CHAPTER X

PLATE 36ORNAMENT.1. “Agades Cross,” ornate form.2, 3 and 4. “Agades Crosses,” debased forms from Damergu.5. Necklaces.6. Bridle Stand.7. Ornamental strip around door at Agades made of tin plate.8. Finial to border on riding saddles.9. Wooden spoon.10. Iron head-piece of camel-bridle.In the course of my wanderings I saw two examples of sticks which are planted in the ground when camp is pitched; they have a crook on one side and are surmounted by a small cross of the same shape as the one on the camel saddle. On these sticks are hung the bridles and ropes when the camels are unsaddled. They are planted outside a man’s tent, and sometimes indicate his high position or prosperity.At Agades I saw a house door ornamented with a border of tin plate in which was cut the cross and ball design shown inPlate 36.A similar example of the cross in design is in the characteristic Agades cross which will be described later.In addition to this evidence of the use of the cross, certain words in Temajegh seem to be so closely associated with Christianity as to require more explanation than the suggestion that they were borrowed from the north in the course of contact with the Romans or other Mediterranean influence. The commonest of these words are given in the following list:[247]Word in Temajegh.Meaning.Suggested derivation.“Mesi”God.Messiah.With “Mesina,” “Mesinak.”⎰⎱My God,Thy God.“Amanai.”God.Adonai (suggested by Duveyrier).[248]“Amerkid.”Religious merit.From the Latin: merces, mercedis.“Abekkad.”Sin.„„„peccatum.“Tafaski.”Feast day.„„„Pasca, or from some later form of the word meaning Easter.“Andjelous,” or “Angelous.”Angel.From the Latin: Angelus.“Aghora,” or “Arora.”Dawn.„„„Aurora.In Air, God is referred to either as Mesi or as Ialla, which, of course, comes from Allah. But there seems to be a slight difference in the use of the two words, for when Ahodu and others talked of praying they spoke of Ialla, but when he said to me that they were aware there was only one God, who was mine as well as theirs, Mesi was used.The cumulative effect of all this evidence is to my thinking too great for Bates’ view that the occurrence of the cross among the Tuareg is merely due to the survival of certain practices connected with the worship of the sun.The Tuareg believe in Heaven and in Hell and in the Devil, but the latter seems to be a somewhat vague personage in their cosmos. Much more present are the good and evil spirits with which their world, as that of all Moslems, is peopled. Belief in these spirits among the Tuareg, however, is probably older than Islam, for they also assert the existence of angels who are indistinguishable from those of various Christian Faiths. Unfortunately the angels are less active in Air than the many other sorts of spirits who haunt the country. Among the latter are the Jinns or Elijinen,[249]as they call them, which are ghosts living in certain places or the spirits which attack people and send them mad. Certain country-sides are known to be haunted by the sounds of drumming, and curious things happen to people who visitthese parts after dark. The spirits have to be fed, and bowls of porridge and water are left out for them at night; they are invariably found empty next morning. Occasionally the spirits make merry: then they can be heard to play the drum and dance and sing. Elijinen speak Temajegh and sometimes Arabic: people have spoken with them. The spirits are rarely harmful, though they occasionally play practical jokes like deceiving travellers or frightening sheep or goats. From time to time, however, they do torture unfortunate people who displease them.The most powerful spirits in Air are identified with the mountains just north of Iferuan, called Ihrsan, opposite which are the mountains of Adesnu. In the olden time they fought against one another, the one armed with a spear and the other with a sword. In the equal combat Adesnu was transfixed and remains split to this day, while the crest of Ihrsan was battered with the sword and retains a serrated poll. They do not fight any more, but they often talk to one another. Aggata in Central Air is also the home of a spirit population, and so is Tebehic in the south.Spirits are part of the every-day life of the universe. No one doubts their existence. They may be found anywhere, even in the open desert, where their drums are often heard. Evidence of such noises is so circumstantial; although I have never experienced them myself, I cannot fail to believe that they are heard. Some physical explanation on the lines suggested by the late Lord Curzon in an essay must certainly be accepted.[250]The spirits which obsess men and women are more serious. I was able to observe a case at Auderas, where Atagoom’s sister became possessed—an affliction to which she had been liable for a long time at irregular intervals. Her fits lasted from one to seven days. She used to lie crouched and huddled all day, sometimes in uncomfortable postures, but not apparently suffering from muscular contraction or fits or spasms. At night she used to wander about obliviousof her surroundings, waking up the children or treading on the goats. Then she would seize a sword and wave it about, thinking she was a man and dancing like a man. It was said that if she could only get some sleep, the spirit would go away, so I provided a sleeping draught which her relations joyfully promised to administer. But they failed in their endeavours because the spirit, of course, knew what the medicine was and made the patient refuse to take it! The treatment for these possessions is both kind and sensible. Atagoom’s relations sat around her trying to attract her attention, calling on her by name, and saying familiar things to her. All the while they beat a drum to distract the spirit’s attention, and she was constantly called or given things to hold or shown a child whom she knew. As soon as the glassy stare leaves the patient’s eye, and the attention can be caught, even for a moment, a cure is certain. Persons afflicted in this way are usually women; it will happen to them at the time they first become aware of men, which is not necessarily when they first marry, but this rule also has many exceptions. Atagoom’s small brother, aged about twelve years, was shortly afterwards afflicted in the same way, but his access only lasted one day.The difficulty of exorcising spirits, at which the Holy Men of Ghat, for instance, are said to be very proficient, is, as Ali explained, that most of the people in Air who can read the Quran do not understand it sufficiently well to do any good. Of course it was useless, he added, to make charms unintelligently against the “jenun.” In Air there was only one man who is really proficient. El Mintaka, the scribe of Auderas, the man from Ghat, was said to know the method, but it was not his speciality and he had not been very successful.The consensus of opinion is that, unlike many of the spirits at Ghat, where they take the form of objects like pumpkins rolling down the road in front of people who happen to be walking about at night, those in Air do not assume visible shape. The spirit which attacks women, nevertheless, isstated to have been seen by some people and to have the aspect of a dragon; it is called “Tanghot.” Ghosts, more especially the ones who live near tombs and deserted villages, are called “Allelthrap.”A famous legend in Air is that of the column of raiders which by the mercy of Allah was swallowed up suddenly as a result of the prayers of the Holy Man Bayazid. They were on the point of capturing Agades when the ground opened before them, and in proof thereof the Hole of Bayazid is shown to this day. The famous event lives on in memory because at that place the water, which we have already seen is naturally somewhat saline and foul in the immediate vicinity of the city, is said to have been poisoned by the corpses of the band. There is another story, too vague to record, of a legendary hero or religious leader called Awa whose tomb in the Talak area is an object of devotion. The rumour may repay investigation, for the tomb was mentioned to me in connection with the religious practices of the Air Tuareg before they became Moslems.Divination is resorted to by means of the Quran, and also by playing that curious game resembling draughts which is so widespread all over the world. In Air the game takes the form of a “board” of thirty-six holes[251]marked in the sand. Each player has thirteen counters made of date stones, or bits of wood, or pebbles, or camel droppings. The object of the game is to surround a pawn belonging to one’s adversary, somewhat on the principle of “Noughts and Crosses.” The game is called “Alkarhat” and when a Holy Man presides, the winner of three successive games carries the alternative submitted for divine decision. Another form of divination is resorted to by women who desire to obtain news of their absent husbands or lovers; they sleep on certain well-known tombs, and thus are favoured with a vision of their desire. The women of Ghadames and of the Azger Tuareg do the same. The practice appears to be identical with that described by Herodotus as current among theNasamonians. It is also reported by Mela of the people of Augila.[252]The consequence of these beliefs in spirits is that amulets are much in demand. They are especially in request to ward off the direct influence of particular evils, which are, of course, more especially potent when the local Holy Men have not been sufficiently regaled with presents. There is no man in Air who does not wear an amulet—usually a verse of the Quran in a leather envelope—somewhere on his person. The more modest may confine themselves to a little leather pouch tied in the white rag which is worn around the head to keep the veil in place. On the other hand, Atagoom, whose wealth permitted him the luxury, had little leather pouches sewn on to every part of his clothing in addition to some twenty-five strung on a cord round his neck. The manufacture of these amulets is the principal source of revenue to the Holy Men of Air. Besides verses written out on paper or skin other objects are also used. Lion claws are very efficacious, and in some cases fragments of bone of certain animals are good. I saw one bag containing the head of a hawk, and another filled with pieces of paper covered with magic squares. These leather amulet pouches are the principal ornament worn by men, with the exception of the “talhakim,” a most interesting object, the distribution of which in Africa still remains to be ascertained.The “talhakim” is an ornament shaped like a triangle surmounted by a ring with three little bosses on its circumference. The material used for making these objects is red agate or white soap-stone or turquoise blue glass. They are so prized in the Sahara and Sudan that cheaper varieties of red and white china or glass were made in Austria before the Great War for trade purposes. The stone “talhakim” are not made in Air. They come from the north. I have it on the authority of Ali that they are not made at Ghat or in the Fezzan either, I have, however, still to learn wherethey actually are made. The stone “talhakim” are beautifully cut and invariably of the same design. The upper part of the triangle is sometimes slightly thicker than the point, and in all cases is divided from the ring part by a ridge and one or two parallel lines with the addition, in some cases, of little indentations. I can neither find nor suggest any explanation of the significance of the design. It may be the prototype of the Agades cross, but I do not think it likely. The bosses on the ring are essential to the design, and somewhat similar, therefore, are agate rings which I used to see worn in the same way as ornaments strung on leather cords around the neck; they seemed too small to be worn on the finger. Most of them had on one side three little bosses analogous to those on the upper portion of the “talhakim.” These rings also came to Air from the north.The flat tablet or plate of stone or wood hung around the neck, which is so widespread throughout the East, occurs in Air, but is not common. The finest example I saw was worn by a man at Towar; it was made of white soap-stone without any inscription on either surface, but was very thin and finely cut.The women but not men wear necklaces of beads, or beads and small stone ornaments, resembling small “talhakim.” It has been suggested that these little objects were similar to those which are known, as far afield as Syria, to have been derived from stone arrow-heads conventionalised as trinkets after they had ceased to be used for weapons. In Air, however, I am convinced the necklace ornaments are intended as small “talhakim,” and I am loth to believe that the latter are conventionalised arrow-heads both on account of the difficulty presented by their large size and also on account of the essential upper ring portion, which points to a different origin. Circular bangles and bracelets with an opening between two knobs such as are worn in the north are affected by the Tuareg women; they are made of brass and copper and in some cases of silver. The workmanship of the latter, considering that they are made by the local blacksmith withhis ordinary tools, is remarkably good. On these bracelets the knobs are surprisingly accurate cubes with the eight corners hammered flat, forming a figure having six square and eight triangular facets.Of all the Air ornaments the so-called Agades cross is the most interesting. The lower part is shaped like the cross on the pommel of the camel saddle; its three points terminate in balls or cones. The fourth or upper arm of the cross fits on to a very large ring similar to that on the “talhakim,” and curiously enough also provided with three excrescences, though in this case all near one another at the top of the circle. An elaborate form worn by Ahodu’s wife had a pierced centre, but this was not generally a part of the design. A conventionalised form was seen among the Fulani and Kanuri of Damergu, where in one case the shape had been so lost that it had become a simple lozenge suspended from a small ring. In all the examples which I saw in Air the large ring of the ornament was obviously, as in the “talhakim,” an essential part of the whole; all the rings also had the three protuberances on the circumference. The cross is worn by men and women alike; it is referred to as the Ornament of the Nobles. They regard it as characteristic of themselves. The stone “talhakim” is worn in the Sudan, but the Agades cross is only known in Damergu, where it has been borrowed as a result of contact with the Tuareg, and in a debased form. In Air it seems as characteristic of the race as the face veil, and like the latter it is never put off, as are the amulet pouches and garments when heavy work necessitates stripping.PLATE 37ABOVE: FLAT SILVER ORNAMENTS, “TALHAKIM” OF RED STONE, BLUE AND WHITE PASTE, AND SILVER, SILVER HEAD ORNAMENT FOR WOMENBELOW: UNFINISHED AND FINISHED ARM RINGS, SILVER “AGADES CROSS,” RED STONE SIGNET RINGThe origin of both “talhakim” and cross must remain matters of conjecture. The former may or may not be, but the latter certainly is, peculiar to the People of the Veil; its occurrence is yet another example of the deep-rooted habit of mind which inculcates the use of the cross among the race. The ideal explanation, in view of the common characteristics of the ring and three excrescences thereon, would be that the “talhakim” and cross had an identical origin. But the cross suggests association with Christianity,while the large ring points rather to some derivation from the Egyptian Ankh: the latter in my own opinion is more probable.Two other adornments there are in Air, both restricted to men: a flat plaque and stone arm rings. The former is a flat rectangular piece of tin or silver, usually 2½ to 3 inches long by 1 inch broad, with some slight embossed design on the surface. It is often worn on the head, tied by two little thongs or threads to the band of stuff which is used to secure the veil around the forehead. The ornament may simply be a metal form of amulet pouch, but it certainly bears a striking resemblance to a fibula, which in the course of time for the sake of easier manufacture is turned out without a pin. The plaque is also worn on the shoulder, like certain classical brooches were on the Roman togæ, from which the white robes of North Africa are said to be descended.[253]No man among the Tuareg will be seen who does not wear one or more arm rings, usually above the elbow and upon either or both arms. The rings are of two main types, a cylindrical ring some ¾ to 1 inch deep by ⅛ to ¼ inch thick, and of the circumference of a man’s forearm, with two or three ridges on the outer surface, and a flat ring some ¼ inch thick, of the same inner circumference, and ¾ to 1 inch broad. The second type is the most important and appears to be the traditional sort. Deep significance is to be attached to the custom of wearing these rings, and there are differences attributed to the numbers and position of the rings on the arms. But whilst I was well aware of the importance of these usages, I was unable to ascertain their precise interpretation. Only it is clear that boys do not wear the rings, that a ring is worn when the sword is girt on, that in the first place only one ring is worn, and that once a ring has been put on it is not again put off. The rings of all types should be made of stone. In Air a soft argillaceous stone of a greenish-grey hue found in the eastern hills is used. The rings are cut by hand without a lathe from a lump of stoneabout one inch thick. The rough ring is smoothed and fined down with rasps and files and finally cleaned with sand and water. The traditional flat rings tend to taper from the inner to the outer circumference. When the cutting and shaping of the rings have been finished, they are dipped in fat and then baked, to give the slightly porous stone a deep black colour and a polished surface. The flat rings seem to be very important, for they are passed on from father to son. They are often mended with riveted brass plates if they happen to have been broken, and sometimes bear inscriptions, for the most part only names, in T’ifinagh. Of late, rings appear to have been made of a hard baked clay which is also dipped in fat, but they break too readily.Elaborate and fanciful explanations have been suggested for the practice, which has a sacred or at least mystic association. One author, who shall be nameless, has suggested that the rings were worn—and presumably he saw a Tuareg with many rings on both arms—to enable a man to crush his enemy’s skull when they closed in battle. I myself cannot offer any explanation worthy of much consideration. I must, however, note that such rings, especially when worn, as some always are, above the elbow, and also at the wrist, afford a valuable protection to the vulnerable arm muscles against sword-cuts. Nevertheless, if such was the reason for their first use they have become traditional with the lapse of time.The last of these matters to which I propose to allude is the use of the Veil, a practice which has certainly assumed a ritual form. No self-respecting Tuareg of noble or servile caste will allow himself to be seen even by his most intimate friends without a veil over his face. The habit has no analogy in the practice of the Arabian Arabs, who sometimes cover their faces with the ends of their head-cloths to protect the mouth and face against the sun and sand. This is a hygienic device[254]; the Tuareg veil is more mysterious.Not the least of the difficulties connected with the veil is, that it is not mentioned by classical authors in referring to people in North Africa who seem to be the ancestors of the present Tuareg and otherwise to correspond to descriptions of the latter. It is only with the advent of the Arabic writers that these same people are first referred to by the name of Muleththemin, the Veiled People.The veil or “Tagilmus” is a long strip of indigo cloth woven and dyed in the Sudan. The best quality is made of six narrow strips about one inch wide sewn together, edge to edge. The material and the open stitching leave plenty of room for the air to pass through, and even a considerable degree of transparency. The veil is put on in the following wise: about one-half of the length is folded over three times into a band only 2½ inches wide. The part where the full breadth begins is placed over the forehead low enough to cover the nose; the narrow band is to the right, the broad part to the left. The latter is then passed round the back of the head and looped up under the narrow part, which is wound around the head on top of the broad portion so as to hold the latter in place. The broad part over the nose is pulled up into a pleat along the forehead and forms the hood over the eyes, being called “temeder.” There remains a long loop of the dependent broad portion held by the narrow fastening band: it hangs loosely from over the right ear, behind which it is passed, over to the left ear, behind which the end is brought and passed, under the narrow fastening band running round the head. The lower part of the veil thus falls below the wearer’s chin in a loop, both ends being under the narrow band which holds them in place. The centre of the strip is taken and placed on the bridge of the nose, and all the slack is pulled in from the two points over the ears. The lower part of the veil, called “imawal,” should now hang from the bridge of the nose over the mouth and chin without touching them; the upper edge from the nose to the lobes of the ears ought to be nearly horizontal. Thus worn, the veil leaves a slit about ½ to 1 inch widein front of the eyes, which, with a small part of the nose, are all that one can ever see of a Tuareg’s face.In this veil the men live and sleep. They lift the “imawal” up to eat but in doing so hold their hand before the mouth. When the veil requires re-fixing, a man will disappear behind a bush to conceal his features even from his own family. These rigorous prescriptions are to some extent less strictly observed in the south among the younger generation, but they belong to the pride of race of the Tuareg. Even when the French induced some Tuareg to visit Paris, they declined to allow their photographs to be taken unveiled. They declared that they had no Moslem prejudices on the subject but firmly refused to entertain the idea.What is the explanation of this curious habit? Every unlikely theory has been advanced, from that of the desire of raiders to conceal their faces in order to escape recognition, to the one which suggests that the Tuareg were the Amazons of the classics, and that the habits adopted by men and women respectively in such a society had become confused. Of this order of hypotheses the simplest one is that which explains the veil as a purely hygienic accessory designed to protect the wearer against the blinding glare and the sand of the desert: from the first use of the veil for this purpose the habit gradually became so innate as to acquire a ritual significance.But none of these theories are really tenable: the Tuareg recognise each other, and foreigners can do the same in a short time, as easily in the veil as a man of another race without the veil. The Tuareg are not the Amazons of the classics, at least in the form in which popular beliefs have conceived the latter; nor is there, as a matter of fact, any reason to suppose that the Amazons, either male or female, veiled themselves. There is no logic in only the men veiling their faces and the women going unveiled if the veil were really intended for hygienic purposes; still less is any explanation of this nature reasonable for the use of the veil at night or in the rainy season. Yet almost all Tuareg, unlessthey have become denationalised, would as soon walk unveiled as an English man would walk down Bond Street with his trousers falling down. No other race in the world possesses this peculiar habit, though some among the population of the Fezzan and the Sudan in contact with them have adopted it. The habit is essentially characteristic of the Tuareg. It is as typical of them as the cross-hilted sword, the cross-pommelled saddle, the status of their women, and their T’ifinagh script.On attaining the age of puberty, Tuareg youths in Air put on the large trousers which all Moslems should wear, and soon afterwards they begin to carry a sword and wear an arm ring. The first event may take place when they reach sixteen or seventeen; the others, two or three years later. As soon as they have put on the dress of a man they are inscribed in the register of the Holy Man of their village or tribe and they commence their individual existence. The veil, however, is sometimes not donned until the mature age of twenty-five years; in no case is it worn until several years have elapsed after the sword is girt on. The ceremony of putting on the veil for the first time is accompanied by much rejoicing in the family and feasting and dancing.Two aspects of this habit strike one. In the first place the ceremonial significance to which I have already alluded is very apparent, and in the second place the comparatively late age at which the veil first begins to be worn is curious in an Eastern people, where physical development takes place early in life. A parallel may perhaps be noticed in the late date at which marriages take place in Air. I questioned Ahodu closely about these practices connected with the veil, but obtained no satisfactory information: he had nothing to say on the subject except that a man was not a proper man until he had put on the veil. And there, for the moment, one must leave the matter.The veil will be found wherever the Tuareg live, and only when the riddle of their origin is solved will an explanation probably be forthcoming. Equally obscure is the absence of any reference to the veil among them until the time of theArab authors. But up to the present no reasonable theory has been advanced.Mention has been made on several occasions of the Holy Men of Air. As is natural among superstitious people, they have always been a powerful part of the community. In mitigation, it must be said that they have probably had a hard fight to keep the Tuareg in the way of Islam at all. Where Europeans have been concerned their influence has been uncompromisingly hostile. It was certainly the Inisilman, as they are called in Temajegh, of T’intaghoda who tried to have Barth and his companions killed on more than one occasion. The attack on the Foureau-Lamy Mission at Iferuan was also due to them. Their counsel to fall on the French expedition a second time would have prevailed at Agades had it not been for the advice of Ahodu and the common-sense of the Sultan, who replied to their promptings that if the attack failed he would have to face the consequences alone, while they, in the name of God and the Faith, saved their own skins.With an effete monarch and lazy Añastafidet at Agades, the most important men in Air to-day are Inisilman like Haj Musa of Agellal, Haj Saleh of the Kel Aggata at Agades, Agajida of the Kel Takrizat, ’Umbellu of T’imia, and Abd el Rahman of the Ikazkazan. Their influence is not exerted through sectarian organisations nor has any “tariqa” like that of the Senussi taken root in Air. The Tuareg have repeatedly come under the influence of the Senussiya, especially during the late war, but in Air at least they never became affiliated to the sect. They have continued to regard its tenets as heretical and its policy as selfish.A certain number of the Air tribes such as the Igdalen, Kel Takrizat, Isherifan, etc., are reputed to be holy. The Igdalen are said not to carry or resort to arms, but use only pens and prayer. It is difficult to ascertain the exact nature of the distinction which they possess over other noble tribes, but the same differentiation is known among other sections of the People of the Veil. They cannot and do not claimdescent from the Prophet, nor are their lives any holier or in the main different from those of their fellows. The Kel T’intaghoda who are Inisilman are reputed even in Air to be great scoundrels. The Kel Takrizat are not less warlike than other tribes. Theirraison d’êtremust be sought in the shadowy past to which all problems surrounding the early religion of the Tuareg are still relegated. On this subject too little information is at present available.The people of Air belong to the Maliki persuasion of Islam, as a result of the teaching of a great leader who came amongst them in the early sixteenth century. His name was Muhammad ben Abd el Kerim el Maghili, surnamed El Baghdadi, and he was the Apostle of Islam in the Central Sudan. El Maghili belonged to Tilemsan and was born either at that place or in Tuat, where he was brought up. He was a contemporary of El Soyuti (A.D.1445-1505), the Egyptian, whose encyclopædic works were destined to perpetuate Moslem learning of the fifteenth century. El Maghili was a man of bold and enterprising character. By his uncompromising fanaticism he stirred up massacres of the Jews in Tuat, which he eventually left in order to convert the Sudan. He preached in Katsina and in Kano, as well as in Air.[255]“Living in the time when the great Songhai empire began to decline from that pitch of power which it had reached under the energetic sway of Sunni Ali and Muhammad el Haj Askia, and stung by the injustice of Askia Ismail, who refused to punish the murderers of his son, he (El Maghili) turned his eyes on the country where successful resistance had first been made against the all-absorbing power of the Asaki, and turned his steps towards Katsina.” On his way thither he passed through Air, where he preached and gave to those Tuareg who were already Moslems a way of salvation, and to the others the first beginnings of their present Faith. He founded a mosque at Abattul near Auderas, and one of his sons is said to have been buried there; the tomb at least is described as his. A short distanceaway on the road north from Auderas he knelt to pray in the Erarar n’Dendemu at the point known as Taghist, and the place was marked by a roughly rectangular enclosure of stones with a semi-circular bay in the eastern side near a small tree marking the Qibla. Travellers always stay there to make their prayers by the road. The place is remembered and far-famed as the “Makam el Sheikh ben Abd el Kerim,” but others call it the “Msid Sidi el Baghdadi,” the name by which he is usually known in Air, where men who have lived long in the East often earn this surname. His stay in Air was not entirely peaceable, for he was eventually driven out by these lax Moslems on account of his uncompromising attitude. It is reported traditionally that he was attacked by a party of Aulimmiden in Western Air, but was not apparently killed, for thereafter he again preached in Katsina. He eventually heard that one of his sons had been murdered in Tuat, probably by the Jews, for motives of revenge, and he set out for the north once more, but died before reaching the end of his journey. It is probably to this period that the attack in the west on his person must be referred. His death occurred betweenA.D.1530 and 1540. El Maghili left behind him the greatest name of any religious teacher in Air and in the Central Sudan. Twenty volumes of his works on law and theology, in addition to a correspondence in verse and prose with El Soyuti,[256]have survived in various places.Near the “Makam el Sheikh ben Abd el Kerim,” which is only one of many similar prayer enclosures in Air, are some mounds of loose stones. On every important road such enclosures and mounds may be seen. The simplest form of praying-place is a semi-circular line of stones; the larger places have a rectangular plan like the mosques. Whenever a standing camp is set up, a place of prayer is cleared and marked, and once made these hallowed areas are not disturbed. The mounds of stones by the roadside mark spots where some holy man has stopped to pray or where some equally important but long since forgotten incident hasbefallen. But although oblivion may have overtaken the event, passing caravans continue to commemorate the place; each man picks up a stone and throws it on the heap. The habit is good, for it clears the paths of loose stones. I acquired much respect by observing the custom scrupulously myself. I made my men do the same, and so assisted in perpetuating a highly commendable and utilitarian practice. Thanks to the many prayers which El Baghdadi must have said all over the neighbourhood, the paths over the Erarar n’Dendemu have been cleared of loose stones. The heaping of stones serves the additional purpose of marking tracks in a difficult country. Where rocks abound or the exact way through a defile is hard to find, it has also become the habit to indicate the way by placing different coloured stones in little heaps on the guiding rocks. It is a superstition that if the traveller does not either add to a mound or help to mark a path, some evil will befall him by the way.In spite of the proselytising of El Baghdadi and the Holy Men of Air, much of the older Faith remained. They were unable to eradicate the use of the cross. The people are also given at times to using camel bells despite the injunctions of the Prophet, who denounced it as an object associated with Christianity. It is also possible to see in the status of women the practice of monogamy, the ownership of property by women, and the treatment of the wife as her husband’s equal, survivals of a state of society which must in many respects have been regarded by El Baghdadi as heretical and tending towards Christian ideals.Is there after all any difficulty in accepting the view that the Tuareg were Christians before Islam in the Near East became victorious over all that schismatic and heterogeneous Christianity of the Dark Ages which did so little credit to the religion which we profess? There was a time when the Bishoprics of North Africa were numbered by the score. What was more natural than that Christianity should have spread into the interior? When the Arabs first came into Africa, we are told by Ibn Khaldun and El Bekri that theyfound in Tunisia and Algeria a majority of the population apparently Christian. Certain “Berber” tribes, however, were Jews, while the Muleththemin, in part, were heathens. The profession of Judaism by people including the inhabitants of the Aures hills, who had Kahena the Queen as their leader in the eighth centuryA.D., means no more than that they professed some form of monotheism which is not inconsistent with Aryan Christianity. But in any case Christianity was quite sufficiently widespread to have accounted for the survival of certain beliefs among the People of the Veil. Even so remote a part of Africa as Bornu was known to have been subjected to the influence of Coptic Christianity from the Nile Valley, and we have Bello’s testimony that the Gober chiefs were Copts.[257]Why, then, should not the Tuareg have been Christians too?Neither to Islam nor to Christianity, however, can be attributed what is susceptible only of explanation as a survival of totemism. The Northern Tuareg[258]believe that “they must abstain from eating birds, fish and lizards, on the score that these animals are their mothers’ brothers. This reason at once suggests that these taboos are both totemic and matriarchal in their origin”; but while the facts have been alluded to by many authors, the possibility that the taboos may be of recent and therefore of Sudanese, origin has not been sufficiently taken into account.[259]As against their southern origin—for birds and fishes are recognised as totemic animals, in Nigeria, for instance—it may be pointed out that no proscription against these animals obtains in Air. Instead, however, another taboo is strongly indicated in the belief which the Tuareg of the latter country hold, that the harmless and vegetarian jerboa is second only in uncleanliness to the pig. Any food or grain which the jerboa has touched must be destroyed, but rats and mice are not abhorred, and the large rat or bandicoot of the Southland is even eaten.Bates cites examples of the ceremonial eating of dogs among the Eastern Libyans, and considers that this may also have been a taboo animal, but these rites are not found in Air, where the eating of dogs, pigs, horses, donkeys or mules in any circumstance is regarded as infamous. Incidentally the prohibition regarding pigs is probably very old, for Herodotus states that none of the Libyans in North Africa bred swine in his day, and the women of Barca abstained from eating pork, as well as in certain cases cow’s flesh, on ritualistic grounds.[260]PLATE 38MT. ARWA: DRAWN BY T. A. EMMET FROM A SKETCH BY THE AUTHORI have a distinct impression of an animistic view of nature among the Tuareg in Air, but I am unable to base it on any tangible evidence. Herodotus tells us that the Libyans sacrificed to the sun and moon,[261]and Ibn Khaldun[262]certainly states that the early Berbers generally worshipped the sun. Bates deduces that the Eastern Libyans revered the sun, and connects their rites with bull worship and the Egyptian deity Amon. The only surviving Libyan name for the solar deity is preserved by Corippus as Gurzil.[263]A trace of sun worship survives in Air perhaps in association with the Kel Owi tribes. When the sun is veiled by white cloud in the early morning and the temperature is low, it is customary to say that “it is as cold as the mother of the Kel Owi,” or “the mother of the Kel Owi is cold.” I asked for an explanation of the remark, and was told that the sun was the mother of the Kel Owi, and that when the early morning air was cold the saying was used, for the Kel Owi are known to be ungenerous and mean.The weather superstitions of the Tuareg are numerous. The climate on certain mornings of the year is heavy and still, with a thick cirro-cumulus cloud in the sky; when this occurs it is held to presage some evil event. A north-west wind, with the thick haze which so often accompanies it, indicates the advent of raiders from the north, probably because in the past some famous raids have occurred in thisweather. Similarly a haze without wind, or a light north-east breeze and a damp mist, are warnings of Tebu raids. The fall of a thunderbolt is a very evil omen, as also is the rare form of atmospheric phenomenon to which the general name of “Tufakoret” is given. It consists of a slight prismatic halo around the sun in the clear morning sky when there is no evident sign of rain. The phenomenon is probably due to the refraction of low sunlight in semicondensed water vapour derived from heavy dew. A sunset behind a deep bank of cloud causing a vivid or lurid effect but obscuring the disc of the sun is also called “Tufakoret” and is equally a bad sign. A morning rainbow “Tufakoret” was seen in Air shortly before the late European war broke out. An ordinary rainbow in wet weather is a good omen.The two most noticeable virtues among the Tuareg, that of patience and of a sense of honour, have not come to them from Islam. They are attributable to something older. Their patience is not that of quietism or of fatalism. It is rather the faculty of being content to seek in the morrow what has been denied in the present. They take the long view of life and are not querulous; they are of the optimistic school of thought. Theirs has seemed to me the patience of the philosopher and not the sulky resignation of a believer in pre-ordained things.Their ethical standards of right and wrong, while differing profoundly from our own, and in no way to be commended or condemned in our shallow European way, seem to come from some older philosophy, some source less obvious than their present religion. Not only have they standards which the Quran does not establish or even approve, but they hold certain codes of conduct for which there can be no legislation. When right and wrong, or good and evil, are not obviously in question, and a Tuareg will still say that a man does not do a thing because it is dishonourable and an action such as no Imajegh would commit, it must mean that his forefathers did learn in an ancient school to seek some goal which is no reward in the present material life.Such development is only found in societies, whether Christian, Moslem or otherwise, which have for long been evolving under the guidance of a few men who have learnt much and taught much. Yet the feet of the Tuareg are not now kept in this way; their conduct is unconscious. They are no community of philosophers seeking by choice to live in primitive conditions for the betterment of their souls. They hold what they have as an inheritance of grace from bygone generations. In mind, as in custom, they are very old. Only a slight glow of the past glory remains to gild the meanness of their perpetual struggle and the eternal hardship of existence. It is doubtful whether they could still be caught and moulded afresh. There is too little left of the now threadbare stuff; it just survives in the clean air of the desert; it would fall to pieces in the atmosphere of more luxurious circumstance. And then, nothing would remain but lying tongues and thieving hands unredeemed by any saving grace.[241]Op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 227-8.[242]Op. cit., p. 317.[243]From “Reg” or “Areg,” an Arabic geographical term for a certain type of sandy desert.[244]Vide infra,Chap. XI.[245]Not, I think, Zu’lqada, as Jean,op. cit., p. 224, suggests. It is properly the greater Bairam, though sometimes known as the Lesser. Sale:Koran Prelim. Dis., § VII.[246]Bates,op. cit., Chap. VIII.[247]Cf. Duveyrier,op. cit., p. 414. Cortier:D’une rive à l’autre. . . ., p. 283. Barth,op. cit., Vol. V. p. 570.[248]Perhaps a connection with “Amana,” pardon, etc., may be suggested.[249]From the Arabic “el jenun.”[250]Curzon:Tales of Travel, p. 261. “The Singing Sands.”[251]Jean says forty: cf.op. cit., p. 215.[252]Herodotus, IV. 1723. Mela, i. 8. Duveyrier,op. cit., p. 415. Ben Hazera:Six mois chez les Touareg du Ahaggar, p. 63.[253]Worn by Arabs and Berbers but not, normally, by Tuareg.[254]The illustration of the Persian in Maspero’sHistoire Ancienne, Chap. XIII, is an example of the use of the head-cloth in early times as a protection in the Arabian manner.[255]Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 386-7; Vol. II. pp. 74 and 76; Vol. IV. p. 606.[256]C. Huart:Arabic Literature, pp. 383-4.[257]Vide infra, Chap. XII.[258]Cf. especially Ibn Khalduned. cit., I. 199-209.[259]Bates,op. cit., pp. 176-7.[260]Herodotus, II. 18 and 47, and IV. 186.[261]Ibid., IV. 188.[262]Ibn Khaldun, IV. p. 89.[263]Corippus, Johannis, IV.,passim.CHAPTER XNORTHERN AIR AND THE KEL OWIWhenI returned to Auderas from Tabello I found the valley had dried up very much. The hamlets were already in great part deserted. The people had moved out of the settlements with their flocks in search of better pasture than could be found on the parched trees and straw of the little valleys. Ahodu, temporarily relieved of his authority pending an adjudication in Agades on a dispute regarding the possession of certain date palms, was living about two miles down the valley with a part of our camels and his own goats and sheep. I was now anxious to stay as short a time as possible in this part of the country, since I wanted to see the north during the time which remained before I was due to return to England. Ahodu himself was unable to come with me, but he provided as guide an Imajegh called Sidi from his own Kel Tadek people at Auderas. With a few camels, my servant and two other men I set forth once more on November 3rd by the now familiar road to the Assada valley. Camping there on the second day out, I met a large caravan of Kel T’imia bound for Damergu via Agades. They were ostensibly trading in dates but were in reality destined for the Southland to undertake transport work in Nigeria during the winter months.The weather was very pleasant, but in the open country the temporary watering-places were fast disappearing. The maximum day temperatures varied between 90° and 95° F. in the shade; the nights were already fresh with temperatures as low as 42° F.On the following day after leaving the Assada camp I did a thirty-mile march along the valley, past the site ofAureran well with a few ruined stone houses both there and on the way there, and then up a side valley under Mount Arwa Mellen. At the mouth of the Tegidda valley my track branched off from the road which I had followed earlier in the year with Buchanan to T’imia. I proceeded north into the Anu Maqaran basin over the low pass to which both Barth and Foureau refer. From the col a long sweep of grassy plain ran gently down to the great valley of Central Air. It is here called T’imilen after the mountains which lie on the north bank of the section higher up, where it is named Abarakan. The T’imilen mountains are a continuation of the small Agalak massif which was just visible to the north; its south-west face lying on my right was very imposing with steep and rugged sides. Straight in front of the pass, beyond the valley, a gap appeared between the broken mass of the Agalak and a small, bold mountain called Aggata on the left hand. The gap, wherein were framed the distant mountains of Northern Air, proved to be a basin containing the Agalak and Aggata tributaries of the main T’imilen valley. I camped within an hour of the pass, a few hundred yards from the north bank of the main bed at the deep well of Aggata, not far from the mountain which is also called by that name.When the Bila and Bagezan massifs appear on the southern horizon, one may be said to have entered Northern Air. While the north-eastern part is more properly the country of the Kel Owi tribes, the whole area north of the central massifs, including the western plain and the towns of Agellal, Sidawet and Zilalet, was largely under their influence. This part of Air is a rugged plateau crossed by wide valleys and broken by only relatively small mountain groups. The most distinctive feature is the number of little peaks which rise abruptly into sharp points and ridges. But though small they are no mere conical hillocks, for they are crowned with the pinnacles and towers usually associated with the Dolomites. T’iriken, for instance, on the way to Assode, has a triple crest rising out of a crown,like the fangs of a tooth. T’imuru is a saddle-backed ridge with turrets along the crest like the spikes on a scaly reptilian back. Asnagho, near Agellal, is shaped like an axe; the one profile is sharp as a blade set on edge, the other flat and long. Most beautiful of all are Arwa and Aggata, soaring out of the plain like dream castles, with battlements and keeps and curtain walls perched high above the cliffs and screes of the lower glacis. The landscape is rather less coloured than in the centre or south, for until the edge of the northern mountains of Air is reached there are hardly any big trees or green vegetation in the valleys. But the same red and black of the rocks against a blue sky and straw-coloured ground prevail.Aggata well proved copious but somewhat stagnant. Agalak well is also deep and similar. It is the country of deep wells, and they are ascribed to the first Tuareg, the Itesan. They are anything up to 100 feet or more deep and 10 to 12 feet broad. The sides are carefully dry-walled with rough basalt boulders. The well mouths are slightly raised above the level of the ground and surrounded by great logs of wood, scored with rope-marks. They are undoubtedly the work of highly-skilled diggers and may be pre-Tuareg. Many of them require cleaning out, but none of them seems to have fallen in.

PLATE 36ORNAMENT.1. “Agades Cross,” ornate form.2, 3 and 4. “Agades Crosses,” debased forms from Damergu.5. Necklaces.6. Bridle Stand.7. Ornamental strip around door at Agades made of tin plate.8. Finial to border on riding saddles.9. Wooden spoon.10. Iron head-piece of camel-bridle.

PLATE 36

ORNAMENT.1. “Agades Cross,” ornate form.2, 3 and 4. “Agades Crosses,” debased forms from Damergu.5. Necklaces.6. Bridle Stand.7. Ornamental strip around door at Agades made of tin plate.8. Finial to border on riding saddles.9. Wooden spoon.10. Iron head-piece of camel-bridle.

ORNAMENT.1. “Agades Cross,” ornate form.2, 3 and 4. “Agades Crosses,” debased forms from Damergu.5. Necklaces.6. Bridle Stand.7. Ornamental strip around door at Agades made of tin plate.8. Finial to border on riding saddles.9. Wooden spoon.10. Iron head-piece of camel-bridle.

ORNAMENT.

In the course of my wanderings I saw two examples of sticks which are planted in the ground when camp is pitched; they have a crook on one side and are surmounted by a small cross of the same shape as the one on the camel saddle. On these sticks are hung the bridles and ropes when the camels are unsaddled. They are planted outside a man’s tent, and sometimes indicate his high position or prosperity.

At Agades I saw a house door ornamented with a border of tin plate in which was cut the cross and ball design shown inPlate 36.A similar example of the cross in design is in the characteristic Agades cross which will be described later.

In addition to this evidence of the use of the cross, certain words in Temajegh seem to be so closely associated with Christianity as to require more explanation than the suggestion that they were borrowed from the north in the course of contact with the Romans or other Mediterranean influence. The commonest of these words are given in the following list:[247]

In Air, God is referred to either as Mesi or as Ialla, which, of course, comes from Allah. But there seems to be a slight difference in the use of the two words, for when Ahodu and others talked of praying they spoke of Ialla, but when he said to me that they were aware there was only one God, who was mine as well as theirs, Mesi was used.

The cumulative effect of all this evidence is to my thinking too great for Bates’ view that the occurrence of the cross among the Tuareg is merely due to the survival of certain practices connected with the worship of the sun.

The Tuareg believe in Heaven and in Hell and in the Devil, but the latter seems to be a somewhat vague personage in their cosmos. Much more present are the good and evil spirits with which their world, as that of all Moslems, is peopled. Belief in these spirits among the Tuareg, however, is probably older than Islam, for they also assert the existence of angels who are indistinguishable from those of various Christian Faiths. Unfortunately the angels are less active in Air than the many other sorts of spirits who haunt the country. Among the latter are the Jinns or Elijinen,[249]as they call them, which are ghosts living in certain places or the spirits which attack people and send them mad. Certain country-sides are known to be haunted by the sounds of drumming, and curious things happen to people who visitthese parts after dark. The spirits have to be fed, and bowls of porridge and water are left out for them at night; they are invariably found empty next morning. Occasionally the spirits make merry: then they can be heard to play the drum and dance and sing. Elijinen speak Temajegh and sometimes Arabic: people have spoken with them. The spirits are rarely harmful, though they occasionally play practical jokes like deceiving travellers or frightening sheep or goats. From time to time, however, they do torture unfortunate people who displease them.

The most powerful spirits in Air are identified with the mountains just north of Iferuan, called Ihrsan, opposite which are the mountains of Adesnu. In the olden time they fought against one another, the one armed with a spear and the other with a sword. In the equal combat Adesnu was transfixed and remains split to this day, while the crest of Ihrsan was battered with the sword and retains a serrated poll. They do not fight any more, but they often talk to one another. Aggata in Central Air is also the home of a spirit population, and so is Tebehic in the south.

Spirits are part of the every-day life of the universe. No one doubts their existence. They may be found anywhere, even in the open desert, where their drums are often heard. Evidence of such noises is so circumstantial; although I have never experienced them myself, I cannot fail to believe that they are heard. Some physical explanation on the lines suggested by the late Lord Curzon in an essay must certainly be accepted.[250]

The spirits which obsess men and women are more serious. I was able to observe a case at Auderas, where Atagoom’s sister became possessed—an affliction to which she had been liable for a long time at irregular intervals. Her fits lasted from one to seven days. She used to lie crouched and huddled all day, sometimes in uncomfortable postures, but not apparently suffering from muscular contraction or fits or spasms. At night she used to wander about obliviousof her surroundings, waking up the children or treading on the goats. Then she would seize a sword and wave it about, thinking she was a man and dancing like a man. It was said that if she could only get some sleep, the spirit would go away, so I provided a sleeping draught which her relations joyfully promised to administer. But they failed in their endeavours because the spirit, of course, knew what the medicine was and made the patient refuse to take it! The treatment for these possessions is both kind and sensible. Atagoom’s relations sat around her trying to attract her attention, calling on her by name, and saying familiar things to her. All the while they beat a drum to distract the spirit’s attention, and she was constantly called or given things to hold or shown a child whom she knew. As soon as the glassy stare leaves the patient’s eye, and the attention can be caught, even for a moment, a cure is certain. Persons afflicted in this way are usually women; it will happen to them at the time they first become aware of men, which is not necessarily when they first marry, but this rule also has many exceptions. Atagoom’s small brother, aged about twelve years, was shortly afterwards afflicted in the same way, but his access only lasted one day.

The difficulty of exorcising spirits, at which the Holy Men of Ghat, for instance, are said to be very proficient, is, as Ali explained, that most of the people in Air who can read the Quran do not understand it sufficiently well to do any good. Of course it was useless, he added, to make charms unintelligently against the “jenun.” In Air there was only one man who is really proficient. El Mintaka, the scribe of Auderas, the man from Ghat, was said to know the method, but it was not his speciality and he had not been very successful.

The consensus of opinion is that, unlike many of the spirits at Ghat, where they take the form of objects like pumpkins rolling down the road in front of people who happen to be walking about at night, those in Air do not assume visible shape. The spirit which attacks women, nevertheless, isstated to have been seen by some people and to have the aspect of a dragon; it is called “Tanghot.” Ghosts, more especially the ones who live near tombs and deserted villages, are called “Allelthrap.”

A famous legend in Air is that of the column of raiders which by the mercy of Allah was swallowed up suddenly as a result of the prayers of the Holy Man Bayazid. They were on the point of capturing Agades when the ground opened before them, and in proof thereof the Hole of Bayazid is shown to this day. The famous event lives on in memory because at that place the water, which we have already seen is naturally somewhat saline and foul in the immediate vicinity of the city, is said to have been poisoned by the corpses of the band. There is another story, too vague to record, of a legendary hero or religious leader called Awa whose tomb in the Talak area is an object of devotion. The rumour may repay investigation, for the tomb was mentioned to me in connection with the religious practices of the Air Tuareg before they became Moslems.

Divination is resorted to by means of the Quran, and also by playing that curious game resembling draughts which is so widespread all over the world. In Air the game takes the form of a “board” of thirty-six holes[251]marked in the sand. Each player has thirteen counters made of date stones, or bits of wood, or pebbles, or camel droppings. The object of the game is to surround a pawn belonging to one’s adversary, somewhat on the principle of “Noughts and Crosses.” The game is called “Alkarhat” and when a Holy Man presides, the winner of three successive games carries the alternative submitted for divine decision. Another form of divination is resorted to by women who desire to obtain news of their absent husbands or lovers; they sleep on certain well-known tombs, and thus are favoured with a vision of their desire. The women of Ghadames and of the Azger Tuareg do the same. The practice appears to be identical with that described by Herodotus as current among theNasamonians. It is also reported by Mela of the people of Augila.[252]

The consequence of these beliefs in spirits is that amulets are much in demand. They are especially in request to ward off the direct influence of particular evils, which are, of course, more especially potent when the local Holy Men have not been sufficiently regaled with presents. There is no man in Air who does not wear an amulet—usually a verse of the Quran in a leather envelope—somewhere on his person. The more modest may confine themselves to a little leather pouch tied in the white rag which is worn around the head to keep the veil in place. On the other hand, Atagoom, whose wealth permitted him the luxury, had little leather pouches sewn on to every part of his clothing in addition to some twenty-five strung on a cord round his neck. The manufacture of these amulets is the principal source of revenue to the Holy Men of Air. Besides verses written out on paper or skin other objects are also used. Lion claws are very efficacious, and in some cases fragments of bone of certain animals are good. I saw one bag containing the head of a hawk, and another filled with pieces of paper covered with magic squares. These leather amulet pouches are the principal ornament worn by men, with the exception of the “talhakim,” a most interesting object, the distribution of which in Africa still remains to be ascertained.

The “talhakim” is an ornament shaped like a triangle surmounted by a ring with three little bosses on its circumference. The material used for making these objects is red agate or white soap-stone or turquoise blue glass. They are so prized in the Sahara and Sudan that cheaper varieties of red and white china or glass were made in Austria before the Great War for trade purposes. The stone “talhakim” are not made in Air. They come from the north. I have it on the authority of Ali that they are not made at Ghat or in the Fezzan either, I have, however, still to learn wherethey actually are made. The stone “talhakim” are beautifully cut and invariably of the same design. The upper part of the triangle is sometimes slightly thicker than the point, and in all cases is divided from the ring part by a ridge and one or two parallel lines with the addition, in some cases, of little indentations. I can neither find nor suggest any explanation of the significance of the design. It may be the prototype of the Agades cross, but I do not think it likely. The bosses on the ring are essential to the design, and somewhat similar, therefore, are agate rings which I used to see worn in the same way as ornaments strung on leather cords around the neck; they seemed too small to be worn on the finger. Most of them had on one side three little bosses analogous to those on the upper portion of the “talhakim.” These rings also came to Air from the north.

The flat tablet or plate of stone or wood hung around the neck, which is so widespread throughout the East, occurs in Air, but is not common. The finest example I saw was worn by a man at Towar; it was made of white soap-stone without any inscription on either surface, but was very thin and finely cut.

The women but not men wear necklaces of beads, or beads and small stone ornaments, resembling small “talhakim.” It has been suggested that these little objects were similar to those which are known, as far afield as Syria, to have been derived from stone arrow-heads conventionalised as trinkets after they had ceased to be used for weapons. In Air, however, I am convinced the necklace ornaments are intended as small “talhakim,” and I am loth to believe that the latter are conventionalised arrow-heads both on account of the difficulty presented by their large size and also on account of the essential upper ring portion, which points to a different origin. Circular bangles and bracelets with an opening between two knobs such as are worn in the north are affected by the Tuareg women; they are made of brass and copper and in some cases of silver. The workmanship of the latter, considering that they are made by the local blacksmith withhis ordinary tools, is remarkably good. On these bracelets the knobs are surprisingly accurate cubes with the eight corners hammered flat, forming a figure having six square and eight triangular facets.

Of all the Air ornaments the so-called Agades cross is the most interesting. The lower part is shaped like the cross on the pommel of the camel saddle; its three points terminate in balls or cones. The fourth or upper arm of the cross fits on to a very large ring similar to that on the “talhakim,” and curiously enough also provided with three excrescences, though in this case all near one another at the top of the circle. An elaborate form worn by Ahodu’s wife had a pierced centre, but this was not generally a part of the design. A conventionalised form was seen among the Fulani and Kanuri of Damergu, where in one case the shape had been so lost that it had become a simple lozenge suspended from a small ring. In all the examples which I saw in Air the large ring of the ornament was obviously, as in the “talhakim,” an essential part of the whole; all the rings also had the three protuberances on the circumference. The cross is worn by men and women alike; it is referred to as the Ornament of the Nobles. They regard it as characteristic of themselves. The stone “talhakim” is worn in the Sudan, but the Agades cross is only known in Damergu, where it has been borrowed as a result of contact with the Tuareg, and in a debased form. In Air it seems as characteristic of the race as the face veil, and like the latter it is never put off, as are the amulet pouches and garments when heavy work necessitates stripping.

PLATE 37ABOVE: FLAT SILVER ORNAMENTS, “TALHAKIM” OF RED STONE, BLUE AND WHITE PASTE, AND SILVER, SILVER HEAD ORNAMENT FOR WOMENBELOW: UNFINISHED AND FINISHED ARM RINGS, SILVER “AGADES CROSS,” RED STONE SIGNET RING

PLATE 37

ABOVE: FLAT SILVER ORNAMENTS, “TALHAKIM” OF RED STONE, BLUE AND WHITE PASTE, AND SILVER, SILVER HEAD ORNAMENT FOR WOMENBELOW: UNFINISHED AND FINISHED ARM RINGS, SILVER “AGADES CROSS,” RED STONE SIGNET RING

ABOVE: FLAT SILVER ORNAMENTS, “TALHAKIM” OF RED STONE, BLUE AND WHITE PASTE, AND SILVER, SILVER HEAD ORNAMENT FOR WOMENBELOW: UNFINISHED AND FINISHED ARM RINGS, SILVER “AGADES CROSS,” RED STONE SIGNET RING

ABOVE: FLAT SILVER ORNAMENTS, “TALHAKIM” OF RED STONE, BLUE AND WHITE PASTE, AND SILVER, SILVER HEAD ORNAMENT FOR WOMEN

BELOW: UNFINISHED AND FINISHED ARM RINGS, SILVER “AGADES CROSS,” RED STONE SIGNET RING

The origin of both “talhakim” and cross must remain matters of conjecture. The former may or may not be, but the latter certainly is, peculiar to the People of the Veil; its occurrence is yet another example of the deep-rooted habit of mind which inculcates the use of the cross among the race. The ideal explanation, in view of the common characteristics of the ring and three excrescences thereon, would be that the “talhakim” and cross had an identical origin. But the cross suggests association with Christianity,while the large ring points rather to some derivation from the Egyptian Ankh: the latter in my own opinion is more probable.

Two other adornments there are in Air, both restricted to men: a flat plaque and stone arm rings. The former is a flat rectangular piece of tin or silver, usually 2½ to 3 inches long by 1 inch broad, with some slight embossed design on the surface. It is often worn on the head, tied by two little thongs or threads to the band of stuff which is used to secure the veil around the forehead. The ornament may simply be a metal form of amulet pouch, but it certainly bears a striking resemblance to a fibula, which in the course of time for the sake of easier manufacture is turned out without a pin. The plaque is also worn on the shoulder, like certain classical brooches were on the Roman togæ, from which the white robes of North Africa are said to be descended.[253]

No man among the Tuareg will be seen who does not wear one or more arm rings, usually above the elbow and upon either or both arms. The rings are of two main types, a cylindrical ring some ¾ to 1 inch deep by ⅛ to ¼ inch thick, and of the circumference of a man’s forearm, with two or three ridges on the outer surface, and a flat ring some ¼ inch thick, of the same inner circumference, and ¾ to 1 inch broad. The second type is the most important and appears to be the traditional sort. Deep significance is to be attached to the custom of wearing these rings, and there are differences attributed to the numbers and position of the rings on the arms. But whilst I was well aware of the importance of these usages, I was unable to ascertain their precise interpretation. Only it is clear that boys do not wear the rings, that a ring is worn when the sword is girt on, that in the first place only one ring is worn, and that once a ring has been put on it is not again put off. The rings of all types should be made of stone. In Air a soft argillaceous stone of a greenish-grey hue found in the eastern hills is used. The rings are cut by hand without a lathe from a lump of stoneabout one inch thick. The rough ring is smoothed and fined down with rasps and files and finally cleaned with sand and water. The traditional flat rings tend to taper from the inner to the outer circumference. When the cutting and shaping of the rings have been finished, they are dipped in fat and then baked, to give the slightly porous stone a deep black colour and a polished surface. The flat rings seem to be very important, for they are passed on from father to son. They are often mended with riveted brass plates if they happen to have been broken, and sometimes bear inscriptions, for the most part only names, in T’ifinagh. Of late, rings appear to have been made of a hard baked clay which is also dipped in fat, but they break too readily.

Elaborate and fanciful explanations have been suggested for the practice, which has a sacred or at least mystic association. One author, who shall be nameless, has suggested that the rings were worn—and presumably he saw a Tuareg with many rings on both arms—to enable a man to crush his enemy’s skull when they closed in battle. I myself cannot offer any explanation worthy of much consideration. I must, however, note that such rings, especially when worn, as some always are, above the elbow, and also at the wrist, afford a valuable protection to the vulnerable arm muscles against sword-cuts. Nevertheless, if such was the reason for their first use they have become traditional with the lapse of time.

The last of these matters to which I propose to allude is the use of the Veil, a practice which has certainly assumed a ritual form. No self-respecting Tuareg of noble or servile caste will allow himself to be seen even by his most intimate friends without a veil over his face. The habit has no analogy in the practice of the Arabian Arabs, who sometimes cover their faces with the ends of their head-cloths to protect the mouth and face against the sun and sand. This is a hygienic device[254]; the Tuareg veil is more mysterious.Not the least of the difficulties connected with the veil is, that it is not mentioned by classical authors in referring to people in North Africa who seem to be the ancestors of the present Tuareg and otherwise to correspond to descriptions of the latter. It is only with the advent of the Arabic writers that these same people are first referred to by the name of Muleththemin, the Veiled People.

The veil or “Tagilmus” is a long strip of indigo cloth woven and dyed in the Sudan. The best quality is made of six narrow strips about one inch wide sewn together, edge to edge. The material and the open stitching leave plenty of room for the air to pass through, and even a considerable degree of transparency. The veil is put on in the following wise: about one-half of the length is folded over three times into a band only 2½ inches wide. The part where the full breadth begins is placed over the forehead low enough to cover the nose; the narrow band is to the right, the broad part to the left. The latter is then passed round the back of the head and looped up under the narrow part, which is wound around the head on top of the broad portion so as to hold the latter in place. The broad part over the nose is pulled up into a pleat along the forehead and forms the hood over the eyes, being called “temeder.” There remains a long loop of the dependent broad portion held by the narrow fastening band: it hangs loosely from over the right ear, behind which it is passed, over to the left ear, behind which the end is brought and passed, under the narrow fastening band running round the head. The lower part of the veil thus falls below the wearer’s chin in a loop, both ends being under the narrow band which holds them in place. The centre of the strip is taken and placed on the bridge of the nose, and all the slack is pulled in from the two points over the ears. The lower part of the veil, called “imawal,” should now hang from the bridge of the nose over the mouth and chin without touching them; the upper edge from the nose to the lobes of the ears ought to be nearly horizontal. Thus worn, the veil leaves a slit about ½ to 1 inch widein front of the eyes, which, with a small part of the nose, are all that one can ever see of a Tuareg’s face.

In this veil the men live and sleep. They lift the “imawal” up to eat but in doing so hold their hand before the mouth. When the veil requires re-fixing, a man will disappear behind a bush to conceal his features even from his own family. These rigorous prescriptions are to some extent less strictly observed in the south among the younger generation, but they belong to the pride of race of the Tuareg. Even when the French induced some Tuareg to visit Paris, they declined to allow their photographs to be taken unveiled. They declared that they had no Moslem prejudices on the subject but firmly refused to entertain the idea.

What is the explanation of this curious habit? Every unlikely theory has been advanced, from that of the desire of raiders to conceal their faces in order to escape recognition, to the one which suggests that the Tuareg were the Amazons of the classics, and that the habits adopted by men and women respectively in such a society had become confused. Of this order of hypotheses the simplest one is that which explains the veil as a purely hygienic accessory designed to protect the wearer against the blinding glare and the sand of the desert: from the first use of the veil for this purpose the habit gradually became so innate as to acquire a ritual significance.

But none of these theories are really tenable: the Tuareg recognise each other, and foreigners can do the same in a short time, as easily in the veil as a man of another race without the veil. The Tuareg are not the Amazons of the classics, at least in the form in which popular beliefs have conceived the latter; nor is there, as a matter of fact, any reason to suppose that the Amazons, either male or female, veiled themselves. There is no logic in only the men veiling their faces and the women going unveiled if the veil were really intended for hygienic purposes; still less is any explanation of this nature reasonable for the use of the veil at night or in the rainy season. Yet almost all Tuareg, unlessthey have become denationalised, would as soon walk unveiled as an English man would walk down Bond Street with his trousers falling down. No other race in the world possesses this peculiar habit, though some among the population of the Fezzan and the Sudan in contact with them have adopted it. The habit is essentially characteristic of the Tuareg. It is as typical of them as the cross-hilted sword, the cross-pommelled saddle, the status of their women, and their T’ifinagh script.

On attaining the age of puberty, Tuareg youths in Air put on the large trousers which all Moslems should wear, and soon afterwards they begin to carry a sword and wear an arm ring. The first event may take place when they reach sixteen or seventeen; the others, two or three years later. As soon as they have put on the dress of a man they are inscribed in the register of the Holy Man of their village or tribe and they commence their individual existence. The veil, however, is sometimes not donned until the mature age of twenty-five years; in no case is it worn until several years have elapsed after the sword is girt on. The ceremony of putting on the veil for the first time is accompanied by much rejoicing in the family and feasting and dancing.

Two aspects of this habit strike one. In the first place the ceremonial significance to which I have already alluded is very apparent, and in the second place the comparatively late age at which the veil first begins to be worn is curious in an Eastern people, where physical development takes place early in life. A parallel may perhaps be noticed in the late date at which marriages take place in Air. I questioned Ahodu closely about these practices connected with the veil, but obtained no satisfactory information: he had nothing to say on the subject except that a man was not a proper man until he had put on the veil. And there, for the moment, one must leave the matter.

The veil will be found wherever the Tuareg live, and only when the riddle of their origin is solved will an explanation probably be forthcoming. Equally obscure is the absence of any reference to the veil among them until the time of theArab authors. But up to the present no reasonable theory has been advanced.

Mention has been made on several occasions of the Holy Men of Air. As is natural among superstitious people, they have always been a powerful part of the community. In mitigation, it must be said that they have probably had a hard fight to keep the Tuareg in the way of Islam at all. Where Europeans have been concerned their influence has been uncompromisingly hostile. It was certainly the Inisilman, as they are called in Temajegh, of T’intaghoda who tried to have Barth and his companions killed on more than one occasion. The attack on the Foureau-Lamy Mission at Iferuan was also due to them. Their counsel to fall on the French expedition a second time would have prevailed at Agades had it not been for the advice of Ahodu and the common-sense of the Sultan, who replied to their promptings that if the attack failed he would have to face the consequences alone, while they, in the name of God and the Faith, saved their own skins.

With an effete monarch and lazy Añastafidet at Agades, the most important men in Air to-day are Inisilman like Haj Musa of Agellal, Haj Saleh of the Kel Aggata at Agades, Agajida of the Kel Takrizat, ’Umbellu of T’imia, and Abd el Rahman of the Ikazkazan. Their influence is not exerted through sectarian organisations nor has any “tariqa” like that of the Senussi taken root in Air. The Tuareg have repeatedly come under the influence of the Senussiya, especially during the late war, but in Air at least they never became affiliated to the sect. They have continued to regard its tenets as heretical and its policy as selfish.

A certain number of the Air tribes such as the Igdalen, Kel Takrizat, Isherifan, etc., are reputed to be holy. The Igdalen are said not to carry or resort to arms, but use only pens and prayer. It is difficult to ascertain the exact nature of the distinction which they possess over other noble tribes, but the same differentiation is known among other sections of the People of the Veil. They cannot and do not claimdescent from the Prophet, nor are their lives any holier or in the main different from those of their fellows. The Kel T’intaghoda who are Inisilman are reputed even in Air to be great scoundrels. The Kel Takrizat are not less warlike than other tribes. Theirraison d’êtremust be sought in the shadowy past to which all problems surrounding the early religion of the Tuareg are still relegated. On this subject too little information is at present available.

The people of Air belong to the Maliki persuasion of Islam, as a result of the teaching of a great leader who came amongst them in the early sixteenth century. His name was Muhammad ben Abd el Kerim el Maghili, surnamed El Baghdadi, and he was the Apostle of Islam in the Central Sudan. El Maghili belonged to Tilemsan and was born either at that place or in Tuat, where he was brought up. He was a contemporary of El Soyuti (A.D.1445-1505), the Egyptian, whose encyclopædic works were destined to perpetuate Moslem learning of the fifteenth century. El Maghili was a man of bold and enterprising character. By his uncompromising fanaticism he stirred up massacres of the Jews in Tuat, which he eventually left in order to convert the Sudan. He preached in Katsina and in Kano, as well as in Air.[255]“Living in the time when the great Songhai empire began to decline from that pitch of power which it had reached under the energetic sway of Sunni Ali and Muhammad el Haj Askia, and stung by the injustice of Askia Ismail, who refused to punish the murderers of his son, he (El Maghili) turned his eyes on the country where successful resistance had first been made against the all-absorbing power of the Asaki, and turned his steps towards Katsina.” On his way thither he passed through Air, where he preached and gave to those Tuareg who were already Moslems a way of salvation, and to the others the first beginnings of their present Faith. He founded a mosque at Abattul near Auderas, and one of his sons is said to have been buried there; the tomb at least is described as his. A short distanceaway on the road north from Auderas he knelt to pray in the Erarar n’Dendemu at the point known as Taghist, and the place was marked by a roughly rectangular enclosure of stones with a semi-circular bay in the eastern side near a small tree marking the Qibla. Travellers always stay there to make their prayers by the road. The place is remembered and far-famed as the “Makam el Sheikh ben Abd el Kerim,” but others call it the “Msid Sidi el Baghdadi,” the name by which he is usually known in Air, where men who have lived long in the East often earn this surname. His stay in Air was not entirely peaceable, for he was eventually driven out by these lax Moslems on account of his uncompromising attitude. It is reported traditionally that he was attacked by a party of Aulimmiden in Western Air, but was not apparently killed, for thereafter he again preached in Katsina. He eventually heard that one of his sons had been murdered in Tuat, probably by the Jews, for motives of revenge, and he set out for the north once more, but died before reaching the end of his journey. It is probably to this period that the attack in the west on his person must be referred. His death occurred betweenA.D.1530 and 1540. El Maghili left behind him the greatest name of any religious teacher in Air and in the Central Sudan. Twenty volumes of his works on law and theology, in addition to a correspondence in verse and prose with El Soyuti,[256]have survived in various places.

Near the “Makam el Sheikh ben Abd el Kerim,” which is only one of many similar prayer enclosures in Air, are some mounds of loose stones. On every important road such enclosures and mounds may be seen. The simplest form of praying-place is a semi-circular line of stones; the larger places have a rectangular plan like the mosques. Whenever a standing camp is set up, a place of prayer is cleared and marked, and once made these hallowed areas are not disturbed. The mounds of stones by the roadside mark spots where some holy man has stopped to pray or where some equally important but long since forgotten incident hasbefallen. But although oblivion may have overtaken the event, passing caravans continue to commemorate the place; each man picks up a stone and throws it on the heap. The habit is good, for it clears the paths of loose stones. I acquired much respect by observing the custom scrupulously myself. I made my men do the same, and so assisted in perpetuating a highly commendable and utilitarian practice. Thanks to the many prayers which El Baghdadi must have said all over the neighbourhood, the paths over the Erarar n’Dendemu have been cleared of loose stones. The heaping of stones serves the additional purpose of marking tracks in a difficult country. Where rocks abound or the exact way through a defile is hard to find, it has also become the habit to indicate the way by placing different coloured stones in little heaps on the guiding rocks. It is a superstition that if the traveller does not either add to a mound or help to mark a path, some evil will befall him by the way.

In spite of the proselytising of El Baghdadi and the Holy Men of Air, much of the older Faith remained. They were unable to eradicate the use of the cross. The people are also given at times to using camel bells despite the injunctions of the Prophet, who denounced it as an object associated with Christianity. It is also possible to see in the status of women the practice of monogamy, the ownership of property by women, and the treatment of the wife as her husband’s equal, survivals of a state of society which must in many respects have been regarded by El Baghdadi as heretical and tending towards Christian ideals.

Is there after all any difficulty in accepting the view that the Tuareg were Christians before Islam in the Near East became victorious over all that schismatic and heterogeneous Christianity of the Dark Ages which did so little credit to the religion which we profess? There was a time when the Bishoprics of North Africa were numbered by the score. What was more natural than that Christianity should have spread into the interior? When the Arabs first came into Africa, we are told by Ibn Khaldun and El Bekri that theyfound in Tunisia and Algeria a majority of the population apparently Christian. Certain “Berber” tribes, however, were Jews, while the Muleththemin, in part, were heathens. The profession of Judaism by people including the inhabitants of the Aures hills, who had Kahena the Queen as their leader in the eighth centuryA.D., means no more than that they professed some form of monotheism which is not inconsistent with Aryan Christianity. But in any case Christianity was quite sufficiently widespread to have accounted for the survival of certain beliefs among the People of the Veil. Even so remote a part of Africa as Bornu was known to have been subjected to the influence of Coptic Christianity from the Nile Valley, and we have Bello’s testimony that the Gober chiefs were Copts.[257]Why, then, should not the Tuareg have been Christians too?

Neither to Islam nor to Christianity, however, can be attributed what is susceptible only of explanation as a survival of totemism. The Northern Tuareg[258]believe that “they must abstain from eating birds, fish and lizards, on the score that these animals are their mothers’ brothers. This reason at once suggests that these taboos are both totemic and matriarchal in their origin”; but while the facts have been alluded to by many authors, the possibility that the taboos may be of recent and therefore of Sudanese, origin has not been sufficiently taken into account.[259]As against their southern origin—for birds and fishes are recognised as totemic animals, in Nigeria, for instance—it may be pointed out that no proscription against these animals obtains in Air. Instead, however, another taboo is strongly indicated in the belief which the Tuareg of the latter country hold, that the harmless and vegetarian jerboa is second only in uncleanliness to the pig. Any food or grain which the jerboa has touched must be destroyed, but rats and mice are not abhorred, and the large rat or bandicoot of the Southland is even eaten.Bates cites examples of the ceremonial eating of dogs among the Eastern Libyans, and considers that this may also have been a taboo animal, but these rites are not found in Air, where the eating of dogs, pigs, horses, donkeys or mules in any circumstance is regarded as infamous. Incidentally the prohibition regarding pigs is probably very old, for Herodotus states that none of the Libyans in North Africa bred swine in his day, and the women of Barca abstained from eating pork, as well as in certain cases cow’s flesh, on ritualistic grounds.[260]

PLATE 38MT. ARWA: DRAWN BY T. A. EMMET FROM A SKETCH BY THE AUTHOR

PLATE 38

MT. ARWA: DRAWN BY T. A. EMMET FROM A SKETCH BY THE AUTHOR

MT. ARWA: DRAWN BY T. A. EMMET FROM A SKETCH BY THE AUTHOR

MT. ARWA: DRAWN BY T. A. EMMET FROM A SKETCH BY THE AUTHOR

I have a distinct impression of an animistic view of nature among the Tuareg in Air, but I am unable to base it on any tangible evidence. Herodotus tells us that the Libyans sacrificed to the sun and moon,[261]and Ibn Khaldun[262]certainly states that the early Berbers generally worshipped the sun. Bates deduces that the Eastern Libyans revered the sun, and connects their rites with bull worship and the Egyptian deity Amon. The only surviving Libyan name for the solar deity is preserved by Corippus as Gurzil.[263]A trace of sun worship survives in Air perhaps in association with the Kel Owi tribes. When the sun is veiled by white cloud in the early morning and the temperature is low, it is customary to say that “it is as cold as the mother of the Kel Owi,” or “the mother of the Kel Owi is cold.” I asked for an explanation of the remark, and was told that the sun was the mother of the Kel Owi, and that when the early morning air was cold the saying was used, for the Kel Owi are known to be ungenerous and mean.

The weather superstitions of the Tuareg are numerous. The climate on certain mornings of the year is heavy and still, with a thick cirro-cumulus cloud in the sky; when this occurs it is held to presage some evil event. A north-west wind, with the thick haze which so often accompanies it, indicates the advent of raiders from the north, probably because in the past some famous raids have occurred in thisweather. Similarly a haze without wind, or a light north-east breeze and a damp mist, are warnings of Tebu raids. The fall of a thunderbolt is a very evil omen, as also is the rare form of atmospheric phenomenon to which the general name of “Tufakoret” is given. It consists of a slight prismatic halo around the sun in the clear morning sky when there is no evident sign of rain. The phenomenon is probably due to the refraction of low sunlight in semicondensed water vapour derived from heavy dew. A sunset behind a deep bank of cloud causing a vivid or lurid effect but obscuring the disc of the sun is also called “Tufakoret” and is equally a bad sign. A morning rainbow “Tufakoret” was seen in Air shortly before the late European war broke out. An ordinary rainbow in wet weather is a good omen.

The two most noticeable virtues among the Tuareg, that of patience and of a sense of honour, have not come to them from Islam. They are attributable to something older. Their patience is not that of quietism or of fatalism. It is rather the faculty of being content to seek in the morrow what has been denied in the present. They take the long view of life and are not querulous; they are of the optimistic school of thought. Theirs has seemed to me the patience of the philosopher and not the sulky resignation of a believer in pre-ordained things.

Their ethical standards of right and wrong, while differing profoundly from our own, and in no way to be commended or condemned in our shallow European way, seem to come from some older philosophy, some source less obvious than their present religion. Not only have they standards which the Quran does not establish or even approve, but they hold certain codes of conduct for which there can be no legislation. When right and wrong, or good and evil, are not obviously in question, and a Tuareg will still say that a man does not do a thing because it is dishonourable and an action such as no Imajegh would commit, it must mean that his forefathers did learn in an ancient school to seek some goal which is no reward in the present material life.

Such development is only found in societies, whether Christian, Moslem or otherwise, which have for long been evolving under the guidance of a few men who have learnt much and taught much. Yet the feet of the Tuareg are not now kept in this way; their conduct is unconscious. They are no community of philosophers seeking by choice to live in primitive conditions for the betterment of their souls. They hold what they have as an inheritance of grace from bygone generations. In mind, as in custom, they are very old. Only a slight glow of the past glory remains to gild the meanness of their perpetual struggle and the eternal hardship of existence. It is doubtful whether they could still be caught and moulded afresh. There is too little left of the now threadbare stuff; it just survives in the clean air of the desert; it would fall to pieces in the atmosphere of more luxurious circumstance. And then, nothing would remain but lying tongues and thieving hands unredeemed by any saving grace.

[241]Op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 227-8.[242]Op. cit., p. 317.[243]From “Reg” or “Areg,” an Arabic geographical term for a certain type of sandy desert.[244]Vide infra,Chap. XI.[245]Not, I think, Zu’lqada, as Jean,op. cit., p. 224, suggests. It is properly the greater Bairam, though sometimes known as the Lesser. Sale:Koran Prelim. Dis., § VII.[246]Bates,op. cit., Chap. VIII.[247]Cf. Duveyrier,op. cit., p. 414. Cortier:D’une rive à l’autre. . . ., p. 283. Barth,op. cit., Vol. V. p. 570.[248]Perhaps a connection with “Amana,” pardon, etc., may be suggested.[249]From the Arabic “el jenun.”[250]Curzon:Tales of Travel, p. 261. “The Singing Sands.”[251]Jean says forty: cf.op. cit., p. 215.[252]Herodotus, IV. 1723. Mela, i. 8. Duveyrier,op. cit., p. 415. Ben Hazera:Six mois chez les Touareg du Ahaggar, p. 63.[253]Worn by Arabs and Berbers but not, normally, by Tuareg.[254]The illustration of the Persian in Maspero’sHistoire Ancienne, Chap. XIII, is an example of the use of the head-cloth in early times as a protection in the Arabian manner.[255]Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 386-7; Vol. II. pp. 74 and 76; Vol. IV. p. 606.[256]C. Huart:Arabic Literature, pp. 383-4.[257]Vide infra, Chap. XII.[258]Cf. especially Ibn Khalduned. cit., I. 199-209.[259]Bates,op. cit., pp. 176-7.[260]Herodotus, II. 18 and 47, and IV. 186.[261]Ibid., IV. 188.[262]Ibn Khaldun, IV. p. 89.[263]Corippus, Johannis, IV.,passim.

[241]Op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 227-8.

[241]Op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 227-8.

[242]Op. cit., p. 317.

[242]Op. cit., p. 317.

[243]From “Reg” or “Areg,” an Arabic geographical term for a certain type of sandy desert.

[243]From “Reg” or “Areg,” an Arabic geographical term for a certain type of sandy desert.

[244]Vide infra,Chap. XI.

[244]Vide infra,Chap. XI.

[245]Not, I think, Zu’lqada, as Jean,op. cit., p. 224, suggests. It is properly the greater Bairam, though sometimes known as the Lesser. Sale:Koran Prelim. Dis., § VII.

[245]Not, I think, Zu’lqada, as Jean,op. cit., p. 224, suggests. It is properly the greater Bairam, though sometimes known as the Lesser. Sale:Koran Prelim. Dis., § VII.

[246]Bates,op. cit., Chap. VIII.

[246]Bates,op. cit., Chap. VIII.

[247]Cf. Duveyrier,op. cit., p. 414. Cortier:D’une rive à l’autre. . . ., p. 283. Barth,op. cit., Vol. V. p. 570.

[247]Cf. Duveyrier,op. cit., p. 414. Cortier:D’une rive à l’autre. . . ., p. 283. Barth,op. cit., Vol. V. p. 570.

[248]Perhaps a connection with “Amana,” pardon, etc., may be suggested.

[248]Perhaps a connection with “Amana,” pardon, etc., may be suggested.

[249]From the Arabic “el jenun.”

[249]From the Arabic “el jenun.”

[250]Curzon:Tales of Travel, p. 261. “The Singing Sands.”

[250]Curzon:Tales of Travel, p. 261. “The Singing Sands.”

[251]Jean says forty: cf.op. cit., p. 215.

[251]Jean says forty: cf.op. cit., p. 215.

[252]Herodotus, IV. 1723. Mela, i. 8. Duveyrier,op. cit., p. 415. Ben Hazera:Six mois chez les Touareg du Ahaggar, p. 63.

[252]Herodotus, IV. 1723. Mela, i. 8. Duveyrier,op. cit., p. 415. Ben Hazera:Six mois chez les Touareg du Ahaggar, p. 63.

[253]Worn by Arabs and Berbers but not, normally, by Tuareg.

[253]Worn by Arabs and Berbers but not, normally, by Tuareg.

[254]The illustration of the Persian in Maspero’sHistoire Ancienne, Chap. XIII, is an example of the use of the head-cloth in early times as a protection in the Arabian manner.

[254]The illustration of the Persian in Maspero’sHistoire Ancienne, Chap. XIII, is an example of the use of the head-cloth in early times as a protection in the Arabian manner.

[255]Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 386-7; Vol. II. pp. 74 and 76; Vol. IV. p. 606.

[255]Barth,op. cit., Vol. I. pp. 386-7; Vol. II. pp. 74 and 76; Vol. IV. p. 606.

[256]C. Huart:Arabic Literature, pp. 383-4.

[256]C. Huart:Arabic Literature, pp. 383-4.

[257]Vide infra, Chap. XII.

[257]Vide infra, Chap. XII.

[258]Cf. especially Ibn Khalduned. cit., I. 199-209.

[258]Cf. especially Ibn Khalduned. cit., I. 199-209.

[259]Bates,op. cit., pp. 176-7.

[259]Bates,op. cit., pp. 176-7.

[260]Herodotus, II. 18 and 47, and IV. 186.

[260]Herodotus, II. 18 and 47, and IV. 186.

[261]Ibid., IV. 188.

[261]Ibid., IV. 188.

[262]Ibn Khaldun, IV. p. 89.

[262]Ibn Khaldun, IV. p. 89.

[263]Corippus, Johannis, IV.,passim.

[263]Corippus, Johannis, IV.,passim.

NORTHERN AIR AND THE KEL OWI

WhenI returned to Auderas from Tabello I found the valley had dried up very much. The hamlets were already in great part deserted. The people had moved out of the settlements with their flocks in search of better pasture than could be found on the parched trees and straw of the little valleys. Ahodu, temporarily relieved of his authority pending an adjudication in Agades on a dispute regarding the possession of certain date palms, was living about two miles down the valley with a part of our camels and his own goats and sheep. I was now anxious to stay as short a time as possible in this part of the country, since I wanted to see the north during the time which remained before I was due to return to England. Ahodu himself was unable to come with me, but he provided as guide an Imajegh called Sidi from his own Kel Tadek people at Auderas. With a few camels, my servant and two other men I set forth once more on November 3rd by the now familiar road to the Assada valley. Camping there on the second day out, I met a large caravan of Kel T’imia bound for Damergu via Agades. They were ostensibly trading in dates but were in reality destined for the Southland to undertake transport work in Nigeria during the winter months.

The weather was very pleasant, but in the open country the temporary watering-places were fast disappearing. The maximum day temperatures varied between 90° and 95° F. in the shade; the nights were already fresh with temperatures as low as 42° F.

On the following day after leaving the Assada camp I did a thirty-mile march along the valley, past the site ofAureran well with a few ruined stone houses both there and on the way there, and then up a side valley under Mount Arwa Mellen. At the mouth of the Tegidda valley my track branched off from the road which I had followed earlier in the year with Buchanan to T’imia. I proceeded north into the Anu Maqaran basin over the low pass to which both Barth and Foureau refer. From the col a long sweep of grassy plain ran gently down to the great valley of Central Air. It is here called T’imilen after the mountains which lie on the north bank of the section higher up, where it is named Abarakan. The T’imilen mountains are a continuation of the small Agalak massif which was just visible to the north; its south-west face lying on my right was very imposing with steep and rugged sides. Straight in front of the pass, beyond the valley, a gap appeared between the broken mass of the Agalak and a small, bold mountain called Aggata on the left hand. The gap, wherein were framed the distant mountains of Northern Air, proved to be a basin containing the Agalak and Aggata tributaries of the main T’imilen valley. I camped within an hour of the pass, a few hundred yards from the north bank of the main bed at the deep well of Aggata, not far from the mountain which is also called by that name.

When the Bila and Bagezan massifs appear on the southern horizon, one may be said to have entered Northern Air. While the north-eastern part is more properly the country of the Kel Owi tribes, the whole area north of the central massifs, including the western plain and the towns of Agellal, Sidawet and Zilalet, was largely under their influence. This part of Air is a rugged plateau crossed by wide valleys and broken by only relatively small mountain groups. The most distinctive feature is the number of little peaks which rise abruptly into sharp points and ridges. But though small they are no mere conical hillocks, for they are crowned with the pinnacles and towers usually associated with the Dolomites. T’iriken, for instance, on the way to Assode, has a triple crest rising out of a crown,like the fangs of a tooth. T’imuru is a saddle-backed ridge with turrets along the crest like the spikes on a scaly reptilian back. Asnagho, near Agellal, is shaped like an axe; the one profile is sharp as a blade set on edge, the other flat and long. Most beautiful of all are Arwa and Aggata, soaring out of the plain like dream castles, with battlements and keeps and curtain walls perched high above the cliffs and screes of the lower glacis. The landscape is rather less coloured than in the centre or south, for until the edge of the northern mountains of Air is reached there are hardly any big trees or green vegetation in the valleys. But the same red and black of the rocks against a blue sky and straw-coloured ground prevail.

Aggata well proved copious but somewhat stagnant. Agalak well is also deep and similar. It is the country of deep wells, and they are ascribed to the first Tuareg, the Itesan. They are anything up to 100 feet or more deep and 10 to 12 feet broad. The sides are carefully dry-walled with rough basalt boulders. The well mouths are slightly raised above the level of the ground and surrounded by great logs of wood, scored with rope-marks. They are undoubtedly the work of highly-skilled diggers and may be pre-Tuareg. Many of them require cleaning out, but none of them seems to have fallen in.

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