsolæ, or
salt-worts, which flourish around the small saline pools. Of these
pools, when seen from a distance, Mr. Atkinson notices a remarkable
characteristic: the salt crystals which accrete upon their banks
frequently reflect the orange or crimson hues of flowers, and resemble
glowing rubies set in a rich mounting.
As we advance in a south-easterly direction, we find the features of the
desert region more prominently marked.
Immense plains of sand, with a bare and brackish surface, called
_Bejaban_, traverse the whole of Persia, from the Caspian Sea to the
Indus. They comprise the Deserts of Kerusan, Seistan, Beloochistan, and
Mekran, rich in salts with a basis of soda. "The coasts of the Persian
Gulf," as Mrs. Somerville remarks, "are burning hot sandy solitudes, so
completely barren, that the country from Bassora to the Indus, a
distance of 1200 miles, is nearly a sterile waste. Three-tenths of
Persia is a desert, and the tableland is nearly a wide scene of
desolation. A great salt-desert occupies 27,000 square miles between
Irak and Khorasan, of which the soil is a stiff clay, covered with
efflorescence of common salt and nitre, often an inch thick, varied only
by a few saline plants and patches of verdure in the hollows. This
dreary waste joins the large sandy and equally dreary desert of Kerman.
Khelat, the capital of Beloochistan, is 7000 feet above the level of the
sea; round it there is cultivation, but the greater part of that country
is a lifeless plain, over which the brick-red sand is drifted by the
north wind into ridges like the waves of the sea, often twelve feet
high, without a vestige of vegetation. The blast of the desert, whose
hot and pestilential breath is fatal to man and animals, renders these
dismal sands impassable at certain seasons."
The Desert of Mekran is separated from that of Moultan by the Indus.
That which lies to the east of Kom, in the centre of Persia, is more
than sixty leagues in extent. Of Persia, M. Forgues observes that the
actual reality differs strangely from those glowing eastern landscapes
which poets and romancists love to paint. Even in those provinces where
the winter rains encourage the growth of vegetation, the scene would
hardly remind the traveller of
"That delightful province of the Sun.
The first of Persian lands he shines upon,
Where all the loveliest children of his beam.
Flowerets and fruits, blush over every stream."[43]
"To bare, dry mountain-ridges," says M. Forgues, "succeed plains,
sometimes incrusted with hard clay, sometimes clothed with thick sand.
At the outset of spring, in the months of April and May, the country is
coloured with some softer tints, the grass breaks here and there through
the granite and the gravel; but in the first summer heats everything
grows dry, and the soil resumes its monotonously brown or gray livery.
Water fails for cultivation, which in the best districts is confined to
a few scattered oases. In these vast spaces, when the eye surveys them
from some mountain-crest, there occurs nothing to arrest the gaze; and
when once the spring has past, the cultured fields become blended with
those which the plough has suffered to lie fallow, the clay-built
villages with the earth of which their walls are constructed. In these
confused landscapes even a considerable town scarcely traces its blurred
outline among the accumulated ruins in whose centre it persists in
living, and whose extent attests its decadence. It is a marvel if, on
arriving at the limit of these monotonous plains, the traveller
distinguishes them from the deserts to whose threshold they have
generally conducted him. He only recognizes the latter by the dazzling
gleam of their saline efflorescence, which stretches far out of sight,
and where at intervals abruptly projects some mass of ebon-black rock,
transformed by the solar refraction, and assuming in quick succession
the most fantastic aspects."
I have spoken of the inland seas and salt lakes which testify to the
primitive submersion of the whole region of the Great Deserts. Let us
pursue our route towards the west, and we shall encounter the most
remarkable of these vestiges of a remote past.
First, I shall speak of the Dead Sea, the Lake Asphaltes, which Dean
Stanley justly designates "one of the most remarkable spots in the
world," and which, as the reader knows, is situated in the south of
Palestine, at a short distance from Jerusalem. It is true that "a great
mass of legend and exaggeration, partly the effect, partly the cause, of
the old belief that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were buried under
the Dead Sea, has been gradually removed in recent years. The glittering
surface of the lake, with the thin mist of its own evaporations floating
over its surface, will now no more be taken for a gloomy sea, sending
forth sulphurous exhalations. The birds which pass over it without
injury have long ago destroyed the belief that no living creature could
survive the baneful atmosphere which hung upon its waters." But still,
for the scientific no less than for the historical student, it possesses
an absorbing interest. It is the most depressed sheet of water in the
world, lying fully thirteen hundred feet below the level of the
Mediterranean: as the Lake Sir-i-Kol, where the Oxus rises
"In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,"
is the most elevated.[44] "Its basin," to quote Dean Stanley's graphic
description, "is a steaming caldron--a bowl which, from the peculiar
temperature and deep cavity in which it is situated, can never be filled
to overflowing. The river Jordan, itself exposed to the same withering
influences, is not copious enough to furnish a supply equal to the
demand made by the rapid evaporation. Its excessive saltness is even
more remarkable than its deep depression. This peculiarity is, it is
believed, mainly occasioned by the huge barrier of fossil-salt at its
south-west corner, and heightened by the rapid evaporation of the fresh
water poured into it. Other like phenomena, though in a less striking
form, exist elsewhere. But, without entering into its wider relations,
this aspect is important, as that which most forcibly impressed the
sacred writers. To them it was 'the salt sea,' and nothing more. They
exhibit hardly a trace of the exaggerations of later times. And so it is
in fact. It is not gloom, but desolation, which is the prevailing
characteristic of the Sea of Death. Follow the course of the Jordan to
its end. How different from the first burst of its waters in Mount
Hermon, amongst the groves of Dan and Paneas! How different from the
'riotous prodigality of life' which has marked its downward course,
almost to the very termination of its existence! Gradually, within the
last mile from the Dead Sea, its verdure dies away, and the river melts
into its grave in a tame and sluggish stream; still, however, of
sufficient force to carry its brown waters far into the bright green
sea. Along the desert shore the white crust of salt indicates the cause
of sterility. Thus the few living creatures which the Jordan washes down
into the waters of the sea are destroyed. Hence arises the unnatural
buoyancy and the intolerable nausea to taste and touch, which raise to
the highest pitch the contrast between its clear, bitter waves, and the
soft, fresh, turbid stream of its parent river. Strewn along its
desolate margin lie the most striking memorials of this last conflict of
life and death: trunks and branches of trees, torn down from the
thickets of the river-jungle by the violence of the Jordan, thrust out
into the sea, and thrown up again by its waves, dead and barren as
itself. The dead beach shelves gradually into the calm waters. A deep
haze--that which to earlier ages gave the appearance of the 'smoke going
up for ever and ever'--veils its southern extremity, and almost gives it
the dim horizon of a real sea. In the nearer view rises the low island
close to its northern end, and the long promontory projecting from the
eastern side, which divides it into its two unequal parts. This is all
that I saw, and all that most pilgrims and travellers have seen, of the
Dead Sea."[45]
The sinister aspect of the valley of the Jordan, especially at the
embouchure of the river, impresses itself on the mind of every
spectator. There the traveller finds the path narrowed between two
abrupt gigantic walls. On the right rises the Arabian chain, black and
perpendicular; on the left, the Judæan range, less elevated, more
irregular, and resembling a dismantled ruin. "The valley comprised
between these two chains," says the Père Laorty-Hadji, "exhibits a soil
closely resembling the bed of a sea which has long been dry. You can
discern but a few stunted trees. Ruined towns and castles appear in the
distance. At the moment of flinging itself into the Dead Sea, the Jordan
itself, traversing a muddy soil, changes its physiognomy and colour. It
seems to drag reluctantly, towards the motionless lake, a burden of slow
and tawny waters. The shores of the Dead Sea are low on the east and
west; to the north and south high mountains enclose it." "These
mountains, separated by a formidable cleft, exhibit their beds of red
sandstone, overlain by a thick stratum of compact chalk, interrupted by
silicious fragments. One is surprised not to see a volcanic crater, when
all about, in this convulsed site, the action of fire is visible--the
violent, bitter struggle of the two Neptunian and Plutonian principles,
which, during the geological eras, contended for the empire of the
world. One might say that here the two antagonistic forces exhausted
themselves, that they have equally lost their potency; so much so, that
at the close of the combat all has sunk into the silence and immobility
of death. And who knows if the volcanic crater, whose absence at first
astonishes the observer, is not the Dead Sea itself? Is it unreasonable
to admit that after the upheaval of the mountains which inclose it, and
which a terrible explosion of subterranean fire will have separated, the
neighbouring waters were precipitated into and swallowed up in the
yawning gulf which they still fill to-day?... This hypothesis is so much
the more probable, because in this fire-scathed region the lake affords
manifest indications of an igneous travail even now accomplishing itself
sullenly in the bowels of the globe. We know that its name of Lake
Asphaltites is due to the semi-fluid bituminous matter which constantly
rises to its surface and accumulates on its shores. With the vapours
exhaled by this bitumen under the influence of heat, mingle sulphurous
and ammoniacal exhalations, which render the atmosphere of the Dead Sea
dangerous to breathe."[46]
Before 1835 no one had ventured upon its waters. An Irish traveller,
named Cottingham, was their first navigator; but after a five days'
voyage he returned to Jerusalem, and died of exhaustion. Two years later
Messrs. Moore and Beke made a new attempt. For several days they
withstood the pestilential exhalations of the lake, and succeeded in
proving the deep depression of its basin; but at length, both of them
being taken ill, they were compelled to cut short their explorations. In
1847 the enterprise was undertaken by a Frenchman--Lieutenant
Molyneux--who sounded it in many places, but was speedily carried off by
fever. The following year Lieutenant Lynch, of the American navy,
embarked on the lake in iron boats, with competent crews. He navigated
its waters for three weeks; but all who composed the expedition were
more or less severely attacked, and one of them, Lieutenant Deane,
succumbed.
[Illustration: THE DEAD SEA.]
Though, as we have said, geographical research has dissipated most of
the wild stories formerly accepted in reference to the peculiarly fatal
concomitants of the Dead Sea, it well deserves its expressive name. It
_is_ a _dead_ sea: it has neither the ocean's living movement nor
deep-sounding roar; the surf and the spray never sparkle on its rocks;
that "multitudinous laughter" which Homer ascribes to the sea is wholly
wanting; the wind never wakes a smile on its passive and sombre
countenance. By its shores one might realize Shelley's mournful wish,
and feel
"In the warm air
His cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er his dying brain its last monotony."[47]
It is lifeless, untenanted; the fish found there, and brought down by
the Jordan, are dead. Unlike the Caspian, it is never stirred by the
whirr of wings--by the flight of gulls, or pelicans, or sea-mews. The
migratory birds sweep across it without even a pause, without seeking
the prey which they could not find. Its waters are denser than those of
other seas: their constituents are different, and mingled in different
proportions.
Laorty-Hadji is mistaken in his idea that they repose on a bed of rock
salt. Rock salt is the chloride of sodium in a nearly pure condition.
But the Dead Sea holds in solution a comparatively small portion of this
salt, mixed with large proportions of other salts. Its water was
analyzed for the first time in 1778 by Lavoiser, Macquer, and Sage.
Experiments have also been made by Arcet, Klaproth, Gmelin, Gay-Lussac,
and, more recently, by Boussingault. According to the latter, it
contains:--
Chloride of magnesium, 10.7288
Chloride of sodium, 6.4964
Chloride of calcium, 3.5592
Chloride of potassium, 1.6110
Bromide of magnesium, 0.3306
Sulphate of lime, 0.0424
Sal-ammoniac, .0013
Water, 77.2303
--------
100.0000
It will be seen that it possesses neither chloride of manganese nor
chloride of aluminium, no nitrates, and no iodines; that it is,
therefore, not _sea water_, properly so called, but a mineral water _sui
generis_.
The enormous proportion of saline matter accounts for its exceptional
density, and justifies the assertion of travellers that a man floats
upon its surface like a log of wood; though we can hardly credit the
statement of Pococke that it is impossible to sink to the bottom. Its
gravity undoubtedly endows it with extraordinary buoyancy, and to dive
to any considerable depth is a matter of difficulty; but in the Dead
Sea, as in other seas, man must employ his strength and skill to keep
his body afloat.
CHAPTER II.
ARABIA DESERTA AND ARABIA PETRÆA.
The traveller who starts from the southern extremity of the Dead Sea
encounters a succession of deserts. To the east extend wide plains,
covered with ruins, where upwards of thirty cities are to be traced in
their decay, like Palmyra, by the trunks of shattered columns and the
wrecks of desecrated temples. This is the once flourishing country of
the Nabatheans, now haunted by some tribes of Idumean Arabs. One might
not inappropriately call it the vestibule of Arabia Deserta; a name
applicable to all the central and southern districts--that is to say, to
nearly three-fourths of the Arabian peninsula. There the sea of sand
reveals itself in all its nakedness, in all its horrors; with its
implacable sky and fiery atmosphere, its sandy billows, its masses of
salt, and, in certain places, with its hidden quicksands capable of
devouring entire armies. The Desert of Akhaf, situated towards the
extremity of the peninsula, conceals, it is said, several of these
abysses, where the hapless traveller, if he set his foot upon them,
would be instantly swallowed up. Thus even the Arabs regard it with an
unconquerable dread. It owes its name to a Saffite king who would fain
have traversed it with his troops, and who saw them perish therein even
to the last man. The tradition does not inform us how he himself escaped
this immense disaster.
[Illustration: CARAVAN IN THE DESERT.]
A European traveller, Baron de Wrede, undertook nevertheless, some
twenty-five years ago, to penetrate into this soul-appalling desert, and
attempted to measure the extent and depth of one of these abysses.
Starting in the morning from Saba, under the guidance of a few Bedouins,
he reached, after six hours' marching, the threshold of the desert of
Akhaf.
"A sandy plain, extending as far as the eye could reach," he says, "and
upon which arose innumerable hills in the semblance of waves,--such was
the scene presented to my gaze. Not the least trace of vegetation was
perceptible; not a bird interrupted with its song the tomb-like silence
which prevailed around the graves of the Sabean army. I remarked three
tracts distinguished by a dazzling whiteness. 'Yonder are the abysses,'
said the Bedouins; 'they are inhabited by the spirits who have covered
with this deceitful sand the treasures intrusted to their charge. He who
dares approach them will assuredly be dragged down under the sand! Do
not venture there!'
"Naturally, I paid no attention to this counsel; on the contrary, I
demanded to be guided towards them, according to agreement. Two hours
were consumed by our camels in reaching the bottom of the plateau, where
we arrived at sunset, taking up our quarters for the night on the lee
side of two enormous rocks. On the following day I insisted that the
Bedouins should guide me over these tracts. My trouble was in vain; fear
rendered them unable to utter a word. Furnished with a plumb-lead
weighing about a pound and a quarter, to which was attached a rope
nearly 350 yards in length, I accomplished this dangerous enterprise. I
occupied thirty-six minutes in reaching the first abyss; it was
thirty-six feet long by twenty-six feet broad, and formed an inclined
plain towards the centre, about six feet deep, which I attributed to the
action of the wind. I approached at first with the utmost precaution, in
order to examine the sand, and found it to be almost impalpable. I cast
my plumb-lead as far as I could; it disappeared immediately; however,
the rapidity with which the rope shortened gradually diminished; in five
minutes, it had wholly disappeared."
Baron de Wrede has made no attempt to account for this strange
phenomenon, which is not, I may add, peculiar to Arabia. The late Doctor
Cloquet, who for many years acted as chief physician to the Shah of
Persia, relates that he had seen similar gulfs in the great Salt Desert,
which he considered to occupy the place of lakes suddenly vanished. This
hypothesis is certainly admissible, and perhaps very probable; but while
in some degree explaining the existence of these abysses of sand, it
raises fresh questions which are by no means easily answered; for
instance, why have these lakes disappeared, and why have they been
replaced by this impalpable and incoherent dust in which heavy bodies
sink as in a void?
Consider, moreover, the remarks made by Doctor Cloquet in a letter
addressed in 1851 to the Academy of Medicine at Paris:--
"At fifteen parasangs from Teheran,[48] commences the _Salt Desert_,
which, from east to west, extends to the very frontiers of India. This
immense basin, eastward, has no other limits than the horizon; to the
west, to the north, to the south, it is bounded by hills of sand which
completely represent the Dunes of France. The soil, of a fawn-coloured
yellow, is composed of clay and sand, exactly resembling the mud which
occupies the bottom of a dried-up basin. It is said that at many points
a man on horseback will disappear without his body being ever again
discovered.[49] I have seen one of these places, near Sivas; the soil is
everywhere impregnated with salt mingled with nitre, which crystallizes
on the surface. For the rest, if you dig two or three inches deep, you
find water, though very brackish in quality. The general opinion is that
the desert was once occupied by a sea, which suddenly disappeared on the
night that Mohammed was born. And it seems to me that there is no reason
to doubt this sudden disappearance, since even in our own days, and only
a few years ago, the salt lake of Ourmiah (Urumiyeh), in the province of
Azerbaïdjan, vanished completely for twenty-four hours; it is true that
the waters emerged again from their subterranean basin. I think it
almost absolutely demonstrated, from inspection of these localities,
that at a remote epoch this sea communicated with the Caspian, and
formed one united basin of water. I am not sure but that in the south it
also communicated with the Indian Sea, for I have not travelled in that
direction. The apparition of the Elburz chain has cloven the two basins,
and the sea, receiving only inconsiderable streams, insensibly receded,
until the day when it was wholly dried up, leaving only two lakes: one,
the lake of Sivas, which disappeared in the seventh century; the other,
the lake of Seistan, which is still extant, and receives several of the
important rivers of Afghanistan. At all events, the great sea itself had
disappeared some generations prior to the epoch of Alexander.
"The great humidity of the soil," adds Doctor Cloquet, "struck me
vividly. Does not this humidity appear to indicate the presence of vast
subterranean sheets of water, which sweat, so to speak (_transsuderaient_),
through the porosities of the earth?"
The desert table-land of Nadjed, which fills all the central part of
Asia, is bounded on the west and south by the more fertile and fortunate
countries of the Hedjaz and the Hadramant, which skirt the Indian Ocean.
To the north-east lies the desert of the Tih, whose deep sand-drifts lie
between Palestine and the Isthmus of Suez, and which the Mediterranean
washes on the north, on the south-west the Gulf of Suez, and on the
south-east the Gulf of Akaba. This is the small triangular peninsula
which was known to ancient geographers as Arabia the Stony. A group of
ever-famous mountains, hallowed by the sublimest associations, Sinaï,
Horeb, Jebel Mûsa, Jebel Bestîn (St. Epistème), raise their granitic
summits on the southern point of this peninsula. "They are 'the Alps' of
Arabia; but the Alps planted in the desert, and therefore stripped of
all the clothing which goes to make up our notions of Swiss or English
mountains; stripped of the variegated drapery of oak, and birch, and
pine and fir, of moss, and grass, and fern; which to landscapes of
European hills are almost as essential as the rocks and peaks
themselves." Sinaï, or St. Catherine, the loftiest peak in the range,
reaches an elevation of 8160 feet. It is so closely connected with Mount
Horeb, to the north, that the two mountains really seem but one.
Ravines, and narrow valleys planted with palm-trees, thorny acacias,
tamarisks, and some other shrubs, wind between the abrupt trunks of this
grand chain. In one of these valleys stands the Monastery of the
Transfiguration, and on Mount Horeb rises the Church of St. Catherine, a
shrine held in great esteem by devout Greeks. The pilgrims ascend on
their knees a large staircase laboriously constructed by the monks.
I have no space to recapitulate the sublime historic memories which
invest these solemn heights with an interest of their own. The presence
of the Almighty has clothed their summits with a glory that might not be
borne; the thunders of the Most High have echoed through their deep dark
valleys. At their base the people of Israel watched and waited while
Moses received from Heaven the code which thenceforth determined their
religious and civil polity. Down the side of yonder mighty peak came
their Prophet and Leader, his face bright with a radiance such as was
never before on the face of mortal man. They were the scene of a
singularly unique history; by which, as Dean Stanley remarks, "the fate
of the three surrounding nations--Egypt, Arabia, Palestine--and through
them the fate of the whole world, has been determined."
[Illustration: MOUNT SINAI.]
The locality, consecrated by such glorious associations, is also rich in
geological interest. It exhibits indubitable traces of the great
volcanic convulsions which have so profoundly shaken the shores of the
Dead Sea, and which still growl sullenly under the accumulated rocks. In
the time of Procopius, the legend runs that men fled from Sinaï on
account of the gruesome noises which haunted it; and modern travellers,
notably Stutzen and Gray, declare that they have heard at intervals a
sound comparable to the dull heavy throbbing of a Cyclops' pulse. It
might be said that one of the vast arteries which provide for the
circulation of the ever boiling and seething flood of lava of our globe
passes in this direction at an insignificant depth below the surface.
The springs of thermal waters which well out at the mountain-base, the
masses of bitumen and lava scattered over the soil, the gigantic rocks
which bristle over the whole desert of El-Tîh, and whose hue, to adopt
the expression of a modern traveller, is that of calcined and
fire-scathed matter, are sufficient evidence that this country has been
the theatre of dreadful volcanic phenomena.
Messrs. Bida and Hachette describe a place named _Wâdy-Nassoub_,
situated a short distance from Sarabit-el-Kadim, on the road from Sinaï
to Suez. It is gained after traversing Ramleh ("the sandy"), a sandy
ravine which serves as a retreat for horrible black serpents, both big
and little, and for enormous lizards, and which is followed by a narrow
valley. "Wâdy-Nassoub," according to these travellers, "is one of the
most magnificent spectacles we have ever seen. It is a circus of twenty
to twenty-five leagues in extent, surrounded by huge rocks arranged in
successive terraces, and of incomparable beauty of form and colour. Its
arena is an immense sheet of black basalt, furrowed here and there by
torrents of yellow sand. A dazzling sun kindles up this landscape, which
is one of incredible splendour."
[Illustration: LAKE BAUDOUIN (A SALT LAKE).]
As you approach the Isthmus of Suez--which will soon be annihilated, so
to speak, by M. de Lesseps' great ship-canal--the desert resumes the
character which we have seen it bear in Persia and Central Arabia. The
rocks, much rarer and less lofty, gradually give place to mountains of
sand. Salt lakes and fields of salt re-appear. Near the shores of the
Mediterranean lies a pool of salt, still known by that name of Lake
Baudouin (Baldwin), which the Crusaders imposed upon it. There the salt
forms a firm and tenacious crust, on which the camel safely plants its
foot. Sometimes the iron hoof of a horse breaks through, but beneath
this first frail stratum it meets with another of astonishing hardness.
"You might think yourself," says a traveller, "on the Mer de Glace of
Mont Blanc. Our camel-drivers collected some large pieces from the
surface. Nothing can be more brilliant or more transparent than these
crystals. It is by tasting them only that you can distinguish them from
rock crystal. As we advance, the impression grows overpowering. A plain
of dazzling whiteness surrounds us, and is prolonged far beyond our
ken. Dimly on the left may be perceived, like an indigo-coloured ribbon,
the line of the distant sea. The sky itself appears jet black. The
reverberation of sound is unendurable." Still further, between Suez and
Cairo, the same traveller speaks admiringly of a natural amphitheatre,
enclosed between two mountain-spurs, and strewn with _débris_ of rock,
and especially with petrified wood. It might be compared to a
forest-clearing which the woodmen had just quitted. The splinters are
quite fresh, the cloven fragments still expose the notches made by the
axe. Great trees, divided into beams, resemble long serpents which have
been slain by blows from a hatchet. The division is so clear that each
gash reveals the concentric tissues perfectly preserved by this mineral
embalming, this natural silification. Similar petrifactions may be seen
in abundance on the plateaux of the Makattam, and the amphitheatre now
described is not far from the hill, visited by every tourist, which has
received the name of the Petrified Forest.
Thus it appears that the Land Deserts, despite the proverbial monotony
of their aspect, do not fail to offer to the artist as well as the
savant, the philosopher no less than the historian, objects worthy of
patient study. Everywhere the handiwork of God and the evidences of
Almighty design awaken the admiration of the thoughtful. Whether the
picture be sombre or beautiful, grand or appalling, we see that it was
conceived and filled up by superhuman power. But we are now in Egypt, on
the threshold of the world's vast deserts. Egypt, kept alive by the
fertilizing and genial Nile, is but an island in the great ocean of sand
which encircles it, and which, far more truly than the Red Sea or the
Mediterranean, isolates it from the rest of the globe.
CHAPTER III.
THE NUBIAN DESERT--THE GREAT SAHARA--DESERTS OF AFRICA.
As soon as we pass beyond the narrow borders of the Nile valley we
encounter the Desert. Egypt _is_, in fact, the Nile; the Nile makes,
recreates, preserves, fecundates Egypt, which, without this grand and
ever-famous river, would immediately cease to be.
"Everything in Egypt," says Miss Martineau,[50] with equal truth and
eloquence, "life itself, and all that it includes, depends on the state
of the unintermitting conflict between the Nile and the Desert. The
world has seen many straggles; but no other so pertinacious, so
perdurable, and so sublime as the conflict of these two great powers.
The Nile, ever young, because perpetually renewing its youth, appears to
the inexperienced eye to have no chance, with its stripling force,
against the great old Goliath, the Desert, whose might has never relaxed
from the earliest days till now; but the giant has not conquered it. Now
and then he has prevailed for a season, and the tremblers whose destiny
hung on the event have cried out that all was over; but he has once more
been driven back, and Nilus has risen up again to do what we see him
doing in the sculptures--bind up his water-plants about the throne of
Egypt."
The traveller, ascending the famous river which has so long been mixed
up with an apparently insoluble geographical problem, sees the Desert
everywhere present; its yellow boundary-line is vividly traced against
the rich emerald-green of the fertile valley, and, as he advances, that
line seems to draw nearer and nearer, until the cultivated soil appears
reduced to a narrow strip on the river-bank. It has encroached upon many
once prosperous and busy sites, and buried deeply the memorials of the
old Egyptian civilization.
"Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Everywhere outside the valley of the Nile, I repeat, lies the Desert.
West of the Arabian chain of heights stretch the vast sandy plains
frequented by the Arab tribes of the Beni-Wassel and the Arabdé. Beyond
the eastern chain spread the Libyan Deserts, which, in the remote
distance, merge into the Great Sahara, and those of the Thebaïd, where
the early Christian anchorites found a dismal asylum. Lower, to the
south of Egypt, extend the Deserts of Lower Nubia.
Let us ascend the Nile as far as Korosko, on the right bank of the
river, and cross the huge chain of rocky hills which separates the
cultivated zone from the Desert to which the village just spoken of
gives name. These hills, all of equal elevation, assume the form of
truncated cones. They are layers of granite superimposed horizontally,
and with a depth of colour which makes them resemble at the first glance
masses of basalt. They are absolutely bare, and separated from each
other by abrupt sinuous gorges, whose bottom is covered deep in sand of
golden lights, brought from the desert on the wings of the south-west.
Long streams of the same brilliant sand descend the slopes opposed to
the direction of the wind with graceful undulations, which subside
imperceptibly in the blown sand that carpets the floor of these
mysterious valleys. The crests of the hills can only be distinguished by
their different colours; some are lightly shaded with gray, others with
blue or green, and others again with rose or crimson. The reflets of the
setting sun on these uniform and many-coloured summits have a marvellous
splendour, lighting up the scene until it assumes a fairy aspect,
"And all puts on a gentle hue,
Hanging in the shadowy air,
Like a picture rich and rare."
At certain times it would rather remind the spectator of another of
Coleridge's conceptions:
"A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!"[51]
Yet the spectacle is generally one of a rare and peculiar loveliness.
"If nature," says M. Trémaux,[52] "had invested with this kind of beauty
our verdurous fields of the West, they would have been veritable Edens;
but to produce, blend, and harmonize these inimitable hues, it requires,
under the last beams of the sun, the emanations from the heated sands
and those which the day has called into existence from the burning
surfaces of the denuded rocks. It is by the side of her greatest horrors
nature places her grandest beauties."
The horror of the Desert does not lie only in its aridity, in its
vacuity--this vacuity is not absolute; in default of life, Death peoples
its solitudes. The glens or gorges frequented by the caravans are lined
with stones, symmetrically disposed at certain intervals. These stones
mark the places where rest the remains of the hapless pilgrims who have
attempted to cross the wilderness, and perished in the attempt. Round
and about each rugged tomb lie the skeletons of animals which none have
troubled themselves to bury in the sand. Frequently you may see, on the
sandy wastes of Africa, or the desolate plains of Asia and the New
World, these carcasses laid out in two interminable rows; indicating the
gloomy track which should be followed by the traveller, and never
failing to remind him of the tribute Death levies upon mankind in these
accursed regions. Thus does the Desert show itself more relentless than
even the hungry ocean, which at least devours its victims whole, and
affronts the eye with no traces of its murders. But the Moloch of the
Desert has no shame; it cynically exposes the hideous remains of those
whom it has killed; it strews the earth with their bones; it has its
museums of skeletons, or rather of preserved animals.
M. Trémaux observed this curious phenomenon in the ravines of Korosko,
but it probably occurs elsewhere under similar conditions. On closely
examining the carcasses which he met at every step, he was astonished to
find them covered with their skin, and presenting still their natural
forms, as if the animals had been stuffed or embalmed. He readily
distinguished horses, oxen, asses, camels. He observed with no less
surprise that these corpses exhaled no odour. They had been dried by the
heat before decomposition could commence its frightful work. The skin
had hardened; the muscles and internal organs had been reduced into dust
and gradually blown away by the wind through the yawning apertures at
the two extremities of the body. There remained nothing more, literally,
but skin and bone.
"This skin had such a consistency," says our author, "such a degree of
solidity, that all my efforts to split it were without result. The
heaviest stones which I could raise rebounded upon their carcasses with
a loud noise, but did not pierce them. If a man dies while a caravan is
on its march, he is buried in the sand. I have had no opportunity of
examining whether the desert-heat produces the same effect upon his body
as upon the corpses of the animals just mentioned; but it ought not to
be so, since the human skin has not the same consistency."
* * * * *
On issuing from these gorges, we enter upon the Desert proper by a sandy
plain which the Djellahs have named the "River without Water," and
which, very low at first, slowly rises into a plateau of very slight
elevation, intersected by some veins of a sandstone similar to that of
the conical mountains. Then the plain declines anew, and we emerge upon
the Sea of Sand, where the pulverized sandstone alternates with fields
of rotted or broken pebbles, and mounds of porphyry and granite. At the
foot of one of these mounds, the _Tallat-el-Guindé_, flourish a few
wretched vegetables, among others some gum-trees and doum-palms. The
latter trees are also found in solitary mournfulness scattered about the
plain. Otherwise the _Desert of Korosko_ is wholly deprived of vegetable
life, of
"The glory in the grass, and the splendour in the flower."
As for water, it must needs be content with that of a few brackish
wells, grouped, about twelve in number, at a spot called _El-Mourath_.
It is there only that the caravans can fill their ill-tanned
leather-bottles, in which the already nauseating liquid grows hot, and
quickly becomes putrid. Its stench and its taste are then so disgustful
that the very camels reject it several times before they can constrain
themselves to drink of it.
[Illustration: RAVINES OF KOROSKO.]
* * * * *
The _Desert of Bahiouda_, situated in about the same latitude as that of
Korosko, but on the other bank of the Nile, is of a less absolute
aridity and nakedness. Water is more abundant and less brackish;
vegetation is less scanty; and one meets on every side with giraffes,
gazelles, wild cattle, and even, it is said, with lions and elephants.
Great numbers of reptiles, lizards, serpents, and tortoises inhabit the
sand and the crevices of the rocks.
* * * * *
South of the above-named Deserts, towards 17° N. lat., is placed the
limit of the Rainless District. Under the 18th parallel the rains do not
last above one or two months in the year, and in some years are
absolutely wanting; but when they _do_ fall, it is generally in
impetuous torrents. As we advance towards the Equator they become more
regular, and last for longer periods. According to Humboldt, the average
yearly rainfall in 19° N. lat. measures 80 inches; under the equator, 96
inches. In these tropical climes the year is divided into two
seasons--one of excessive drought, and one of excessive rain. During the
former, the sky is ever cloudless; during the latter, completely
overcast.
There are, in fact, two rainless belts or districts, one on each side of
the Equator. In the old world, the northern belt commences on the west
side of Africa; includes the Sahara between 16° and 28° of latitude; and
narrowing as it extends easterly, comprises on the banks of the Nile
from 19° to 27°. It also embraces the low coast; and portions of the
interior of Arabia; passes through Beloochistan to the base of the
Himalayas, and terminates with the rainless tableland of Thibet. The
southern district occurs north of the Gareep or Orange River in South
Africa, and includes wide tracts in Australia, and a narrow belt in
South America.
Where the earth is blessed with copious showers, vegetation will abound;
grass, and herb, flower, bush, and tree;
"Fields of grain
Will bend their tops
To the numberless beating drops."
To meet with the true Desert we must, therefore, direct our steps in a
north-westerly course, and penetrate into _The Sahara_.
M. Charles Martins, in his elaborate monograph on this remarkable
region, divides it into three distinct sub-regions: the _Desert of the
Table-lands_, the _Desert of Erosion_, and the _Sandy Desert_.[53]
In Algeria, and in Barbary generally, the Mediterranean littoral does
not come into immediate contact with the Sahara; but is separated from
it by the Atlas chain. But the Atlas does not rise abruptly from the
plain: on either side it ascends by a succession of rocky steps or
terraces, which form the sub-region of the elevated Table-lands. Vast
denuded surfaces, sprinkled with _chotts_, or salt lakes, deprived of
all arborescent vegetation, traversed in summer by immense herds which
feed on the plants even to their very roots, bare mountains starting
abruptly from these horizontal surfaces; such is the general aspect of
the landscape. The richly-varied culture of the Mediterranean littoral
has disappeared, and barley is the only cereal which the husbandman
relies upon for his harvest. At many points, however, the "purple vine"
and "golden olive" succeed admirably, and are destined one day to clothe
the nakedness of these plateaux which the free-pasturing herds and the
careless Arab have stripped of their blooming verdure.
Descending these rocky terraces of gray old Atlas, we enter the desert
region in its first phase: the Desert of the Table-lands, or Saharan
Steppe.
[Illustration: LANDSCAPE IN THE ATLAS (REGION OF TABLE-LANDS).]
Here, horizontal strata of mud and gypsum, or sulphate of lime, are
deposited upon the shores, as it were, of the great Sandy Sea. The
gypsum reposing on the mud is composed of plates in such close
juxtaposition as to resemble an artificial pavement. "It covers the
surface of vast plateaux which have not been encroached upon by the
waters; whether those waters were marine currents at the epoch when the
Sahara was a vast sea, or diluvian torrents which descended from the
mountains after their elevation, little matters; the gypsum, produced by
the violent evaporation of the Saharan sea, has withstood their
operation, and composes the plateaux of which we are speaking. Their
surface is so smooth, that vehicles might roll for leagues upon this
natural pavement, which echoes like a vault under the horses' hoofs.
A plateau of this kind, the small Desert of Mourad, extends from Biskra
to the banks of the great salt lake called _Chott Mebrir_ by the Arabs.
The gypseous surface is not everywhere exposed: most frequently it is
covered by a layer of small rounded pebbles, nearly all quartzose,
exhibiting the greatest variety of tints, from the purest white to the
most vivid red; they are mixed with black calcareous stones split on the
surface. Whence came these pebbles, which have evidently been 'rolled'
by the waters? We know not. They are the mysterious witnesses of those
grand diluvian torrents which have left the traces of their passage over
the surface of the whole earth, though the geologist cannot always
discover the mountains or rocks that furnished the materials of this
diluvium."[54]
From the Desert of the Table-lands we must needs make another descent.
The town of Batna is situated at the extremity of the lowest of the
Atlantean terraces, whose elevation is still some 3300 feet above the
level of the sea. To the north-west rise the lofty spires of the
colossal chain, with their diadems of cedars sharply defined in black
upon the azure of the sky. Loftiest of all soars the _Jebel-Tougour_, or
"Peak of Cedars," reminding the spectator of the Pyrenean crests.
Towards the south-east stretch the rounded shoulders of the mountains of
the Aurès, clad with dense dark forest of oak and pine. In a fold of the
mountains lurk the ancient Lambessa and the mouldering ruins of a Roman
camp. Four miles to the south of Batna is a large depressed hill, whose
base mingles with the table-land, above which it rises only three
hundred and thirty feet. This ridge marks the watershed; all the streams
on the north flowing towards the Mediterranean, and, on the south,
gradually disappearing in the arid bed of the ancient Saharan sea. On
the frontier line, like a Cyclopean landmark, is planted the Peak of
Cedars, while from its loins a torrent issues, and through a deep ravine
whirls and leaps and flows towards the desert. Springs, abundant and
warm, bubble up through the chalky marls, and take the same direction.
Beyond the French military post, called _Les Tamarins_, the road
descends the ravine-cloven mountain-slopes, and passes over the torrent
which bifurcates at the foot of the majestic Metlili. On the left is
seen a steep wall of rock, the Jebel-Gaouss, cleft midway by a chasm, or
breach, which the Arabs expressively designate "The Mouth of the
Desert," and which, gradually enlarging, opens upon the first oasis of
the Sahara, _El Kantara_ ("the bridge," from a Roman arch which spans
the torrent), the most northerly limit of the palm-tree. "A magnificent,
semi-alpine, semi-tropical scene. Below, a tumultuous foaming stream,
its banks on either side clad with palms bending their feathery foliage
towards the river, and sheltering fig, apricot, peach, almond, and
pomegranate trees."[55] Above, a range of snowy heights, wreathed in
ever ascending and descending clouds.
We now enter the Desert of Erosion, a mass of mountainous highlands; of
ridges, peaks, and _cols_, intersected and, as it were, gashed by
ravines where roll the winter torrents and the rivers which the heats of
summer dry up, and which, hollowing and gnawing into the stony soil,
spread themselves over the valleys and awake a transitory vegetation.
The erosive action of the waters is, then, the special characteristic of
this part of the desert, which the Arabs call _Kifar_, or "the abandoned
country." Most of the streams which water it have their sources in
Mounts Aurès and Zibans, which form its northern boundary. They have
excavated wide intermingling furrows, whose intervening spaces are
occupied by gypseous plateaux. The formations of less resisting power,
the marls, clays, and sands, have been washed away.
[Illustration: THE SAHARA (DESERT OF EROSION).]
The waters, whether proceeding from rain, or the melting of the snows on
the loftiest peaks, are very pure at first, and roll in deep beds with
vertical sides; when they reach the plains, their channels grow wider
and shallower. In the wet season, the floods burst the banks, and
overflowing, carry down immense quantities of rolled pebbles, which are
distributed over an extensive area; in ordinary weather they are reduced
to thin threads of silver, which, on arriving in the desert, vanish
completely. You must excavate the soil to obtain a supply of water, and
when found, it is brackish. Frequently the beds unite, forming basins of
greater or less extent and depth, which fill themselves at the close of
the winter floods, and a few of which preserve, even in the winter
season, a certain quantity of water. Elsewhere, the soil is only humid,
thanks to the abundance of salt, which retains the moisture. In such
places numerous slimy marshes occur, where the traveller may not
adventure without peril. But in general the surface is dry, cracked,
cloven, and completely parched.
The Desert of Erosion is not completely inhabited. At intervals you meet
with a few squalid villages, and a multitude of camel's-skin tents are
scattered like black spots over the yellow or grayish plains, on the
borders of the _chotts_ or scanty water-courses. Herds of goats and
flocks of sheep wander in the valleys, browsing on the rare short grass.
Columns of smoke arise from the Arab bivouacs, and the women of the
Sahara group themselves around the wells and springs to fill the
water-bags with which they load their asses.
When, from the summit of the rocks which fence round and bristle over
the Desert of Erosion, we perceive for the first time the _Desert of
Sand_, the impression is very similar to that which we derive from the
sight of ocean. M. Martins had already become sensible of this peculiar
effect when, from the Col de Sfa, he had gazed down upon the Desert of
the Plateaux. "A grand circular arch," he says, "extended before us,
bounding a violet surface, smooth as the sea, and blending at the
horizon with the azure of heaven; it was the Sahara. The arc eastward
rested against the chain of the Aurès; westward, against that of the
Zibans, some of whose offshoots, in the neighbourhood of Biskra, arose
like reefs upon that sea which seemed to have been frozen suddenly into
immobility. The actual sea ever trembles and shivers on the surface; a
light wavering, imperceptible to the eye, propels towards the shore the
expiring wave, fringed with a border of foam. Here, nothing like this
may be seen; it is a motionless, a congealed sea, or, rather, it is the
smooth bed of a sea whose waters have disappeared. Science teaches us
that such is the fact; and now as ever the expression of the reality is
more picturesque, more eloquent than all the comparisons created by the
imagination."[56]
An eminent French artist, M. Fromentin, whose skill with the pen equals
his talent with the brush, has also painted this "congealed sea" in
grand and poetic language. "The first impression," he says, "produced by
this glowing lifeless picture, composed of the sun, space, and solitude,
is keen, and cannot be compared to any other. Little by little, however,
the eye grows accustomed to the grandeur of the lines, to the emptiness
of space, to the denudation of the earth; and if anything can still
astonish, it is that one becomes sensible to effects which change so
little, and is so powerfully affected by spectacles in reality of the
simplest character."[58]
I must also enumerate among the "artists in words" who have painted the
wonders of the Sahara, General Daumas, not one of the least
distinguished of the Franco-Algerine warriors. He describes it in the
following language:--"It is a naked and barren immensity,--this sea of
sand, whose eternal waves, agitated to-day by the _choub_, will
to-morrow be heaped up immovable, and which are slowly furrowed by those
fleets called caravans."
General Daumas, it is evident, confines himself to the scientific
realism, which M. Martins prefers to the glowing and inexact imagery of
the poets, and conveys in a few words an accurate yet very picturesque
idea of that arid sea, where the wind stirs up rolling waves of sand
instead of foaming billows, and which the Arabs call _Falat_. I shall
place before the reader, however, the description given by M. Martins
himself, for it represents both the _ensemble_ and the details of the
picture.
"If the Desert of the Plateaux," he says,[57] "be the image of a sea
suddenly fixed during a level calm, the Desert of Sand represents to us
a sea which may have been solidified during a violent tempest. The
Dunes, or sand-hills, like waves, rise one behind another even to the
limits of the horizon, separated by narrow valleys which represent the
depressions of the great billows of the ocean, all whose various aspects
they simulate. Sometimes they narrow themselves into keen-edged crests,
or shoot upwards in pyramids, or swell into cylindrical domes. Seen from
a distance, these Dunes also remind us at times of the appearances of
the _névé_ (or granulated snow) in the amphitheatres and on the ridges
which lie contiguous to the loftiest Alpine summits. Their colours still
further enhance the illusion. Moulded by the winds, the burning sands of
the desert assume the same forms as the _névés_ of the glaciers."
Whoever has seen the Dunes on the coast of Norfolk, or more particularly
in Gascony, may gain a very accurate conception of the Desert. The only
notable differences are in the extent, which here seems infinite, like
that of ocean; the purity of the heaven, which is seldom sullied by a
cloud; and the colour, which is of a soft, intense blue. The nature of
the soil is the same; it is a very fine, shifting, silicious sand, white
sometimes, like that of Fontainebleau, and sometimes reddened by the
presence of oxide of iron. In the Sahara this sand gathers in veritable
Dunes, hillocks which the wind upheaves, displaces, and transforms from
one day to another. Only the _lettes_, or valleys, which in our Dunes
receive the pluvial waters and preserve a sufficient amount of
fertility, are here just moistened by rare saline infiltrations, and
almost always remain in a condition of absolute sterility. Nevertheless,
in some localities, the presence of gypsum gives the sand a certain
fixity, which permits a small number of plants to germinate and develop
themselves. This gypsum is never found but in the valleys, and never in
tabular masses, as on the plateaux, but only in crystals of various
forms, penetrated by silica. "You pick up a pebble," says M. Martins,
"and find it to be a crystal." The villages are surrounded by
crenellated ramparts built of crystals; the houses which compose these
villages are constructed of the same materials; and very weird and
splendid is the scene presented by these edifices with their
sun-illuminated walls. Notwithstanding their small dimensions and mean
architecture, when thus lit up in glorious radiance, they seem to
realize the wonders told in fairy tales of the enchanted palaces of the
genii!
CHAPTER IV.
PHENOMENA OF THE DESERT.
The desert has its own meteorology; it is the theatre of peculiar
phenomena, which one observes in no other part of the globe. Its
climate, at least in the sandy region, is remarkably uniform; it varies
only, according to latitude, in a greater or less elevated
thermometrical mean. Hippocrates, the ancient philosopher, rightly
called "the Father of Medicine," states the three elements of climate to
be, the atmosphere, the soil, and the waters. Throughout the desert
these are identically similar, and consequently originate identically
similar phenomena.
The atmosphere, in fact, is everywhere of an almost unchanging purity.
It is only in the neighbourhood of mountains that clouds accumulate, to
spend themselves at periodical seasons in more or less abundant rains.
In the plains it never rains, and during the day no veil is interposed
between the earth and the sun's burning glare, nor during the night do
any refreshing dews weaken the force of the terrestrial radiation. There
result constant alternations of devouring heat while the sun is above
the horizon, and of rapid and frequently intense cooling when he has
disappeared.
The soil is everywhere as smooth as "the liquid main." This uniformity
contributes, in addition to its silicious, argillaceous, or calcareous
character, to render more abrupt the changes of temperature which occur
from morning to evening and from evening to morning. In truth, the earth
reflects the sun's heat in proportion as it receives it; it absorbs but
insignificant quantities, which it loses in a few minutes when the
calorific source begins to fail. On the other hand, in these immense
plains where no inequality of surface can oppose the atmospheric
movements, the wind acquires an increasing force and swiftness, _vires
acquirit eundo_, and soon assumes all the characteristics of a tempest.
Hence arise those terrible typhoons, those appalling hurricanes, of
whose destructive effects history records so many instances, and of
which I shall presently be called upon to speak. As for water, we have
seen that its entire absence is a characteristic feature of the Sandy
Desert.
To sum up, an overpowering degree of heat during the day,--a freshness,
often even an excessive cold, during the night (in the Sahara the
thermometer frequently rises above 120° F. at noon, and not infrequently
sinks below 32° about two or three o'clock A.M.); an ever transparent
and azure sky,
"Darkly, deeply, beautifully blue;"
the absence of rains and dews, of gales and thunder; but a frequent
recurrence of terrible hurricanes: such is the meteorological
constitution of the arid zone, which embraces all the northern districts
of Africa, except the Mediterranean region--that is, from the snowy
heights of Atlas to the fertile pastures of Soudan--and which extends in
Asia from the west to the north-east, for all but one narrow belt, as
far as the 119th meridian of longitude.
* * * * *
Foremost among the phenomena peculiar to this zone we must place those
famous tempests which, in default of humid clouds, traverse with
startling swiftness the changing surface of the Desert, driving before
them whirlwinds of burning sand, and striking the traveller's heart with
a sense of unconquerable awe. The wind of the Desert is called by the
Arabs the _choum_ or _khamsin_; but is more generally known in European
books as the _Simoun_, _Simoom_, or _Samoun_. It is the _Samiel_ of the
Turks; and, under a somewhat milder form, the _Scirocco_ of the
Mediterranean. Wherever, or however it blows, it is a pernicious and
hateful wind; the blast, in all probability, which destroyed the hosts
of Sennacherib at the bidding of the Divine Word,--
"The angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed.
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still."
Torrents of burning sand sweep before it, a thick veil of darkness
envelopes the firmament, and the sun assumes a blood-red hue.
"That crimson haze
By which the prostrate caravan is awed
In the red desert when the wind's abroad."[58]
When the Simoom rises, says M. Martins,[59] the air is filled with dust
of such extreme fineness that it makes its way through objects
hermetically sealed, penetrates into the eyes, the ears, and the organs
of respiration. A burning heat, like that which breathes from the mouth
of a furnace, possesses the air, and paralyzes the strength of men and
animals. Seated on the sand, with their backs turned to windward, the
Arabs, wrapped in their burnous, wait with fatalistic resignation the
end of the torment; their camels crouching, exhausted, panting, stretch
their long necks upon the scorching soil. Seen through this powdery
haze, the sun's disc, shorn of its beams, shows pale and ghastly as that
of the moon.
Fortunately, the phenomenon never prevails over any very considerable
area, and beyond its limits the atmosphere remains serene and calm; so
that travellers who have watched it approaching in the form of a reddish
cloud, without being able to calculate on its direction, have often
escaped with no worse result than a panic, and have only witnessed its
terrible effects at a distance.
It must not, however, be confounded with the sand-storms which the
pilgrim encounters in the Arabian Desert, and which seem confined to
that region. Dean Stanley, on his route from Suez to Sinai, met with one
which prevailed the whole day. "Imagine," he says, "the caravan toiling
against this,--the Bedouins each with his shawl thrown completely over
his head, half of the riders sitting backwards,--the camels, meantime
thus virtually left without guidance, though from time to time throwing
their long necks sideways to avoid the blast, yet moving straight
onwards with a painful sense of duty truly edifying to behold. Through
the tempest, this roaring and driving tempest, which sometimes made me
think that this must be the real meaning of 'a _howling_ wilderness,' we
rode on the whole day."[60]
A French cavalier, M. Trémaux, while crossing the Desert of Korosko, had
the good fortune to witness the course of a Simoom, while himself in a
position of safety.
It was the 8th of February 1848. The horizon in the south-west wore a
hue of the evillest augury. Gusts of wind, which seemed to have issued
from some red-hot brazier, beat in the face of the travellers. The
camel-drivers, accustomed to interpret these sinister signs, and assured
that a tempest was at hand, felt themselves called upon to give M.
Trémaux a few counsels, which were by no means reassuring.
"As soon as the storm darkens the air," said one of them, "by
surrounding us with a cloud of sand, we must throw ourselves prone on
the ground, wrap our heads in our finest stuffs, to protect our
respiration from this sand, which burns the throat. It will be useless
to trouble ourselves about the camels; they will lie down of their own
accord, bend their head against their burden, and never stir so long as
the tempest lasts. If the sand accumulates by our side, we must move in
such a manner as to prevent it from covering us, making it roll under
itself, but without exposing our heads. Remember these things carefully;
and the will of God be done!"
"That is not all," added another; "when the water-bags are partly
shrunken, as are ours at this moment, and the Khamsin blows for some
time, it finishes by completely drying them up."
Thus warned, M. Trémaux was compelled to face, with all the resignation
he was capable of, the melancholy alternative of perishing suffocated by
the sand, or, a little later, of succumbing to the tortures of thirst.
He continued to journey, or rather to drag himself towards the centre of
the choking atmosphere, and to watch the scourge which rapidly drew
near. This lasted a couple of hours, after which the travellers had the
satisfaction of seeing the Simoom glide by on their right, and depart
with the same rapidity.
A column of the French army, commanded by the Dukes of Aumale and of
Montpensier, had met with a less happy chance on the 7th of March 1844,
in the Souf, or Algerine Sahara; it was attacked by a Simoom, which
prolonged its furious assaults during fourteen hours. On the day
following, M. Fournel, a mining engineer who accompanied the expedition,
ascertained that the meteor had swept but a narrow zone parallel to the
Aurès range, and that at the mountain base the tranquillity of the
atmosphere had been undisturbed.
The Simoom, or Khamsin, is, however, more troublesome and painful than
really dangerous. M. Martins speaks of the annihilated army of Cambyses,
the Persian king, which perished in the Libyan Desert (B.C. 524),[61]
and of whole caravans engulfed in the sepulchral sands. "The numerous
skeletons of camels," he adds, "which we met with on our way prove that
these catastrophes are still of frequent occurrence." It is more
probable, however, that they died from dearth of water and want of food.
As for the Persian host, it was probably swallowed up in one of those
quicksands, those hidden treacherous gulfs, which are found in the
deserts of Libya, as well as in those of Persia and Arabia. The evil
effects of the Simoom have, in fact, been exaggerated by the Arabs,
whose highly-coloured narratives have been too easily adopted by
credulous travellers. It heats the blood, it dries the skin, it
renders respiration troublesome; but it does not kill.
[Illustration: A FRENCH COLUMN IN ALGIERS SURPRISED BY THE SIMOOM.]
[Illustration: WHIRLWINDS OF SAND (SAND-SPOUTS).]
It is not always a single wind which blows in the Deserts; but sometimes
two or three currents, from opposite directions, cross and clash and
drive against one another with increasing fury. Then is produced the
singular phenomenon of the sand-spout, often witnessed on a magnificent
scale in the sandy plains of Eastern Asia and Southern America. The sand
is not now driven in voluminous masses in a rectilineal direction; but
raised aloft in the form of long tortuous columns, which whirl to and
fro like gigantic spectres in the mazes of a wild demon-dance. At the
same time, the azure of the sky grows pale and troubled, the sun's
light obscured, the boundaries of the horizon seem to meet together; the
burning dust held in suspension in the air renders it irrespirable, and
if one of these whirlwinds encounters any object which offers a
resistance, it carries it upward and hurls it a considerable distance.
Fortunately the phenomenon is one of brief duration. The atmospheric
equilibrium is speedily restored; the heavens recover their serenity;
the atmosphere grows clear, and the sand columns, falling in upon
themselves, form a number of little hills or cones, apparently
constructed with great care, like those mimic edifices of sand or snow
built up by children in their pastimes.
It is said that these furious whirlwinds have occasionally engulfed
whole caravans in their tremendous vortex,--
"Man mounts on man, on camels camels rush,
Hosts march on hosts, and nations nations crush;
Wheeling in air the wingèd islands fall,
And one great sandy ocean covers all."
Whether this be true or not, there can be no doubt that the spectacle is
one of great magnificence, and calculated to inspire the traveller with
emotions of awe and dread. Mr. Atkinson describes it as seen by him, on
one occasion, when traversing the Mongolian Desert:--
"As we passed," he says,[62] "in the middle of a space sown with
innumerable hillocks of sands, we saw about thirty of them suddenly
raise themselves around us, lengthen into long elliptical columns, and
glide with many a whirl and sweep over the surface of the Desert with
the hissings and contortions of gigantic serpents which had awakened at
our approach. These spouts, for the phenomenon was no other, varied in
diameter; the smallest measured between twenty and thirty feet; a few
attained to a hundred; and one, which absorbed in its vortex all that it
approached, rose to nearly two hundred. One might have said, on seeing
them bending, rising again and crossing one another in space amidst an
atmosphere of dust, that they were antediluvian monsters emerging from
their geological bed, and returning into the feverish activity of
existence. But soon, the atmospheric forces which had raised them
beginning to fail, we saw these sand-spouts fall away one after another,
and form on the surface of the Desert a number of moving hillocks
similar to those from which we had just emerged."
* * * * *
The poet, invoking the judgment of Heaven on the traitor, would fain
doom him to the misery of cherishing hopes that shall never be realized.
"May he," cries the minstrel--
"May he, at last, with lips of flame,
On the parched desert thirsting die,
While lakes that shone in mockery nigh
Are fading oft, untouched, untasted."[63]
The image here is borrowed from that most singular phenomenon of the
Desert, the _Mirage_; an atmospheric illusion due to the refraction of
the sun's rays upon the sand, and the intense expansion of the lower
strata of the air,--in other words, it arises from the total reflection
of the rays of light from the lower surface of a stratum of air. "This
occurs when, from any cause, such a stratum of air possesses a higher
refractive power than the one immediately below it. Such a condition of
the atmosphere causes remote objects to be seen as if reflected in a
mirror, or to appear as if suspended in the air. When the effect is
confined to apparent elevation, the English sailors call it _looming_;
when inverted images are formed, the Italians give it the name of _Fata
Morgana_. The Arabs call it _Serab_, or _Suhrab_, the 'Water of the
Desert;' and the Hindus, _Tchittram_, or 'the Picture.'"
The effects of the illusion are extraordinary, but undoubtedly they are
heightened by the imagination of observers, generally over-excited by
fatigue, by privations, or sometimes by fever. These causes contribute
to vary the nature of the phenomenon as seen by different eyes. Thus
some gaze enraptured on verdurous islands bright as Armida's enchanted
garden, with feathery palms and blooming flowers, and delicious
sparkling lakes; others see, in that dim far-off which is never reached,
the laughing waves of ocean, with ships resting calmly at anchor, or
"Veering up and down, they know not why,"
and camels browsing quietly upon its shores; others, again, see before
them the rolling river, its banks studded with groves and palaces; and
all this, while there is not a solitary real object on the horizon whose
presence might serve in some degree as a foundation for their visions.
It is the very phantasmagoria of nature; her wildest, most wayward, and
most fantastic sport. The reflection of the sky, modified by the
inequalities of the soil and the vibratory movements of the air, can
alone account for the singular deception. Imagination shows its victim,
in the reflected image of the cloudless sky, a sheet of water, which is
variously taken for a sea, a lake, or a river; it invests the slightest
objects on the earth's surface with forms, colours, and dimensions,
which are easily metamorphosed into houses, ships, men, animals; and it
seems certain that those which in Nubia our fancy converts into camels
would, in the Soudan, be transformed into elephants, and at Venice into
gondolas. Imagination makes us its dupes, and gives to airy nothings
"A local habitation and a name."
It becomes absolutely necessary, therefore, to distinguish these wholly
personal illusions born of a heated brain, from those which are really
due to a definite physical cause. The latter necessarily suppose the
existence of _actual objects_, below or very little above the horizon.
Under such conditions, the most frequent illusion is that which shows
the sky or rocks reflected in the expanse of rarified air superincumbent
on the earth's surface, and which through this cause alone resembles
water. It is then that the ignorant or inexperienced traveller,
overwhelmed with fatigue and devoured by thirst, hastens his eager steps
to reach more quickly that limpid water, where he hopes to refresh and
reinvigorate himself, but which flies before his advance, and speedily
vanishes altogether. Sometimes it is an inverted representation of
terrestrial objects which appears in the air; or rather, these same
objects, several times reflected, appear to multiply themselves. M.
Trémaux relates that he saw the latter form of mirage in Nubia. He
observed a row of doum-palms, which were about two thousand yards
distant, repeated in several similar rows, each with a like number of
trees, so as to produce the effect of a quincunx; among these trees
floated several seeming sheets of water.
[Illustration: A MIRAGE IN THE DESERT.]
We must remember, moreover, that the immensity, uniformity, and vacuity
of the Desert, singularly contribute to render optical illusions
frequent. The very serenity of the air assists in destroying the
perspective to which we are accustomed in temperate climates, which are
always more or less misty. Objects appear much nearer than they are in
reality, because they are more distinctly visible, and also because
nothing intervenes between them and the observer. Their dimensions, too,
become arbitrary, for want of standards of comparison by which to
measure them. So the trees and the mountains where the weary traveller
hopes to obtain a temporary repose and a passing shelter from the
Pythian's fiery arrows, seem constantly to recede before him, like the
rainbow when pursued by the ignorant peasant; and, until experience has
taught him to rectify the apparent testimony of his senses, he is
doomed, like Tantalus, to be the victim of continual deceptions,--
"Ev'n in the circling floods refreshment craves,
And pines with thirst amidst a sea of waves;
When to the water he his lip applies,
Back from his lip the treacherous water flies."[64]
Nor is this all; hunger, thirst, weariness, and especially the action of
the solar heat upon the brain, determine a peculiar pathological
condition, a species of mental intoxication or delirium which powerfully
predisposes the victim to hallucinations, and deprives the mind of that
self-control which would enable it to chase away the phantoms that haunt
it. To this affection, whose symptoms are frequently but erroneously
confounded with those of the mirage, the Arabs have given a specific
name. They call it _Ragle_. A distinguished French traveller has
described it with exhaustive fulness,[65] and he attributes it to
fatigue, excessive heat, and want of sleep.
It shows itself most commonly at night, and in dreams, attacks of
nightmare, and a somnambulism of which the sufferer is perfectly
conscious, without being able to throw it off. By day strange
hallucinations affect the sight, the hearing, and even, though less
powerfully, the senses of taste and smell. The aberration extends, as
far as the sight is concerned, to the objects which we are in the habit
of seeing; a small stone, for instance, expands into a rock; the rut of
a carriage-wheel enlarges into the furrow of a freshly ploughed field; a
tuft of grass or a bush will assume the grand proportions of a forest;
and, what is remarkable, these objects seem always close at hand.
Another frequent error is the elevation of horizontal surfaces; the
horizon becomes a wall or a mountain. "It has happened to myself," says
M. d'Escayrac, "to meet with walls constantly reappearing before me. My
extended arm has plunged into the masonry, but my body never encountered
any obstacle; the rampart opened to give me a free passage."
Hearing is, in its turn, affected. Then, any sound whatsoever, such as a
footfall, the blow of a stone, the whisper of the wind, is changed into
melodious sounds, keen cries of distress, the murmur of woods, the
harmony of familiar songs.
One day, says M. d'Escayrac, I heard the click-clack of a village mill.
Endeavouring to collect my senses, and to obtain an explanation of the
sound, I perceived that it arose from the clink of my sword-belt against
the pommel of my saddle, to which I had buckled my sabre.
Jomard, the savant, who experienced the effects of the ragle during his
travels in Egypt, confirms in every respect the foregoing description.
On his way from Rosetta to Alexandria, he kept along the border of the
sea, and found his feet painfully staggering in the thick fine sand.
Such a journey is necessarily one of extreme fatigue. After the first
night, this fatigue grew overwhelming; the traveller lost all accurate
perception of objects, or of the form of places. The surface of the lake
Medeah appeared not so much a sheet of water as a monotonous plain.
Constantly pressing forward, he maintained a hard fight against the
overpowering sense of slumber. Half-asleep, half-awake, his brain was
dazzled with the most fantastic phantoms, and the hallucination was so
great that he plunged into the lake before him, without perceiving it,
though the water was very deep. But the freshness caused by the
evaporation of the water warned him of his error, and the vision
suddenly passed away.
Such being the phenomena of the Desert, one can understand the dreary
picture which Dante paints in his "Inferno," of--
"The plain
Which from its bed rejecteth every plant;"
whose soil is--
"Of an arid and thick sand;"
and where--
"With a gradual fall
Are raining down dilated flakes of fire.
As of the snow on Alp, without a wind."[66]
CHAPTER V.
VEGETABLE LIFE IN THE DESERT:--THE OASES.
The _Flora_ of a region where nature provides no genial fertilizing
rains, and whose soil is simply a shifting sand, moistened only in
certain places by a brackish water, must necessarily be one of extreme
poverty.
It is reduced very nearly, as we have seen, to a few plants of the genus
_Salsola_ (salt-wort), flourishing on the borders of the salt pools and
lakes. Nevertheless, at a few points, where a certain degree of fixity
obtains in the sand, we meet with the thornless bushes or shrubs, the
_Ephedra alata_ and the _retama Durioei_; some pistachios (_pistacia
lentiscus_ and _p. terebinthus_); the "drin" (_aristida pungens_), a
tall grass, with linear leaves, some seven feet high, to which the camel
is very partial; and the "ézel," a member of the family of Polygonaceæ,
which botanists class with the allied buckwheat and knot-grasses, and
which attains the stature of three to four feet. The latter plant throws
out roots, which are generally uncovered, to a distance of twenty to
twenty-five feet; its woody stem spreads in its upper portion into
gnarled branches, terminated each by a cluster of green, cylindrical and
leafless twigs, which fall during winter. Elsewhere rise the tall trunks
of the doum-palms, either isolated or assembled in scanty clumps, under
which the traveller obtains with difficulty a modicum of shade, but
which are otherwise of no value to him.
In districts where the surface is more broken up, notably in Palestine,
on the banks of the Jordan and the Dead Sea; in the Sinaitic Peninsula
of Arabia; in the Nubian deserts of Naga, Aredah, and Bahiouda; finally,
even in the Sahara, in the "Desert of Erosion," and the table-land
region, vegetable life becomes more abundant and more varied, though
still but of mediocre interest. However, a curious arbustus, the
_Limioniastrum Guyonianum_, shows itself very frequently in these damp
localities, where it attains sometimes the dimensions of a tree. Its
attenuated leaves are covered with saline efflorescence, and its
particles of rosy flowers relieve the monotony of the wilderness. In the
permanent salt marshes, or _chotts_, some of the plants are analagous to
those formed in the bogs of Languedoc.
Among the plants of the Desert I must not forget the rose of Jericho
(_Anastatica hierochuntica_),[67] an annual which contracts itself into
a ball, and, blown about by the breeze, seems a dead and withered mass
of twigs. But plunge it into water, and it expands, regains the bloom of
life, affording a remarkable example of what is called "revivification."
The fable respecting it is, that the first time it ever bloomed was on
the eve of the Nativity, and that its flower remained open until Easter.
Several other vegetable species grow on the table-lands of the Algerine
Sahara, which are found elsewhere under similar conditions of soil and
climate. They are thorny shrubs and underwood, almost wholly belonging
to the family of Salsolaceæ, or littoral plants, which only thrive on
ground impregnated with salt; there are also sub-frutescent plants,
partly dried up by the sun. In some places the nakedness of the earth
is concealed by the bloom of geraniums and heliotropes. Further, you may
notice in the region of the table-lands, the _Melantha punctuata_, a
member of the Colchicum tribe, which bears a bouquet of very white
flowers grown upon the sand, and surrounded by a crown of ensheathed
leaves. Not unworthy of rejoicing the eyes of the most fastidious
connoisseurs, it lives and dies unknown in the solitudes of the Sahara.
[Illustration: VEGETABLE LIFE IN THE DESERT.
1. Jujube Tree. 2. Lentiscus. 3. Tamarisk.]
In the hollows, where the earth preserves some degree of humidity, a
fine soft sward prevails, of the most delicious emerald green; two
herbs, the Alfa (_stipa tenacissima_) and the White Wormwood
(_artemisia alba_),[68] often cover extended areas; the jujube trees
clothe themselves in profuse foliage; the coloquinta stretches over the
ground its branches loaded with spherical fruit; and the tamarisk,
developed into a tree, waves in the wind its tufts of snowy and
rose-hued flowers. It is in these meadows that the Arab rears his tent
and pastures his flocks under a winter sky. The industrious and
sedentary tribes seek in the oases a more benignant nature,--
"The yellow down
Bordered with palm, and many a winding vale
And meadow;"
and a soil which will repay their toil with liberal harvests. And it is
there only, in truth, that vegetation presents a development, a
continuity, and sometimes even a variety, which recalls the fortunate
countries of the Mediterranean region.
The old geographer, Ptolemæus, compared the Sahara to a panther's skin,
sprinkled with black spots on a tawny ground. These spots which, by an
effect of contrast, are set off in black on the yellowish tint of the
desert, are the far-famed oases, which have furnished our poets and
romancists with so many an appropriate image. Ptolemy's comparison is
the more accurate because these islands of verdure scattered over the
sandy ocean,
"Like precious stones set in a silver sea,"
have, in general, a circular form. We must except, however, the grandest
and most beautiful of all, Egypt. That immemorial land of mystery and
power is enchased in the Desert region like any other oasis, and only
differs in its greater extent and more elongated figure. It stretches
along the Nile like a ribbon--
"And Egypt joys beneath the spreading wave."
Its length, from Cairo to Assouan, is 450 miles. Its breadth does not
exceed nine to twelve miles, except at Cairo, where it measures about
eighty miles along the sea-coast, which forms the base of a triangular
district known as the Delta ([Greek: delta]) of the Nile. The two other
angles are marked by the cities of Pelusium and Alexandria. This long
strip of fertility is narrowly shut in between deserts of almost
incredible sterility.
A peculiarity worthy of attention, because it is the unique cause of the
fertility of Egypt, is, that the valley of the Nile, instead of sloping
down on either side to the river-bank, assumes a gently convex form. It
is owing to this slight convexity that, at the epoch of the
inundation--beginning in June and ending in October--the Nile waters
overflow to the right and to the left, rest upon the soil, and there
deposit their precious mud. How different the aspects of the country at
different seasons of the year! First, the bright sparkling sheets of
far-spreading and fertilising water; then the emerald green of the
growing crops; lastly, the ripe warm yellow hues of the full harvest.
Well might Amrou, the Arab conqueror of Egypt, remark to the Caliph
Omar, that, "according to the vicissitudes of the seasons, the face of
the country is adorned with a _silver_ wave, a verdant _emerald_, and
the deep _gold_ of an abundant harvest."
The soil of Egypt is, then, simply an alluvium mixed with the sand which
the winds bring from the Desert. Its aspect is that of a rich,
well-cultivated land, but bears the impress of a wearisome monotony. You
see there neither the dark dense forest, the rolling prairie, nor the
undulating woodland; from the shore of the Mediterranean to the tropics
you meet everywhere with the same cultivation; the same mud-built
villages, with their dirty and winding streets; and ever the same clumps
of palms, which would end by becoming tedious if it were not that their
elegance of form invests them with an eternal beauty--if a glorious
radiance did not gild with "refined gold" everything it touches--if,
finally, an after-glow of wondrous loveliness, of which the eye and soul
can never weary, which whenever seen suggests some new and subtle
emotions, did not terminate every day by a crepuscular pomp of
indescribable magnificence.
[Illustration: VEGETABLE LIFE IN THE DESERT.
1. Doum-Palm. 2. Date-Palm. 3. Alfa (_Stipa tenacissima_).]
The Palm-tree is, in Egypt, as in all the oases, the principal element
of the arborescent vegetation. But you also meet there with the banana,
the gum-tree, the orange, the jujube, the mulberry, the sycamore, and
other tall trees, which were planted by command of Mehemet Ali, and have
perfectly succeeded. The green banks of the river are diversified by
coppices of acacias and tamarisks. In the Fayoum district bloom
impervious hedges of cactus, and plantations of roses for the production
of rosewater. Cereals yield four crops a-year; flax, hemp, indigo,
cotton, the sugar-cane, prosper admirably; and under a climate where
ice, snow, and hail are unknown, not a month but has its burden of
flowers and fruits. Abundant crops of vegetables are raised, even as in
those days when the Israelites in the wilderness bewailed "the
cucumbers and the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlics" of
Egypt.
* * * * *
M. Charles Martins classes the Oases of the Sahara under three heads,
corresponding to his three sub-regions.[69]
The oasis of the Table Lands is watered by a stream or a copious spring.
That of the valleys of Erosion, by natural or artificial Artesian wells.
That of the Sandy Desert wants water. In the latter the palm-trees are
planted in conical cavities hollowed by the hand of man, that their
roots may strike down to the subterranean reservoir which is to nourish
them.
Every oasis is composed, in the main, of date-palms, which seem to form
a continuous forest; but in reality they are planted in rows, and in
gardens separated from one another by walls of earth, which are pierced
with an aperture to admit of the entrance of the irrigating rill into
the enclosed square. The soil employed in the construction of the walls
is removed from the paths, which are consequently below the surface, and
can be employed for a double purpose; they facilitate circulation in the
oases, and the waters, after having refreshed the gardens and revived
the soil, discharge themselves into these hollow ways, whence they flow
towards the chotts, or stagnate in swamps, which the lethargic Moslem
never thinks of draining. From such hotbeds of infection issues the
monster Fever every year, and slays its hundreds.
In case of need, every oasis becomes a fortress. Each "square of flowery
ground" is a redoubt; the assailant's bullet lodges in the earth wall,
or if it pierces through, forms a new loophole in which the Arab plants
his gun to aim at his enemy. The villages themselves are encircled with
walls, flanked by towers, which remind the spectator of the picturesque
fortifications of mediæval times.
* * * * *
The Date-Palm (_Phoenix dactylifera_) is _the_ tree of the Desert;
there only will its fruits ripen; without it, the Desert would be
uninhabitable and uninhabited. Arab poesy represents it as a living
being, created by God on the sixth day, at the same time as man. To
express under what conditions it prospers, the imagination of the
Saharan exaggerates the true, to render it the more palpable. "This king
of the oasis," he says, "must plunge his feet in the water and raise his
head in the fire of heaven." Science, to a certain extent, confirms this
seeming hyperbole; for it needs 5100° of heat accumulated during eight
months for the date to ripen its fruit perfectly. If the sum of heat be
less, the fruits set, but they do not grow to their full dimensions,
remain bitter to the taste, and fail in the sugar and farina, which form
their nutritive properties.
These conditions are realized in the climate of the Sahara. The mean
temperature of the year averages from sixty-eight to seventy-six
degrees, according to the locality. The heat commences in April, and
does not cease until October. The thermometer seldom sinks in the cold
season more than two degrees below zero, and the date can endure six
degrees below zero.
Rain, as already stated, is rare in the Sahara; it falls in winter, and
stimulates into a newly awakened life the vegetation which has been
drained of vigour by a summer sun. Sometimes they descend in torrents,
but these torrents, like our summer showers, are of briefest duration.
At Tongourt and Ouraegla whole years pass by without a drop of rain.
Does not the reader understand, then, the gratefulness of the Arabs
towards a tree which can derive its nourishment from the burning sand,
the scarcely less burning airs of heaven, and the brackish waters
beneath the soil which are fatal to all other kinds of vegetation--which
retains its verdure fresh in the glare of a pitiless sun--which resists
successfully the winds that bow to the ground its flexible stem--which
provides him with beams and coverings for his tent, cordage for the
harness of his horses and camels, fruit to satisfy his hunger and wine
to quench his thirst--which is, moreover, "a thing of beauty," and
gladsome to the eye?
"Those groups of lovely date-trees bending
Languidly their leaf-crowned heads,
Like youthful maids, when sleep descending,
Warns them to their silken beds."[70]
What the vine is to the Italian, the oak to the Englishman, the
cocoa-nut tree to the Polynesian, is the date-palm to the Arab. And
more--far more. This single tree has peopled the Desert. A civilization,
rudimentary compared with that of the West, sufficiently advanced if you
contrast it with that of the Malay or the South Sea Islander, finds in
it its standing-point, its centre, its support. And without it the
tribes of the Sahara would cease to be.[71]
The wealth of an oasis is computed by the number of its palm trees. All
of them, however, are not fruitful; for the date is dioecious. It has
its males and its females. The males have flowers furnished with stamens
only, and form a closed-up, folded, grape-like ball, previous to the
ripening of the pollen in an envelope called the spathe. The females, on
the contrary, bear clusters of fruit also wrapped up in a spathe, but
incapable of development until fecundated by the pollen or dust of the
stamens. To multiply the date-trees, the Arabs do not sow the kernels of
the fruits, though they germinate with extreme facility, for it is
impossible to tell beforehand of what sex the tree will be; they prefer,
therefore, to detach a slip from the trunk of a female tree, and this
becomes fruitful at the expiry of eight years.
The male trees blossom, says Mr. Tristram,[72] in the month of March,
and about the same time the case containing the female buds begins to
open. To impregnate these, a bunch of male flowers is carefully inserted
and fastened in the calyx. Towards the beginning of July, when the fruit
begins to swell, the bunches are tied to the neighbouring branches.
The dates are ripe in October, at which time any premature rain is fatal
to the crop, though the _roots_ require a daily watering. Not less
injurious are east winds in March and April. The tree when it begins to
bear is about seven feet high. Each year the lowest ring of leaves falls
off, so that the age of a palm may be roughly computed from the notches
on its stem. Its fruit begins to decline after a century, and the tree
is then cut down for building purposes; but it will live for at least a
couple of hundred years. Some trees produce as many as twenty bunches,
but the average in a favourable season is from eight to ten bunches,
each weighing from twelve to twenty pounds. Before the dates ripen, each
proprietor is bound to set apart one tree in his garden, whose fruit is
consecrated for the service of the mosque and the use of the poor.
From the juice of the date the Arab obtains a sweet fermented liquor,
called "laguni," of which he is inordinately fond. He makes an incision
in the top of the tree, taking care to strike home to the centre. A
funnel is attached, by which the sap flows into a vessel at the rate of
about three quarts every morning for ten to sixteen days. The incision
requires to be opened afresh daily.
The cabbage, or soft pith and young unfolded leaves at the summit of the
stem, in taste approaching the chestnut, is also eaten, but only when
the tree has fallen or been felled, as the loss of its crown invariably
destroys it.
There are fifteen varieties of dates, of which the _dghetnour_ is
considered the best for keeping, and three other kinds are preferred
fresh.
The crest of the full-grown trees rises about fifty feet above the
ground. The air circulates freely under the leafy canopy formed by their
interlacing branches, but the sun's rays do not penetrate. Shade, air,
and water--these three elements permit the most varied cultivation in
the palm-gardens, despite the scorching heats of summer. The fruit trees
which flourish are the fig, the pomegranate, the apricot; less
frequently, the vine and the olive; still more rarely, the peach, the
pear, and the orange. Vegetables are commonly cultivated during winter;
such as turnips, cabbages, onions, carrots, beans, and pimento
(_Capsicum annuum_), an indispensable condiment for those Arab sauces
(_merga_) destined to stimulate the digestive energies of a people who
abstain from alcoholic liquors. You may also remark pumpkins, gourds,
and water-melons; small squares of lucerne, which yield as many as eight
crops yearly; the henna (_Lawsonia inermis_), which tints with yellow
the nails of the Arab women; and tobacco (_Nicotiana rustica_),
cultivated most largely in the Souf. In winter you may refresh your eyes
in the clearings of the oasis with verdurous fields, green with barleys
and early wheats springing vigorously from the earth. The cultivation of
cotton, though considerably stimulated by the failure of the usual
supply from the Southern States of America, is still in its infancy.
There can be little doubt, however, that with improved methods of
irrigation it will be considerably and successfully developed.
* * * * *
The oases of the table-land region, fertilized, as we have already seen,
by the streams of fresh water which flow down from the mountains and
spread abroad in natural or artificial channels, are much the most
fertile, and also the most healthy. They possess, moreover, the
inestimable advantage of being but a short distance from the
Mediterranean region, in a country less arid and less desolate than the
remainder of the Desert. I may name, among these oases, those of
El-Kantara, Biskra, and El-Outaïa, which form a sort of chaplet, and are
watered by the same river.
The oasis of El-Kantara is the first we encounter on quitting the
Mediterranean region to penetrate into the Sahara through the gloomy and
precipitous ravine entitled "The Mouth of the Desert." It is situated
1800 feet above the sea-level. Its length is 5000 yards. Fournel, the
first geologist who examined it (in 1864), christened it the Hyères of
the Sahara. Its temperature is cool and equable, and does but just
suffice to enable the dates to ripen. It possesses upwards of 76,000
palm-trees, sheltering under their leafy shadow legions of apricots,
pomegranates, and fig-trees. In the centre of this pleasant and fruitful
shade houses of brick, with flat roofs and narrow loop-holed windows,
surround a square tower. The ancient watch-towers have fallen into
decay. Before France took under its "protection" the peaceful Berbers
who cultivate the oasis, these towers were useful as posts of
observation whence to descry the approach of the wandering Arabs, who
resort in summer to the pastures of the mountains, and in winter to
those of the Sahara.
* * * * *
As a type of the oasis of the Desert of Erosion, let us take that of
Ouargla, the last which submitted to the French in South Algeria.
[Illustration: A Street in Ouargla.]
It is situated in a profound hollow. In form it is elliptical, with its
major axis measuring about five thousand yards, and its minor about
three thousand. The palms are planted at the rate of ten to eleven
hundred a hectare (two acres); they attain to extraordinary dimensions,
and their dense foliage over-arches a small world of fruit trees.
Outside the gardens grow some wild date-palms, which yield a smaller
crop, but whose fruit is much more savoury. Two avenues, or clearings,
bisecting the forest from north to south, lead to the _q'sour_, or
village, of Ouargla. This _q'sour_, like every other, is built of
sun-dried earth, and surrounded by a circular rampart in very bad
condition, six to thirteen feet in height, and four and a-half feet
thick at the base. It is flanked with loop-holed towers, and encircled
externally by a muddy moat, crossed by six causeways leading to as many
gates.
Before some of these gates are planted the small entrenched camps,
wherein the Arab shepherds of the neighbourhood take refuge with their
flocks what time the oasis is menaced by an enemy.
The _q'sour_ of Ouargla is divided into three quarters, inhabited by
three tribes, who do not live always on the most friendly terms. In
appearance it resembles the Saharan _q'sours_, which have all a strong
family likeness; there are the mosque, and the governor's residence, and
the open market-place, and the narrow squalid streets, often obstructed
by heaps of unclean and unsavoury rubbish; and the low dull houses,
pierced with holes instead of windows, which have seldom any shutters;
so that the traveller, when he penetrates into these dismal quarters, is
startled by the contrast which they present to the picture of enchanted
palaces full of shade, perfume, and freshness, drawn by his eager
imagination. Our poets and romancists have much to answer for. Their
ideal East is very different from that actual East, in all its heat, and
noisomeness, and glare, which the voyager finds around him, and which
seems to have lost much of its beauty along with its grandeur and its
power. Pleasant to the fancy is the palm-grove, pleasant the garden with
its golden and purple fruitage, but the warm (and often mineral) waters
which irrigate, or rather inundate the soil, exhale the most deleterious
emanations, so that the unfortunate inhabitants are constantly decimated
by fever, blinded by ophthalmic disease, and devoured by insects!
We have already seen that the Desert of Erosion is watered by means of
artesian wells, natural or artificial. The latter have been known to the
peoples of the Sahara from the remotest antiquity; but the implements
and the methods employed to bore or preserve them were, as the reader
will suppose, very rude and unsatisfactory. The sides of the well are
only supported by a framework of palm-wood, which decays very quickly;
the well gets choked; divers descend with baskets to clear away the
sand; but after awhile the evil exceeds their power of remedying it.
"Then, for want of water," says M. Martins, "the palms grow sick and
perish; the villages are emptied of their population; the oasis
contracts its boundaries, and gradually disappears. The Desert resumes
possession of the demesne which the labour of man had temporarily won
for it." Fortunately, in the track of the French army have trodden the
French engineers, with all the wonderful apparatus that Science places
at their disposal, and in numerous places they have excavated true
artesian wells, similar to those which supply some of our great towns.
And thus many oases which were on the point of perishing have been
saved, others have been created, and the conquest of the Desert by
modern industry is henceforth no more than a question of time.
* * * * *
The oases of the Sandy Desert, as I have said, are not watered. They
only possess such wells as suffice, more or less, for the needs of the
poor cultivators. As for the palms, and other nutritive vegetables, they
are planted at the bottom of conical excavations some eighteen,
twenty-five, or thirty feet in depth; so that at a short distance you
only see their crests rising above the sandy soil like large tufts of
herbage. The slopes around these hollow gardens are stayed indifferently
well by a matting of palm leaves. The well itself is placed in the
centre, and its depth does not exceed five-and-twenty feet. Nothing can
be more precarious than these oases, which a gust of wind may bury under
an avalanche of sand. Yet the men are cleaner in their person, neater in
attire, and livelier in spirit--the women are less wretched and less
oppressed--and the houses better built and better provided than in the
great _q'sours_ of the upper regions. In the Souf, the sandy region of
the Eastern Sahara, the industrious inhabitants of these oases remain at
peace in the midst of the tumults and insurrections of their turbulent
neighbours, and appear fully sensible of the advantages they undoubtedly
derive from the firm and impartial rule of the French Government.
CHAPTER VI.
ANIMAL LIFE IN THE DESERT.
The artist who wishes to represent the broad expanse of Ocean's "liquid
plain," does not fail to animate it with the white canvas of the
labouring ships. If he paints the Desert, his picture would be divided
by a horizontal line into two parts--the blue heaven, the yellow sand;
the latter, an undulating sea, with a few clumps of palms in the
background, and in the foreground, to enliven the too monotonous scene,
a group or so of camels. The camel is, in fact, the indispensable
accessory of every view of the Desert, as the ship of every marine
painting; which justifies once more the Arab designation of "ship of the
Desert" or "terrestrial ship" (_gouareb el beurr_).
In Book the First I have spoken of the Camel properly so-called, or
camel with two humps, which is peculiar to Central and Eastern Asia. The
camel of Arabia and Africa is the dromedary. The latter is employed
conjointly with the two-humped camel in the westernmost countries of
Asia: in Egypt, and in Nubia, he is much more widely spread than his
congener, which is nearly unknown in the rest of Africa. The dromedary
has but one hump. His hair is soft, woolly, moderately long about the
body, longer and much thicker on the hump, the head, the neck, and the
shoulders. Its colour varies from a reddish-brown to a clear yellow.
Zoologists recognize three varieties of this species:--The _Brown
dromedary_, also called, but improperly, the Caucasian dromedary--he is
brown, like the Bactrian camel, and his short squat limbs indicate
strength rather than agility; the _White dromedary_, of a very
transparent colour, and of slender figure; and the _Egyptian dromedary_,
larger than either of the preceding, and with body and limbs uniformly
clothed in short gray hair. But the Arabs distinguish only two races:
the _Djemel_, or camel of burden, which is no other, probably, than the
Caucasian dromedary; and the _Mahari_, or camel for the saddle and war,
whose name seems to apply equally to the two other varieties.
[Illustration: 1. The Mahari. 2. The Djemel.]
The mahari is to the djemel what our chargers are to our carthorses, or,
as the Arabs say, what the _djend_ (noble) is to the _kheddim_ (the
servant). He has a very sure foot, a free, sustained, and rapid trot;
he is sober, enduring, and courageous; a true courser, and the nomade's
inseparable friend and companion. His training is a matter of the
highest importance, and skilfully adapted to develop all his best
qualities and highest faculties.
The Arabs of the Tell assert that the maharis accomplish in one day ten
times the march of a caravan, or a hundred leagues; but the best in
blood and breeding do not generally exceed a daily journey of from
thirty-five to forty leagues.
The young mahari has his place in the Arab's tent. The children play
with him; he is a recognized member of the family; custom and gratitude
attach him to his masters, whom he divines to be his friends.
If the djemel be not as noble as the mahari, he is not less useful.
Without him, all relations would be suspended between the peoples of the
Sahara; the Soudan, wide, populous, and fertile as it is, would be a
_terra incognita_; he is the sole means of intercommunication possible
in the arid wastes of the Desert.
Alike living and dead, he is the fortune of his master.
Living, he carries the tents and the provisions; he makes war, he
carries on commerce; that he might be patient, God (say the Arabs)
created him without gall; he fears neither hunger nor thirst, fatigue
nor heat; his hair is woven into the burnous and the tent-stuff; the
milk of the female nourishes rich and poor, and fattens the horses; it
is "a spring which does not dry up."[73]
Dead, all his flesh is excellent eating; his hump (_deroua_) forms the
daintiest dish at the banquet; in the bottles made of his skin, the
water is neither consumed by wind nor sun; the shoes fashioned from it
may tread unhurt upon the viper, and will save the traveller's feet from
burning wounds (_haffa_); denuded of its hair, afterwards soaked in
water, and simply applied to a wooden saddle, without nails or pegs, it
adheres to it, like the bark to the tree, and communicates to the whole
a solidity which will defy war, the chase, and the foray.
The superiority of the mahari consists in this, that to all his own
peculiar qualities he adds those of the djemel. His inferiority arises
from the difficulty of his training, which consumes for more than a year
all his master's time without compensation, and from the fact that
animals of his race are few in number.
* * * * *
[Illustration: STRIPED HYÆNAS OF THE SAHARA.]
If we turn to the poet or the artist for a picture of the Desert, we
find it peopled with animals of a very unsatisfactory character: the
lion, the leopard, the panther, in quest of prey, seeking whom they may
devour, or troops of hyænas and jackals, tearing with keen teeth the
corpses of men and animals.
"With these, lean dogs in herds obscene repair,
And every kind that snuffs the tainted air."--(_Lucan._)
[Illustration: JACKALS DISINTERING DEAD BODIES.]
Others diversify the scene with the graceful form of the gazelle, with
the ungainly body, immensely long neck, and spotted hide of the giraffe;
or with the ostrich, the camel of the bird-world, spreading his plumes
to the wind, and flying with swift feet from the hunter or the wild
beast that pursues him. But, in truth, these are bold fancies, artistic
or poetic licenses, rather than exact representations of what one really
sees in the Desert; and most of the animals with which we people, at our
pleasure, the immense solitudes of Africa and Asia actually belong to
neighbouring regions of a less arid character. And, in the first place,
the lion of the Desert is a myth, or nearly so. "When you speak," says
Carrette, "to the inhabitants of the Desert of these ferocious beasts
which Europeans give them as companions, they reply with imperturbable
coolness, 'You have, then, in your own country, lions which drink air
and browse on leaves? But, among us, lions must have running water and
live flesh. Therefore they only appear in those parts of the Sahara
where are wooded hills and an abundance of water. We dread nothing but
the viper (_lefa_) and the innumerable swarms of mosquitoes; the latter
being found wherever any humidity prevails.'"[74]
[Illustration: 1. Gypaëtos, or Bearded Vulture. 2. Sociable Vulture. 3.
Cathartes Percnopterus.]
What Carrette relates of the lion is also true of the other carnivora,
of the panther and the leopard, as well as of the hyæna and the jackal.
It is surely easy to understand that these animals greatly prefer to
sojourn in fertile and well-watered countries, where they enjoy
freshness, shelter, copious supplies of water, and abundant prey, than
in hot glaring plains of sand, which offer them no asylum, and where
they run the risk of perishing of hunger and thirst. It is, then, only
on exceptional occasions that the lions and other large _felidæ_ of
Africa issue from their caverns or their lairs, and wander into the
Desert (properly so called) in pursuit of prey. The hyæna and the jackal
venture there more willingly. We know that these carnivora only attack
living animals at the last extremity; their food is the dead and even
putrid flesh; it is a nutriment which costs them less trouble to obtain,
and probably, also, most pleases their taste. Thus, it is by no means an
uncommon occurrence to see them in the towns and _q'sours_, devouring
the carrion, or in the cemeteries disinterring the corpses; they follow
also in the Desert the caravans and detachments of troops on the march,
and at night prowl around their encampments, in the hope of some
windfall, which they seldom expect in vain, but which the dogs, the
vultures (_Cathartes percnopterus_ and _vultur fulvus_), the _gypaëtos_,
and the crows rarely fail to dispute with them.
The region of the table-lands, or Saharan Steppes, the valleys of
Erosion, and certain parts of the Gobi--Persia, Syria, and Arabia--which
are not absolutely deprived of rain, or which are refreshed by
mountain-streams, nourish several species of mammifers: gazelles,
hedgehogs, porcupines, hares, offering both to man and the carnivora an
abundant variety of game. Of all these animals, the most interesting are
the gazelles, several species of which inhabit the desert region. I
shall refer in the first place to the gazelle properly so called, or
_Antilope dorcas_, so remarkable for the grace of his movements, his
slender limbs, and the expressive gentleness of his eyes. This beautiful
species is common in Central Sahara, Nubia, and Asia. He lives in
numerous troops, is of small stature, with a yellowish or yellow-brown
skin on the back, and a white belly, a brown or blackish belt marking
the sides. The horns, larger and stronger in the male than in the
female, have a double curve, are lyrated, and without projections. The
Ariel Gazelle is about twenty inches high at the shoulder. The _Gazella
Soemmeringii_ belongs to Abyssinia and Sennaar. The gazelle _nanguer_
is found as far as Morocco, Nubia, and in the Cordofou; some varieties
occur at the Senegal. Finally, the oryx-leucoryx inhabits Tropical
Africa, and rarely makes his appearance in the Deserts; he differs from
the gazelle in his arched horns, but his skin is nearly the same.
Although the gazelles are generally considered extremely timid animals,
which, moreover, their weakness would fully justify, they display on
emergency a surprising courage. When they cannot escape from danger
through agility, they bravely confront the enemy which attacks them.
Menaced by a panther or a leopard, they form themselves into a circle,
which, bristling everywhere with keen-pointed horns, compels the
antagonist to retreat.
[Illustration:
1. Gazelle.
2. Antelope (_Oryx-leucoryx_).
3. Gazelle (_of Soemmering_).
4. Nanguer.]
In the deserts of Africa and Arabia the traveller frequently meets with
small rodents, which excavate their burrows in the sandy soil, and only
issue from them at night in quest of food. These are the jerboas and
jerbilles. The jerboas are easily recognized by the length of their
hind-legs and the disposition of their toes--three to each hind-foot,
the middle larger than the rest; five to each fore-foot; and all
furnished with sharp, strong, crooked claws; their structure resembling
that of the _raptores_ among birds. These animals leap with great
celerity, and to an extraordinary distance. The tail, which is a fifth
longer than the body, and terminated by a tuft of black hair, forms at
one and the same time a sort of balance, a rudder, and a lever. It
enables the jerboa to preserve his equilibrium, and to direct himself
when he has taken his spring; or, in a state of repose, furnishes him
with a substantial support.
[Illustration: GAZELLES OF ARABIA OPPOSING A PANTHER.]
The jerboas constitute, in the family of _dipodidæ_, a tribe composed of
several species, which are found in eastern and central Europe, Asia,
and Africa.
The jerbilles, owing to the similarity of name, are often confounded
with the jerboas; but the only things they have in common are a certain
conformity of habits, and a nearly equal aptitude for leaping.
Otherwise, their organization rather resembles that of the rat, along
with which it is classed by zoologists. Their hind-legs are much shorter
than those of the jerboa, and their tail is garnished with but a few
short, stiff hairs. Like the jerboas, they inhabit the sandy
wildernesses of Africa, Asia, and eastern Europe.
[Illustration: JERBOAS ATTACKED BY A HORNED VIPER.]
These small animals, exclusively frugivorous and graminivorous, seem
able, in the solitary places where they make their retreats, to multiply
themselves _ad infinitum_; but, while a great number perish through
famine, they are also decimated by a host of enemies in the reptiles of
the Desert, and especially by the terrible horned viper, or _cerastes_,
and a great saurian, intermediate between the lizard and crocodile--the
"varan of the Desert."
The horned viper (_vipera cerastes_) is thus named on account of the two
horns or protuberances on its forehead, which give it a physiognomy
more hideous, perhaps, than that of any of its congeners. It attains the
length of two to three feet. Its head is depressed, very obtuse, swollen
behind the eyes, and, so to speak, truncated in front. Its body, cased
in shells of a tawny-like yellow, marked with brown spots, blends
curiously with the sand, half-buried in which it lurks to surprise its
prey or escape from its enemies. The cerastes frequents the deserts of
Lybia, Arabia, the Sahara, and the valley of the Nile. Its bite is
exceedingly dangerous.
[Illustration: 1. Varan of the Nile. 2. Varan of the Desert.]
The _varans_, or _monitors_, called also _tupinambis_ by the ancient
naturalists, form a genus represented in tropical climes by several
species of great size. English writers commonly designate them monitors,
the French sauvegardes, because they frequent the haunts of crocodiles
and alligators, and give warning of their approach by a whistling sound.
Two species belong to Africa: one, aquatic, the varan of the Nile
(_varanus dracæna_); the other, sand-burrowing, the varan of the Desert
(_varanus sunius_, or _arenarius_), called by the Arabs
_onaran-el-ard_. Their usual size is from three feet to three feet four
inches. The varan of the Nile wears an armour of alternately green and
black scales. Its congener exhibits a mixture of brown and yellow, more
suitable to its sandy lairs. It is rare in the Sahara, but common enough
in the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Nubia.
Poor as may be the Fauna of the Desert, there is yet cause enough for
astonishment that the species which compose it, especially the
herbivora, should be able to find subsistence in these seas of sand,
where they can find but a few saline plants scattered at rare intervals,
and where fresh water is almost wholly wanting. It is, however, well
known now-a-days that the wilderness provides its denizens with an
aliment, which is sometimes very abundant, suitable for man, the camel,
and the beasts, and is considered identical by many authorities with the
_manna_ of the Bible.[75] This substance is a cryptogamous vegetable,
variously christened _lichen esculentus_ (Acharius), _lecanora
esculenta_ (Pallas), _luttarut_ (by the Arabs), and _vasseh-el-ard_, or
"earth-dung" (by the Algerines). It sometimes forms on the sand, in the
morning, a layer one or two inches in thickness, and appears to have
dropped from heaven, or to have sprung spontaneously from the soil,
during the night. It is probable that its spores, transported by the
wind, are developed by the humidity which is condensed through the
nocturnal coldness.
A shower of this lichen was observed, in April 1846, in the Russian
government of Wilna. It covered the soil for three or four inches in
depth, and the inhabitants lived upon it for several days. Its form is
that of a small, anfractuous, rounded grain, about the size of a pea,
externally of a gray colour, but white and farinaceous within. Its taste
is weak, amygdalaceous, with a faint, mushroom-like aroma. Boiled in
water, it swells, becomes gelatinous, and may be served up in various
ways. In the Sahara, as well as in Arabia, it adheres to any foreign
body. Cattle feed upon it eagerly. It certainly facilitates digestion,
and contains all the assimilating principles which form the constituents
of the wholesomest vegetable food. Such as it is, the _lichen
esculentus_ is an inestimable boon to the wandering tribes of the
Desert, who would perish of hunger in years of famine but for its
heaven-sent nutriment.
CHAPTER VII.
THE MEN OF THE DESERT.
When I use the terms "Men of the Desert," "Populations of the Desert,"
evidently I must not be understood to employ them in their absolute
sense. Man, no more than that other so-called "lord of animals"--the
lion, makes a voluntary sojourn in countries where game, verdure, and
fresh water are wanting. The peoples whom we entitle "Inhabitants of the
Desert" are then, in reality, those who dwell upon its borders or in its
oases, but whom the necessity of traversing and frequently abiding in it
has familiarized with its gloom and its peril, as a similar necessity
has familiarized the mariner with the ocean. We have seen, however, that
some pastoral tribes pitch their tents and pasture their flocks in those
districts where vegetation is favoured and cherished by a supply of rain
or subterranean waters, and which should more accurately be designated
as Steppes than Deserts. Some authorities have, indeed, affixed the name
of "the Saharan Steppe" to the region of high table-lands which lies at
the base of the Atlas range.
Other groups, who are partly shepherds and partly hunters, inhabit, in
the Southern and Western Sahara, those plateaux where ostriches,
gazelles, and hares abound. The more peaceful and industrious tribes
occupy the oases. As for those who encamp or habitually wander in the
Sandy Desert--where all cultivation is impossible, where the herds can
obtain but an insufficient pasture, where game very seldom shows
itself-the reader will suppose that they can only subsist by plundering
or ransoming the caravans. These are the rovers, the pirates of the Sea
of Sand. There are "land-rats," Shakspeare tells us, as well as
"water-rats." Others, again, there are who seem convinced that "honesty
is the best policy," who give themselves up exclusively to commercial
transactions, and act as agents and intermediaries between nations
separated from one another by leagues of rock and sand, for the exchange
of their respective products. It might be said of these that they
discharged a useful and honourable function, if the purchase and sale of
slaves were not the most ordinary, and unfortunately the most lucrative,
of their operations.
In our previous examination of the peoples of the Steppes, we discovered
that all were more or less directly sprung from the same sources;--the
yellow or Mongolian race, which blends in the north with the Hyperborean
race, and in the west with the Japhetic or Indo-Germanic. We have now to
note a not less remarkable fact--that the whole Desert zone is likewise
occupied by one family, the Semitic, modified in certain parts of Africa
by commixture with the Negro race. Soon we shall see the latter peopling
of itself the plains of Central and Southern Africa; the
Malayo-Polynesian and Papuan, but slightly distinguished from the
preceding, in possession of the islands of the Indian Ocean, those of
Oceania, and the Australian continent; the Hyperborean race, scattered
through the Arctic solitudes; and, finally, the "Red Man," gradually
dying away among the prairies and forests of the two Americas: so that,
to each of the great divisions of the Savage or Desert World corresponds
one of the great fractions of the human species.
The Shemites--so named because the Bible attributes their origin to
Shem, the eldest son of Noah--are now-a-days represented only by the
Jews and the Arabs, though they formerly included also the Assyrians,
the Chaldæans or Babylonians, the Syrians, Phoenicians, and
Ethiopians. Of their modern representatives, the Jews alone have
displayed any real aptitude for civilization. The Arabs, whose name is
derived from the word _Arâba_, which signifies "desert," seem almost
exclusively adapted for a nomadic life; and it is to them can most
correctly be applied the characteristics which Renan too broadly
attributes to the entire Shemitic race.
"As far as concerns the civil and political life," says that
distinguished orientalist, "the Shemites are distinguished by the same
character of simplicity. They have never understood civilization in the
sense which we apply to the word. We do not find among them any great
organized empires, or commerce, or public spirit--nothing which recalls
the absolute monarchy of Egypt and Persia. The true Shemitic society is
that of the tent and the tribe: it owns no political or judiciary
institution; its principle is, man free, without any controlling
authority, and without any other security than that of the family tie.
The questions of aristocracy, democracy, feudality, which sum up all the
history of the Aryan peoples, have no meaning for the Shemites.
Aristocracy, not having among them a military origin, is accepted
without protest and without repugnance. The Shemitic nobility is purely
patriarchal: it owes nothing to conquest; it has its origin in blood."
As far as their physique is concerned, the Arabs are in general tall,
thin, nimble, not very strong. Their face is pale and long, their
forehead low, their nose aquiline, their mouth large, their chin
receding. The complexion is brown, as becomes those who live for months
under a glaring sun; the eyes are keen and glowing; the port is free and
even haughty. They have black hair and beard.
Of their history, prior to the day when Mohammed's genius knit them into
a great proselytizing military people, little certain is known. A
Shemitic tribe, descended from Joktan, grandson of Shem, settled in
Arabia at a remote period of antiquity, and Joktan's great-grandson,
Himzar or Homin, founded a dynasty which ruled in Yemen for upwards of
two thousand years. Even the Romans could not utterly subdue them, but
gradually the different tribes fell apart from one another, and for
centuries waged against each other the most desperate wars, until
Mohammed supplied them with a rallying-point in the creed of Islam.
Thenceforth their mission was to propagate the new faith by fire and
sword, and bursting from their rocky highlands like a torrent, they
poured along the shores of the Mediterranean to Gibraltar on the north,
and Tangier on the south. In Northern Africa they gradually mingled with
the Berbers, the Numidians, and the Getulians, and from the fusion
sprang the Kabyles, the Tibbous, and the Touaregs, while the Shemites
themselves lost a portion of their original character.
All the tribes of the desert are Moslems. The precepts of the Koran, and
certain traditional usages, are almost the only laws which they
recognize.
The Koran authorizes polygamy, and the Arab women, therefore, are less
the wives than the slaves of their husbands, who enforce upon them the
strictest seclusion, and impose upon them the most arduous labours. The
tyranny which weighs upon the women is, however, in inverse proportion
to the degree of welfare and civilization of the various tribes. Among
the poor and almost barbarous peoples of the desert, these unfortunate
creatures are reduced to a condition of degradation and brutishness
which inspires in the European almost as much disgust as pity.
The instinct of rapine which most writers have signalized as one of the
leading features of the Arab character, appears to have been greatly
exaggerated, or, at least, too much generalized. This vice is a special
result of their position, and, we must own, of the very antiquated views
they hold upon the "rights of man," which, indeed, they sum up in much
the same manner as Wordsworth's _Rob Roy_:--[76]
"The creatures see of flood and field,
And those that travel on the wind!
With them no strife can last; they live
In peace, and peace of mind.
"For why?--because the good old rule
Sufficeth them, the simple plan,
_That they should take who have the power,_
_And they should keep who can_."
We must also take into account the spirit of hostility which their
religion fosters against the infidel--against, that is, all who do not
accept the laws of the Prophet. "The sword," says Mohammed, "is the key
of heaven and of hell; a drop of blood shed in the cause of God, a night
spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fasting or prayer:
whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven: at the day of judgment
his wounds shall be resplendent as vermilion and odoriferous as musk;
and the loss of his limbs shall be supplied by the wings of angels and
cherubim." Such a declaration could not but fire the enthusiasm of the
Arab, and whet their swords against the enemies of Islam.
The leading features of his character have been discriminated by Gibbon
with his usual sagacity, and described with his wonted stateliness of
language.
"In private life," he says,[77] "every man, at least every family, is
the judge and avenger of his own cause. The nice sensibility of honour,
which weighs the insult rather than the injury, sheds its deadly venom
on the quarrels of the Arabs; the honour of their women, and their
_beards_, is most easily wounded; an indecent action, a contemptuous
word, can be expiated only by the blood of the offender; and such is
their patient inveteracy, that they expect whole months and years the
opportunity of revenge. A fine or compensation for murder is familiar to
the barbarians of every age; but with the Arabs the kinsmen of the dead
are at liberty to accept the atonement, or to exercise with their own
hands the law of retaliation. Their refined malice refuses even the head
of the murderer, substitutes an innocent for the guilty person, and
transfers the penalty to the best and most considerable of the race by
whom they have been injured. If he falls by their hands, they are
exposed in their turn to the danger of reprisals, the interest and
principal of the bloody debt are accumulated; the individuals of either
family lead a life of malice and suspicion, and fifty years may
sometimes elapse before the account of vengeance be finally settled.
This sanguinary spirit, ignorant of pity or forgiveness, has been
moderated, however, by the maxims of honour, which require in every
private encounter some decent equality of age and strength, of numbers
and weapons....
"According to the remark of Pliny, the Arabian tribes are equally
addicted to theft and merchandize; the caravans that traverse the desert
are ransomed or pillaged; and their neighbours, since the remote times
of Job and Sesostris, have been the victims of their rapacious spirit.
If a Bedouin discovers from afar a solitary traveller, he rides
furiously against him, crying, with a loud voice, 'Undress thyself, thy
aunt (my wife) is without a garment.' A ready submission entitles him to
mercy; resistance will provoke the aggressor, and his own blood must
expiate the blood which he presumes to shed in legitimate defence. A
single robber, or a few associates, are branded with their genuine name;
but the exploits of a numerous band assume the character of lawful and
honourable war. The temper of a people thus armed against mankind, was
doubly inflamed by the domestic license of rapine, murder, and revenge."
The name of "Bedouins" (from _bedaouî_, "man of the Desert") has been
bestowed on the nomades of Arabia, Egypt, and the Northern Sahara. The
majority of them are shepherds; a few add to this industry the much less
honourable occupation of plundering trade-caravans; some prefer to
devote themselves wholly to this pursuit. All the Bedouins are children
of the sword. They exult in strife and the clash of arms. It is their
_acmé_ of happiness to mount the war-steed and ride against the foe. The
theme of the Arab and his horse, of the attachment which subsists
between them, of the services which the latter renders to his master, of
his physical and moral qualities, his courage, his swiftness, his
fidelity, has been worn so threadbare that I need not here insist upon
it.
I must state, however, that as there are two varieties of Arab camels,
so are there of Arab horses: the noble and the common, the beast of
blood and the beast of burden. The former seem to be growing scarcer
every year. He is named _koleïl_. The nobility of a horse depends
entirely upon that of his mother, so that an authentic certificate of
birth is always delivered to the purchaser of a "high-bred steed." This
certificate is enclosed in a small bag, which also contains a mysterious
writing, and suspended to the animal's neck will be an omen of good
fortune, it is hoped, to him and his owner.
[Illustration: BEDOUIN SHEPHERDS AND BEDOUIN NOMADES.]
The arms of the Bedouins are the curved sword, the yataghan, and the
long musket. Pistols are sometimes added, and the lance. They fight hand
to hand, and without any strategical method. They never venture upon
night attacks. They seek to surprise the enemy by rapid marches and
unexpected diversions, by ensnaring him in ambuscades, and harassing him
when he is the strongest in numbers. The most trifling fortification,
however, arrests them--a wall of brick, a simple ditch, a hedge of the
fig-tree, will suffice to protect a village from their depredations.
[Illustration: TOUAREGS.]
[Illustration: ATTACK UPON A Q'SOUR.]
The nomades of the Southern Sahara have not, like the Bedouins,
preserved in its purity the Shemitic type, but they have fostered and
developed the spirit of adventure and rapine which characterizes the
Arab of the desert, and they have added something of the ferocity of the
still barbarous tribes of Ham, with whom they have intermarried. These
nomades form two principal groups--the Tibboos on the east, and Touaregs
(Touarick, Touereug, or Tawarik) on the west. The former, according to
Humboldt, are called "birds," on account of their agility; they are
still imperfectly known to Europeans, despite of the labours of
Richardson, Clapperton, and Barth. The second are divided into the
Touaregs of Aghadez and the Touaregs of Tagazi. It was not until 1862
that the French army, crossing the Sahara from north to south, entered
into direct relations with these fierce children of the desert. In the
same year their ambassadors attracted the curiosity of ever-curious
Paris. They are the despots, the tyrants of the southern Sahara. The
charge of their lean flocks is their least occupation. They are, it is
true, skilful and enthusiastic hunters; but their veritable industry is
the exploration of the desert: an exploration which changes in form
according to circumstances. For a proper remuneration they undertake the
guidance and protection of the caravans; but whoever has not purchased
their safeguard they treat as an enemy, and if not adequately ransomed
sell into slavery. The Berbers of the oasis not unjustly regard these
marauders with alarm. For they pitilessly exact from the peaceful
cultivator a share of his harvest, which is always the lion's share; the
right of the strongest being the only right they recognize, and each
man for himself the only principle they respect. A troop of Touaregs,
for instance, descends upon an oasis, and summons its inhabitants to
deliver up immediately a certain number of bags of dates. In case of
refusal they withdraw, but the people of the oasis may prepare to defend
themselves with arms, for the dreaded blow will very shortly be
delivered. The Touaregs, leaving their maharis and their baggage at a
convenient distance, penetrate at night into the palm-gardens, scale the
walls, and, unless very energetically repelled, seize upon the tribute
they had demanded.
Nothing is there to be remarked in the Arabs of the _q'sours_ but their
misery and degradation. A French officer, M. Tremblet, has described
with exactness and force their physiognomy, manners, character, ideas,
and history.[78] One rises from the perusal of his book with a painful
impression. In the narrow and pestilential streets of the _q'sours_,
where vermin are as numerous as men and women, in those mud palaces
where the sultans are enthroned in rags, the same passions, the same
ambitions, the same all-potent appetites, the same struggles, intrigues,
and crimes prevail, as occupy so large a place in the history of the
great states of Europe and Asia.
Among the inhabitants of the Desert I would include the possessors of
the great Egyptian oasis,--that ancient cradle of civilization--that
strange and mysterious land which, after throbbing with so full and
brilliant a life in the days of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies,
slumbered for centuries under the leaden domination of the Moslem. Let
us note only that the Egyptian people have undergone no special
modification; the features of the fellahs of to-day are exactly those
which we trace in the pictures that cover the walls of palace and tomb,
the monuments that carry us back in imagination to the erection of the
Pyramids or the glories of hundred-gated Thebes. It is the old
Egypto-Berber race, wherein we recognize the mixture of the black and
Shemitic blood, or perhaps the still incomplete result of the
influences which have transformed into negroes the whites who emigrated,
some thousands of years ago, from Western Asia into Africa.
[Illustration: NUBIAN WOMEN.]
The Egyptians establish, very clearly, the transition between the
Shemites and the population of Nubia and Ethiopia. With the latter the
skin is black or of a deep bronze; but the form, the features, the hair,
approach much more nearly the Caucasian than the Negro type. The Nubian
women especially exhibit a grace and dignity of movement which reveal
the nobleness of their origin. "It is in these far lands," says Trémaux,
"we meet with the modern Rebecca, attired with the antique Biblical
simplicity, and carrying the water vessel on her head. Their air, at
once easy and reserved, their black modest eyes, recall those images of
the holy history which every one has seen; only, instead of a cotton
stuff gaily coloured, imagine a piece very dirty and often in tatters,
and you will have the portrait of the Nubian woman; this garment is
otherwise so naturally draped and so proudly worn, that it yields in
nothing to the ancient models."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
BOOK III.
_PRAIRIES, SAVANNAHS, PAMPAS, AND LLANOS._
CHAPTER I.
THE WILD PLAINS OF THE OLD WORLD:--THE AFRICAN INTERIOR.
When we have crossed the 18th parallel (or nearly so) of north latitude
in Africa and the 30th in Asia--the southern boundary of the Rainless
District--countries of extreme fertility and exuberant product succeed
to the dreary solitudes we have hitherto traversed.
At intervals, indeed, the traveller encounters some vast blighted and
accursed area, where, for a part of each year, a deadly aridity
prevails; but ever there comes a happy moment, even in these desolate
wastes, when genial Nature resumes her rights, abundant rains nourish
vegetable and animal life, and the glowing scene constrains us to
exclaim with thankful heart, "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness
thereof."
The Asiatic plains in the south, are, however, preserved from such
abrupt alternations; numerous water-courses, leaping downward from the
snowy fountains of the Himalayan chain, refresh and fertilize these
countries, which are almost everywhere subject to the dominion of man.
Analagous causes, in the grand rich islands of the warm Indian seas,
produce similar effects; there, also, the very deserts are humid
regions, and tall grasses, bushes, shrubs, reeds, and climbing plants
grow in a rank and luxuriant chaos which we designate by the name of
jungles, in whose dense obscurity the tiger makes his lair, and the
serpent conceals his deadly venom!
In the immense triangle defined by that portion of the African continent
which extends from the Mountains of the Moon to the Cape of Good Hope,
nature has maintained almost intact her savage independence; but she
displays there her most varied forms, from the snow-crested ice-bound
mountain to the lowest and most monotonous plain, from the impenetrable
forest to the nakedest and barrenest steppe.
To enable the reader to comprehend these widely different aspects, and
to describe the peculiar characteristics of each region of this immense
continent, it will be necessary for us to recapitulate its most
important geographical features.
* * * * *
A vast plateau, of comparatively slight elevation, occupies all Southern
Africa, extending eastward as far as the fifth or sixth degree north of
the equator. To the north-west, it is bounded by the mountains of
Senegambia; to the north-east, by those of Abyssinia. On the east and
west, the mountains descend to the very shore in secondary chains; to
the south the table-land is brought down to the sea in a series of
terraces which separate the mountain-ranges.
At its southern extremity, the African continent is from 550 to 600
miles broad. It is occupied by the British colony of the Cape, which is
bounded on the north by the Orange River. The most striking features of
the physical geography of this part of Africa, and which determine in
the main its climate and natural productions, are three chains of
mountains disposed parallel to one another and to the southern coast.
These are separated by terraces or upland plains, each range forming the
boundary of the lower and the abutment of the higher terrace. The
communication is maintained by transverse valleys, which are often of a
highly romantic character. The loftiest and most inland chain is
christened in different parts of its course the Roggeveld Bergen, the
Nieuveld Bergen, and the Sneeu Bergen, or "Snowy Mountains." Of these
the loftiest summit is the Compass Berg, 10,000 feet in altitude. The
second chain, the Black Mountains, though not so lofty are more massive,
and, in truth, composed of two or three chains in close juxtaposition.
The third, or last chain, in proceeding from south to north, varies from
eighteen to fifty-four miles, enlarging towards the west.
The plain or terrace between the Black and the Snowy Mountains is much
loftier than the two other steps by which we descend to the southern
extremity of the continent. The lowest terrace, bordering on the sea, is
well-watered and fertile. The second, or central terrace, consists of
fertile districts, equally well watered, but intersected by vast dry
deserts, called (from a Hottentot word) _Karroos_. The third terrace,
commonly designated the Great Karroo, at the base of the Roggeveld and
Nieuveld chain, is 300 miles in length, 80 miles in breadth, and 2000
feet above the sea-level. Its soil, says a writer in the _Quarterly
Review_, presents throughout its whole extent, for the greater portion
of the year, not a trace of vegetation. These gloomy solitudes assume a
character of picturesque grandeur through their very wildness of
desolation. The scene might convey to a fanciful mind the dreary image
of a ruined world, where the witches and demons of Goethe's
Walpurgis-Night might fitly celebrate their revels.
"And through the cliffs with ruin strewn,
The wild winds whizz, and howl, and moan."[79]
During the long dry summer months, the smallest birds would not find
wherewithal to sustain their existence in these sombre deserts, whose
solemn silence not even the murmur of an insect interrupts.
[Illustration: NIGHT-SCENE IN THE AFRICAN INTERIOR.]
Yet these regions, deprived of springs and running waters, are not
always sterile deserts, are not always desolate plains. In the dry
season, the soil, a yellow ferruginous clay, acquires the hardness of
brick, just as if it had been exposed to the fire of a furnace; but the
roots and bulbs, protected by a ligneous covering, resist the devouring
heat. The first rains revive them; they put forth their stems and
branches; a myriad flowers reveal their sparkling colours; and the
country which, a day or two before, had shown to the eye a bare and
dreary surface, shines out in a panoply of splendour, as if a magician's
spell had suddenly transformed it into a terrestrial paradise! But as
the days lengthen, and the sun's power increases, the bloom and the
beauty vanish, and the curse of fire once more descends upon the gloomy
scene.
In several districts north of the Cape Colony whole years pass by
without the sight or sound of running water rejoicing the wistful
wanderer. Dr. Livingstone, while residing among the Bakouans, in the
Bechuana country, saw the natives excavating the bed of the Kolobeng to
extract a few drops of water. A centigrade thermometer, sunk two and a
half inches in the earth, at noon, marked 56°. Insects placed on the
surface of the ground died in a few seconds. The grass was so dry that
it crumbled into powder when plucked.
The coast of Natal is rich in trees and herbage. The Zambesi, and other
rivers which descend from the central plateau, refresh the plains of
Mozambique and Zanzibar. But from the 4th parallel of north latitude to
Cape Guardafui extends an almost continuous desert. The southern
extremity of the Lupata chain also presents a vast naked country, where
the presence of gold has encouraged the Portuguese to found some
establishments.
The neighbouring zone of Kaffraria consists of great far-spreading,
gently-undulating plains, characterized by extreme aridity. The western
districts are much less broken than the central, and exhibit no
undulations except in the vicinity of the ocean. There an immense level
territory exists under the name of the Kalihari Desert, whose southern
boundary is marked by the Gariep or Orange River, which drains rather
than waters it. To the north this awful wilderness stretches as far as
the Lake Ngami, thus covering the area comprised between the 29th and
30th parallels of south latitude. The pastoral country of Namaqua and
Damaras bounds it on the west. Eastward it extends to the 24th meridian
of west longitude.
Moisture is not wholly wanting in this vast region. The Kalihari has
been called a desert, says Livingstone,[80] because it contains no
running water, and very little in wells. Far from being destitute of
vegetation, it is covered with grass and creeping plants, and there are
large patches of bushes, and even trees. It is remarkably flat; and
prodigious herds of antelopes roam over its trackless plains. The soil
is composed in general of a fine soft sand, lightly coloured--that is,
of a nearly pure silica. In the ancient beds of dried-up rivers lie
immense patches of alluvial soil, which, hardened by the sun, form great
reservoirs, retaining the rain-water for several months of the year. The
quantity of grass flourishing in this region is remarkable. It grows
generally in thick tufts, occasionally intermingled with spaces where
the earth is naked or closely overgrown with creeping plants. These,
deeply rooted in the soil, suffer but little from the effects of the
excessive heat. Most of them have tubercular roots, and are so organized
as to furnish both food and liquid during the long droughts--an epoch
when one vainly seeks elsewhere anything which can appease one's hunger
or one's thirst.
The rich vegetation of the Kalihari is due to its geological
constitution. It consists of a great valley, or rather of a vast basin,
whose bottom is formed of a diluvial earth, and which is encircled by a
belt of rocks, cloven at several places. It follows that where the rain
is abundant, the slope of the hills directs it towards the centre of the
basin, and this rain filters and deposits itself beneath the surface of
the soil. And it appears to be a proof of this statement, that on
digging in the sand cisterns are formed, or "sucking-places," which are
filled with water supplied by subterraneous conduits.
This so-called Desert is not without its utility. Not only does it
nourish innumerable multitudes of animals of every kind, but it has
become the asylum of fugitive tribes. Here at first the Bakalabaris
found a refuge; and then, in their turn, other peoples of the Bechuana,
whose territories had been invaded by the Kaffirs.
The Kalihari has its mirage and its sirocco. During the excessive
drought which precedes the rainy season, a burning wind traverses this
desert from north to south, and during its three or four days' duration
it withers and dries up everything in its path. It is so loaded with
electricity that a bundle of ostrich feathers, which remained exposed to
it for a few seconds, was itself charged as if it had been in contact
with a powerful electrical machine, and produced a lively disturbance,
accompanied by cracking noises, when taken in the hand. As often as this
wind prevails, the electricity of the atmosphere is so abundant that
every movement of the natives causes sparks to be given off their
_karosses_, or cloaks made of the skin of beasts.
The contrast is striking between the well-watered east coast of South
Africa and the arid western coast. After the scarped mountains of the
Cape, which ascend northward to the ocean, come the less lofty
chains--the hills of sand which separate the interior sandy desert from
the equally sandy district of the littoral. With the exception of the
Walvish Bay, the coast for eight hundred miles--from the great Orange
River to Cape Negro--has not a stream of water.
At Cape Negro commences a series of terraces, separated from one another
by long bands of sunken ground. This _ensemble_ describes a curve
towards the interior, and leaves on the coast a level plain of about 110
miles in breadth.
In Benguela the plains are healthy and cultivated. More to the north,
one encounters nothing but monotonous savannahs and forests with
gigantic trees. The soil, at a great number of points, is saturated with
water, and, so to speak, enveloped in a shroud of pestilential vapour,
which the breeze never scatters.
The low plains of Biafra and Benin, and especially the Delta of the
Niger, are unwholesome, rank, and foul-smelling marshes. In their
mangrove swamps lurks fever, and a legion of deadly diseases.
"Macies et nova febrium
Terris incubuit cohors."--(_Horace._)
Until the early years of the present century very little was known of
the interior of Southern Africa. At this epoch some native merchants
traversed the country from one sea to another--from St. Paul de Loanda
to the coast of Mozambique and Zanzibar. This exploit was repeated and
outstripped by Dr. Livingstone, who, from 1850 to 1856, accomplished a
marvellous journey of six thousand miles, through regions never before
trodden by the white man's foot.
Setting out from Kolobeng, the most advanced of the English missionary
stations, he arrived, after having crossed some three hundred miles of a
region without water, at the beautiful river Zouga, which issues from
the western extremity of Lake Ngami.
"A region of drought, where no river glides,
Nor rippling brook with osiered sides,
Nor sedgy pool, nor bubbling fount,
Nor tree, nor cloud, nor misty mount
Appears, to refresh the aching eye;
But barren earth, and the burning sky,
And the blank horizon round and round."[81]
Lake Ngami is from 45 to 60 miles long, and from 56 to 110 in
circumference. Its direction is N.N.E. to S.S.W. Its southern portion
curves westward, and it receives from the north-west the Teoughé. The
water, very fresh when the lake is full, grows brackish during the dry
season. At the latter period it is very shallow, and at eighteen or
twenty miles from the shore canoes can be manoeuvred with the help of
a pole. The banks are everywhere low. At the west a considerable space,
utterly bare of trees, proves that the lake was formerly larger. During
the months which precede the arrival of the northern waters, cattle, to
quench their thirst, make their way with difficulty through the belt of
reeds dried up by the sun. The natives, says Livingstone, who reside on
the shores of the lake, tell us that trees and antelopes are carried
down by the waters during the annual inundation.
The same traveller informs us that the vast regions lying to the north
of the lake at such great distances--regions copiously watered, and
deluged every year by the heavy tropical rains--pour towards the south
the excess of the waters which saturate their soil; and a certain
quantity of these waters, encountering the lake on their way, flow into
it. It is in March and April that the inundation begins. The waters, on
descending, find the rivers dried up, and the lake itself exceedingly
shallow. The rivers in this part of Africa flow in channels capable of
containing a far greater volume of water than they generally hold. When
looking at them, you might believe yourself in some desolated Oriental
garden where all the irrigating canals still exist, but where the dams
permit only a mere thread of water to take its course.
"The water," adds Livingstone,[82] "is less absorbed by the earth than
lost between banks too wide apart, where the air and the sun evaporate
them. I am persuaded that there is not in the whole of this country a
river which loses itself amid the sands."
The country situated to the north is exceedingly level for some hundreds
of miles, and abundantly provided with lakes and rivers, which the
slightest undulations of the soil divert into innumerable windings. The
plain is alternately covered with sombre thickets, lofty forests, and
dense herbage. On the banks of some rivers this herbage assumes gigantic
proportions, and by its tenacity opposes an effectual barrier to
animals. In many places the wide green pastures are enlivened by large
herds of cattle, which the natives breed. The land of the Barotses
possess immense prairies of this description, the home of numerous herds
of elephants. But this richness of the soil is counterbalanced by the
insalubrity of the climate. These vast, periodically flooded surfaces
become, when the waters recede, the nurseries of deadly fevers, and
other formidable maladies, whose destructive influence extends to a
great distance.
The magnificent river Zambesi, known in its upper course by the local
appellation of Leambye--both words having the same signification in the
native tongue, "the River"--fertilizes and brightens these productive
regions. Flowing at first from north to south, it makes a sharp bend
westward, to march with stately step from south to north, and from west
to east, until, with a south-eastern inclination, it moves onward to the
Indian Ocean.
It was at a point nearly midway between the two oceans--the Indian and
the Atlantic--that the intrepid Livingstone first descried the Zambesi,
regarding its fertile banks and noble stream with much the same emotions
of delight and surprise as thrilled to the heart of Balboa, when
"With eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent,upon a peak in Darien."[83]
He arrived there near the close of the dry season, and yet a grand
volume of water still sparkled in the river's bed, which varied from 950
to 1900 feet in breadth. At the epoch of the great floods, the Zambesi
rises perpendicularly more than eighteen feet, and at certain points
extends more than forty miles from its bank. From the borders of the
Chobé to those of the Zambesi spreads a low, level country, whose
uniform expanse is only broken by the gigantic hillocks of the termites.
At intervals the traveller lights upon spots where the waters have
formerly settled, then on great morasses and deep rivers, winding their
slow way through an almost impervious jungle. There is a certain fatal
beauty about the whole region, like that of a Circe or a Lucrezia
Borgia; but its atmosphere breathes disease and death.
A general depression and flatness of surface seems to be the physical
characteristic of this part of Central Africa. Thus, on the route
adopted by Livingstone, in a N.N.E. direction, from the chain of
Bamunguatos to the Zambesi, all is level. Mount N'goua, an isolated mass
in 18° 27' 20" south latitude, and 24° 13' 63" east longitude, is a
wholly exceptional accident. The Kandehy Valley, which deploys on the
northern slope of this narrow colossus, is one of the most picturesque
scenes that greeted the eyes of Livingstone during his adventurous
pilgrimage. Fruit trees, loaded with emerald foliage, adorn its sides;
a crystal brook ripples in the centre. Under the shade of an enormous
baobab the graceful antelopes browse undisturbed, until alarmed by the
footfall of the approaching traveller. Gnus and zebras contemplate the
strange intruder with an air of surprise. A few continue to crop the
grass indifferent; others pause in the banquet, uncertain whether to
stay or take to flight. The huge hulk of a white rhinoceros drags
labouring up the shady valley. Buffaloes, and condors, and giraffes
stray far into its pleasant depths as peaceful and almost as trustful as
those of their race which, in days remote, wandered among the beauties
of Eden, in
"That delicious grove,
That garden, planted with the trees of God."
Further to the north, even to the river Sanshureh, the country increases
in richness and beauty, the water-courses multiply, and the herbage
aspires to such a height that vehicles and animals are lost amongst it.
An exceeding gentleness, an almost Arcadian calm, characterizes the
landscape on the banks of the Leeba, a great affluent of the Leambye.
This river drags its slow and ever-winding waters through a delightful
meadow-land, which is probably flooded every year, for there is no wood
except where the ground rises four or five feet above the general level
of the plain. The soil of these tree-crowned plateaux, or knolls, is
sandy, while that of the prairies consists of an alluvial earth, gray
and black, and mixed with numerous river-shells.
Ascending the Leeba, we enter on a plain more than eighteen miles in
breadth, where the water rises to the traveller's ankles. This water,
says Livingstone, does not proceed from the overflow of the river; but
the level of the ground is so horizontal that the rain-water cannot pass
away, and abides there for months. Still more humid are the adjacent
plains of Lobala. This vast submerged area forms a watershed between the
rivers of the north and those of the south. Up to this point all the
rivers wend their way southward; but from this point they adopt a
northerly course, to empty their tribute into the Kasaï or Loké.
The interior table-land, especially towards the mid-course of the
Zambesi, is intersected by lofty mountain-chains. It is in this region,
and at the southernmost point of the river's great Delta, which is 270
miles in length, that the famous Falls occur, named by the natives
"Mosioatounya," or "Smoke-resounding," re-christened by Livingstone, the
Victoria. Their vast columns of vapour are visible at a distance of five
or six miles, and might suggest to an American traveller the rolling
clouds that ascend from a burning prairie. The banks and islands of the
river are here enriched with sylvan vegetation of every variety of form
and colour: the mighty baobab, each of whose enormous arms would form
the trunk of a large tree; the graceful palm, with its crest of
plume-like foliage; the silvery mohonams, whose leaves sparkle in the
sunshine like Achilles' shield; and the nutsouri, abounding in clusters
of pleasant scarlet fruit.
The Falls are bounded on three sides by densely-wooded ridges 300 or 400
feet in height, and may be likened to a flood of water a thousand yards
broad, suddenly hurled over a basaltic precipice 100 feet in depth, and
then as suddenly compressed into a narrow gully not more than fifteen or
twenty yards across.
"If one imagines," says Dr. Livingstone,[84] "the Thames filled with low
tree-covered hills immediately below the Tunnel, extending as far as
Gravesend, the bed of black basaltic rock instead of London mud, and a
fissure made therein from one end of the Tunnel to the other, down
through the keystones of the arch, and prolonged from the left end of
the Tunnel through thirty miles of hills; then fancy the Thames leaping
bodily into the gulf, and forced there to change its direction and flow
from the right to the left bank, and then rush boiling and roaring
through the hills, he may have some idea of what takes place at this the
most wonderful sight I have witnessed in Africa."
[Illustration: VICTORIA FALLS, RIVER ZAMBESI.]
In descending into the narrow abyss already spoken of, the cataract
breaks into five separate streams, which send up, to an elevation of 200
or 300 feet, as many columns of luminous vapour--pillars of shivering
spray, and foam, and diamond sparkle, which in the sunlight are
gloriously wreathed with the rare hues of Iris.
"How profound
The gulf! and how the giant element
From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,
Crushing the cliffs, which, downward worn and rent
With his fierce footsteps, yield in chasms a vent
To the broad column which rolls on."--(_Byron._)
In descending the Zambesi, we encounter the great river Kafue, which
flows from the north. Beyond the point of confluence the country becomes
opener, freer, and healthier, and we arrive at the Portuguese town of
Tété.
About 200 miles to the north-west of Tété lies the great lake of fresh
water, Niyanyizi-Nyassa, or "Lake of Stars," which stretches far away to
the north-west across Unyamuezi, or "The Land of the Moon." It is rather
shallow, sprinkled with numerous fairy islands, and seems to be the
remains of an ancient lake of much greater extent. To the south-west a
belt of fertile country separates it from another lake called Shirwa,
whence issues a beautiful river, tributary to the Zambesi, impeded in
its course by numerous rapids, but traversing a level and unwholesome
country.
At the same time (1856-58) that Livingstone accomplished these great
discoveries, Equatorial Africa was penetrated from the coast of Zambesi
by Captains Burton and Speke. These undaunted and indefatigable
travellers, after having ascended the river Pangany for a hundred and
thirty miles, through a rich and cultivated but pestiferous plain,
arrived in February 1858 at Lake Tanganyika, of which the natives had
spoken to Livingstone, describing the country lying to the westward of
that mass of water as bare of wood, and solely covered with marshy
plains.
Lake Tanganyika lies 200 miles S.W. of the Victoria N'yanza, between
lat. 3° and 7° 45' S., at an elevation of 1844 feet above the sea. The
30th meridian of east longitude strikes it in the centre. Its length is
320 miles; but its breadth seldom exceeds 15 or 20, and never 60 miles,
so that it has been compared to a beach inclining its head towards the
north. To the north-east its shores are bold and elevated; the water is
fresh and deep. The country around it is rich in pasture, where a
thriving population breed numerous flocks and herds.
About two hundred miles to the north-east of this lake, and 3740 feet
above the sea-level, lies the vast basin of the Victoria N'yanza,
discovered by Captain Speke in 1859, and more fully explored by Speke
and Grant in 1862. Its northern shore runs nearly parallel to the
Equator, at a distance of about twenty miles from it; its southern is in
lat. 2° 46' S., and long. 33° E. It would seem at some remote period to
have occupied a much larger area than it does at present, though even
now it is supposed to measure 220 miles in length and fully as much in
breadth. Speke describes it as very shallow. Fleets of canoes cover its
surface; but the natives on the one shore never venture across to the
other, and no intercommunication has ever existed between them. The
surrounding landscapes are of a pastoral character, genial and fertile,
with quiet breadths of rich meadow land, dotted by hundreds of white
hornless cattle, and scarcely distinguishable from our midland English
scenery, were they not interspersed with groves of the banana, the
coffee-tree, and the date-palm. At its north-eastern extremity, and
probably connected with it, lies a long narrow basin which the natives
call Lake Baringo. On the west it receives the tributary waters of the
Kitangulé, and from the north throws off the various streams which unite
in one channel to form the famous Nile.
North-west from the N'yanza lies the little Lúta N'zigé, or Albert Lake,
discovered by Sir Samuel Baker in 1864; a long, narrow, and shallow
basin, surrounded by mountains 7000 feet high, about 230 miles in
length, and 2488 feet above the sea-level, which apparently serves as
the great reservoir of the Nile.[85]
The discoveries of Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Grant, and Baker, seem to
confirm the theory put forward by Sir Roderick Murchison, that the
central portion of South Africa is a large and elevated basin, abounding
in immense plains, in fertile lands, besprinkled with numerous lakes fed
by a thousand currents descending from the lofty mountains that
surrounded it. The rains, says Morin, cause these lakes to overflow, and
their waters, prevailing over every obstacle, break through the barrier
of the high lands, and descend into the lower levels in a series of
cataracts, to make their way eventually towards the ocean. Livingstone
has proved the truth of this felicitous induction as far as the Zambesi
is concerned. The Nile also issues from the lofty table-lands through
deep and rocky ravines. The great reservoir of the mysterious Egyptian
river, the _N'yanza Spekii_, may be accepted as the final confirmation
of Sir Roderick's theory, and the conspicuous feature of the African
people. The southern extremity of this lake stretches as far as the
watershed between North and South Africa. Starting from the same
viewpoint, Speke concludes that another great lake will be found under
the Equator, to the west of the Tanganyika and the N'yanza Victoria.
This will be the reservoir of the Congo. To establish this fact will be
to solve the last problem of the hydrographic system of Africa.[86]
The western region of the African equatorial zone has been but
superficially explored, and in this direction numerous hypotheses remain
to be verified. Lake Tchad, situated in Central Nigritia, between Bornou
on the west and the south-west, and the Kanem to the north and east, was
discovered in 1823 by Major Denham, and explored by Dr. Barth in 1852.
The latter traveller grows eloquent in his description of the delicious
perspective which he had supposed it would offer to the gaze. He met
with numerous slaves on their way to cut grass for the horses. But
instead of a lake, an immense treeless plain stretched as far as the eye
could reach. The herbage became fresher and greener, thicker and taller;
a marshy bottom, describing a curve which projected here and receded
there, embarrassed his progress more and more; and after a useless and
prolonged struggle to escape from the quagmire, seeking in vain on the
horizon some mirror-like surface, he retraced his steps, dabbling in the
slimy water, and consoling himself with the reflection that at least he
had seen some traces of the "liquid element." But the scene was
strangely different when, in the winter of 1854-55, more than one-half
of the Ngornou was destroyed by the inundation; and to the south of that
town lay a deep sea, swallowing up the whole plain even to the village
of Koukiya! The lower stratum of the soil, composed of limestone,
appeared to have given way in the preceding year, and had lowered the
shore of the lake several yards; hence the inundation. But apart from
this evidently exceptional geological catastrophe, the character of the
Tchad is clearly that of an immense lagoon whose borders change every
month, and of which it is consequently impossible to lay down any
strictly accurate map.[87]
Lake Tchad lies between lat. 12° 30' and 14° 30' N., long. 13° and 15°
30' S. Its length varies from two hundred to three hundred miles,
according to the amount of rainfall and similar circumstances; at its
broadest it measures one hundred and seventy miles; and it has an
elevation of eight hundred feet above the sea-level. The actual margin
of its waters is lined by a deep fence of papyrus and tall reeds, from
ten to fourteen feet high. Its islands are densely peopled. Fish and
water-fowl abound, and not less do crocodiles and hippopotami. The lake
has no outlet, but receives several rivers, of which the Waube and the
Shari are the most notable.
The country watered by the Niger is also broken up by vast plains which,
fertile and glowing in the rainy season, are scorched and withered by
the summer heats. The famous port of Kabara, not far from Timbuktù, is
several miles from the river, and only accessible for five months in the
year at the epoch of the great rains.
Beyond this belt of vegetation, this girdle of fertility, Nature wears a
sombre aspect--the stony look of a corpse; for the immense Desert of the
Sahara begins. The transition from the one region to the other, from
the land of plenty to the land of want and famine, from the land of
bright lakes, and copious streams, and green pastures, to the land of
rocky heights and barren sandy wastes, is as startling as the change
which sometimes occurs in human life--the change of a moment, from
bustling and exuberant happiness to profound sorrow. It is such
contrasts, however, that enable us fully to appreciate the beauty and
wealth of Nature.
"The scorching winds from arid deserts borne,"
teach us to prize the balmy breath of the "sweet south" that wanders
"o'er a bank of violets." Fresh from the dreary Sahara plain, burnt and
scathed by a Tropic sun, we can feel all the loveliness of the woodland
and the leafy vale, of each
"Melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless."
Thus, in the material world as in the moral and intellectual, the law of
compensation prevails, and the wayfarer in the Desert of Life may cheer
himself with the recollection that in due time the silence will be
succeeded by music, the desolation by beauty, and the wilderness by
"Verdurous glooms, and winding mossy ways."