(AUGUST)
In the parching August wind
Cornfields bow the head.
--_Christina G. Rossetti._
Over the sea-like, pathless,
Limitless waste of the desert.
--_Longfellow._
THE DESERT
August is usually such a hot, dry month that it ought to be a good time
for talking of deserts. We can realize better what a desert is and
what an interesting region it must be to those who spend their lives
there--the Arabs and the camels, for instance. In fact, there are so
many strange and striking things to be seen and learned in deserts that
whole books--including many stories--have been written about them, and
I'm sorry we can give the subject only one chapter.
I. The Face of the Desert
I sometimes think it was no wonder the old Sphinx got to asking
conundrums. Always looking toward the desert and its mysteries, how
could he help it? The desert is just full of conundrums. For instance:
Where is it that rains fall without reaching the earth?
[Illustration:
_From the painting by Elihu Vedder_
THE QUESTIONER OF THE SPHINX
]
Where is it that there are lake beds without lakes, river beds without
rivers, and rivers without mouths?
Where do you see stretches of water that aren't there, and men and
animals walking and trees growing--most of them upside down?
Where are the roses of the land and the waves of great inland seas made
of sand and where does the wind always blow the mountains away?
Of course you would probably give the right answer at once--"the
desert"--because you know I am talking about deserts. And the "water
that isn't there," and the trees and people and things that are upside
down--you probably know that's the mirage; and that the inland seas
with their waves of sand are the dunes; that the rivers without mouths
are those that, like the Tajunga in California, lose their waters in
the sand.
Most people who have gone to school know all these things. Most people
also think of the desert as just a sea of sand and all tawny, like a
lion's skin; but this is wrong. The Romans used to call the African
desert "the panther's skin," because of the tawny stretches spotted
with the dark palms of the oases, but the sands are not all tawny, and
the desert isn't all covered with sand.
If we could arrange to get on the back of any one of the great birds of
the Sahara--say an eagle or his big cousin the vulture--and sail with
him on his way to dinner, the scenery would unroll beneath us something
like this:
On the northern border the Atlas Mountains, with precipices of wild
beauty and ranges of bare, pink rock outlined against the blue of
the morning sky; then dune waves stretching for miles and miles with
valleys between them, so wide that it takes the camels from breakfast
time until noon to lumber their way across. The crests of some of these
dune waves go spinning off in spray with every freshening breeze.
Little dunes often dissolve away in the wind as the caravan moves
toward them.
GAUNT OUTLINES OF THE HUNGRY HILLS
Then we come to more mountain ranges running right across the desert's
face, their bare rocks shivered and shelving down into broken fragments
at their feet; then sharp-edged, jagged hills--not rounded, plump,
and well-fed hills, such as we have at home. They are the bones of the
hungry landscape showing through. Then we come to bare table-lands and
the empty beds of rivers and lakes that long ago went dry; valleys
scattered with boulders of all sizes and in every imaginable position;
and so on over into the Arabian desert, with its flats of white sand
closed in by high cliffs, and vast stretches of black and red gravel.
More of the sand and gravel of the desert is red than yellow; but some
of it is white and some of it is black.
[Illustration: AN OASIS]
[Illustration: THE DARK HILLS AND THE FIGURES IN WHITE
"The Baths of the Damned," the superstitious Arabs call the region
of the Northern Sahara in which you come upon these strange white
figures. The fearsome name was suggested by the fact that the
figures slowly rise from some hot region inside the earth. In
reality they are mounds of carbonate of lime deposited by the water
of hot springs heavily charged with dissolved limestone. Similar
springs in our Yellowstone Park spout up in the form of geysers
and form "geyser basins"--huge stone tubs. Here in the desert the
water doesn't spout; it bubbles up slowly and so builds the mounds.
In the background you see black masses of volcanic rock, for this,
like Yellowstone Park, is a volcanic region where the underground
rocks haven't cooled off.
]
A CHAOS OF COLOR IN THE ROCKS
The desert wears rocks and stones of as many colors as the jewels of
Oriental kings. It also runs much to solemn black in its heaps of
volcanic rock with cold limestones on the heights; but you can see
blue-grays, browns, ochres of every shade gleaming in the sun, the reds
of the rusting iron in them staining the precipices and the walls; and
there are purples and pinks and dark greens and violets. These colored
rocks are often fantastically mixed together, like the colors on an
Easter egg.
THE SKELETONS OF THE DEAD RIVERS
And here we come upon one of those skeletons of dead rivers that I
spoke about. There they are, the river valleys and the river beds,
full of sand and gravel, and with boulders along the banks, and branch
valleys running into them; a river system all complete but for one
thing--water. It's just as if the main valley and the branches had been
made all ready but the river never came; or as if there had been rivers
there once but they couldn't stand the climate! Of course, when a
cloudburst comes along it helps itself to these ready-made river-beds;
but for the most part they stand as empty as the ruins on the desert's
edge in which
... the lion and the lizard keep
The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep.[30]
[Footnote 30: "The Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam.]
Not only do the size of the river-beds show that there used to be more
frequent rains in these regions of desolation, but right at the edge of
the northern Sahara are the remains of immense aqueducts; great troughs
built of stone and carried on bridges from the source of a water supply
to a city. When the Romans owned the earth--including the Sahara
desert--they were famous builders of these aqueducts.
[Illustration: WHY DYING RIVERS MULTIPLY BY TWO
Director Hornaday, of the New York Zoo, took this picture while
in the arid regions of the great Southwest. It shows a little
stream dying away in the desert sands. Now just notice how a little
knowledge of nature's methods as a landscape artist makes the most
commonplace scenery interesting. All streams as they go dry have
a tendency to spread out arms like that; sometimes two, sometimes
four or more, but always in twos or multiples of two. The reason
is that as the water evaporates the stream becomes weaker and so
is obliged to drop a part of its load. The heaviest part of the
load--the most pebbles, sand, and soil--is carried in the middle of
the stream, owing to the current being stronger, relieved as it is
from the friction of the banks. So bars of sand, gravel, and such
stuff are built up that finally divide the water into two branches.
Then if the water keeps on flowing, each of these branches divides
by two, and so on. You see the same thing in the mouths of deltas.
]
"But what about the roses made of sand? That's a conundrum you didn't
answer."
Oh, yes, we must get down closer to the desert to see these. We can't
see them in the bird's-eye view we have been taking. The desert sand
has a great deal of gypsum in it, and when the sand gets a wetting from
a cloudburst this gypsum crystallizes and forms what are called "sand
roses." These "roses" are of various sizes and forms; some look like
camelias and some like a cluster of pearls. They are not common and you
have to hunt for them.
[Illustration: ALL THE COMFORTS OF HOME
Children in the primary grades have here told us, with their clever
little fingers, about life in Africa immediately south of the big
desert, the part of Africa where they have rain and to spare.
]
II. How the Desert Makes Its Sand
Most of the sand of the desert, as you may imagine, is home-made; and
it is very curious to notice the different which it is manufactured.
The desert sun and the cloudless nights have a great deal to do with
it.
[Illustration: HOW THE ARAB FARMER GATHERS HIS DATES]
Think of the hottest day in August you ever saw, and then multiply
by two. That will give you an idea of how hot a desert gets in the
day-time--something like 200 degrees; and 212 degrees boils eggs, you
know! But how cold do you suppose it gets at night? Fifteen minutes
after sunset the temperature drops to freezing. The reason of this is
that there are no clouds over the desert to keep the heat of the sand
wastes and the burning rocks from passing off rapidly into space. The
days are so hot and the nights are so cold that the rocks get a kind of
fever and ague, which makes them pull themselves to pieces.
THE "GOOSE-FLESH" ON THE ROCKS
It is the same process we have just read about in the story of the
stones of our fields, only it goes on much faster in the desert on
account of the more rapid changes of temperature. You know how your
skin will pucker up into goose-flesh when you are cold. The desert
rocks do something similar. Because rock is a poor conductor, the heat
of the day and the cold of the night penetrate only a little way--only
through the skin of the rock, as it were; so this skin, stretching in
the day-time and puckering up at night, becomes loosened and shells off
bit by bit. Then it is blown about and in time ground into sand by the
desert winds.
Some rocks have an additional way of getting picked to pieces. Granite
is one of these. It has several different kinds of mineral in it, and
some of these minerals contract and expand faster than others; some
more than others. As a consequence, the particles of the rock keep
pulling and hauling at each other. This helps to break it up into
little pieces, which soon become sand. The darker the rock, other
things being equal, the greater the changes, because anything dark--a
suit of clothes, for instance--absorbs heat faster than a light object.
[Illustration:
_From Norton's "Elements of Geology."
By permission of Ginn and Company_
HOW RAIN-DROPS HELP SPLIT BOULDERS
A big boulder in western Texas split, just as you see it here, by
rain-drops, with the help of the sun, and under the conditions
described in the text, sat for this photograph. A friend of mine
who has been all over that country says that on blistering-hot
days you can see little pieces pop out of the granite boulders,
like chips from an invisible chisel struck by an invisible hammer.
This is why: We Granites are made up of particles--little bits--of
several different minerals, and some of these minerals expanding
much faster than others pop themselves out.
]
The great mountain rocks of the desert, bare of all protecting soil and
verdure, are always crumbling as a result of all these causes, and so
the winds are constantly blowing them away, piece by piece.
HOW LITTLE RAIN-DROPS SPLIT BIG BOULDERS
As if everything in the desert were in the sand-making business the
very rain-drops help make sand. The rain-drops do this in much the same
way that the farmer breaks big boulders in his fields, so that he can
more easily haul them away, piece by piece. He builds a fire against
the boulder, gets it as hot as he can, then rakes the fire away, dashes
water on the stone, and--bang! It cracks as if old Thor had struck it
with his hammer.
You see why this is, don't you, after what we have been saying about
why the rock's skin chips off? The water suddenly cools the highly
heated rock, and the parts shrinking pull away from each other with a
bang! bang! bang! The hot desert rocks, dashed by the torrents of a
cloudburst, break apart just like that, and you can hear them. Stones
twenty-five feet across are often broken into many pieces after a
downpour. Then the finer pieces of rock that are made in this continual
splitting, and by the chipping that goes on day and night, the fierce
winds grind against each other; so manufacturing sand. And the fiercer
winds also drive coarse sand against crumbling rock surfaces, thus
grinding them away and making more sand. So the winds, using sand to
make sand, put the sand out at interest, you may say.
And on all its sand, made in these various ways--by wind and rain and
heat and cold, and the crystal fairies of the land of change--the
desert puts its special trade-mark, just as a manufacturer puts his
trade-mark on his goods. If you should take some desert sand and some
sand from the shores of the sea and show them to a man who knows about
such things, he would say (after he had put them under a microscope, of
course):
THE DESERT'S TRADE-MARK ON ITS SANDS
"_This_ sand came from a desert, or from some place where it was much
blown about by the winds; while _this_ sand is from the shores of the
sea, or of a lake." The sand grains of the seashore, although they are
always being tumbled about by the waves, as the desert sands are by the
winds, are protected from each other by the water between them. These
little water cushions prevent the sand grains from rubbing together;
so they keep a good many of their sharp edges. They are not rounded
like the sands of the desert. The winds keep the desert sands grinding
against each other, at the same time turning them over and over, so
wearing them away pretty evenly on all sides. It also grinds them
against the desert rocks.
[Illustration: A DESERT SIMOOM ON ITS TRAVELS
A traveller in the Sahara took this snap-shot of a simoom from
the outside and at a safe distance. You can see that it must be
quite a distance from where we are standing, for the trees in the
foreground are still. The vast cloud of sand looks quite dark
because of the shadows cast by the sun, which it hides from view.
]
It is as if there were cut upon the sea sands, "Father Neptune: His
Make"; while the genii of the desert, jealous for the desert's
reputation, had engraved on their own product:
"Genuine Desert Sand. Look for the Trade-Mark and Accept No
Substitutes!"
III. The Plant People of the Desert
Although it doesn't look a bit homey to us there are quite a few people
living in the desert, when you come to count them all--four-legged
people, and six-legged people, and two-legged people, and big and
little people with wings, and the people of the plant world.
THE WATER BOTTLE OF THE DESERT
One of the most curious of the plant people is the cactus, particularly
the one known as the "desert water bottle." Like many two-legged people
it has a rough, unsociable exterior, but a kind heart. Let a traveller
come upon one of these bristly cactuses, after long, thirsty hours,
and he will realize what this means. Inside this cactus he will find
what will seem to him the most delightful drink he ever tasted. While
it isn't as cool as it might be, neither is it as warm as you would
expect, and it has a pleasant, sweet taste.
[Illustration: DRAWING WATER FROM THE BARREL CACTUS
This cactus, so far as shape is concerned, really belongs to the
barrel family, as you can see, besides performing one of the most
useful functions of a barrel in holding good drinking water for
thirsty travellers in the desert. My, how thirsty you get! You
drink, drink, drink from sunrise to sunset--about two gallons a
day. But sometimes the supply you are carrying gives out because
you miscalculated or you've lost your way, or the barrel leaks.
Then, oh, how you welcome the sight of a barrel cactus among the
rocky foot-hills! Director Hornaday, in the delightful book from
which I have already quoted says: "You get a gallon of water
surprisingly cool, and in flavor like the finest raw turnip. The
object on the ground is not a circular saw, but the inverted top
of the cactus, and the whiteness is that of the white meat that
contains the water. With a stick the meat is pounded to a pulpy
mass, and the water oozes out, forming a little pool. Then the
man with the cleanest hands washes them cleaner with some of the
pulp--throwing _this_ pulp away, of course--then squeezes the water
out of the rest of it into the barrel."
Another interesting thing about this cactus is that it enables you
to get candy right in the desert; for here and there, through its
thick skin, it oozes out a secretion called "cactus candy," which
is very delicious. You are always sorry there is so little of it.
]
The fact that you can get a drink in this way, just when you want it
most, all comes of foresight on the part of the cactus. After they get
down from two to four inches in the ground the roots of this cactus
spread out in every direction and for a long way. They collect every
bit of moisture in the soil, and they make the most of every drop of
rain that falls within their reach. Then they hide all this moisture
away and cling to every precious drop. Most plants, you know, evaporate
a great deal of water through their leaves. But the cactus, living in
a world where rains are few and far between, just can't afford to do
any evaporating to speak of; so it has practically no leaves, you see,
only little bits of things that you almost have to take a microscope to
find. But what it lacks in leaves it makes up in spines, which defend
it against the attacks of most thirsty animals, although it is believed
the desert mice know the secret of getting at this water, in spite of
the spines.
One kind of desert plant you have no doubt met face to face, for it is
used to make printing paper. It grows in the deserts of Libya and other
parts of North Africa, and is called esparto grass. Like hemp, it has
stems which are full of strong fibres. These stems are gathered in huge
bundles, which are carried by camels to the sea, where they are sent by
ship to the English paper mills.
HOW THE "ROSE OF JERICHO" GOES TO SEA
But there is a member of the desert plant family called the "Rose of
Jericho," that doesn't wait for anybody to come after it and carry it
to sea; it just picks up and sets sail for itself. It is a bush about
six inches high, a native of the wastes of Northern Africa, Palestine,
and Arabia. It bears a little four-petaled flower. When blossom time is
over the leaves fall off and its branches, loaded with seeds, dry up,
and, curling inward as they dry, form a ball. Its roots also let go of
the soil, so that the strong desert winds easily pull it up and it goes
bowling away toward the sea. When it gets there it tumbles in.
[Illustration: THE CACTUS-WREN AND HER LITTLE FRONT DOOR
Speaking of cactus spines, do you know how many of those wicked
little spines the cactus-wren had to work with and tug and twist
about in building that nest? About two thousand! These spines not
only make the nest but defend it. You can't be too careful about
your front door in Desertland. Such neighbors!
]
Then this bold little traveller, who is very sensitive to moisture
although he has had so little of it in his bringing up, promptly
unfolds his arms and scatters his handful of seeds on the water; which
is precisely the thing he took all that journey to do! For the seeds
are carried far by the currents of the sea. Thus the family to which
this plant belongs keeps sending out colonies into new lands. This
seems to be one of the chief missions in life of plants as of other
peoples.
The plant of which we have just been speaking is called the "Rose of
Jericho," although it looks so little like a rose that quaint old John
Gerard, an English doctor who loved and studied plants over three
hundred years ago, says:
"The coiner of the name spoiled it in the mint; for of all plants that
have been written of not any are more unlike unto the rose."
THE WIND WITCHES OF THE STEPPES
Our own tumbleweeds and the Canada thistle have the same trick of
bowling before the wind. There is a relative of these tumblers living
on the Russian steppes that the Cossacks call the "wind witch." At
the end of the season the branches dry up into a ball and then by the
hundreds these witches go skimming over the plains, driven by the loud
autumn winds. They are as light as a feather, and they go so fast that
sometimes even the Cossack horsemen cannot catch them, as they often
try to do in sport. Part of the time they move along with a short,
quick, hopping motion, and then, caught by an eddy, rise a hundred feet
in the air.
Often dozens of them get locked together, join hands like the real
witches of our fairy tales, and the whole company goes dancing away
before the howling blast.
Eery creatures!
IV. The Autographs in the Sand
There are certain very interesting people of the desert that you
don't often find at home, not because they aren't there, but because
they don't _want_ to be found. Snakes, lizards, rabbits, and ground
squirrels slip quietly out of your way in the early morning, and by
the time the hot sun is high, beast and bird seek the shadows of the
canyons, or of big rocks, shelving banks, or caves.
[Illustration: THE COYOTE'S NOCTURNE
In addition to what he tells so cleverly in the picture about the
night song of the Coyote, Dan Beard--_your_ Dan Beard of the Boy
Scouts--says the animal is a ventriloquist; can throw his voice so
that it sounds as if he were a mile off, then startle you with the
noise of a full pack at your heels--and all the time be sitting
watching you from behind a stone not fifty yards away!
]
But they all leave word. In the lava beds of the Arizona desert, where
not even the cactus will grow, you can make out the tracks of the quail
and the linnet, and of a peculiar desert bird called the road-runner.
There, also, are the tracks of the coyote and the wildcat, the gray
wolf, and sometimes the mountain lion. If about daybreak you saw what
seemed to be a long, lean, hungry dog, trotting away slantwise with a
cautious eye to the rear, it was probably a gray wolf a little late in
getting home. Like the coyote, the wildcat, the owl, and many other
desert people, that old gray wolf belongs to the world's great night
shift and is usually back in his mountain home by sunrise. Even when
you see him at all--which is seldom--he is hard to make out; for, like
the coyote, he wears a rusty, sunburned coat, which blends with the
sand and the yellow rocks.
The coyote is a smaller member of the wolf family, to which both the
dog and the fox belong. He has much of the same cunning, and like Br'er
Fox is fond of chicken. But his home is usually so far from modern
conveniences he has few chances to visit poultry yards, and lives from
paw to mouth, as it were, catching a jack-rabbit when he can--the
desert rabbits seem to sleep with both eyes open--and lizards when he
can't get rabbits. At the worst he will make out on "prickly pears,"
the pods of the mesquite bush, which are full of seeds.
THE WINGED PEOPLE OF THE DESERT
Although you will not realize it at first there are a good many birds
in the desert. Some are transients, just passing through, and stopping
for a rest and a bite or two on the way. Others, such as the linnet
and the wrens, have nests tucked away among the spines of the cactus,
and there's a finch singing from the top of that bush! In flower
time in the Arizona desert (of which we are now speaking) there are
humming-birds, but their colors are not so bright as those of our
humming-birds. Feathers, like hair, have the natural color burned out
of them in the desert sun. Only the insects keep their bright clothes.
Turn over a stone and away will scamper golden beetles, silver beetles,
turquoise blue beetles, beetles in bronze; a whole boxful of jewels on
six legs.
[Illustration:
_From McCook's "Nature's Craftsmen."
Copyright Harper and Brothers_
THE LIFE STRUGGLE IN THE DESERT
The late Harry Fenn, who did everything so well, drew this picture
of one of the incidents of the life struggle in the desert. It
represents the desert wasp, known as the "tarantula killer,"
pursuing its prey. The tarantula of the Southwest is the giant
among our native spiders, but it cowers before the wasp, and
hurries off as fast as it can; but usually it _can't_, and is soon
laid away in Lady Wasp's nest as food for her solitary baby when
it comes out of the egg which the mother wasp lays in the spider's
body.
]
INSECTS, LIZARDS, SPIDERS, AND OTHERS
And there are gray lizards, yellow lizards, and lizards called
"skinks," with tails as blue as indigo; and the gila monster, a lizard
in dull orange and black, with an ugly disposition and poison in his
lower jaw. Another big lizard of the Arizona desert is called the
chuckwalla. The Arizona Indians are very fond of him. They say he
tastes like chicken.
Most of the spider family are represented in Arizona, including the
trap-door spider, who hides and waits for his dinner in a hole with
a wonderful trap-door that he made himself. This door he slams tight
when he gets you inside, if you're a fly or anything like that. He
also shuts this door in the face of his enemy, the centipede, a flat
worm a foot long, with loads of legs and feet. His name means "hundred
footed." He has poison daggers in his feet and his two-branched tail.
[Illustration: A DESERT BEETLE AND HIS GYMNASTICS
This desert beetle is called by the Indians
"The-Bug-that-Stands-on-His-Head." At first I thought he was taking
stomach exercises, for beetles have wonderful digestions, as you
may learn from Fabre's book on "The Sacred Beetle." But Mr. Howard,
Chief of the Bureau of Entomology at Washington--Uncle Sam's great
authority on bugs--tells me this is an attitude many beetles take
on the approach of an enemy, the object being to discharge a kind
of poison-gas which is intended to drive him away; and usually does.
]
WHAT A WONDERFUL FLYING MACHINE HE IS!
But what's that away up in the sky? A flying machine? Yes, one of the
most wonderful flying-machines in the world--a vulture. There he goes,
sweeping in wide circles, as he hunts along the mountain range, mile
after mile, closely scanning the base of the cliffs for the bodies of
unfortunate creatures that have fallen over. Vultures will keep in the
air in that way whole days at a time, following the cliffs and canyons
for hundreds of miles. But for all that it is sometimes a week or two
between meals with a desert vulture.
How does the vulture soar so wonderfully? Nobody is quite sure about
it. Often for hours there is no motion of the wings, as far as anybody
has been able to make out, and a soaring vulture seems to be able to
move as easily against the wind as with it. You'll not be surprised
to hear that it takes time to learn to fly like that--a whole year.
And even after the first year the young vultures stay for a good while
under the instruction of their parents, going out hunting with them
every day and sleeping with them in the nest on the cliffs at night.
V. A Day in the Sahara
How would you like to spend a day in the famous Sahara desert with the
camels and the people and the dogs; and, I was going to say, the flies?
But the flies can't stand it. They stay in the villages on the borders.
Only a few are ever bold enough to start with a caravan and these soon
turn back.
When a desert Arab and his family start on a journey the tents, the
sleeping-rugs, the scanty provisions, and the women and children are
piled on the camels, the dogs take their places at the end of the
procession and the men at the head, and the caravan starts.
As the chieftain throws the end of the burnoose (his hooded cloak)
across his shoulder and, with his carbine in the hollow of his arm,
stalks in advance of all, you feel that if you were an Arab boy you
would be as proud as he is to have a father like that. What a splendid
figure; what a strong, grave, handsome face, and utterly without fear!
All his poor possessions would hardly pay a month's rent in a fine city
apartment, but he has the proud bearing of a king. He looks as if he
had just stepped out of a picture in a Bible story-book.
[Illustration: ALL IN THE DAY'S WORK!
This looks to me like the beginning of a simoom; if so, we'd better
wrap _our_ shawls about our faces as the Arabs are doing. Notice
how the rising wind picks up and twirls the sand about the camels'
legs and sends it stinging into the faces of the men. Maybe it
will die down as quickly as it came; maybe it will increase into a
choking sand-storm that will last a week.
]
And how keen those dark eyes must be; and what a memory for the look
of things! At the beginning of the day's journey he is guided, as
sailors are at sea, by the stars. But soon the winds begin to rise, as
the desert farther away is warming under the sun, and the fine sand
drifts and shifts like snow, filling up our own tracks as fast as they
are made; so, you may be sure, it is leaving no guiding tracks made by
previous travellers. But this man has known every hill, every dune, and
every rocky gully along the way since he himself was a little boy, and
went over this same route sitting on the camel with his mother while
his father stalked on before.
[Illustration: A CARAVAN ON THE MARCH
Here is a caravan lumbering along over what appears to be a
pretty well-beaten roadway in Algeria where many improvements to
facilitate travel have been made by the French. It must be about
8.00 A. M. or 4.00 P. M. Shouldn't you say so, from the shadows?
]
Presently we come across another little group of travellers going in
another direction. They are on their way north to the summer pastures;
for you see they have a little flock of sheep and goats and two
donkeys. And there are two men. These people are probably two families
travelling together. But they are not so well-to-do as our Arab. They
have no camel to carry the women and children. So dogs, donkeys, men,
women, children, and the sheep and goats all tramp along together.
[Illustration: THE FORLORN LITTLE RAT OF THE DESERT SANDS
If you've read Roosevelt's books on Africa you've met this little
creature before. But isn't he the rattiest-looking rat you ever
saw? He has only a hair here and there on his yellow skin; and no
eyes to speak of. He can hardly see at all, spending most of his
time, as he does--like the sightless creatures of caves--in the
pitch-dark of his underground burrow. Yet, I suppose, like that
desert boy it tells about at the end of this chapter, he thinks
there's no place like home!
]
They are not worried because they are poor; for listen, they are
singing! It's a melancholy kind of song, as we think. It reminds us
of the queer sound the sand grains make when the desert winds are
beginning to blow. But to the Arab it is music. What a lot of verses it
has--all just alike--and sung over and over again.
But what's the matter now? All of a sudden they stop singing and
begin to shout and fire off their guns. You'll laugh when I tell you
why. They heard something talking back to them; repeating all their
words. It was only an echo made by the rocks of the mountains that
we have just reached. But these superstitious people of the desert
don't know what an echo is. They think echoes are the voices of evil
spirits mocking them, and the shouting and the firing of the guns is to
frighten these mockers away.
[Illustration: THE PACK-RAT'S FORTRESS
This is a diagram of the fortress of another little citizen of
mountain rocks and desert places, known out West as the "pack" rat
because he is always packing off other people's things and hiding
them in his burrow. The "fortress" consists of several burrows,
the roads leading to which are carefully protected by the prickly
bayonets of the cactus joints which the rat drags there for that
purpose.
]
Life for everybody in the Sahara and the Arabian desert is very much
what it is for the animals in the Arizona wastes--a constant struggle
for food. In the Arizona desert every living creature puts in all its
time trying to get something to eat without being eaten. The wildcat is
fortunate if he gets a meal once in two or three days; and while the
coyote is trying to slip up on a rabbit, ten to one there's a panther
slipping up on him. A traveller in northern Africa tells how, when his
caravan halted for dinner at an inn for the French soldiers quartered
in that region, he saw a lean and hungry cat eying him from around the
corner of a nearby hut. To borrow from Victor Hugo's description of
the hungry cat at the Spanish inn,[31] this cat of the desert looked
at the traveller "as if it would have asked nothing better than to be
a tiger." When the guest of the inn had finished the piece of chicken
he was eating he tossed the bone toward the cat which pounced on it
fiercely. Instantly a dog, which had been watching proceedings, rushed
forward and took the bone from the cat. Just then an Arab, who happened
to be passing, fell upon the dog and wrenching the bone from his mouth
began eagerly gnawing it himself.
[Footnote 31: "Hugo's Letters to His Wife."]
It's a hard life!
And yet if you should bring an Arab boy to London or New York to live
and give him three good meals a day--he's not always sure of _one_ at
home--and nice clothes to wear and a real bed to sleep in, and shady
parks to play in, do you suppose he would be happy? No indeed. The
thing has been tried. He says this kind of life is all right for those
who like it, but it _isn't_ the desert.
And you have to admit it!
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
Not at all dry, are they--these deserts--when you get down into
them? And I haven't told you half there is to tell about them.[32]
[Footnote 32: John C. Van Dyke, for one, has written a wonderfully
interesting little book just about the American desert. It's called
simply "The Desert."]
To begin with, what does your geography say about deserts--about
how they are made?
How do mountains help make deserts?
In and near what zone does your geography locate the great deserts
of the world?
How does the Sahara desert compare in size with the United States?
(You see, the Sahara is practically a whole United States gone dry!)
Yet, the soil of much of the Sahara is very fertile and with water
would yield wonderful crops. But where is the water to come from?
Where do we get the water that has made our deserts bloom? Has the
Sahara any such sources of supply?
Is it true that the Libyan desert was once covered by the sea, as
it was in that story of Phaeton, the boy who set the world afire?
And speaking of that story, was there a Jupiter and a Jupiter
Pluvius, too?[33]
[Footnote 33: "That was a good deal like asking if there was a George
Washington and a President Washington too," said the High School Boy,
after he had looked it up.]
Wouldn't you say the addition of "Pluvius" to the name of their
chief god meant the ancients recognized rain-making as a very
important and difficult business to manage?
But what is it, really, that brings our rains? What has the sea
to do with it? And the winds? And the mountains? Your geography
answers all these questions briefly. You will find a full treatment
of the whole subject of the weather and of how the weather man,
"the man with a hundred eyes," manages to be so clever, in
"Pictured Knowledge."[34]
[Footnote 34: In the article in the Nature Department, "What is the It
that Rains?"]
From what general direction do the winds come that bring the rains
in North America? In South America? Why the difference?
How many inches of rainfall are enough for raising good crops?
Nevertheless, they raise fine crops in many parts of the United
States where they have hardly any rain at all. How do they manage
it? I mean how do they store up the water and distribute it, and
everything? (Irrigation.)
In reading up on deserts in the encyclopedias alone you will
find many such interesting things as the following, and in other
books--particularly books of travel--much more:
How long the commercial caravans are (such great freight trains as
those that cross the Sahara between Morocco and Timbuctoo); how
many camels one driver takes care of; how fast the camels travel;
how many days they can go without a drink.
If you're going to cross with one of these caravans (or just
pretend to cross) I must tell you one thing:
_You've got to look out for lions!_
From what you have learned in your geography about African lions,
where would you say you were likely to come across them?[35]
[Footnote 35: Have you read Roosevelt's "African Game Trails"? or his
"Life Histories of African Game Animals"?]
What do these caravans bring back from Central Africa? (What is
produced in Central Africa that the civilized world wants?)
The ostrich is a most interesting citizen of the desert that I
didn't have room to talk about. There's enough for a whole chapter
in your notebook just about ostriches and their ways.
Among other things, I wish you'd find out for me if the ostrich
really does bury its head in the sand and imagine that it is
thereby hiding itself. (I'll warrant you it's only book ostriches
that do this; not real ostriches.)
One of the most curious things about Mrs. Ostrich is how she and
her neighbors work together. It's like an old-fashioned quilting
bee, for all the world; although, to be sure, the ostriches don't
make quilts--they make nests.[36]
[Footnote 36: "Romance of Animal Arts and Crafts."]
Speaking of ostrich nests naturally suggests eggs--and very big
eggs, of course, including the roc's egg in the "Arabian Nights."
They do have real rock's eggs in the desert, only this kind of a
roc's egg is spelled with a "k." You just turn to the chapter on
deserts in Hobb's "Face of the Earth," and you'll find not only
that there are such eggs, but how the desert sun uses salt in
cooking them and what the crystal people have to do with it; and
how, like a cat in a hen-house, the desert winds suck these eggs,
leaving only the hollow shell.