PLATE 39MT. AGGATA: DRAWN BY T. A. EMMET FROM A SKETCH BY THE AUTHORI slept quite quietly at Aggata and was disappointed at not hearing the Drums of the Spirits which haunt the mountain. The next day I again marched some thirty miles, around Aggata and T’imuru peaks, where there is an old deep well, now, alas! silted up, and reached Assode, once the most considerable town in Air after Agades. The plain was flat and the going good, even over the scattered rock outcrop. Mirages were showing all the time. The mount of T’in Awak, north of the point I was making for, shone in the dancing air like a chalk hill standing in a blue lake. There was no shade and it was hot. We were all tired and disappointed by the elusive valley which continually crept away beyond another ridge, so when Assode was finallyreached we were very glad. The Agoras, or “The Valley” by which the town lies, is not inspiring; and the site is marked by no prominent feature. The position, however, is otherwise interesting. The Agoras rises in the Agalak-T’imia massif and joins the basin of Northern Air not far north of Assode; the low hills on the north bank of the Agoras surround the town like the rim of a saucer. The position is not artificially fortified, but could readily have been defended, were it not that the only well lies some hundreds of yards distant from the houses in the bed of the valley.Assode is said by Jean[264]to have been built by the Kel Owi for the first Añastafidet, but is certainly older than that. It very possibly dates from the first immigration of Tuareg. The reputed date of its foundation inA.D.900 is therefore far more probable than that which Jean’s statement implies. Nor is there any reason to follow Barth[265]in setting it down to be of recent origin simply because it is not mentioned by Arabic authors. The superficial extension of the place is considerable, but the settlement belongs to various periods, and not all the 1000 ruined houses were probably ever inhabited at the same time. Although it is completely abandoned to-day, the population, even in Barth’s time, had become scanty, for he heard that only eighty houses were occupied, despite the fact that it was then, as in former and also more recent times, the official place of residence of the Añastafidet.[266]On a small rise in the middle of the little basin is the mosque, the largest building in Air.[267]The minaret fell many years ago, but the mosque is still well preserved in spite of the rainwhich, since the evacuation of 1918, has gradually been breaking down the roof. The saucer in which the town lies warrants the construction of a minaret to serve, like the one at Agades, as a watch-tower. The general plan of the building may be gathered fromPlate 32.The roof is low, as in all the Air mosques. The various outhouses and separate portions were used as khans and as schools. It once boasted a large library, the rotting remains of which I collected. I made up a whole camel load of these manuscripts[268]and took them to Iferuan, where I placed them in charge of the local alim, who turned out to be El Mintaka from Auderas. The books in part proved to be the remains of the private library of El Haj Suliman of Agellal, who possessed over 1000 volumes; he lived in the last century and belonged to the Qadria sect.North of the mosque was the quarter where the Añastafidet used to live. The houses seemed to be mainly of the “A type.” The dwellings further south were more numerous, and included examples of all types and periods. The houses for the most part were surrounded by low compound walls and lay close together along narrow streets and lanes. No particular details are worth recording except the presence in many of the houses of grain pits, some of which had been used for concealing belongings and might repay investigation.[269]The most interesting feature of Assode, considering its size, was the absence of all traces of garden or date cultivation. The town was obviously inhabited only by camel-owners and their domestic slaves. It was a trading depot and a metropolis, but not a productive centre, for even the pasture in the neighbourhood is limited. The selection ofthe place as the residence of the Añastafidet must have been due to its convenience as a centre for the tribes of the Confederation of Kel Owi. It also suited the conditions of their trade, and therefore probably that of their predecessors in the area, the first Tuareg to enter Air. As a strategic position it was admirably located, well within the borders of the plateau, and consequently not liable to be easily raided from without; tactically, also, it was defensible. It is interesting to note that of the thirty to forty wars, most of which were in Air and Tegama, mentioned in the Agades Chronicle, only two are recorded at Assode, whereas Agades was repeatedly involved. Assode was, to my mind, unquestionably the first real capital of the country, before Agades or any town in Tegama assumed an important rôle.The great Kel Owi tribes in modern times are the Kel Azañieres, the Kel Tafidet and the Ikazkazan. The major part of the confederation lived in North and North-eastern Air; the Ikazkazan alone were in the west with sections ranging as far afield as Damergu and Elakkos. A little research makes it clear that both the Kel Azañieres and the Kel Tafidet are “Kel name” sections of older “I name” tribes; in the course of time they became so powerful and numerous that their parent stems were obscured. Of the latter three main stocks can still be traced, in addition to the Ikazkazan, certain unattached Imghad tribes, and several settled communities. The three parent tribes bear the names of Imaslagha, Igermaden, and Imasrodang.The Imaslagha include the important Kel Azañieres tribes of the Azañieres mountains in the extreme north-west of Air, as well as the Kel Assarara of the north-eastern plain. When the Kel Owi entered Air, this stock occupied the area of the Immikitan and Imezegzil tribes of earlier Tuareg known as the People of the King.[270]It contains several ancient “I name” sections which might also be considered as separate stocks, were it not that on the one hand they neversplit up into “Kel name” tribes associated with definite localities, and, on the other, that they continued to be traditionally connected with the parent Imaslagha stems until to-day. These “I tribes” are the Izeyyakan, who are also said to be People of the King and may in fact have been a part of the latter division absorbed by the Kel Owi, the Imarsutan, and the now almost extinct Igururan, represented by one surviving section, the Kel Fares, who take their name from Fares water and pasture in the far north of North-eastern Air on the edge of the desert. If the Izeyyakan were originally People of the King, their absorption would afford a precedent for a similar process which can be observed in progress among the Immikitan who have fallen under the political influence of the Imaslagha stock of tribes. The Imarsutan are said to have come from an unidentified place called Arsu, which is presumed not to be in Air. In popular parlance all these tribes have collectively come to be known as the Kel Azañieres, but, although of the same Imaslagha stock, the Kel Assarara are usually not included under this head. The Kel Assarara with the subdivision, Kel Agwau and Kel Igululof, were the people of Annur, the paramount chief of Air in Barth’s day. Their villages are along the great valley of North-eastern Air, for which the Tuareg have no one name. They call the valley after the various villages on its banks, and these in turn are named from the neighbouring tributaries. It is into this basin that the Assode Agoras flows. The Kel Assarara fall into a somewhat separate category from the Kel Azañieres because Annur had made them into a powerful people, his own position being in reality far greater than either that of the Amenokal or the Añastafidet. It was due to him that his tribe acquired independent status in genealogical systems. Barth gives a good picture of the chief, and it is worth reproducing as the impression of a traveller who had no reason to be prejudiced in favour of the Air Tuareg, having at that time recently been attacked and nearly massacred by them.[271]“We saw theold chief on the day following our arrival. He received us in a straightforward and kindly manner, observing very simply that even if, as Christians, we had come to his country stained with guilt, the many dangers and difficulties we had gone through would have sufficed to wash us clean, and that we had nothing to fear but the climate and the thieves. The presents we spread out before him he received graciously, but without saying a single word. Of hospitality he showed no sign. All this was characteristic. We soon received further explanations. Some days afterwards he sent us the simple and unmistakable message that if we wished to proceed to the Sudan at our own risk, he would place no obstacle in our way; but if we wanted him to go with us and protect us, we ought to pay him a considerable sum. In stating these plain terms he made use of a very expressive simile saying that as the ‘leffa’ (or snake) killed everything she touched, so his word, when it had once escaped his lips, had terminated the matter in question—there was nothing more to be said. . . . Having observed Annur’s dealings to the very last, and having arrived under his protection safely at Katsena, I must pronounce him a straightforward and trustworthy man, who stated his terms plainly and dryly, but stuck to them with scrupulosity (sic); and as he did not treat us, neither did he ask anything from us, nor allowed his people to do so. I shall never forgive him for his niggardliness in not offering me so much as a drink of ‘fura’ or ‘ghussub water’ when I visited him, in the heat of the day, on his little estate near Tasawa, but I cannot withhold from him my esteem both as a great politician in his curious little empire, and as a man remarkable for singleness of word and purpose.”PLATE 40ROCK DRAWINGS.Annur was killed in 1856 by raiders from Bilma, which he had frequently attacked. As another example of a similar type of chief, I will copy the entry made in my diary when Ahodu and Sidi described to me Annur’s successor, Belkho of Ajiru, chief of the Igermaden during the last years of the nineteenth century. “He was the last independentruler of Air. He was small and rather hunched, but with authority unquestioned from Ghat to the Sudan. His raids were swift, well planned and executed in a manner which betrayed imagination. He had a great reputation for generosity, combined with personal magnetism of such a remarkable nature that his power was believed to be derived from communing with the spirits. ‘We used,’ said Sidi, ‘to see him sitting near the fire at night when he was travelling or raiding, crouched with his back turned on his companions, saying no word, but looking into the darkness with the firelight flickering on his small form, casting shadows in the distance, where his friends among the spirits sat and conferred with him!’”Belkho’s people, the Igermaden, are the parent stock of the Kel Tafidet, who not only became the most distinguished tribe in the Confederation, but also gave their name to the administrative ruler of the Kel Owi and the Confederation generally. They inherited the Tafidet mountains in the easternmost parts of Air and include an old “I name” tribe, the Igademawen. The name Igermaden seems to associate them with Jerma or Garama in the Fezzan, but I am aware of no particular reasons for supposing that they came to Air from there, though it may once have been theirs in the remote past. There are, incidentally, numerous names of places in Air containing the root ‘Germa’ in their composition.The third group of the Kel Owi, the Imasrodang, occupied the Ighazar valley and villages, whence they drove the Kel Ferwan. Certain small nuclei of People of the King, however, remained in this area, as we have seen also occurred elsewhere. The Imasrodang deserve no particular comment except that a section, the Kel T’intaghoda, is reputed to be “holy.” There is no justification in their conduct for the description. They are the lords of the servile people of Tamgak, as well as of the so-called “Wild Men of Air.”I never succeeded in seeing these curious people. Their origin is a deep mystery. Buchanan on his first journey ran across a party of them in Northern Air, but they come downvery seldom from Tamgak and betray the utmost nervousness of any strangers. The Tuareg call them Immedideran and admit that they are noble, though not of their own race. They emphatically deny that these people are negroid. They are said to speak a language which the Tuareg do not understand. When they meet any Tuareg they are reputed, probably quite untruly, to hold their noses as if to indicate that they smelled a bad or at any rate a curious smell. According to Sidi, who has seen them, they live in Tamgak in a very primitive state, wearing hardly any clothes except a few rags or skins. They nevertheless all affect the Veil, but although they possess many sheep and goats, the camel seems strange and unfamiliar to them when they come down to the valleys to sell their animals. They live neither in houses nor in huts nor in tents, but in very low shelters made of three uprights of stone or wood, with a fire in front and a roof of skins or grass. The Tuareg know nothing of their origin, but say that they were there before the Veiled People came. They are apparently as fair as the Tuareg themselves, and not negroid in type, but who they are it is not possible even to surmise, unless they are the Leucæthiopians of the classics.PLATE 41ROCK DRAWINGS.The Ikazkazan group are the junior partners of the Kel Owi, but probably the most numerous group in the Confederation of the Children of Tafidet. They range as far south as Elakkos, which sometimes makes one wonder if they are perhaps a non-Kel Owi tribe which threw in its lot with these people when they entered Air. Their many tribes are grouped into two main divisions, the Kel Tamat (the People of the Acacia) in the north, and the Kel Ulli (the People of the Goats) in the south, both of which appellations are in the nature of distinctive nicknames to distinguish the two geographical units. The names may have a totemic significance, in which case the Kel Tagei (the People of the Dûm Palm) and Kel Intirza (the People of the Asclepias) could be cited as other examples of the practice. There is no particular reason for calling the People of the Goats by this name, since they own as many camels as do the other Tuaregand are not in any way the only tribe to keep goats. Their occupation of Elakkos is reputed, probably rightly, to be fairly recent. The most important tribe of the northern section is the Kel Gharus (the People of the Deep Well) in Talak—with their dependent Imghad, the Ahaggaren.Such, briefly, is the Kel Owi tribal system. From Assode I determined to examine their country in the great north-eastern basin of Air contained between the mountain groups of Afis, Taghmeurt, Azañieres and Tafidet. Somewhere in this area clearly was the village and valley of T’intellust where Annur lived and where Barth’s expedition made its head-quarters in Air. The name does not figure on the French maps, and since such indications as I had received from native sources seemed to be confused, I was determined to find it for myself.The country east of Assode was a broken plain, out of which only one small massif emerged, the Gundai[272]hills, standing isolated and compact against the background of the eastern mountains. Between Gundai and T’imia the country is drained by the Unankara valley, which is crossed by the trans-Saharan caravan road on its way from the Ighazar to Mount Mari. The watering-point of Unankara lies below Gundai opposite the Talat Mellen hills: from there a branch off the Tarei tan Kel Owi runs up to T’imia village by a very difficult road along a watercourse which is the upper part of the Assode Agoras. Whenever in the south-eastern plain I crossed the main Kel Owi road and plotted the point on a map compiled from my compass traverse, I was impressed by the directness and straightness of its course across country. From Mount Mari southward the line was almost due north and south; at that point a change of direction takes place, and a line drawn somewhat west of north from Mount Mari to Unankara and produced, would, as the road does, pass within a short distance of Assatartar and enter the Ighazar between T’intaghoda and Iferuan. The upper part of the great caravan road in Air is as straight as the southern sectionacross the Azawagh and Damergu. Great age alone can account for the directness of the road and the worn tracks on the rocky ground. Its conquest and tenure by the Kel Owi is only an episode in the history of one of the oldest roads in the world.Leaving three men with my baggage at Assode to take care of themselves, Sidi and I on two camels set out to look for T’intellust, which he had often visited in his younger days. I passed one or two small settlements of stone houses, including Assadoragan, near Assode, and T’in Wansa, and reached Igululof after crossing or ascending a number of small valleys which flowed from Gundai into the Agoras. Igululof is a largish village with a date grove and the remains of some gardens; the houses were nearly all of the “B type” and were still filled with the household effects of the inhabitants who had evacuated the country in 1918. Apart from the usual collections of skins for water and grain, mortars, saddle-stone querns and pottery, the frequent occurrence of beds and furniture deserves mention as indicating the prosperity of the communities in the past. One also saw here, as elsewhere in these northern villages, swinging doors hewn out of one piece of wood set in stone sockets. The trees from which they were cut must certainly have been four feet in diameter, a few such were still to be seen in all the larger valleys. In one house I remarked a wooden bridle stand with a broadening top like the capital of a column surmounted by four wooden horns, on which were hung looped bridle ropes and halters. There were examples of low kidney-shaped or rectangular seats standing not four inches from the ground cut out of blocks of wood: they were used by the women when preparing food, and constituted the nearest approach to a chair in a country where it is the universal custom to sit on mats on the ground. Many of the houses had long rectangular racks of palm ribs up to 10 ft. × 5 ft. × 1 ft. deep slung from the roof, with the household effects, which they were intended to contain, still in their places. The niches were filled with the pots and skinsand trinkets of the former owners. The spectacle of desolation produced by these pathetic human remains made one sympathise profoundly with the unfortunate people who had had no time even to save their few worldly goods.By far the most important household implement appeared to be the double luggage rest which was conspicuous in all the houses. It consists of a pair ofU-shaped wooden crutches on a short round pole, which is planted in the ground. The upper orU-part of these rests, in the ordinary variety, has plain flat surfaces some four inches broad by a half-inch thick. The elaborate variety has a broader front member which spreads gradually from some four inches at the base, where it joins the round pole or leg, to a breadth of twelve to fifteen inches. The tops of these members are flat or stepped down in the centre, so as to make the corners appear like wide projecting horns. Their front surfaces were very elaborately ornamented with brass ribs and silver, lead or zinc studs. The brass was nailed on or hammered into the surface of the wood as an inlay. Brass sheet fretted in patterns with green leather or red stuff behind it covered the larger spaces. The designs were geometrical and somewhat analogous to the ornamentation on the camel saddles, but rather more varied. The workmanship was excellent and displayed the most finished craft in Air. These rests were traditionally used in pairs on the march to keep valuable merchandise and baggage out of the wet. Their great weight—as they measure up to 5 ft. high and 2 ft. 6 in. between tops of the arms, and are always cut in one piece from a log of hard wood—in practice rendered it impossible to use them much on the road, and they have consequently become articles of household furniture. So far as I know, both the shape of the objects themselves and the designs which ornament them are traditional and peculiar to the Tuareg.PLATE 42ORNAMENTED BAGGAGE RESTSIn view of their having been so recently inhabited and being at the same time so similar to the older “A type” houses, these houses were very interesting, as they showed themode of life of the earlier Tuareg. Within, the floors were neatly sprinkled with sand or small quartz gravel; two rings of stones containing coarser pebbles marked the places where personal ablutions were performed or where rubbish was collected. A group of large stones represented the hearth. The absence of windows and the lower roofs and doors make the more recent houses seem rather dark, but otherwise they are quite pleasant dwellings. The older houses must have been most comfortable. Their cleanliness, as early travellers remarked, depended on the owners: judging by the state of their present-day huts they were very well kept.Crossing to the north of the broad Igululof valley, Sidi and I entered a very rough plateau covered with large ochreous and brown boulders; it was intersected by numerous small valleys and gullies flowing north into the main basin. We climbed laboriously over a steep ravine and up a pass between two hillocks where there was a way down into the further valley of Anu Samed.[273]It was already late in the evening and the sun was setting on our left: in front the whole plain of the basin of North-eastern Air was spread out with a great green and white snake of a bed winding through it. In the distance along the horizon were the fantastic purple mountains which reach from Tamgak to Tafidet along the edge of the desert. We descended slowly in the dusk into the Anu Samed ravine, and lay down to sleep where this tributary enters the stream bed of the nameless basin. Night came on immediately. I made some cocoa, but we had to put out the fire as soon as possible, for this is the way by which raiding parties enter Air from the east. There is no permanent habitation nearer than T’imia or Iferuan, fifty miles away to the south and west respectively. The country was impressive and rather frightening.Next morning I said I wanted to go to T’intellust. We set off up the main valley in an east to north-easterly direction; it was filled with big trees and had a series of small villages on either bank. After riding for some hours Siditurned to me and asked me if I wanted to go to T’intellust village or to the House of the Christians. I supposed the latter was some old French Camel Corps camp, but expressed mild curiosity about it. I asked him why, particularly, it was so called. Sidi replied that in the olden days when his father was alive, he had told him that some Christians had come to the valley and had lived with the chief Annur. This interesting information decided me to make for the House of the Christians, which proved to be not so very far from T’intellust village itself, a settlement of “B type” stone houses with a few enclosures and brushwood huts. It lay on the north side of the great bed, which here was several hundred yards broad and contained many large trees between various flood channels. As we approached a group of large trees south of the village I saw some piles of brushwood. They turned out to be the ruins of two thatch huts. I dismounted, tethered the camels and again questioned Sidi, who repeated his story, adding that the Christians were three white men of whom he supposed I knew, for they had not been French. Because they were great men and friends of Annur their houses had neither been inhabited nor pulled down since they went away. Their dwellings had been left slowly to decay, but not before the place had been called after them, the House of the Christians.Sidi had vouchsafed this information unsolicited; he had no idea of what I was coming to seek. There is no doubt that the ruined huts are the remains of the camp occupied by Barth and his companions in 1850. When they reached T’intellust after narrowly escaping massacre at T’intaghoda, they had camped on a low hill to the south of the village where Annur himself was living. Another attack, by robbers this time, took place there, and for greater safety they moved their camp rather nearer to his village. It was this second camp which I saw.PLATE 43T’INTELLUSTLittle remains to-day of the falling huts. There was a small wooden drinking-trough and a semicircle of stones to mark the east, to which their servants knelt in prayer. Three-quartersof a century have passed and gone, but their camp has never been touched, “because they were the friends of Annur,” who had given them his word that they would be safe in Air. Barth’s speculation was fulfilled when he said: “This spot being once selected the tents were soon pitched, and in a short time there rose the little encampment of the English expedition. . . . Doubtless this said hill will ever remain memorable in the annals of the Asbenawa as the ‘English Hill,’ or the ‘Hill of the Christians.’”[274]And so it has come to pass. The site induced in me a justifiable glow of pride. Her Majesty’s Government had sent the first successful expedition to Air. A German, Heinrich Barth, assisted by another compatriot of his, had been Richardson’s companions. Their memory survives in the land as the white men who were not French and who did not come as conquerors but as the friends of Annur. In the light of history, the broad-mindedness of the statesman who selected a German to assist Richardson in his work on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government is only less worthy of praise than the loyalty with which Barth carried out his task when lesser men would have considered themselves free to return to Europe after accomplishing only a fraction of what he achieved.PLATE 44BARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUSTBARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUSTNeither T’intellust nor Oborassan, a little further up the valley, deserve any special mention. Annur had houses in both villages, though his official residence was in the latter. They are small settlements of a nomadic people, dependent upon camels and goats for sustenance, and lie near the point where the great valley receives the waters of Gundai by a large tributary from the south. The west side of the mountains of Tafidet also drain into the main basin, the upper part of which eventually turns north-east towards the Taghmeurt n’Afara hills. These mountains are the last barrier which divide the plateau of Air from the desert. The plain north of T’intellust and the right bank of the valley bed are low,rocky and devoid of vegetation. Along the western side of the plain runs the Agwau valley. Agwau village, marked by a white hillock, is the principal settlement of the Kel Agwau section of the Kel Assarara tribe in the Imaslagha group of the Kel Owi. It boasts a number of houses of the “B type,” a small mosque, a few “A type” dwellings and many large circles which were once hut enclosures.Marching west from Oborassan and T’intellust towards Agwau, there were few landmarks of any note along the north side of the main valley. I gradually left the line of the main bed and skirted some low rocky ground, which reaches for some distance towards the north. Beyond Agwau I crossed a grassy plain in the direction of a big group of bare mountains, one side of which is called the Assarara and the other the Afis massif;[275]it is an isolated southern spur of the great Tamgak formation just visible behind it in the north-west. The Agwau torrent flows down between its eastern side and the plain of North-eastern Air. A road from the great nameless valley runs northwards up its course and eventually leaves the mountains for the desert by Fares and T’iwilmas watering-points.The most important settlement of this north-eastern basin of Air is Assarara, a small town lying in a cranny between two boulder-strewn peaks which rise suddenly out of the gentle slope of the northern bank of the main valley. Here I spent a night after looting a number of ethnological specimens from deserted houses, mainly of the “B type.” The dwellings were all well built and were still filled with abandoned household goods: several had stucco decorations derived from the older “A type” house decoration which has already been described. There were also a mosque and khan. Thence I returned to Assode by Assatartar village, crossing the Tarei tan Kel Owi as it emerges from the plateau south of the main valley by the little left bank ravine called Azañieres.[276]By the next day I had again set forth towards the north, halting after the first march at Afis village, not far from Assarara, but on the other side of the Afis massif. There also I saw a number of stone houses and another mosque. The country in a sense was dangerous, because the neighbouring watering-point called Agaragar, has often proved to be the favourite camping-ground for raiders entering Air from the north. It happened while I was taking an astronomical observation during the night at about 1 a.m. that a sudden wind arose in the valley, and the camp woke up with a sense of foreboding. The air seemed filled with impending danger, of which the camels also became aware. Almost at once a camel was seen silhouetted on a ridge against the dark sky. Amadu, my servant, seized a rifle and quickly but silently woke up Sidi and the camel men. They said that a raid was upon us, and with difficulty I restrained them from firing indiscriminately into the night. We took up our positions behind the baggage in the black shadow of a tree under which we were camped. But the camel on the sky-line turned out to be one of my own beasts which had strayed, and calm was restored. We had received a visitation from the great god Pan.On the following day we crossed the Agaragar valley and wound slowly up a defile towards the upper part of the Ighazar basin. We climbed to a pass over a spur of the Tamgak mountains. The rocks all round were covered with drawings and inscriptions, for the way was very old. It was the road of the Northern Air salt caravan which went to Bilma from Iferuan by Faodet, Agwau, Taghmeurt n’Afara and the pool of Agamgam on the edge of the desert in the far north-eastern corner of the mountains. From Agamgam the caravan used to march by an easier route than the southern track which is now followed to Ashegur well, north of Fashi and from that place to Bilma.From the pass the road fell steeply to Faodet in an amphitheatre of great hills, a picturesque place, and important on account of a good, deep well. Although the houses werefew the site proved interesting by reason of the existence of rectangular grass huts constructed at great labour to preserve the traditional type of the Tuareg house. They provided an excellent example of the tenacity of custom, for the material of which they had been built was totally unsuited to their shape or plan.The upper waters of the Ighazar basin collect in three valleys which unite between T’intaghoda and Seliufet. On the way down the valley from Faodet, the village and palm grove of Iberkom were passed, whence a fine valley runs up into the heart of Tamgak and provides some degree of communication between T’iwilmas or Fares on the desert, and the villages in the Ighazar. Further on we come to Tanutmolet village, remarkable for a modern elaboration of the “B type” house displayed in the strictly rectangular but many-roomed dwelling shown inPlate 27.T’intaghoda is interesting as possessing an early mosque and several fine “A” and “B type” houses covered with a stucco of red earth. Most of the houses had been built on two low hills standing in the bottom of the valley. There are no gardens near them nor any palm grove. The importance of the merchants and holy men who used to live there had made of T’intaghoda the capital of Northern Air. A little further on begins the palm grove of Seliufet, and from there date palms and gardens continue all the way to Iferuan, with a chain of almost contiguous settlements on both sides of the valley bed.At Iferuan the French established a small fort in 1921 near the site where the Foureau-Lamy expedition had camped and had been attacked some twenty years before. The fort is valueless except for the moral support it may offer to induce the local Tuareg to return to their old villages from the south. The Senegalese soldiers of the garrison are not mounted and would be powerless to do anything in the event of a raid. By the end of 1922 some families, but only a few compared with the numbers who lived there before the war, had returned to their homes.Iferuan was a very delightful place. The peak of Tamgak stands pointing like a finger to heaven on the edge of the massif. The gardens and the groves of palm trees, some of which, alas! have died through lack of attention during the years of neglect since 1917, give the area a distinctly fertile aspect. It is impossible to say how many palm trees there are in the Ighazar, but they must run into many thousands. There are said to be 4250 at Iferuan alone. This number exceeds the next largest single group at In Gall west of Agades, where there are some 4000 trees, and the former are only a part of the total in the Ighazar.The date palm is a comparatively late arrival in Air, where it was introduced from the north. The trees are a cross of the Medina and Fezzan varieties. As elsewhere in North Africa, each tree is an immovable asset like a house, and often does not belong to the same man as the ground on which it is grown.At the foot of the palms were numerous gardens growing vegetables and grain. The fort had a wonderful kitchen garden with all sorts of melons, gourds and welcome European green food. The French officer in command of the post used to declare that Iferuan was the Switzerland of the Sahara, and the cool climate seemed to justify his praise. The Tuareg buildings had nothing remarkable about them with the exception of the large mosque of Tefgun not far away, and the khan or caravanserai built on the Arab plan. The Sudanese habit of making large clay amphoræ and baking themin situ, for the storage of wheat and millet grown in the gardens, has been adopted in Iferuan, and to my knowledge not elsewhere in Air.Although the open desert on the way to Ghat is not reached much before In Azawa, several days further north, now, as in the past, Iferuan is the last permanently inhabited point in Northern Air. Between these points the mountain mass of Fadé has first to be crossed; it contains several watering-points and some pastures, and huts were occasionally built at a pool called Zelim, but they had no permanence.The mountains and the watering-places have long since been abandoned by their old owners, the Ifadeyen and Kel Fadé and now belong to the Ikazkazan and Kel Tadek tribes.At Iferuan several important roads meet. The road from Air to Tuat and to Ghat, which is the main north and south caravan track across the Central Sahara, and the Haj road from Timbuctoo to Cairo, all three have a stage in common from Iferuan to In Azawa. The Haj road used to leave the Niger at Gao and enter Air at In Gall, whence it skirted the western edge of the plateau and then turned into the mountains to Iferuan: after passing In Azawa and Ghat it ran through Murzuk, Aujila and Siwa to Cairo. From Iferuan there are also several roads to the west, while the northern of the two alternative eastern roads across the desert to Kawar equally started from there, running, as already stated, by way of Taghmeurt n’Afara, Agamgam and Ashegur.In seeking to identify Air with the Agisymba Regio of the Roman geographers, Duveyrier presumed that the Fezzanian Garamantes were in the habit of visiting the plateau in ox-drawn chariots or wagons. If they had, in fact, done so, it is logical to suppose the road they used would have come to Iferuan or one of the Ighazar villages. Indeed he states that he heard rumours of a direct road from Murzuk or Garama to Air, a “Garamantian way” which passed through a place called Anai, where there were rock drawings similar to those found in Algeria and Tripolitania. This Anai was south-west of Murzuk and must not be mistaken for the better known Anai of Kawar, which is north of Bilma on the Murzuk-Chad road.I was at particular pains to inquire into the existence of this road from all the most prominent guides and personages in Air whom I could find. It would have been peculiarly interesting to establish its existence, for Duveyrier says, “La voie, avec ses anciennes ornières, est encore assez caractérisée pour que les Tebou, mes informateurs, qui en arrivaient, n’aient laissé dans mon esprit aucun doute à cesujet.”[277]Other writers, presumably on his authority, have added that where this road crossed the sand, stone flags were laid for the wheels to pass over. Duveyrier’s informers stated that the petroglyphs at Anai represented ox-drawn vehicles, and that the road also passed by way of Telizzarhen, where Barth discovered the famous rock drawings depicting men with animal heads.[278]While the broad valley at T’intellust would afford easy passage for a wheeled vehicle, there is no way to the south for any but pack transport. There are no signs of any road for vehicles ever having existed either east or west of the Bagezan massif. The great Kel Owi road is only fit for pack animals; and although many parallel tracks are visible in the open country there are numerous defiles where a single path only a few inches broad occurs. I am convinced that wheeled transport could never have been used anywhere in Central or Southern Air. But, it may be asked, could chariots have arrived even as far as T’intellust or Iferuan? There are only three ways into the plateau from the north-east that are at all suitable even for loaded camels. They are (a) through the Fadé mountains to Iferuan, (b) by Fares water and the Agwau valley to the great north-east basin, and by Taghmeurt n’Afara to T’intellust. The first two are not practicable for wheeled traffic, and on hearsay evidence the third one is equally out of the question. I do not, therefore, think that wheeled transport could ever even have entered Air from the north or north-east, though wagons might, of course, have come as far as the borders of the mountains to points such as Fares or Agamgam, provided the surface of the desert were hard enough. This cannot be determined until Anai and the country between it and Air have been visited.If any direct road between these areas ever existed, it isvery unlikely to have run straight from Anai to T’intellust, as Duveyrier’s map shows. In my inquiries I heard in all of only four roads across the Eastern Desert: (a) the southernmost from Damagarim by Termit;[279](b) the direct road to Fashi and Bilma from Southern Air, starting at Tabello; (c) the old Kel Owi Taghalam road from Agamgam to Ashegur, whence one branch goes north to Jado oasis and the other south to Fashi; and (d) a northern road from Fadé to Jado direct. Guides like Efale, who know every part of the Eastern Desert, state that there is no road from Air direct to Murzuk which does not go either by way of Jado or by way of the usual caravan road between Kawar and the Fezzan. The northernmost road from Fadé to Jado runs through two places called Booz and Ghudet, where water is found a short way below the surface; Efale travelled this way in his youth. He told me that it was known to and used by Tebu raiders to-day. But there are no deep wells on this track to be filled up to prevent raiders passing down the old Garamantian way, as Duveyrier implies was done. From Jado it, of course, is possible to reach Murzuk either by Anai or by joining the usual Chad road via Tummo. The existence of this northern Anai is certainly substantiated, and Jado, a Tebu oasis with a palm grove, is known to exist. It is called by this name among the Arabs, but Agewas by the Tuareg of Air and Braun by the Tebu themselves. The place has been reconnoitred by certain French officers, one of whom, a commandant of the fort of Bilma, I had the good fortune to meet. He was aware of the story of a flagged road, but after visiting Jado several times found no trace of any such track and did not believe in its existence. That the Garamantes and, indeed, other inhabitants of the Fezzan at one period in history used chariots drawn by oxen is quite likely, but it is highly improbable that they ever ventured so far afield in them as Air.The existence of a road between Air and the Fezzan may be admitted as possible, but only on condition that it is notmade to run direct between these countries. South of Anai it would almost certainly pass through Jado, and thence may have reached the plateau either by Ghudet and Booz to a water-point called Temed[280]on the eastern edge of Fadé north of the Tamgak group, or else by Ashegur and Agamgam north-east of T’intellust. This is not the road of the Garamantes on Duveyrier’s map; and beyond this his story cannot be further substantiated. As against this line of argument it must be observed that Von Bary[281]during this stay in Air collected information which led him to believe that there was a road from Air to Jerma by way of Anai. It is implied that it went direct, but he was never able to learn any details and was probably influenced by Duveyrier’s statements. He heard that there were some traces visible, but found no evidence to confirm the report of flagstones, wheel-marks or sculpture along its course.There is nevertheless one piece of evidence which militates in some measure against my belief that chariots never were seen in Air, and that is a rock drawing which I found in Air on a boulder in the Anu Maqaran valley just west of Mount Arwa. The drawing is reproduced inPlate 41.In the conventional manner adopted in these designs it represents oxen pulling four-wheeled vehicles. The identification of the ox is confirmed from the many other similar pictures of this animal on rocks in Air. The object behind it must apparently be a cart. The whiteness of the marks in the Anu Maqaran drawing appears to indicate that it is a comparatively recent production, although the colour and degree of patination of Saharan drawings are of course no real criteria, for weathering is notoriously uneven in its action. Near the drawing of the ox and chariot, but on a different boulder, was the magic square shown in the same figure. Both drawings were in a very sheltered place and seemed contemporary. The evidence of this picture of the chariot orwagon is too unreliable and slender to establish any theory, but it is certainly difficult to understand where the draughtsman obtained his idea except as a result of seeing chariots drawn by oxen, a condition which does not, I think, obtain in the Fezzan to-day. Wheeled vehicles have only been known in the Sudan since they were imported by Europeans during the last twenty years, and I am not aware that even those are ox-drawn. Furthermore, although the most puzzling point about the Anu Maqaran rock drawing is its apparent modernity, which is paradoxical in view of the disuse of wheeled vehicles in the Sahara, it is almost certainly older than this century. Yet the application of an ox to a cart is not likely to have been imagined by any Tuareg who had not seen an instance of it, and there seems to be no adequate reason for him to reproduce his knowledge on a rock in Air even if chance had taken him so far afield as the Mediterranean littoral, where he might have seen the equipage, unless it had in some way become associated with Air.The identification of Air with the Agisymba Regio of the Romans has been accepted by many authorities other than Duveyrier. It raises the whole problem of the Roman penetration of the Sahara. They are known to have administered the Fezzan, and it is even pretended that they reached the Niger, but evidence on this point is more scanty. Doubtless as the exploration of the Central Sahara is carried out systematically further evidence of their penetration will come to light. I am, for instance, not aware that any remains have actually been found at Ghat, though the city, which was known to them as Rapsa, was almost certainly that place and was visited in 19B.C.by Cornelius Balbus. The Roman remains discovered by Barth on the road from Mizda over the Hammada el Homra to Murzuk are better known. This route seems to have been opened about the time of the Emperor Vespasian, and to have rendered possible or at least easier the occupation of the Fezzan, which had, however, already been visited by military expeditions earlier than that reign. Pliny writes: “Ad Garamantes iter inexplicabileadhucfuit. Proximo bello, quod cum Œensibus Romani gessere auspiciis Vespasiani Imperatoris, compendium viæ quatridui deprehensum est. Hoc iter vocatur ‘Præter caput saxæ.’” Evidently the road was called by the natives, even in those days, by the same name which it now possesses, for the Pass over the Red Rock Desert at 1568 feet above the sea is still known to the Arabs as “Bab Ras el Hammada.”[282]In aboutA.D.100[283]Septimius Flaccus penetrated from the Fezzan into Æthiopia at the head of a Roman column; Julius Maternus marching from some point on the coast to Garama had joined forces with the Garamantes in order to proceed southward together against various Æthiopian bands. By this date, then, it is probable that an occupation of the Fezzan had been accomplished, for this alone would justify a further advance or punitive expeditions on such a scale against raiders from the south. Indeed, from the account given by Pliny[284]of Cornelius Balbus’ expedition of 19B.C.to the Fezzan, it might be supposed that the occupation of Southern Tripolitania and the Central Sahara had taken place a century earlier. The identification of the cities conquered by Balbus has not been satisfactory except in the case of Cydamus, Cillaba or Cilliba, Tabudium,[285]Rapsa and Jerma, respectively Ghadames, Zuila,[286]Tabonie, Ghat and Garama; the last named being the capital of the Garamantes and of the whole Fezzan, a position which later passed on to other places and finally to Murzuk.These operations of Septimius Flaccus and Julius Maternus have been held to concern Air. The latter, ἀπὸ Γαράμης ἅμα τῷ βασιλεῖ τῶν Γαραμαντίων ἐπερχομένῳ τοῖς Αἰθιόψιν ὁδεύσαντα τὰ πάντα πρὸς μεσημβρίαν μησὶ τέσσαρσι ἀφικέσθαι εἰς τὴν Ἀγίσυμβα. . . .[287]It is important to try to identifythe area, since it appears to be the most southerly point to which Roman geographical knowledge is recorded as having extended. Duveyrier, arguing, on what may in any case be a false premise, that because Pliny mentions no camels in Africa there were no camels, concludes with the fantastic statement that the Romans must have used wheeled transport on their expeditions, and that that is why the “Iter præter caput saxæ” played such an important part in their operations; but I have seen no evidence which might lead one to suppose that this route over the Hammada el Homra was fit for wheeled traffic. The Garamantes were said by Herodotus to have used wagons drawn by four horses.[288]From this Duveyrier concludes that at a later date oxen were substituted for horses, and that in virtue of a perfectly imaginary road from Murzuk by way of Anai Air must be the Agisymba Regio. He gives no convincing reason for the identification, but implies that by a process of elimination it must be so. The name Agisymba and Bagezan have been connected by displacing the terminal and initial syllables respectively of the two words, but undoubtedly it was not this so much as the existence of a Garamantian road which appealed to the learned author.One of the principal objectives which I had in mind in visiting Air was to seek evidence of Roman penetration. In the course of their long historical knowledge and occupation of the Fezzan, it seemed natural for the Romans to have explored the Air road. But I found no remains, nor evidence whatsoever of their penetration, not even at points which had considerable strategic value. Some more fortunate traveller than myself may one day chance upon an inscription or a camp. Such a discovery in so vast and little known a land is quite conceivable, but up till now the weight of evidence is against the Romans ever having come to Air. There is a certain historical analogy in the fact that the Arabs never invaded the country either. Their influence on the Tuareg of Air was confined to an unenthusiastic conversion to Islamin comparatively recent times. On the other hand, the Arabs in the first century of the Hijra, like the Romans, seem to have descended the Chad road at least as far as Bilma, and again, Arab influence in Central Africa east of the lake is at least as strong as, and perhaps even greater than, the Western Arab-Moorish influence on the Upper Niger.I am, however, much more inclined to regard Tibesti and not Air as the Agisymba Regio. We find the Arabs in the Fezzan evidently feeling the same necessity of expansion southwards along the Chad road as did the Romans. By 46A.H.the Fezzan had already twice been conquered by the Arabs, first in 26A.H., soon after the occupation of Egypt had been completed and the attention of Islam was turned to North Africa, and again when the inhabitants had cast off their servitude to the Arabs. Okba ibn Nafé was induced by this breach of faith[289]to leave his army, which was on its way to conquer Ifrikiya (Tunisia and Western Algeria), at Sert in the Great Syrtis, and to lead an expedition to reconquer the desert. He took Wadan and Jerma, near Murzuk, and the last strong places of the country, and asking what lay “beyond,” learnt of the “people of Hawar,”[290]who had a fortress on the edge of the desert at the top of an escarpment. It was said to be the capital of a country called Kawar, the name which is borne even to-day by the depression along which the main caravan road passes south through Bilma and other small villages, any one of which may have been their stronghold, which El Bekri[291]also calls Jawan. After a march of fifteen nights Okba came to this place and eventually captured it. At one moment his expedition nearly perished of thirst, but according to the story Okba’s horse found water in the sand and saved the column, wherefore the place was called Ma el Fares, the“Water of the Horse.” This point is now spelt Mafaras on the Murzuk-Kawar road in about Lat. 21° 15′ N.[292]The Romans seem to have had much the same experience as the Arabs, though we can identify the movements of the latter with greater certainty. The expedition of Septimius Flaccus and Julius Maternus started from Garama. Now an expedition from the Fezzan proper to Negroland would normally have proceeded along the Chad road, which runs south, and not in the direction of Air, which lies south-west. Furthermore, we have already seen that there is no direct road from the Fezzan to Air save by making a detour via Jado and crossing the worst part of the desert. Had the Romans intended to use the Air road to Negroland they would assuredly have started from Rapsa (Ghat) and not from Garama; alternately had they started from Garama and proceeded by way of Ghat, it is likely to have been mentioned, nor would the enterprise have been so directly connected with the Garamantes. After marching south from Garama the expedition reached the Agisymba Regio. But if the Air mountains are neither south of Garama nor on a direct road from that place, both these conditions do apply to Tibesti. This country lies due south of the eastern Fezzan and there is a direct road from Garama by way of Tibesti to Negroland, though it is not so well known as the main Chad road. The latter trade road, however, and the Tibesti mountains seem to fit the description of the course taken by the expedition sufficiently well, and clearly better than the Air road and plateau. The Romans, we are told, marched for three months to the south; it may be objected that this would be an inordinately long time to take on a journey to Tibesti and that Air, being somewhat further away from Garama, is the more probable. But expeditions may take longer or shorter times to traverse any particular desert roadaccording to the difficulties encountered, the fighting sustained and the pasturage available on the way for the transport animals, and I do not think that any conclusion can be drawn from the reported length of the march. A period of three to four months might as easily bring one expedition from the Fezzan to Tibesti or to Air as it would be insufficient for another under different conditions but on the same road to get more than half-way.
PLATE 39MT. AGGATA: DRAWN BY T. A. EMMET FROM A SKETCH BY THE AUTHOR
PLATE 39
MT. AGGATA: DRAWN BY T. A. EMMET FROM A SKETCH BY THE AUTHOR
MT. AGGATA: DRAWN BY T. A. EMMET FROM A SKETCH BY THE AUTHOR
MT. AGGATA: DRAWN BY T. A. EMMET FROM A SKETCH BY THE AUTHOR
I slept quite quietly at Aggata and was disappointed at not hearing the Drums of the Spirits which haunt the mountain. The next day I again marched some thirty miles, around Aggata and T’imuru peaks, where there is an old deep well, now, alas! silted up, and reached Assode, once the most considerable town in Air after Agades. The plain was flat and the going good, even over the scattered rock outcrop. Mirages were showing all the time. The mount of T’in Awak, north of the point I was making for, shone in the dancing air like a chalk hill standing in a blue lake. There was no shade and it was hot. We were all tired and disappointed by the elusive valley which continually crept away beyond another ridge, so when Assode was finallyreached we were very glad. The Agoras, or “The Valley” by which the town lies, is not inspiring; and the site is marked by no prominent feature. The position, however, is otherwise interesting. The Agoras rises in the Agalak-T’imia massif and joins the basin of Northern Air not far north of Assode; the low hills on the north bank of the Agoras surround the town like the rim of a saucer. The position is not artificially fortified, but could readily have been defended, were it not that the only well lies some hundreds of yards distant from the houses in the bed of the valley.
Assode is said by Jean[264]to have been built by the Kel Owi for the first Añastafidet, but is certainly older than that. It very possibly dates from the first immigration of Tuareg. The reputed date of its foundation inA.D.900 is therefore far more probable than that which Jean’s statement implies. Nor is there any reason to follow Barth[265]in setting it down to be of recent origin simply because it is not mentioned by Arabic authors. The superficial extension of the place is considerable, but the settlement belongs to various periods, and not all the 1000 ruined houses were probably ever inhabited at the same time. Although it is completely abandoned to-day, the population, even in Barth’s time, had become scanty, for he heard that only eighty houses were occupied, despite the fact that it was then, as in former and also more recent times, the official place of residence of the Añastafidet.[266]
On a small rise in the middle of the little basin is the mosque, the largest building in Air.[267]The minaret fell many years ago, but the mosque is still well preserved in spite of the rainwhich, since the evacuation of 1918, has gradually been breaking down the roof. The saucer in which the town lies warrants the construction of a minaret to serve, like the one at Agades, as a watch-tower. The general plan of the building may be gathered fromPlate 32.The roof is low, as in all the Air mosques. The various outhouses and separate portions were used as khans and as schools. It once boasted a large library, the rotting remains of which I collected. I made up a whole camel load of these manuscripts[268]and took them to Iferuan, where I placed them in charge of the local alim, who turned out to be El Mintaka from Auderas. The books in part proved to be the remains of the private library of El Haj Suliman of Agellal, who possessed over 1000 volumes; he lived in the last century and belonged to the Qadria sect.
North of the mosque was the quarter where the Añastafidet used to live. The houses seemed to be mainly of the “A type.” The dwellings further south were more numerous, and included examples of all types and periods. The houses for the most part were surrounded by low compound walls and lay close together along narrow streets and lanes. No particular details are worth recording except the presence in many of the houses of grain pits, some of which had been used for concealing belongings and might repay investigation.[269]
The most interesting feature of Assode, considering its size, was the absence of all traces of garden or date cultivation. The town was obviously inhabited only by camel-owners and their domestic slaves. It was a trading depot and a metropolis, but not a productive centre, for even the pasture in the neighbourhood is limited. The selection ofthe place as the residence of the Añastafidet must have been due to its convenience as a centre for the tribes of the Confederation of Kel Owi. It also suited the conditions of their trade, and therefore probably that of their predecessors in the area, the first Tuareg to enter Air. As a strategic position it was admirably located, well within the borders of the plateau, and consequently not liable to be easily raided from without; tactically, also, it was defensible. It is interesting to note that of the thirty to forty wars, most of which were in Air and Tegama, mentioned in the Agades Chronicle, only two are recorded at Assode, whereas Agades was repeatedly involved. Assode was, to my mind, unquestionably the first real capital of the country, before Agades or any town in Tegama assumed an important rôle.
The great Kel Owi tribes in modern times are the Kel Azañieres, the Kel Tafidet and the Ikazkazan. The major part of the confederation lived in North and North-eastern Air; the Ikazkazan alone were in the west with sections ranging as far afield as Damergu and Elakkos. A little research makes it clear that both the Kel Azañieres and the Kel Tafidet are “Kel name” sections of older “I name” tribes; in the course of time they became so powerful and numerous that their parent stems were obscured. Of the latter three main stocks can still be traced, in addition to the Ikazkazan, certain unattached Imghad tribes, and several settled communities. The three parent tribes bear the names of Imaslagha, Igermaden, and Imasrodang.
The Imaslagha include the important Kel Azañieres tribes of the Azañieres mountains in the extreme north-west of Air, as well as the Kel Assarara of the north-eastern plain. When the Kel Owi entered Air, this stock occupied the area of the Immikitan and Imezegzil tribes of earlier Tuareg known as the People of the King.[270]It contains several ancient “I name” sections which might also be considered as separate stocks, were it not that on the one hand they neversplit up into “Kel name” tribes associated with definite localities, and, on the other, that they continued to be traditionally connected with the parent Imaslagha stems until to-day. These “I tribes” are the Izeyyakan, who are also said to be People of the King and may in fact have been a part of the latter division absorbed by the Kel Owi, the Imarsutan, and the now almost extinct Igururan, represented by one surviving section, the Kel Fares, who take their name from Fares water and pasture in the far north of North-eastern Air on the edge of the desert. If the Izeyyakan were originally People of the King, their absorption would afford a precedent for a similar process which can be observed in progress among the Immikitan who have fallen under the political influence of the Imaslagha stock of tribes. The Imarsutan are said to have come from an unidentified place called Arsu, which is presumed not to be in Air. In popular parlance all these tribes have collectively come to be known as the Kel Azañieres, but, although of the same Imaslagha stock, the Kel Assarara are usually not included under this head. The Kel Assarara with the subdivision, Kel Agwau and Kel Igululof, were the people of Annur, the paramount chief of Air in Barth’s day. Their villages are along the great valley of North-eastern Air, for which the Tuareg have no one name. They call the valley after the various villages on its banks, and these in turn are named from the neighbouring tributaries. It is into this basin that the Assode Agoras flows. The Kel Assarara fall into a somewhat separate category from the Kel Azañieres because Annur had made them into a powerful people, his own position being in reality far greater than either that of the Amenokal or the Añastafidet. It was due to him that his tribe acquired independent status in genealogical systems. Barth gives a good picture of the chief, and it is worth reproducing as the impression of a traveller who had no reason to be prejudiced in favour of the Air Tuareg, having at that time recently been attacked and nearly massacred by them.[271]“We saw theold chief on the day following our arrival. He received us in a straightforward and kindly manner, observing very simply that even if, as Christians, we had come to his country stained with guilt, the many dangers and difficulties we had gone through would have sufficed to wash us clean, and that we had nothing to fear but the climate and the thieves. The presents we spread out before him he received graciously, but without saying a single word. Of hospitality he showed no sign. All this was characteristic. We soon received further explanations. Some days afterwards he sent us the simple and unmistakable message that if we wished to proceed to the Sudan at our own risk, he would place no obstacle in our way; but if we wanted him to go with us and protect us, we ought to pay him a considerable sum. In stating these plain terms he made use of a very expressive simile saying that as the ‘leffa’ (or snake) killed everything she touched, so his word, when it had once escaped his lips, had terminated the matter in question—there was nothing more to be said. . . . Having observed Annur’s dealings to the very last, and having arrived under his protection safely at Katsena, I must pronounce him a straightforward and trustworthy man, who stated his terms plainly and dryly, but stuck to them with scrupulosity (sic); and as he did not treat us, neither did he ask anything from us, nor allowed his people to do so. I shall never forgive him for his niggardliness in not offering me so much as a drink of ‘fura’ or ‘ghussub water’ when I visited him, in the heat of the day, on his little estate near Tasawa, but I cannot withhold from him my esteem both as a great politician in his curious little empire, and as a man remarkable for singleness of word and purpose.”
PLATE 40ROCK DRAWINGS.
PLATE 40
ROCK DRAWINGS.
ROCK DRAWINGS.
ROCK DRAWINGS.
Annur was killed in 1856 by raiders from Bilma, which he had frequently attacked. As another example of a similar type of chief, I will copy the entry made in my diary when Ahodu and Sidi described to me Annur’s successor, Belkho of Ajiru, chief of the Igermaden during the last years of the nineteenth century. “He was the last independentruler of Air. He was small and rather hunched, but with authority unquestioned from Ghat to the Sudan. His raids were swift, well planned and executed in a manner which betrayed imagination. He had a great reputation for generosity, combined with personal magnetism of such a remarkable nature that his power was believed to be derived from communing with the spirits. ‘We used,’ said Sidi, ‘to see him sitting near the fire at night when he was travelling or raiding, crouched with his back turned on his companions, saying no word, but looking into the darkness with the firelight flickering on his small form, casting shadows in the distance, where his friends among the spirits sat and conferred with him!’”
Belkho’s people, the Igermaden, are the parent stock of the Kel Tafidet, who not only became the most distinguished tribe in the Confederation, but also gave their name to the administrative ruler of the Kel Owi and the Confederation generally. They inherited the Tafidet mountains in the easternmost parts of Air and include an old “I name” tribe, the Igademawen. The name Igermaden seems to associate them with Jerma or Garama in the Fezzan, but I am aware of no particular reasons for supposing that they came to Air from there, though it may once have been theirs in the remote past. There are, incidentally, numerous names of places in Air containing the root ‘Germa’ in their composition.
The third group of the Kel Owi, the Imasrodang, occupied the Ighazar valley and villages, whence they drove the Kel Ferwan. Certain small nuclei of People of the King, however, remained in this area, as we have seen also occurred elsewhere. The Imasrodang deserve no particular comment except that a section, the Kel T’intaghoda, is reputed to be “holy.” There is no justification in their conduct for the description. They are the lords of the servile people of Tamgak, as well as of the so-called “Wild Men of Air.”
I never succeeded in seeing these curious people. Their origin is a deep mystery. Buchanan on his first journey ran across a party of them in Northern Air, but they come downvery seldom from Tamgak and betray the utmost nervousness of any strangers. The Tuareg call them Immedideran and admit that they are noble, though not of their own race. They emphatically deny that these people are negroid. They are said to speak a language which the Tuareg do not understand. When they meet any Tuareg they are reputed, probably quite untruly, to hold their noses as if to indicate that they smelled a bad or at any rate a curious smell. According to Sidi, who has seen them, they live in Tamgak in a very primitive state, wearing hardly any clothes except a few rags or skins. They nevertheless all affect the Veil, but although they possess many sheep and goats, the camel seems strange and unfamiliar to them when they come down to the valleys to sell their animals. They live neither in houses nor in huts nor in tents, but in very low shelters made of three uprights of stone or wood, with a fire in front and a roof of skins or grass. The Tuareg know nothing of their origin, but say that they were there before the Veiled People came. They are apparently as fair as the Tuareg themselves, and not negroid in type, but who they are it is not possible even to surmise, unless they are the Leucæthiopians of the classics.
PLATE 41ROCK DRAWINGS.
PLATE 41
ROCK DRAWINGS.
ROCK DRAWINGS.
ROCK DRAWINGS.
The Ikazkazan group are the junior partners of the Kel Owi, but probably the most numerous group in the Confederation of the Children of Tafidet. They range as far south as Elakkos, which sometimes makes one wonder if they are perhaps a non-Kel Owi tribe which threw in its lot with these people when they entered Air. Their many tribes are grouped into two main divisions, the Kel Tamat (the People of the Acacia) in the north, and the Kel Ulli (the People of the Goats) in the south, both of which appellations are in the nature of distinctive nicknames to distinguish the two geographical units. The names may have a totemic significance, in which case the Kel Tagei (the People of the Dûm Palm) and Kel Intirza (the People of the Asclepias) could be cited as other examples of the practice. There is no particular reason for calling the People of the Goats by this name, since they own as many camels as do the other Tuaregand are not in any way the only tribe to keep goats. Their occupation of Elakkos is reputed, probably rightly, to be fairly recent. The most important tribe of the northern section is the Kel Gharus (the People of the Deep Well) in Talak—with their dependent Imghad, the Ahaggaren.
Such, briefly, is the Kel Owi tribal system. From Assode I determined to examine their country in the great north-eastern basin of Air contained between the mountain groups of Afis, Taghmeurt, Azañieres and Tafidet. Somewhere in this area clearly was the village and valley of T’intellust where Annur lived and where Barth’s expedition made its head-quarters in Air. The name does not figure on the French maps, and since such indications as I had received from native sources seemed to be confused, I was determined to find it for myself.
The country east of Assode was a broken plain, out of which only one small massif emerged, the Gundai[272]hills, standing isolated and compact against the background of the eastern mountains. Between Gundai and T’imia the country is drained by the Unankara valley, which is crossed by the trans-Saharan caravan road on its way from the Ighazar to Mount Mari. The watering-point of Unankara lies below Gundai opposite the Talat Mellen hills: from there a branch off the Tarei tan Kel Owi runs up to T’imia village by a very difficult road along a watercourse which is the upper part of the Assode Agoras. Whenever in the south-eastern plain I crossed the main Kel Owi road and plotted the point on a map compiled from my compass traverse, I was impressed by the directness and straightness of its course across country. From Mount Mari southward the line was almost due north and south; at that point a change of direction takes place, and a line drawn somewhat west of north from Mount Mari to Unankara and produced, would, as the road does, pass within a short distance of Assatartar and enter the Ighazar between T’intaghoda and Iferuan. The upper part of the great caravan road in Air is as straight as the southern sectionacross the Azawagh and Damergu. Great age alone can account for the directness of the road and the worn tracks on the rocky ground. Its conquest and tenure by the Kel Owi is only an episode in the history of one of the oldest roads in the world.
Leaving three men with my baggage at Assode to take care of themselves, Sidi and I on two camels set out to look for T’intellust, which he had often visited in his younger days. I passed one or two small settlements of stone houses, including Assadoragan, near Assode, and T’in Wansa, and reached Igululof after crossing or ascending a number of small valleys which flowed from Gundai into the Agoras. Igululof is a largish village with a date grove and the remains of some gardens; the houses were nearly all of the “B type” and were still filled with the household effects of the inhabitants who had evacuated the country in 1918. Apart from the usual collections of skins for water and grain, mortars, saddle-stone querns and pottery, the frequent occurrence of beds and furniture deserves mention as indicating the prosperity of the communities in the past. One also saw here, as elsewhere in these northern villages, swinging doors hewn out of one piece of wood set in stone sockets. The trees from which they were cut must certainly have been four feet in diameter, a few such were still to be seen in all the larger valleys. In one house I remarked a wooden bridle stand with a broadening top like the capital of a column surmounted by four wooden horns, on which were hung looped bridle ropes and halters. There were examples of low kidney-shaped or rectangular seats standing not four inches from the ground cut out of blocks of wood: they were used by the women when preparing food, and constituted the nearest approach to a chair in a country where it is the universal custom to sit on mats on the ground. Many of the houses had long rectangular racks of palm ribs up to 10 ft. × 5 ft. × 1 ft. deep slung from the roof, with the household effects, which they were intended to contain, still in their places. The niches were filled with the pots and skinsand trinkets of the former owners. The spectacle of desolation produced by these pathetic human remains made one sympathise profoundly with the unfortunate people who had had no time even to save their few worldly goods.
By far the most important household implement appeared to be the double luggage rest which was conspicuous in all the houses. It consists of a pair ofU-shaped wooden crutches on a short round pole, which is planted in the ground. The upper orU-part of these rests, in the ordinary variety, has plain flat surfaces some four inches broad by a half-inch thick. The elaborate variety has a broader front member which spreads gradually from some four inches at the base, where it joins the round pole or leg, to a breadth of twelve to fifteen inches. The tops of these members are flat or stepped down in the centre, so as to make the corners appear like wide projecting horns. Their front surfaces were very elaborately ornamented with brass ribs and silver, lead or zinc studs. The brass was nailed on or hammered into the surface of the wood as an inlay. Brass sheet fretted in patterns with green leather or red stuff behind it covered the larger spaces. The designs were geometrical and somewhat analogous to the ornamentation on the camel saddles, but rather more varied. The workmanship was excellent and displayed the most finished craft in Air. These rests were traditionally used in pairs on the march to keep valuable merchandise and baggage out of the wet. Their great weight—as they measure up to 5 ft. high and 2 ft. 6 in. between tops of the arms, and are always cut in one piece from a log of hard wood—in practice rendered it impossible to use them much on the road, and they have consequently become articles of household furniture. So far as I know, both the shape of the objects themselves and the designs which ornament them are traditional and peculiar to the Tuareg.
PLATE 42ORNAMENTED BAGGAGE RESTS
PLATE 42
ORNAMENTED BAGGAGE RESTS
ORNAMENTED BAGGAGE RESTS
ORNAMENTED BAGGAGE RESTS
In view of their having been so recently inhabited and being at the same time so similar to the older “A type” houses, these houses were very interesting, as they showed themode of life of the earlier Tuareg. Within, the floors were neatly sprinkled with sand or small quartz gravel; two rings of stones containing coarser pebbles marked the places where personal ablutions were performed or where rubbish was collected. A group of large stones represented the hearth. The absence of windows and the lower roofs and doors make the more recent houses seem rather dark, but otherwise they are quite pleasant dwellings. The older houses must have been most comfortable. Their cleanliness, as early travellers remarked, depended on the owners: judging by the state of their present-day huts they were very well kept.
Crossing to the north of the broad Igululof valley, Sidi and I entered a very rough plateau covered with large ochreous and brown boulders; it was intersected by numerous small valleys and gullies flowing north into the main basin. We climbed laboriously over a steep ravine and up a pass between two hillocks where there was a way down into the further valley of Anu Samed.[273]It was already late in the evening and the sun was setting on our left: in front the whole plain of the basin of North-eastern Air was spread out with a great green and white snake of a bed winding through it. In the distance along the horizon were the fantastic purple mountains which reach from Tamgak to Tafidet along the edge of the desert. We descended slowly in the dusk into the Anu Samed ravine, and lay down to sleep where this tributary enters the stream bed of the nameless basin. Night came on immediately. I made some cocoa, but we had to put out the fire as soon as possible, for this is the way by which raiding parties enter Air from the east. There is no permanent habitation nearer than T’imia or Iferuan, fifty miles away to the south and west respectively. The country was impressive and rather frightening.
Next morning I said I wanted to go to T’intellust. We set off up the main valley in an east to north-easterly direction; it was filled with big trees and had a series of small villages on either bank. After riding for some hours Siditurned to me and asked me if I wanted to go to T’intellust village or to the House of the Christians. I supposed the latter was some old French Camel Corps camp, but expressed mild curiosity about it. I asked him why, particularly, it was so called. Sidi replied that in the olden days when his father was alive, he had told him that some Christians had come to the valley and had lived with the chief Annur. This interesting information decided me to make for the House of the Christians, which proved to be not so very far from T’intellust village itself, a settlement of “B type” stone houses with a few enclosures and brushwood huts. It lay on the north side of the great bed, which here was several hundred yards broad and contained many large trees between various flood channels. As we approached a group of large trees south of the village I saw some piles of brushwood. They turned out to be the ruins of two thatch huts. I dismounted, tethered the camels and again questioned Sidi, who repeated his story, adding that the Christians were three white men of whom he supposed I knew, for they had not been French. Because they were great men and friends of Annur their houses had neither been inhabited nor pulled down since they went away. Their dwellings had been left slowly to decay, but not before the place had been called after them, the House of the Christians.
Sidi had vouchsafed this information unsolicited; he had no idea of what I was coming to seek. There is no doubt that the ruined huts are the remains of the camp occupied by Barth and his companions in 1850. When they reached T’intellust after narrowly escaping massacre at T’intaghoda, they had camped on a low hill to the south of the village where Annur himself was living. Another attack, by robbers this time, took place there, and for greater safety they moved their camp rather nearer to his village. It was this second camp which I saw.
PLATE 43T’INTELLUST
PLATE 43
T’INTELLUST
T’INTELLUST
T’INTELLUST
Little remains to-day of the falling huts. There was a small wooden drinking-trough and a semicircle of stones to mark the east, to which their servants knelt in prayer. Three-quartersof a century have passed and gone, but their camp has never been touched, “because they were the friends of Annur,” who had given them his word that they would be safe in Air. Barth’s speculation was fulfilled when he said: “This spot being once selected the tents were soon pitched, and in a short time there rose the little encampment of the English expedition. . . . Doubtless this said hill will ever remain memorable in the annals of the Asbenawa as the ‘English Hill,’ or the ‘Hill of the Christians.’”[274]And so it has come to pass. The site induced in me a justifiable glow of pride. Her Majesty’s Government had sent the first successful expedition to Air. A German, Heinrich Barth, assisted by another compatriot of his, had been Richardson’s companions. Their memory survives in the land as the white men who were not French and who did not come as conquerors but as the friends of Annur. In the light of history, the broad-mindedness of the statesman who selected a German to assist Richardson in his work on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government is only less worthy of praise than the loyalty with which Barth carried out his task when lesser men would have considered themselves free to return to Europe after accomplishing only a fraction of what he achieved.
PLATE 44BARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUSTBARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUST
PLATE 44
BARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUST
BARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUST
BARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUST
BARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUST
BARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUST
BARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUST
Neither T’intellust nor Oborassan, a little further up the valley, deserve any special mention. Annur had houses in both villages, though his official residence was in the latter. They are small settlements of a nomadic people, dependent upon camels and goats for sustenance, and lie near the point where the great valley receives the waters of Gundai by a large tributary from the south. The west side of the mountains of Tafidet also drain into the main basin, the upper part of which eventually turns north-east towards the Taghmeurt n’Afara hills. These mountains are the last barrier which divide the plateau of Air from the desert. The plain north of T’intellust and the right bank of the valley bed are low,rocky and devoid of vegetation. Along the western side of the plain runs the Agwau valley. Agwau village, marked by a white hillock, is the principal settlement of the Kel Agwau section of the Kel Assarara tribe in the Imaslagha group of the Kel Owi. It boasts a number of houses of the “B type,” a small mosque, a few “A type” dwellings and many large circles which were once hut enclosures.
Marching west from Oborassan and T’intellust towards Agwau, there were few landmarks of any note along the north side of the main valley. I gradually left the line of the main bed and skirted some low rocky ground, which reaches for some distance towards the north. Beyond Agwau I crossed a grassy plain in the direction of a big group of bare mountains, one side of which is called the Assarara and the other the Afis massif;[275]it is an isolated southern spur of the great Tamgak formation just visible behind it in the north-west. The Agwau torrent flows down between its eastern side and the plain of North-eastern Air. A road from the great nameless valley runs northwards up its course and eventually leaves the mountains for the desert by Fares and T’iwilmas watering-points.
The most important settlement of this north-eastern basin of Air is Assarara, a small town lying in a cranny between two boulder-strewn peaks which rise suddenly out of the gentle slope of the northern bank of the main valley. Here I spent a night after looting a number of ethnological specimens from deserted houses, mainly of the “B type.” The dwellings were all well built and were still filled with abandoned household goods: several had stucco decorations derived from the older “A type” house decoration which has already been described. There were also a mosque and khan. Thence I returned to Assode by Assatartar village, crossing the Tarei tan Kel Owi as it emerges from the plateau south of the main valley by the little left bank ravine called Azañieres.[276]
By the next day I had again set forth towards the north, halting after the first march at Afis village, not far from Assarara, but on the other side of the Afis massif. There also I saw a number of stone houses and another mosque. The country in a sense was dangerous, because the neighbouring watering-point called Agaragar, has often proved to be the favourite camping-ground for raiders entering Air from the north. It happened while I was taking an astronomical observation during the night at about 1 a.m. that a sudden wind arose in the valley, and the camp woke up with a sense of foreboding. The air seemed filled with impending danger, of which the camels also became aware. Almost at once a camel was seen silhouetted on a ridge against the dark sky. Amadu, my servant, seized a rifle and quickly but silently woke up Sidi and the camel men. They said that a raid was upon us, and with difficulty I restrained them from firing indiscriminately into the night. We took up our positions behind the baggage in the black shadow of a tree under which we were camped. But the camel on the sky-line turned out to be one of my own beasts which had strayed, and calm was restored. We had received a visitation from the great god Pan.
On the following day we crossed the Agaragar valley and wound slowly up a defile towards the upper part of the Ighazar basin. We climbed to a pass over a spur of the Tamgak mountains. The rocks all round were covered with drawings and inscriptions, for the way was very old. It was the road of the Northern Air salt caravan which went to Bilma from Iferuan by Faodet, Agwau, Taghmeurt n’Afara and the pool of Agamgam on the edge of the desert in the far north-eastern corner of the mountains. From Agamgam the caravan used to march by an easier route than the southern track which is now followed to Ashegur well, north of Fashi and from that place to Bilma.
From the pass the road fell steeply to Faodet in an amphitheatre of great hills, a picturesque place, and important on account of a good, deep well. Although the houses werefew the site proved interesting by reason of the existence of rectangular grass huts constructed at great labour to preserve the traditional type of the Tuareg house. They provided an excellent example of the tenacity of custom, for the material of which they had been built was totally unsuited to their shape or plan.
The upper waters of the Ighazar basin collect in three valleys which unite between T’intaghoda and Seliufet. On the way down the valley from Faodet, the village and palm grove of Iberkom were passed, whence a fine valley runs up into the heart of Tamgak and provides some degree of communication between T’iwilmas or Fares on the desert, and the villages in the Ighazar. Further on we come to Tanutmolet village, remarkable for a modern elaboration of the “B type” house displayed in the strictly rectangular but many-roomed dwelling shown inPlate 27.T’intaghoda is interesting as possessing an early mosque and several fine “A” and “B type” houses covered with a stucco of red earth. Most of the houses had been built on two low hills standing in the bottom of the valley. There are no gardens near them nor any palm grove. The importance of the merchants and holy men who used to live there had made of T’intaghoda the capital of Northern Air. A little further on begins the palm grove of Seliufet, and from there date palms and gardens continue all the way to Iferuan, with a chain of almost contiguous settlements on both sides of the valley bed.
At Iferuan the French established a small fort in 1921 near the site where the Foureau-Lamy expedition had camped and had been attacked some twenty years before. The fort is valueless except for the moral support it may offer to induce the local Tuareg to return to their old villages from the south. The Senegalese soldiers of the garrison are not mounted and would be powerless to do anything in the event of a raid. By the end of 1922 some families, but only a few compared with the numbers who lived there before the war, had returned to their homes.
Iferuan was a very delightful place. The peak of Tamgak stands pointing like a finger to heaven on the edge of the massif. The gardens and the groves of palm trees, some of which, alas! have died through lack of attention during the years of neglect since 1917, give the area a distinctly fertile aspect. It is impossible to say how many palm trees there are in the Ighazar, but they must run into many thousands. There are said to be 4250 at Iferuan alone. This number exceeds the next largest single group at In Gall west of Agades, where there are some 4000 trees, and the former are only a part of the total in the Ighazar.
The date palm is a comparatively late arrival in Air, where it was introduced from the north. The trees are a cross of the Medina and Fezzan varieties. As elsewhere in North Africa, each tree is an immovable asset like a house, and often does not belong to the same man as the ground on which it is grown.
At the foot of the palms were numerous gardens growing vegetables and grain. The fort had a wonderful kitchen garden with all sorts of melons, gourds and welcome European green food. The French officer in command of the post used to declare that Iferuan was the Switzerland of the Sahara, and the cool climate seemed to justify his praise. The Tuareg buildings had nothing remarkable about them with the exception of the large mosque of Tefgun not far away, and the khan or caravanserai built on the Arab plan. The Sudanese habit of making large clay amphoræ and baking themin situ, for the storage of wheat and millet grown in the gardens, has been adopted in Iferuan, and to my knowledge not elsewhere in Air.
Although the open desert on the way to Ghat is not reached much before In Azawa, several days further north, now, as in the past, Iferuan is the last permanently inhabited point in Northern Air. Between these points the mountain mass of Fadé has first to be crossed; it contains several watering-points and some pastures, and huts were occasionally built at a pool called Zelim, but they had no permanence.The mountains and the watering-places have long since been abandoned by their old owners, the Ifadeyen and Kel Fadé and now belong to the Ikazkazan and Kel Tadek tribes.
At Iferuan several important roads meet. The road from Air to Tuat and to Ghat, which is the main north and south caravan track across the Central Sahara, and the Haj road from Timbuctoo to Cairo, all three have a stage in common from Iferuan to In Azawa. The Haj road used to leave the Niger at Gao and enter Air at In Gall, whence it skirted the western edge of the plateau and then turned into the mountains to Iferuan: after passing In Azawa and Ghat it ran through Murzuk, Aujila and Siwa to Cairo. From Iferuan there are also several roads to the west, while the northern of the two alternative eastern roads across the desert to Kawar equally started from there, running, as already stated, by way of Taghmeurt n’Afara, Agamgam and Ashegur.
In seeking to identify Air with the Agisymba Regio of the Roman geographers, Duveyrier presumed that the Fezzanian Garamantes were in the habit of visiting the plateau in ox-drawn chariots or wagons. If they had, in fact, done so, it is logical to suppose the road they used would have come to Iferuan or one of the Ighazar villages. Indeed he states that he heard rumours of a direct road from Murzuk or Garama to Air, a “Garamantian way” which passed through a place called Anai, where there were rock drawings similar to those found in Algeria and Tripolitania. This Anai was south-west of Murzuk and must not be mistaken for the better known Anai of Kawar, which is north of Bilma on the Murzuk-Chad road.
I was at particular pains to inquire into the existence of this road from all the most prominent guides and personages in Air whom I could find. It would have been peculiarly interesting to establish its existence, for Duveyrier says, “La voie, avec ses anciennes ornières, est encore assez caractérisée pour que les Tebou, mes informateurs, qui en arrivaient, n’aient laissé dans mon esprit aucun doute à cesujet.”[277]Other writers, presumably on his authority, have added that where this road crossed the sand, stone flags were laid for the wheels to pass over. Duveyrier’s informers stated that the petroglyphs at Anai represented ox-drawn vehicles, and that the road also passed by way of Telizzarhen, where Barth discovered the famous rock drawings depicting men with animal heads.[278]While the broad valley at T’intellust would afford easy passage for a wheeled vehicle, there is no way to the south for any but pack transport. There are no signs of any road for vehicles ever having existed either east or west of the Bagezan massif. The great Kel Owi road is only fit for pack animals; and although many parallel tracks are visible in the open country there are numerous defiles where a single path only a few inches broad occurs. I am convinced that wheeled transport could never have been used anywhere in Central or Southern Air. But, it may be asked, could chariots have arrived even as far as T’intellust or Iferuan? There are only three ways into the plateau from the north-east that are at all suitable even for loaded camels. They are (a) through the Fadé mountains to Iferuan, (b) by Fares water and the Agwau valley to the great north-east basin, and by Taghmeurt n’Afara to T’intellust. The first two are not practicable for wheeled traffic, and on hearsay evidence the third one is equally out of the question. I do not, therefore, think that wheeled transport could ever even have entered Air from the north or north-east, though wagons might, of course, have come as far as the borders of the mountains to points such as Fares or Agamgam, provided the surface of the desert were hard enough. This cannot be determined until Anai and the country between it and Air have been visited.
If any direct road between these areas ever existed, it isvery unlikely to have run straight from Anai to T’intellust, as Duveyrier’s map shows. In my inquiries I heard in all of only four roads across the Eastern Desert: (a) the southernmost from Damagarim by Termit;[279](b) the direct road to Fashi and Bilma from Southern Air, starting at Tabello; (c) the old Kel Owi Taghalam road from Agamgam to Ashegur, whence one branch goes north to Jado oasis and the other south to Fashi; and (d) a northern road from Fadé to Jado direct. Guides like Efale, who know every part of the Eastern Desert, state that there is no road from Air direct to Murzuk which does not go either by way of Jado or by way of the usual caravan road between Kawar and the Fezzan. The northernmost road from Fadé to Jado runs through two places called Booz and Ghudet, where water is found a short way below the surface; Efale travelled this way in his youth. He told me that it was known to and used by Tebu raiders to-day. But there are no deep wells on this track to be filled up to prevent raiders passing down the old Garamantian way, as Duveyrier implies was done. From Jado it, of course, is possible to reach Murzuk either by Anai or by joining the usual Chad road via Tummo. The existence of this northern Anai is certainly substantiated, and Jado, a Tebu oasis with a palm grove, is known to exist. It is called by this name among the Arabs, but Agewas by the Tuareg of Air and Braun by the Tebu themselves. The place has been reconnoitred by certain French officers, one of whom, a commandant of the fort of Bilma, I had the good fortune to meet. He was aware of the story of a flagged road, but after visiting Jado several times found no trace of any such track and did not believe in its existence. That the Garamantes and, indeed, other inhabitants of the Fezzan at one period in history used chariots drawn by oxen is quite likely, but it is highly improbable that they ever ventured so far afield in them as Air.
The existence of a road between Air and the Fezzan may be admitted as possible, but only on condition that it is notmade to run direct between these countries. South of Anai it would almost certainly pass through Jado, and thence may have reached the plateau either by Ghudet and Booz to a water-point called Temed[280]on the eastern edge of Fadé north of the Tamgak group, or else by Ashegur and Agamgam north-east of T’intellust. This is not the road of the Garamantes on Duveyrier’s map; and beyond this his story cannot be further substantiated. As against this line of argument it must be observed that Von Bary[281]during this stay in Air collected information which led him to believe that there was a road from Air to Jerma by way of Anai. It is implied that it went direct, but he was never able to learn any details and was probably influenced by Duveyrier’s statements. He heard that there were some traces visible, but found no evidence to confirm the report of flagstones, wheel-marks or sculpture along its course.
There is nevertheless one piece of evidence which militates in some measure against my belief that chariots never were seen in Air, and that is a rock drawing which I found in Air on a boulder in the Anu Maqaran valley just west of Mount Arwa. The drawing is reproduced inPlate 41.In the conventional manner adopted in these designs it represents oxen pulling four-wheeled vehicles. The identification of the ox is confirmed from the many other similar pictures of this animal on rocks in Air. The object behind it must apparently be a cart. The whiteness of the marks in the Anu Maqaran drawing appears to indicate that it is a comparatively recent production, although the colour and degree of patination of Saharan drawings are of course no real criteria, for weathering is notoriously uneven in its action. Near the drawing of the ox and chariot, but on a different boulder, was the magic square shown in the same figure. Both drawings were in a very sheltered place and seemed contemporary. The evidence of this picture of the chariot orwagon is too unreliable and slender to establish any theory, but it is certainly difficult to understand where the draughtsman obtained his idea except as a result of seeing chariots drawn by oxen, a condition which does not, I think, obtain in the Fezzan to-day. Wheeled vehicles have only been known in the Sudan since they were imported by Europeans during the last twenty years, and I am not aware that even those are ox-drawn. Furthermore, although the most puzzling point about the Anu Maqaran rock drawing is its apparent modernity, which is paradoxical in view of the disuse of wheeled vehicles in the Sahara, it is almost certainly older than this century. Yet the application of an ox to a cart is not likely to have been imagined by any Tuareg who had not seen an instance of it, and there seems to be no adequate reason for him to reproduce his knowledge on a rock in Air even if chance had taken him so far afield as the Mediterranean littoral, where he might have seen the equipage, unless it had in some way become associated with Air.
The identification of Air with the Agisymba Regio of the Romans has been accepted by many authorities other than Duveyrier. It raises the whole problem of the Roman penetration of the Sahara. They are known to have administered the Fezzan, and it is even pretended that they reached the Niger, but evidence on this point is more scanty. Doubtless as the exploration of the Central Sahara is carried out systematically further evidence of their penetration will come to light. I am, for instance, not aware that any remains have actually been found at Ghat, though the city, which was known to them as Rapsa, was almost certainly that place and was visited in 19B.C.by Cornelius Balbus. The Roman remains discovered by Barth on the road from Mizda over the Hammada el Homra to Murzuk are better known. This route seems to have been opened about the time of the Emperor Vespasian, and to have rendered possible or at least easier the occupation of the Fezzan, which had, however, already been visited by military expeditions earlier than that reign. Pliny writes: “Ad Garamantes iter inexplicabileadhucfuit. Proximo bello, quod cum Œensibus Romani gessere auspiciis Vespasiani Imperatoris, compendium viæ quatridui deprehensum est. Hoc iter vocatur ‘Præter caput saxæ.’” Evidently the road was called by the natives, even in those days, by the same name which it now possesses, for the Pass over the Red Rock Desert at 1568 feet above the sea is still known to the Arabs as “Bab Ras el Hammada.”[282]In aboutA.D.100[283]Septimius Flaccus penetrated from the Fezzan into Æthiopia at the head of a Roman column; Julius Maternus marching from some point on the coast to Garama had joined forces with the Garamantes in order to proceed southward together against various Æthiopian bands. By this date, then, it is probable that an occupation of the Fezzan had been accomplished, for this alone would justify a further advance or punitive expeditions on such a scale against raiders from the south. Indeed, from the account given by Pliny[284]of Cornelius Balbus’ expedition of 19B.C.to the Fezzan, it might be supposed that the occupation of Southern Tripolitania and the Central Sahara had taken place a century earlier. The identification of the cities conquered by Balbus has not been satisfactory except in the case of Cydamus, Cillaba or Cilliba, Tabudium,[285]Rapsa and Jerma, respectively Ghadames, Zuila,[286]Tabonie, Ghat and Garama; the last named being the capital of the Garamantes and of the whole Fezzan, a position which later passed on to other places and finally to Murzuk.
These operations of Septimius Flaccus and Julius Maternus have been held to concern Air. The latter, ἀπὸ Γαράμης ἅμα τῷ βασιλεῖ τῶν Γαραμαντίων ἐπερχομένῳ τοῖς Αἰθιόψιν ὁδεύσαντα τὰ πάντα πρὸς μεσημβρίαν μησὶ τέσσαρσι ἀφικέσθαι εἰς τὴν Ἀγίσυμβα. . . .[287]It is important to try to identifythe area, since it appears to be the most southerly point to which Roman geographical knowledge is recorded as having extended. Duveyrier, arguing, on what may in any case be a false premise, that because Pliny mentions no camels in Africa there were no camels, concludes with the fantastic statement that the Romans must have used wheeled transport on their expeditions, and that that is why the “Iter præter caput saxæ” played such an important part in their operations; but I have seen no evidence which might lead one to suppose that this route over the Hammada el Homra was fit for wheeled traffic. The Garamantes were said by Herodotus to have used wagons drawn by four horses.[288]From this Duveyrier concludes that at a later date oxen were substituted for horses, and that in virtue of a perfectly imaginary road from Murzuk by way of Anai Air must be the Agisymba Regio. He gives no convincing reason for the identification, but implies that by a process of elimination it must be so. The name Agisymba and Bagezan have been connected by displacing the terminal and initial syllables respectively of the two words, but undoubtedly it was not this so much as the existence of a Garamantian road which appealed to the learned author.
One of the principal objectives which I had in mind in visiting Air was to seek evidence of Roman penetration. In the course of their long historical knowledge and occupation of the Fezzan, it seemed natural for the Romans to have explored the Air road. But I found no remains, nor evidence whatsoever of their penetration, not even at points which had considerable strategic value. Some more fortunate traveller than myself may one day chance upon an inscription or a camp. Such a discovery in so vast and little known a land is quite conceivable, but up till now the weight of evidence is against the Romans ever having come to Air. There is a certain historical analogy in the fact that the Arabs never invaded the country either. Their influence on the Tuareg of Air was confined to an unenthusiastic conversion to Islamin comparatively recent times. On the other hand, the Arabs in the first century of the Hijra, like the Romans, seem to have descended the Chad road at least as far as Bilma, and again, Arab influence in Central Africa east of the lake is at least as strong as, and perhaps even greater than, the Western Arab-Moorish influence on the Upper Niger.
I am, however, much more inclined to regard Tibesti and not Air as the Agisymba Regio. We find the Arabs in the Fezzan evidently feeling the same necessity of expansion southwards along the Chad road as did the Romans. By 46A.H.the Fezzan had already twice been conquered by the Arabs, first in 26A.H., soon after the occupation of Egypt had been completed and the attention of Islam was turned to North Africa, and again when the inhabitants had cast off their servitude to the Arabs. Okba ibn Nafé was induced by this breach of faith[289]to leave his army, which was on its way to conquer Ifrikiya (Tunisia and Western Algeria), at Sert in the Great Syrtis, and to lead an expedition to reconquer the desert. He took Wadan and Jerma, near Murzuk, and the last strong places of the country, and asking what lay “beyond,” learnt of the “people of Hawar,”[290]who had a fortress on the edge of the desert at the top of an escarpment. It was said to be the capital of a country called Kawar, the name which is borne even to-day by the depression along which the main caravan road passes south through Bilma and other small villages, any one of which may have been their stronghold, which El Bekri[291]also calls Jawan. After a march of fifteen nights Okba came to this place and eventually captured it. At one moment his expedition nearly perished of thirst, but according to the story Okba’s horse found water in the sand and saved the column, wherefore the place was called Ma el Fares, the“Water of the Horse.” This point is now spelt Mafaras on the Murzuk-Kawar road in about Lat. 21° 15′ N.[292]
The Romans seem to have had much the same experience as the Arabs, though we can identify the movements of the latter with greater certainty. The expedition of Septimius Flaccus and Julius Maternus started from Garama. Now an expedition from the Fezzan proper to Negroland would normally have proceeded along the Chad road, which runs south, and not in the direction of Air, which lies south-west. Furthermore, we have already seen that there is no direct road from the Fezzan to Air save by making a detour via Jado and crossing the worst part of the desert. Had the Romans intended to use the Air road to Negroland they would assuredly have started from Rapsa (Ghat) and not from Garama; alternately had they started from Garama and proceeded by way of Ghat, it is likely to have been mentioned, nor would the enterprise have been so directly connected with the Garamantes. After marching south from Garama the expedition reached the Agisymba Regio. But if the Air mountains are neither south of Garama nor on a direct road from that place, both these conditions do apply to Tibesti. This country lies due south of the eastern Fezzan and there is a direct road from Garama by way of Tibesti to Negroland, though it is not so well known as the main Chad road. The latter trade road, however, and the Tibesti mountains seem to fit the description of the course taken by the expedition sufficiently well, and clearly better than the Air road and plateau. The Romans, we are told, marched for three months to the south; it may be objected that this would be an inordinately long time to take on a journey to Tibesti and that Air, being somewhat further away from Garama, is the more probable. But expeditions may take longer or shorter times to traverse any particular desert roadaccording to the difficulties encountered, the fighting sustained and the pasturage available on the way for the transport animals, and I do not think that any conclusion can be drawn from the reported length of the march. A period of three to four months might as easily bring one expedition from the Fezzan to Tibesti or to Air as it would be insufficient for another under different conditions but on the same road to get more than half-way.