Mount Atlas

“ Here the moon, whose hue is golden, not silvern, has a regular dawn before rising, and an afterglow to her setting; and Venus casts a broad cestus of glimmering light upon the purple sea. Mount Atlas, alias the Pike of Teyde, gradually upreared his giant statue, two and a half miles high: travellers speak of seeing him from Madeira, a distance of some 260 (dir. geog.) miles; but this would be possible only were both termini 15,000 feet in altitude. The limit of sight for terrestrial objects under the most favourable conditions does not exceed 210 miles. ”

“ The last of these barren wastes is separated by the Indus from the Desert of Moultan.
22. p. 9.—“The western portion of Mount Atlas.”
The question of the position of the Atlas of the ancients has often been agitated in our own day. In making this inquiry, ancient Phœnician traditions are confounded with the statements of the Greeks and Romans regarding Mount Atlas at a less remote period. The elder Professor Ideler, who combined a profound knowledge of languages with that of astronomy and mathematics, was the first to throw light on this obscure subject ”

“ From near the eastern extremity of the main range two other straight ridges are shown, diverging abruptly at an acute angle, and enclosing a trench-like valley that extends north-west for fully 120 miles. If this were even approximately correct, we should be led to conclude that the structure of the Great Atlas is quite unlike that of any other known mountain region. The tendency of mountain ranges to follow a uniform general direction is always modified by the numerous secondary causes that have helped to fashion the earth’s surface. ”

“ We had ascended several hundred feet, and were looking about for plants among rocks to the left of the path, when some faint sound made us look up, and we descried, amid the rain and mist, a party of men and laden mules descending towards us down the steep ravine. There was some obvious awkwardness in the impending encounter of three Englishmen, utterly ignorant of the native tongue, with a set of wild mountaineers of the Atlas, in a spot where no stranger had ever before been seen. ”

“ What we now term Atlas is a long ridge. How came the Romans to recognise in this long ridge the isolated conical mountain of Herodotus? May not the reason be found in the optical delusion by which every mountain chain seen in profile, in the prolongation of its direction, has the appearance of a narrow cone? I have often seen in this manner, from the sea, the ends of long chains or ridges, which might be taken for isolated mountains. According to Höst the Atlas is covered near Morocco with perpetual snow, which implies an elevation of above 1800 toises, or 11510 English feet. ”

“ Looking due west, nothing approaching our level lay between us and the dim horizon. A succession of projecting spurs of the Atlas, dividing as many successive valleys, subsided into the plain; the most prominent, and that extending farthest from the main chain, being the mountain above Seksaoua. Turning the eye a little to the left, about west by south, we saw crowded together many of the higher summits of the western portion of the main range, which was here seen foreshortened, so that it was impossible to judge of their true relative position. ”

“ Excluding the mountains of Central Asia, and the Andes of Bolivia and Peru, neither of which can be spoken of as mountain chains in the ordinary sense, the only considerable range surpassing the Atlas in height is the higher part of the Caucasus, between the peaks of Elbruz and Kasbek, whose mean height, for a distance exceeding 110 miles, must reach, if it does not surpass, the limit of 13,000 feet. ”

“ The giant buttresses of the Atlas Mountains, red and purple with the glow of the morning and twilight sun, look down upon a tempestuous mountain torrent which has cut its way athwart their core, and grim and crag-eaten rocks, buried deep within their own bowlder masses, wall off with heights of three thousand to five thousand feet the gray and yellow panorama of shifting sands—the warm heart of the southern Sahara. ”

“ Meeting with men in Mogador who had come straight from the mysterious country, veiled, untamed, and remotely removed from European touch, our interest was naturally kindled in that Back of the Beyond. There is no need for the traveller to penetrate so far as either the Sahara or the Sus. Long before he reaches them, and in order to do so, he must cross the Atlas Mountains by one of the wild passes, and the great chain of the Atlas is still unsurveyed and practically unknown. ”

“ We left Meskala early and in rain, which soon was over, and entering on a little bit of desert country, the Atlas range appeared like a great wall of limestone capped with white in the far distance.
For three hot hours we passed through a miniature Sahara, rocky and desolate, stones, stones, and still more stones and sand, a colocynth or two lying amongst the rocks, some orange-headed thistles, Ziziphus Lotus here and there, some sandarac bushes now and then; the horses stumbling on the stones, mules groaning in the sand, and no great rock in all the thirsty land to shelter under from the sun. ”

“ ATLAS MOUNTAINS, the general name for the mountain chains running more or less parallel to the coast of North-west Africa. They extend from Cape Nun on the west to the Gulf of Gabes on the east, a distance of some 1500 m., traversing Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. To their south lies the Saharan desert. ”

“ For some time the defile continued, the cliff-like walls still showing at intervals excavated rock dwellings, and at one point it receives a tributary stream, with a bed now dry, which had cut a similar trench, and whose cliffs also showed the traces of rock dwellings. As we advanced, always ascending, we gradually emerged from the defile, and found ourselves on the slope of the hills that extend northward from the base of the Great Atlas for a distance of thirty or forty miles, and are probably continuous with the low range that we crossed between Shedma and Aïn Oumast. ”

“ Artificial heat may sometimes be applied; but this is rarely available for travellers in such a country as Marocco.
It was necessary to interrupt the work during the forenoon, in order to pay a visit to the Governor. This was no matter of mere ceremony, as it was essential to obtain his consent and assistance towards carrying out the design—on which we had fixed our hearts—of penetrating to the head of the Amsmiz valley, and climbing some one of the higher adjoining peaks. We knew, indeed, that in this part of the range, the Great Atlas does not attain so high a level as it does farther east ”

“ The backbone of the country is the Great Atlas, which, taken as a whole, has a higher mean elevation than that of any other range of equal length in Europe, Africa, or western Asia, attaining in places an elevation of nearly fifteen thousand feet. Snow-clad, this mighty and isolated wall rises so abruptly from the plain that it needs but little stretch of the imagination to understand how the ancients believed that on it rested the heavens—whence, indeed, its name. ”

“ Metamorphic rocks appear in rugged hills near Morocco, and white limestone on the high Atlas. Glacial moraines may be seen on this range nearly 8,000 feet above the sea, forming gigantic ridges and mounds of porphyritic blocks, in some places damming up the ravines; and at the foot of Atlas are enormous mounds of bowlders. These mounds often-times rise 2,000 feet above the level of the plain, and according to Mr. Man were produced by glaciers. ”

“ The valley, with the river flowing through its midst, is entirely shut in on both sides by high cliffs of yellow soil. From amongst the gardens crop up everywhere the ksor with their battlements and towers, each one of which would be considered a large building in Europe. As a frame to this strange scene [172] there is the barren desert, bounded on the north by the rocky snow-clad peaks of the great chain of the Atlas, and on the south by the irregular line of Jibel Saghru. ”

“ Up we toiled until, passing through a narrow gorge, the scene opened out before us in indescribable beauty. At our feet lay the valley of the Tensift, far below us, stretching away some thirty miles or so to where the great range of the Atlas rose majestically from the plain. Green was the valley, green with crops and groves of date-palms, while here, there, and everywhere sparkled and glittered the river Tensift and the many canals that carry water from its stream to irrigate the surrounding country. ”

“ This is intersected by occasional narrow ravines, which wind up to the crest of the ridge; and its face, fronting the plain, is for the most part exposed as an escarpment of red sandstone and limestone beds dipping away from the plain, and again rising from a synclinal against the crystalline porphyrites of the centre of the ridge, and unconformably overlying nearly vertical grey shaly beds with a strike ranging with the general trend of the Atlas range. Against the plateau escarpment rest enormous mounds of boulders spreading down to the level plain. ”

“ They are, like the beds of the plain, remarkable for containing great deposits of chalcedonic concretions; but the latter may possibly be of more recent age. They rest unconformably on the upturned edges of grey shaly beds, and extend also over the porphyries that form the great mass of the Atlas chain. They appear to have been deposited subsequently to the porphyry ridge assuming its present hill-and-valley contour, as little isolated fragments are seen clinging to the sides of a narrow ravine leading out of the valley we ascended through the province of Reraya to the Atlas. ”

“ The fresh sheet of snow which had fallen on the Aït Mesan range within the last few days led us to what seemed an explanation of the inconsistent accounts given as well by travellers as by natives as to the existence of [291] perpetual snow on this part of the Great Atlas. From its position between the Great Desert to the south, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the low country to the north, it is obvious that a range of mountains from 11,000 to 13,000 feet in height must frequently be the seat of violent atmospheric disturbances. ”

“ The lofty hills that form the outer extremity of the spurs diverging from the Great Atlas slope rather steeply towards the plain, while the torrent issues from them through a cleft so narrow that no path is carried along it into the valley. Trees, that naturally clothe the outer ranges of the Alps, are here very scarce, and the upper declivity, as commonly in the Apennine, is covered with brushwood and low shrubs; while the lower slopes are partly under tillage, or else planted with olive and fig trees. ”

“ Considering that, in the Romans’ time, Pliny, quoting from the lost journal of Suetonius Paulinus, informs us that the Atlas Mountains were full of elephants, and swarmed with wild beasts of every kind, who took refuge in the impenetrable forests with which those mountains then were clad, it is strange to find the Atlas of to-day so largely a treeless and a gameless land. ”

“ The Plain of Marocco.—We now turn inland; and before referring to the details of the structure of the Great Atlas range, it will save repetition if I briefly describe the general contour of the district under consideration. Leaving the sand-hills, which die out inland, and travelling westward, we gradually ascend over an undulating country, in aspect somewhat like the Weald of Sussex, covered for 30 miles with Argan Forest, till we reach, at 60 miles inland, the average level of the plain, about 1,700 feet above the sea.
The fundamental rock is here rarely to be seen ”

“ Mountain range rises beyond mountain range, until only the snowy summits are visible in the great distance, and one knows that beyond the last of them lies the open sea. The near-by peaks and ridges, red with granite or black with shale and gullied from top to bottom with snow and ice, the broad highways of the glaciers at their feet carrying parallel moraines that look like giant tram-lines, stand out with vivid distinction. A lofty peak, that we suppose is Mount Hunter, towers above the lesser summits. ”

“ Atlas;—At sunset splendid view of the snowy peaks of the long looked for Atlas, which we now see in all their glory lighted up by the western sun; an extensive plain in every direction, and apparently reaching to their feet; the masses of snow before us are magnificent, but detached, as seen from this distance, upwards of a hundred miles; the whole group bounding the arc of the horizon between south-east by south, and south by west; the highest isolated peak south-south-east. ”

“ The situation of his Atlas is “on the continent, where the Western Lybians inhabit a projecting peninsula. The mountain has in it towards the sea a semicircular deep abyss.” The precipices are so steep that they cannot be descended; the abyss below is filled with trees, and “one looks down upon their summits, and on the fruits which they bear, as if one was looking into a well.” ”

“ History and Exploration.—The name Atlas given to these mountains by Europeans—but never used by the native races—is derived from that of the mythical Greek god represented as carrying the globe on his shoulders, and applied to the high and distant mountains of the west, where Atlas was supposed to dwell. From time immemorial the Atlas have been the home of Berber races, and those living in the least accessible regions have retained a measure of independence throughout their recorded history. ”