Sahara Desert

“ Their appearance is strikingly different, being wooded and bristling on the sides, shooting up in craggy heights, hoary and white on the uppermost peaks and ridges, as if bitten by the cold and frost, and bared by the bleak winds of the sea. The Great Desert ranges, on the contrary, are naked as nakedness can be, dull, dreary, and dead, smoothed over as velvet, of black and purple hues, and look more like mountains which children might paint than the sterile realities of Old Sahara. ”

“ Then the Sahara began to give up its bliss—the unspeakable thing—the inner calm, the sense of repose, of relief, the feeling of separation from life, the falling away of the burden, the freedom from it all in the freedom of those blue and silent distances over sandy and rock-paved tracts, full of the sun. How quiet it was, how large, and what a sense of effortless elemental power—of nature in her pure and lifeless being! It is easy to think on the desert, thought is there so near to fact—a still fresh imprint in consciousness; thought and being are hardly separate there ”

“ For all time they have stood as over-masters of the Great Desert. Proudly they overlook the far-flung wastes beneath them, where foot-hills die out among black, stony, boulder-strewn plains, and “lakes” of sand, relieved, here and there, by odd-shaped pill-box or church-like kopjes that stand as miniature guardians of the mountains behind them—beyond, right to the faint horizon, nothing but the great dead plains of the desert. ”

“ The hills and trees to the north seem to be the land, and the great expanse of stone and scrub spread out before one is the sea. To the west barren mountains rise up with almost flat tops, reminding one of billiard tables built by some dead race of giants. The world has suddenly changed as the car rushes on along the straight, even road.
No one is in sight, no habitation—just the wide plain. If the Sahara proper is to attract one the attraction will come now. There is no question about this: the expanse of desert either takes hold of one’s mind or else it merely bores. ”

“ Even in face of our information as to the Sahara’s only partial sterility, we cherish some shreds of wonder at the men who can wring a livelihood and find the means of travel under such inhospitable conditions.
The Sahara has been defined as the region which receives only as an exception any rainfall, whether of Mediterranean origin, or from the tropical regions of West Africa. It is only relatively a desert in the strict sense of the word; no part of it is absolutely without rain, and even in the districts which are reputed the most dry the traveller may meet with violent storms. ”

“ El-Aïshi, describing the sandy Sahara, says, "There is neither tree, nor bush, nor herb. The eye sees only clouds of sand, raised by continual winds, which by their violence efface the marks of the caravan as fast as men and animals imprint them with their feet. The aspect of this immensity of sand reminds me of the words, 'Bless our Lord Mahomet as much as the sand is extended,' and I understood now their full import." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Old Sahara looks absolutely pretty with the dark shrubs bespotting and besprinkling his white shining sand-hills. The heavens are strewn with soft flaky light clouds; the blue above is clear and profound, and what other colours there are, look fresh and fair. Our people catch the lighter and more exhilarating influence, and are more talkative to-day. Descending to grosser matters, they are joking about how much of the camel's meat they are to swallow for supper. A part of the ghafalah left us, as the main body would not start [427] early, thinking to arrive a couple of days before us in Ghat. ”

“ In the north is the Sahara Desert, the largest arid region in the world, where the prevailing winds are from the northeast and are hot and dry, while the humidity of the southerly winds that may penetrate into the interior is diminished by the heat, and seldom falls as rain. A second arid region, the Kalahari Desert, is found in the southern limb of the continent, between the Zambezi and Orange rivers and the eastern and western coastal highlands. It has a small spasmodic rainfall, which is usually insufficient to support a constant growth of vegetation. ”

“ The Sahara is not everywhere an utter desert; there are many oases—trenched valleys with wells to the water percolating underground in their bottoms, or hilly tracts against which at times the clouds gather—but these are minute and scattered exceptions upon a barren and riverless area nearly as large as all Europe. The Sahara is the most unbroken natural boundary in the world; throughout History it has been a barrier between the White and the Black men.
Between the Sahara and the Heartland there is a broad gap which is occupied by Arabia. ”

“ How different is all this from European notions of a desert, or level expanse of sand! With some few exceptions, the Sahara is a region covered by comparatively low, rocky hills, forming valleys here and there, supplied with trees, and herbage, and water. We are now in a really uninhabited spot; scarcely a bird is seen, or a lizard, or a beetle, or any living thing, save a few flies that still follow the caravan on unwearied wing, and buzz with moderated ferocity about the noses of the camels. ”

“ In The Desert, though armed, they have no courage to fight. Their arms are their mysterious playthings. Their genius is pacific and to make peace—they are the peacemakers of The Desert—and they always travel under the intrepid escort of their warlike Touarick friends and neighbours. Intelligent, instructed and industrious, they are the greatest friends of civilization in North Africa and the Great Desert. But upon such a people, falls as a blast of lightning, rending and shivering the fairest palm of the oasis, the curse of Turkish rule. ”

“ Some and all have vainly invoked sleep upon a bed, in the time of darkness and cold, but those who call for the god in the African Desert, in midday of the hottest season of the year—and to the last moment of starting with a long, long night of travel before them—as they lay rolling on the burning sand, and he disdains to shed his dull influence over the eyelid, know, indeed, something of this kind of human suffering, and how dreadfully long and dreary were those nights! ”

“ A strange place is this little town of sand, buried in the heart of the Central Sahara, but although so small, and with such limited resources, what a paradise it seems to many a wayfarer in the desert! Here at least it is possible to get shelter from the cruel sandstorms and from the fierce heat of the sun. At Insalah there is that precious necessity of life, water. While here, also, a man can rest, and his camels can be relieved of their burdens. The necessity for hurrying forward with the restless energy which is required of a caravan in the Sahara need no longer be exercised. ”

“ Sahara is the name given in modern geography to the whole of the interior of North Africa between the Nile Valley and the Atlantic littoral, south of the Mediterranean coastlands and north of the Equatorial belt. The word “Sahara” is derived from the Arabic, and its meaning refers to a certain type of stony desert in one particular area. There is no native name for the whole of this vast land surface: it is far too large to fall wholly within the cognisance of any one group of its diverse inhabitants. ”

“ From Salt Lake City to Washoe and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the road lies through the most horrible desert conceivable by the mind of man. For the sand of the Sahara we find substituted an impalpable powder of alkali, white as the driven snow, stretching for ninety miles at a time in one uninterrupted dazzling sheet, which supports not even that last obstinate vidette of vegetation, the wild-sage brush. Its springs are far between, and, without a single exception, mere receptacles of a salt, potash, and sulphur hell-broth, which no man would drink, save in extremis. ”

“ Sahara around has a varied aspect of trees and plain, sand and mountains. The contrasts are striking, and spite the gloom of Wareerat range, it is a bright desert scene. The town is small, and the gardens are also extremely limited; the oasis is comprehended within a circle of not more than three or four miles. The palms are dwarfish, and half of them do not bear fruit, and their dates are of the most ordinary kind. A sufficient proof that the date-palm is not dependent on the quality of its water, otherwise the palm of Ghat should be the finest and its fruit the most delicious of The Sahara. ”

“ But its great, appalling feature was the great desert of Sahara, forbidden to Greek or Roman, Persian or Egyptian, till the Arab came on his camel, and with the flaming sword of Mohammed in hand, to pierce its waste places and make traffic possible amid its sandy wastes.
South of the Western Sahara is a fairly defined section extending from Timbuctoo to the Gulf of Guinea, or in other words nearly to the Equator. It is divided by the Kong chain of mountains, and embraces the water systems of the Senegal and Niger Rivers. ”

“ The Nubian desert, from Korosko to Abou Hamed, would become a garden, the whole of that sterile country inclosed within the great western bend of the Nile towards Dongola would be embraced in the system of irrigation, and the barren sands that now give birth to the bitter melon of the desert (Cucumis colocynthis) , would bring forth the water-melon, and heavy crops of grain.* The great Sahara is desert, simply because it receives no rainfall: give it only water, and the sand will combine with the richer soil beneath, and become productive. ”

“ It rejoices my heart to contemplate the future—if perchance that future come—when this Saharan region shall fall into the hands of another Government, be invaded, circumscribed, and reduced on every side, and such a conquest over The Desert made by the hand of industry, as to render it a garden of the Hesperides, and to blossom as the rose. ”

“ The Arabs who conduct the cafelahs or caravans across the Sahara, are often seen at Agadeer or Santa Cruz, and sometimes even at Mogodor; and if there was a river penetrating to the north through the Sahara, would it not have been noticed by them? Is it possible that such a prominent feature of African geography, as a river of sweet water passing through a desert, could fail of being noticed by these people, who are, in their passage through the Desert, continually in search of water? ”

“ The Sahara is not a mere plain of sand—it embraces more than one mountainous and picturesque area as large as Wales, but, unlike that country, arid in the extreme; besides numerous oases where a scanty subsistence is yielded by palms for small communities, and which are largely dependent on the visits of travelling caravans in quest of that most precious of all commodities—water. In these places, isolated by vast seas of desert, dwell the remnants of tribes once more numerous, who migrated thither when conditions were more favourable, for alas! ”

“ It is the Sahara, “the great sea without water,” to which the Moors have given also the name of “Bled-el-Ateuch,” the land of thirst.
These desert shores stretch for five hundred leagues without one port of call for the passing vessel, without one blade of grass, one sign of life.
Solitude succeeds solitude with mournful monotony; shifting sandhills, vague horizons—and the heat grows each day more intense.
At last there comes in sight over the sands an old city, white, with yellow palm trees set here and there—it is St Louis on the Senegal, the capital of Senegambia. ”

“ Everyone, it has been said, has his own Sahara. For many of us perhaps the geography lessons of childhood left an impression of an ocean of shifting sand, sometimes separated from the sea by a narrow strip of cultivated land, sometimes extending to the very shore, from which majestic lions, appropriate lords of the inhospitable desert, gaze pensively at the setting sun. ”

“ Moving sand undoubtedly covers a large space in both divisions of the desert, but according to Sir Lambert Playfair, our best modern authority on the subject, it occupies not more than one-third part of the entire Algerian Sahara. Elsewhere rock, clay, and muddy lake are the prevailing features, interspersed with not infrequent date-groves and villages, the product of artesian wells, or excavated spaces, or river oases. Even Sahara, in short, to give it its due, is not by any means so black as it's painted. ”

“ We must consider the Sahara, then, not a monotonous expanse of burning sand, but a region presenting great variety in its form and characteristics.
From south to north it has an average breadth of about one thousand miles. From the Atlantic Ocean to the western edge of the Nile valley its length is about two thousand miles.
Throughout the entire desert rain rarely falls. Indeed, over a great portion of it there is never a drop of rain. For this reason the land is dry and sterile. ”