Sahara

“ A precipice falls sharply right against the midday sun; it is built up of those red rocks whose colour adds so much to the evil silence of the Sahara, and the ridge-top of this precipice is here a sharp dividing-line between living and desert land. Africa the province, the Maghreb full of towns and men, ends in a coast, as it were, against this blinding ocean of sand. You look down from its cliffs over a vast space much more inhuman than the sea. ”

“ At its eastern end the Sahara at once dips into a deep, lateral gorge, which feeds, after rains, the Barada Valley, and here we remark that curious contrast of intense fertility with utter, hopeless barrenness which characterises inner Spain. Life is in that thick line of the darkest and densest evergreen, which, smiling under the fierce and fiery sun-glare, threads the side of the valley, in the wholesome perfume of the wild plants, and in the gush and murmur of waters making endless music. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a wild, fierce region, where the sun’s heat scorches all vegetation from off the hill-sides. Deep and terrible chasms yawn between the rugged mountains; there are sharp and rocky peaks that seem to have been thrown up by sudden upheavals of the earth, and at their feet lie great stretches of tawny desert recalling the burning expanse of the Sahara. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we ponder over the thought that the Sahara is increasing in sand, and size, is it not conceivable that this mountainland of Aïr is as an island that, because of its altitude, is left high and dry out in the open while the plains surrounding it have been gradually smitten as by a plague that has slowly driven back the line of fertility, while that which remains, as representative of a configuration of the past, is the rugged rock land that still offers a bold front to the advances of time and decay? ”

“ Some day, when the great Sahara is turned into an inland sea, when steamers shall ply where sand now flies before the desert wind, the Plateau may be found again. Some day, when Africa is cut from east to west by a railway line, some adventurous soul will scale the height of one of many mountains, one that seems no different from the rest and yet is held in awe by the phantom-haunted denizens of the gloomy forest, and there he will find a pyramid of wooden cases surrounded by bleached and scattered bones where vultures have fed. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ This was on the Saturday morning; and when they again rose into the air to continue their voyage, they saw that they had crossed the great mountain mass that divides the Sahara from the little-known regions of Equatorial Africa, and that in front of them to the south-west lay, as far as the eye could reach, a boundless expanse of dense forest and jungle and swamp, a gloomy and forbidding-looking region which it would be well-nigh impossible to traverse on foot. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If any one wants to renew his health, or forget his troubles, let him come to North Africa, and breathe the sweet, biblical, sunny atmosphere of Tclemcen. You will find no more tourists there than you would do in the heart of the Great Sahara; and whilst you enjoy all the charm of romantic, isolated Eastern life, none of the material comforts of modern civilization are missing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have heard of travellers who have disliked Egypt because the Sahara does not differ greatly in appearance from our dunes, while the dust provides an equivalent for the atmosphere of our country; whereas others will never cease dilating upon the glaring white of the sunlight on white walls, upon the light blue shadows under the motionless blue of the sky, a view which shows that not every one shares Bauer's acceptance of the East. ”

“ As Bob rode along on camel-back in the lee of the sand dunes, there was never a thought of danger in his mind. The Sahara is not like the great grassy steppes of Siberia or the plains of western America, which are flat and level as a table top and across which one can see for miles in every direction. On the contrary, this great African desert is filled with shifting sand dunes, low hills of sand, which are whipped away when the strong winds blow and change their position, piling up in new drifts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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? ”

“ It was an unreasonable question to ask of the captain of any ship in a dead calm in a desert, but Shard said he would set a course and let him know in a day or two. And a day or two went by over the monotony of the Sahara, who for monotony is unequalled by all the parts of the earth. Great marshes cannot equal it, nor plains of grass nor the sea, the Sahara alone lies unaltered by the seasons, she has no altering surface, no flowers to fade or grow, year in year out she is changeless for hundreds and hundreds of miles. ”

“ In travelling through Sahara, one or two days greatly relieve you without making you feel that you have been stopping when you again mount the camel, whilst a rest of a week often makes a new journey and a new tour, and you feel all the pain and misery of beginning again. ”

“ Queries of the kind bring home realisation of how firmly is planted the popular conception that the whole of the Sahara is desert, and how difficult it becomes, once a belief is firmly planted, to convey, by a broad sweep of the hand, or pen, the complete aspect of any land by proxy. ”

“ The region of arid waste lands called the Sahara lies between the Sudan on the south and the Atlas Mountains and the Egyptian coast on the north. It is a part of an arid belt extending eastward to Baluchistan, the entire area measuring about 4,000,000 square miles. Of this area at least two-thirds lies west of Suez, and is known in general as the Sahara. It is all an elevated plain, into which many valleys have been eroded by the ancient drainage systems which are now the only marked topographical features of the region. ”