[Illustration]F. R. del.Emery Walker Ltd. sc.[To face p.36.The Sudan, though geographically in Central Africa, belongs to the Mediterranean civilisation. The great empires of the Niger, Melle and Songhai, the Fulani Empire of Sokoto, the Emirates of Kano and Katsina, and the Empire of Bornu, were all products of contact with the north. Commercially and culturally, the Sudan faced north with its back against an impenetrable belt of tropical forest inhabited by savage negro tribes, through whose dripping and steaming jungles there was little or no access to the sea. This orientation explains the high degree of civilisation which Barth found already past its “floruit” in 1850. It is obviously also the reason why the early explorers came from the north rather than from the nearer coast of the Atlantic between Sierra Leone and the mouths of the Niger.With the arrival of the Europeans, ways down to the coast were gradually opened up, until finally in Nigeriaseven hundred miles of railway were built from Lagos to Kano. As a consequence trade has left the trans-Saharan roads where the Tuareg were masters. It is now carried to Europe and even to the Mediterranean by steamers sailing from Lagos and Liverpool. In more ways than one the advent of the white man in Central Africa has been disastrous for the Tuareg. Camel-borne trade on a large scale is doomed; caravan broking and long-distance desert transport are gone, never to return; even a trans-Saharan railway, whose commercial value must be as unreal as the dream of its advocates among French Colonial authorities, can never hope to compete with sea-borne traffic. Aircraft alone may one day revive the old camel roads, for they provide lines of watering-points along the shortest north and south routes.If one may judge by the numbers and size of the market cities, which are the termini of the trans-Saharan routes in the Sudan, the Air road was by far the most important of the two in the centre. In Kano and in Katsina and in Sokoto the commercial genius of the Hausa people developed centres for the exchange of the European goods with the products, and more especially the raw materials, of Central Africa. To these cities also came the negro people of the south, to buy and sell or be sold as slaves. In a thickly populated and extremely fertile country the cities grew to immense size. Though in no sense properly a Tuareg country, Northern Nigeria and the neighbouring lands are visited and lived in by the People of the Veil. Every year it is the habit of many of this people to come from Air to Nigeria during the dry season. They earn a prosperous livelihood on transport work between the cities of Hausaland. They feed their camels on the richer pastures of the south when those in the north grow dry. But before the rains begin they move north again to the steppe and desert, for flooded rivers and excessive damp are conditions which the camels of the Veiled People do not relish. Quite large colonies of Tuareg have settled in some of these cities and have adopted a semi-sedentary life, maintaining theircharacteristics in inverse measure as intermarriage with the negroid peoples has become more frequent. The influx of Tuareg into Nigeria after the 1917 revolution in Air added considerably to the numbers living permanently under British rule. This migration was not as strange a phenomenon or so entirely the product of the Great War as at first sight it appears to be. The various waves of Tuareg which in succession entered Air have each in turn had the effect of driving the earlier populations further south. The trend of migration in North Africa from the earliest days, when the zone of permanent habitation of the negroid races extended as far as the Mediterranean, has always been southward. It has continued in modern times. The temptation of richer lands in Central Africa has always proved irresistible when local political or economic conditions altered in consequence of growing ethnic pressure to the extent of providing just that impetus necessary to overcome the human disinclination to leave homes which have been occupied for generations. The Kel Geres Tuareg left Air to settle in the country north of Sokoto when the mountains became over-populated; masses of Air Tuareg generally took up their habitation in Katsina and Kano after the unsuccessful revolution against the French during the late war. The motives were not strictly similar, but the effects were identical, and have been observable throughout the ages.AIRand theSOUTHLANDF. R. del.Emery Walker Ltd. sc.To-day at Kano, a village of some size named Faji, almost entirely Tuareg in population, has sprung up a few hundred yards from the walls of the city. Here the People of the Veil live like the Hausa in mud houses. They are engaged in retail trade or act as agents and brokers for their relations in Air when the latter come down in the dry season. In Katsina a quarter of the town and the country immediately north are thickly populated with Tuareg, for whom the Emir has a marked partiality, largely on account of his commercial propensities, which are powerfully stimulated by the ownership of several fine herds of camels. The Tuareg of Katsina, drawn from almost every tribe in Air,have formed a new tribal unit known as the Kel Katchena,[44]and are rapidly forgetting their older tribal allegiances. The results of these movements have always been much the same. Progressive mixing with the negroid people of the Sudan, the gradual acquisition of sedentary habits, and the cultivation of fat lands where life is easy, are combining to make these People of the Veil lose their characteristics as a northern race; their language cannot compete with Hausa, which isthelingua francaof the Sudan, as Arabic is that of North Africa. The retention of the Veil is the only exception: in fact many southerners associated with them have adopted it, although the rigorous proscription against revealing the mouth and face is being less strictly observed.North of the country surrounding the great walled cities of red earth, and more or less coterminous with the northern frontiers of the Emirates of Katsina, Daura, Kano and Hadeija, there is a deep belt of country which marks the beginning of the transition between the Saharan and the Equatorial zones.[45]North of the open country around Kano, with its large trees that for a height of some feet from the ground, like those in English parks, have been stripped of leaves by the grazing flocks and herds, the rock outcrops become less frequent and eventually disappear entirely. They give place to scrub, bush and clearings through which the Anglo-French boundary runs. The frontier from Lake Chad to the Niger was delimited in 1907 and 1908 by an international expedition whose work has been described by Colonel Tilho with a wealth of detail which makes one regret that his labours did not extend a little further north, as far as the edge of the desert where the Saharan zone proper commences. The area mapped by Colonel Tilho hardly extends beyond the northern limit of the Hausa-speaking people. Along the roads leading to Air, or in other words along the great trade route, no work was done beyond the southern fringe of the area called Damergu, and there is consequently to the south of Air a considerable depth of unsurveyed country for which no maps are available.The area between the international boundary and the somewhat arbitrary limits of Algeria and Tripolitania constitutes the French colony known as the “Territoires du Niger,”[46]the southern part of which is divided into provinces or “cercles,” roughly corresponding to the old nativeEmirates. French colonial policy in this part of Africa, in contrast with the system so successfully instituted by Sir F. Lugard in Nigeria, has been directed towards the removal of the more important native rulers. They have been replaced by a form of direct administration which is only now in process of being organised under French civilian officials. North of Katsina the Emirates of Maradi and Tessawa[47]have been combined into one province, and here almost the last Sultan of the “Territoires” survives, exercising authority only in the immediate vicinity of Tessawa itself. West of this is the province of Tahua; to the east is the old Emirate of Damagarim with its capital at Zinder, and east again is Gure, the northern part of which is known as Elakkos and Kuttus.Once the belt of thick bush near the frontier is crossed the country resembles Northern Nigeria again, with park bush and broad open spaces, both cultivated and grass-grown. The villages are of the usual Central African type; the groups of conical huts are surrounded by millet stores, raised on legs like gigantic bee-hives, to contain the grain cultivated in the clearings around the settlements. The inhabitants are Hausa and Kanuri, though of late years a number of lower-caste Tuareg from Air have settled there as well. There is a considerable amount of rock outcrop in the form, round Zinder, of low peaks with great boulders, or, near Gure, of hills which terminate abruptly in a cliff of red rock, north of which is the district called Elakkos.Through this belt of park bush runs east and west the road recently levelled and rendered passable for light cars in the dry season between Lake Chad and the Niger. The nomadic cattle-breeding Fulani come into this zone from the bush to the north and south; Maradi is a Fulani centre of some importance. A certain number of this people also come to Tessawa, but the Hausa population here have been at feud with them for many generations, and only the adventof European control has put an end to continual wars between the two Emirates.PLATE 4DIOM IN ELAKKOSPUNCH AND JUDY SHOWTessawa lies in a shallow depression which, like others further north on the way to Damergu, drain into the Gulbi n’Kaba, an affluent of the Niger containing running water only in its lower reaches in the neighbourhood of Sokoto. North of Tessawa and Damagarim the land becomes more sparsely populated and the bush thickens, except in the immediate vicinity of the villages, which now begin to be tenanted in increasing numbers by Kanuri. The bush contains herds of Fulani cattle and a certain amount of game; there are two or three varieties of gazelle, some bustard, guinea-fowl, ostriches and occasionally giraffes. The vegetation becomes more stunted as progress is made northward and large trees are rarer; the soil is sandy; rock outcrop is almost completely absent. The configuration of the ground is difficult to follow in the thick bush; the gentle slopes and valleys appear generally to drain westwards, but shallow closed basins are numerous. Plenty of water is obtainable in any of these depressions a few feet below the ground; the larger groups of wells, usually near the two or three hamlets of straw huts which form a village, are the resort of the Fulani with their cattle during the dry season. The vegetation and the general aspect of the country, however, are still those of the Sudan.Damagarim differs but little from the Tessawa landscape except that the bush is thicker and there are fewer open spaces. East of the boulder-strewn hills of Zinder the more ambitious elevations of Gure are visible. Zinder itself consists of two contiguous towns; like Tessawa and the Hausa cities further south, they are built of red mud. Zinder is smaller than the analogous Nigerian cities. Since 1921 it has had no Sultan. The French headquarters of the Niger Territories till recently were situated here. In the past Zinder was of some importance; although the main caravan track from the north appears in the early days to have run direct to Katsina, a branch from Damergu went byway of Zinder as soon as Kano grew in importance. But in spite of the number and influence of the Tuareg who used to make Zinder their headquarters, neither Damagarim nor Gure has changed its essentially Sudanese character.Within a few days’ march of Tessawa on the road north to Gangara in Damergu, several interesting features were observable. At Urufan village the Magazawa Hausa and Kanuri women were wearing the ornament known as the “Agades Cross,” peculiar to the Air Tuareg, in a simple as well as in a conventionalised form. Many of the women exhibited almost Mongolian traits in their eyes and cheek-bones. Their hair was done in what I believe to be a Kanuri fashion, that is to say, in a low crest along the top of the head, tightly matted and well greased, with a parting, or very often a shaved strip on each side, running the length of the skull; over the ears the hair was again tightly plaited and greased. Their dancing was different from the practice in Nigeria: the women dance with bent knees and a crouching body, so that the back is nearly horizontal. They shuffle up to the drum band one behind the other, the woman at the head of the line turning away at the end of each movement to take her place behind. The absence of sedentary Fulani influence is obvious as soon as music starts; the rattles and cymbals made of segments of calabash on a stick, peculiar to the Fulani in Nigeria, are not used.Ethnically it is a very mixed area. In most cases each hamlet in a village group is inhabited by a different people. Magazawa Hausa, Kanuri from Damergu, and more recent Kanuri from Bornu predominate, but there are also nomadic Fulani and semi-nomadic Tuareg.This is the edge of the country called Damergu, which, on the direct road from Tessawa, may be said to begin at the village group of Garari in a small valley, tributary of the Gulbi n’Kaba. Just before reaching the southern edge of the valley the thorn bush suddenly ceases. In the hollow are two or three hamlets of Kanuri, Bornuwi, sedentary Tuareg and Hausa with common wells in the valley bottom.Instead of interminable thorn scrub just so high that nothing can be seen above it, an open wind-swept plain of rolling downland covered with yellow-gold grass appears in front. On the sharp African horizon to the N. and N.E. are the blue peaks of Damergu, quite small and humble, but clear cut against the sky-line with all the dignity of isolation in a sea of waving sun-washed prairie.Damergu begins and ends abruptly: as soon as the belt of bush which surrounds it on all sides is crossed, the ground lies open to the sky and visibility becomes good. There is no more suffocating feeling in the world than marching through Central African bush. The discomforts and disabilities of travelling are not compensated for by any advantage except a ready supply of firewood. The bushland around Damergu is particularly unpleasant. It is never so tall that one may not hope to see over the top of the ugly stunted trees at the next low rise, and never in reality low enough to allow one to satisfy one’s passionate longing. Visibility is limited to a few yards and one’s sense of direction is confounded. It is infernally hot, because the undergrowth effectively shelters one from any breeze. The country is uniformly rolling and unbeautiful. A high proportion of the trees are of the virulently thorny variety which arch over the rare paths and make life on camel or horseback intolerable. Walking is equally distasteful, as the ground is strewn with burr grass which enters every fold of clothing and mortifies the flesh like hot needles. Camels get lost pasturing, game appears in vast quantities and disappears before a shot can be fired. There are scorpions, snakes, centipedes and tarantulas, not to speak of bush folk who have an uncanny sense of their own whereabouts, and of yours as well. They are armed with poisoned arrows, and though I did not suffer from their unkind attentions, the bush through which I passed north of Daura has a bad reputation. There are vast areas with no accessible water in the dry season, but when it rains the trees drip their moisture down your neck. I know the particular and private hell which isin store for me one day for the many misdemeanours I have committed. It will be to wander eternally through Sudan bush in search of the desert, where one may see what will bring happiness or oblivion at a distance and where one may at least face Destiny in the open.On each separate occasion when I entered Damergu, in the east returning from Termit, in the west going north from Tessawa, and in the north returning home by way of Nigeria, I experienced such a sense of relief and pleasure at emerging from the bush as to dull my perception of the really somewhat monotonous nature of the country. The winding hollows flow more or less aimlessly east or west, except in the Gangara area, where the drainage is definitely westwards into the Gulbi n’Kaba basin. The general level of the country is about 1700 feet above the sea. Except in the hollows around the rain pools the country is devoid of trees or scrub. Every here and there small groups of hills rise 300-400 feet above the surrounding country. They are so far apart that the next system only appears on the horizon. The black ferruginous outcrop forms conical peaks or stretches of pebbly surface, which break the round contours of the prairie. These little hills, set on a rolling golden prairie of very wide prospect, are the great characteristics of Damergu. The land is vast and generous in its proportions.The hills of Gangara in the west mark the site of a group of four villages called Zungu and Gangara close under the principal peak, Malam Chidam to the east and Karawa to the south. The hills are a series of cones rising a few hundred feet from the plain and are connected at their bases; a series of gullies or ravines clothed with little bushes descends from them; there are no cliffs or great masses of bare rock; the slopes are covered with low scrub. The Gangara hills divide the Gulbi n’Kaba basin from a wide depression on the east which sweeps south towards the cone of Zawzawa near the large village of Kallilua, with Dambida and Mazia not far to the north. North and east of Gangara are the low hills of Dambansa, Birjintoro and Ollelua, while furthereast again in a confused medley of aimless valleys are Mount Ginea and the triple peaks of Akri. The Akritan[48]hills are a landmark for the towns of Jajiduna, Tanut and Gamram. These various groups are the signposts of Damergu; even a raw traveller can learn them in a short time. Between the more important villages and towns the scattered hamlets are of such frequent occurrence that, once the general lie of the land has been observed, travelling is easy.It is a country of considerable potential wealth. It was known in the past as the granary of Air; even now great quantities of grain are exported to the north and to the more densely populated Hausa countries of the south. The long, broad downs, usually well fed by the summer rains, are admirably suited for growing millet and guinea corn. The surrounding margin of bush, especially on the northern side within reasonable distances of the plentiful water holes in open places, is full of the cattle of nomad Fulani and the camels of the Damergu Tuareg. The cultivable area to-day is limited only by the scarcity of population and some lack of enthusiasm for work. A periodic cycle of dry years with the inevitable sequels of drought and famine can only be guarded against by administrative measures, which have not been enforced since the fall of the Central African Empires. One after another they dominated this part of the world, but whether Melle, Songhai, Bornu or Sokoto was pre-eminent in the Central Sudan, Damergu remained an appanage of Air, whose destinies it followed and of which it is economically a part. After the first arrival of the Tuareg from the east, a progressive descent of other tribes from the north led to the establishment of a reigning class in the country, recruited among the People of Air. To them the sedentary Kanuri people, who then and since have constituted the majority of the population, were subjected. The Tuareg Sultans of Damergu in the early period of modern history ruled in Jajiduna, Gamram, Tademari and Demmili. Even when they fell under the political influence of Tessawa or ofDamagarim or were conquered by Melle, Songhai or Sokoto in turn, they remained in close touch with their relations in the north. The economic necessity of keeping open the great caravan road to Tripoli, which was a source of wealth to the Tuareg and to the south alike, was realised by everyone.The more intense cultivation and thicker population of earlier days are proved by the profusion of deserted sites all over the country, where the passing of the villages has left no more tangible, if unmistakable, evidence than acres of cleared and levelled ground strewn with potsherds and heaps of stones. The greater population of those days and the administrative ability of the empires of the Sudan combined to counteract the effects of dry years by creating proportionately larger reserves of grain, which were so conspicuously absent just before the late war that a severe drought brought about wholesale emigration to the Southland.The present-day villages in Damergu are all of the grass hut variety of the usual African type. In the past a few towns appear to have been built of mud. The ruins of old Dambiri show a walled mud-built town, although Demmili, once the seat of a Sultan who probably moved to Gangara when his village fell into decay, must have been wholly built of grass, for it has entirely disappeared. A lonely tree on a barren patch of ground marks its passing. The Gangara villages are all straw built, as are, among the larger settlements which have survived, Mazia and Kallilua. There are mud buildings, I believe, at Tademari and Jajiduna, and certainly at Tanut. The latter is the French centre of the country. It has an important grain market and a fort containing a small garrison of Senegalese troops. The principal native place was Jajiduna, where the first French post was established; but the town has rather declined since the move of the official capital to Tanut, where the water supply for caravans is better. At Jajiduna there is a Senussi “zawia,” one of the few points where the influence of this sect has taken root in Tuareg countries. The principal Senussi“zawia” in the Southland is at Kano, with another smaller one reported at Zinder.PLATE 5GAMRAMNorth of Jajiduna and north-east of Tanut is Gamram,[49]a town of some importance in the past for the Tuareg, and the seat of one of their rulers of Damergu. Now a small collection of straw huts is surrounded by the ruins of mud walls like any of the towns of Hausaland. Gamram was the Warden of the South on the marches of the desert. As the most northerly permanent settlement of the Sudan on the Tripoli road it became a point of vital strategic importance for the caravan traffic. The town has occupied many sites on the edge of a basin that becomes a lake in the rainy season. The present site is on the north side, but the most important settlement was probably to the south-west. The beauty of Gamram struck Barth very forcibly. It was the first definitely Sudanese settlement to which he had come after the inhospitable deserts and the mountains of the Sahara. He had suffered intense discomfort in the waste called Azawagh, intervening between Damergu and the Sudan, but when he came to Gamram, the rains had filled the lake which laps the feet of some immense acacias that are perpetually green. Their roots live in water, and when the pool dries up, wells only a few feet deep are dug under their shade. The trees are filled with the song of many birds and the sound of running lizards. The gardens around the edge of the basin produce vegetables and luxuries rarely encountered in the Sahara. There are eggs and chickens and milk and cheese in the market. All these things are found at Gamram, not in plenty but in just sufficient quantities to delight the traveller in barren lands. I came to Gamram a day after leaving the impenetrable bush of Elakkos and found it as good as Barth had described.The town has lost its Tuareg character. It is now a small settlement of a few hundred Kanuri and mixed inhabitants. The Tuareg element in the immediate neighbourhood is accounted for by some sedentary serfs or slaves living inother hamlets near by. The noble Tuareg of the Isherifan tribe who used to possess Gamram wander in the district between this place and the bush of Guliski. They have not counted for very much since they were decimated in a raid by Belkho, the great leader of the Air Tuareg during the latter years of last century. Belkho had complained that the Isherifan at Gamram were interfering with the caravans which crossed Damergu, and as his people were especially interested in the traffic, he demanded an assurance that the annoyance should cease, failing which he would have to take measures. The Isherifan returned an insolent reply and Belkho warned them again. He offered to accept a fine in camels for their misbehaviour, but when this was refused, collected a body of some two hundred to three hundred men and came swiftly down the road from Tergulawen with hostile intent. He reached the town at nightfall. Next morning he fell on the Isherifan, who had prepared for the attack, defeated them, and carried off so many camels that each of the victorious participants, as one explained to me, secured five female beasts for his share. Since then, my informant remarked, “the Isherifan are not.”Damergu has been the scene of many bloody raids in recent times. At Farak, one day from Gamram, a great assemblage of men and camels from the Southland, bound for Ghat, was caught by the Imuzurak under Danda. Merchandise and camels were looted and the personnel was massacred.During the four years which elapsed after the journey of the Foureau-Lamy Mission took place in 1900, a series of important events occurred in Damergu which ultimately led to the occupation of Air. In July 1900 the French military territory of Zinder-Chad had come into official existence, with a base of operations under Colonel Peroz at Say, and subsequently at Sorbo Hausa, on the Niger.[50]In February 1901 Colonel Peroz set out towards Lake Chad. Sergeant Bouthel, left in command at Zinder by Lieut. Joalland of theVoulet Mission, entered Damergu, defeated the Imuzuraq tribe of Tuareg at Tademari or Tanamari and killed their chief, Musa. His place was taken by his brother, Danda, who became ruler of the country, while a third brother, afterwards killed at Bir Alali (Fort Pradie) east of Lake Chad, in January 1902, with the assistance of the Senussi organised Kanem against the French. Of all the Air Tuareg, the Kel Owi confederation of tribes alone, on account of their commercial relations with the Hausa countries and with the north, adopted a pacific attitude. The rest of the Air and the local Tuareg in Damergu set about fortifying Tademari, Jajiduna and Gamram and raided as far afield as Zinder. Their defeat by Sergeant Bouthel had so little effect that they soon plundered a Kel Owi caravan at Fall near Mount Ginea. The French in consequence were forced to occupy Gidjigawa near Kallilua in southern Damergu, and finally, when the Farak massacre occurred, Jajiduna itself, where a fort was built and a nucleus of camel corps established. The latter, however, was restricted in its action to a small area north of the post; operations did not even extend to Farak, only thirty odd miles away. The effect of this French expansion was nevertheless to make many of the prouder Tuareg, who would not submit but foresaw the inevitable, move eastwards. Some of them migrated as far afield as Kanem and Wadai, others only to Elakkos. It was the continuation of a movement which had begun after the advent of the Foureau-Lamy Mission. But even east of Chad the ubiquitous white men arrived; the migrants fought the French with conspicuous success at Bir Alali on two occasions, though they were finally defeated. Of these Tuareg of the Exodus, some returned to Air, but the rest moved yet further east to the strange land of Darfur, where they still live in voluntary exile near El Fasher.The repeated attacks on the north- and south-bound caravans in Damergu induced the French to escort the larger convoys of 1902 and 1903 as far as Turayet on the borders of the Air mountains. The departure of the irreconcilablestowards the east, whence only a part was to return after the third encounter of Bir Alali, and the gradual penetration of the Southland, with the consequent pacification of the population, left the Imuzurak alone in Damergu in open defiance of the French. But in the meanwhile a second pillage had taken place at Farak, and, moreover, in Air itself the situation from every point of view was most unsatisfactory. The Sultan of the Air Tuareg was tossed about between the important Kel Owi confederation and their pacific policy on the one hand, and the irreconcilables of Damergu and Air on the other. In Gall in the south-east of Air had become a head-quarters of the raiders, and the Sultan began to find his position intolerable. He concluded by inviting the French to enter and take over. The occupation of Agades took place in the autumn of 1904 by a camel patrol under Lieut. Jean, when the modern history of Air and Damergu commenced.Osman Mikitan, the Sultan of this critical period, lies buried in a square tomb of mud bricks in the Zungu hamlet of Gangara. He had changed places three times with Brahim as Sultan of the Air people, and died unregretted because he had sold his country to the foreigner.The Tuareg of Damergu number among their tribes factions of many of the most famous Air clans. The Ikazkazan are represented by the section known generically as the Kel Ulli, the People of the Goats; these tribes include the Isherifan of Gamram and the Kel Tamat, in addition, of course, to many others in Air. The Imuzurak round Tanamari, with the Imaqoaran, Ibandeghan, Izagaran and Imarsutan are tribes which seem to represent the earliest Tuareg stock in the neighbourhood; some of them certainly belong to groups which, when the first migration into the plateau from the east occurred, never reached Air at all. The omnipresent Ifoghas reappear in Damergu near Tanut and roam northward; they are apparently cousins of the great division of the Ifoghas n’Adrar (Ifoghas of the Mountains), whose centre is around Kidal, north-east of Gao on the Niger. These Ifoghas of Damergu also I believeto have been left here in the course of the westward migration of the first wave of Tuareg, though some of them may have returned east after the initial movement. The Tamizgidda of Air apparently also had a section in Damergu in Barth’s day:[51]their name connects them with “the mosque,” and they are said by this explorer to have been regarded by the Arabs in his day[52]as “greatly Arabicised, having apparently been settled somewhere near a town.” A tribe of the same name occurs in the west; they also may be remnants, powerful as they were in Barth’s days, of a westward migration from the Chad area, or possibly of a returning wave which is known to have reached Air. The Tegama in Damergu, says Barth,[53]“form at present a very small tribe able to muster, at the utmost, three hundred spears; but most of them are mounted on horseback. Formerly, however, they were far more numerous, till Ibram, the father of the present chief, undertook, with the assistance of the Kel Geres, the unfortunate expedition against Sokoto. . . .” But this fighting certainly occurred at a more recent date than 1759, when, according to the Agades Chronicle, they were at war with the Kel Geres. Barth adds that they were said originally to have come from Janet, near Ghat, that they were already settled in the south long before the Kel Owi came to Air, and that they are found on the borders of Negroland in very ancient times. Ptolemy speaks of a Tegama people beyond Air towards Timbuctoo and the middle Sudan. Hornemann, from what he heard of them, “believed them to be Christians,” says Barth; though the only reference I can find in this authority is to the fact that they were probably idolatrous. I think Barth’s reference is to a generic group, now called the Kel Tegama, a collective name for the people living in the southern part of the area known as Tegama, which is on the west side of the northern borders of Damergu. Among the Kel Tegamato-day would be classed the Damergu Ifoghas and other tribes already mentioned. I fancy Barth has used a generic local and geographical name as a tribal name.The belief that they were Christians is, however, particularly interesting. It is possible that these Tegama were not Tuareg at all, and that Barth’s informants may have been referring to the nomadic Fulani who pasture their cattle in the area where he met them, round In Asamed and Farak, though his description of the time spent in their company certainly points to their having in reality been Tuareg. Their “customs showed that they had fallen off much from ancient usages,” for not only did the women make advances to the eminent explorer, but even the men urged him to make free with their wives. He adds that the women had very regular features and fair skins and that the men were both taller and fairer than the Kel Owi, many of them dressing their hair in long tresses as a token of their being Inisilman or holy men (“despite their dissolute manners”), a peculiarity which connects them with the Ifoghas of Azger, who also are a tribe of “marabouts.”[54]His general description of the Tegama, taken in conjunction with their hunting and cattle-herding habits, corresponds so closely with the appearance of the Ifoghas of Damergu to-day that there is little doubt that Barth is referring to them, and that he should consequently more accurately have written, not “the Tegama” but the “Kel Tegama.” He distinctly states that they acknowledged the supremacy of the Sultan of Agades rather than that of the Kel Owi leaders, which will be seen to point to their early origin in the country. Normally resident in Northern Damergu, they move to Tegama and Azawagh after the rains to feed their cattle, goats and camels. The conquests of the later Tuareg immigrants reduced them to a low stage of poverty and degradation, though they have retained their nobility of caste, race and feature to a remarkable degree.The history of Damergu shows clearly the predominantrôle which the Tuareg played among the lower-caste Kanuri sedentaries and the nomadic Fulani. The prepotency of a noble race among people of inferior class is one of the most interesting phenomena of history. The Kanuri in Damergu are, and probably have always been, numerically the stronger; they are armed with bows and arrows, the weaponpar excellencefor bush fighting. The Tuareg was less numerous at all times, but everywhere, except in the west, where he has been so long associated with the Sudan as to lose his nobility, disdained any weapon but the sword, knife or spear. Like the knight in medieval Europe, the Tuareg has always held that thearmes blancheswere the only weapons of a gentleman, yet with all these disadvantages his prestige was sufficient to ensure an ascendancy which would have continued but for the advent of the gun and gunpowder. In Damergu this prestige ensured the maintenance of the Tuareg Sultanates until the advent of the French. In the Southland all legends continue to magnify his prowess.In Hausaland, at Dan Kaba in Katsina Emirate, a strolling player came one day to give a Punch and Judy show for the delectation of the village people, who were in part Hausa, in part sedentary Fulani, and in part nomadic cattle-owning Fulani. The old traditional play had been modernised, and although it was full of topical allusions to the Nigeria of 1922, enough of the past remained to show the reputation and moral ascendancy which the Tuareg enjoyed in the Southland. The showman’s apparatus was simple: divesting himself of his indigo robe, he arranged it on the ground over three sticks and crouched hidden beneath its folds. He had four dolls in all and worked them like those in our Punch and Judy shows in England. In the place of the squeaky voice of the Anglo-Saxon artist he used a bird whistle to conceal his words; the modulations of tone and inflexion in the dialogues and conversations between the puppets were remarkable. The Tuareg doll is the villain of the piece: his body is of blue rags, most unorthodoxly crowned with a white turban and armed with a huge sword and shield.Divested of the latter and crowned with a red turban, the same doll in the course of the play becomes the “dogari,” or native policeman of the Hausaland Emirs. The King of the Bush is a Fulani man, impersonated by a puppet made largely of orange cretonne with huge hair crest and bow and arrow. He suspects his wife, made of the same material but ornamented with cowries before and behind, of having relations with the Tuareg. She soothes and pets and sings to her suspicious husband, playing music on drums and calabash cymbals. Her mellifluous tones finally persuade him to go out a-hunting in the bush. Needless to say, in Act II she flirts outrageously with the attractive Man of the Open Lands, but is surprised by her husbandin flagrante delicto, most realistically performed, whereupon, in the next act, a tremendous fight ensues. The King of the Bush, discarding his bow and arrow, fights with an axe, the Tuareg with his sword. The latter is victorious and kills the King of the Bush. The wife calls in the “dogari” to avenge her husband and to please her Southland audience. In Act V the Tuareg is haled off before the British Political Officer, presented in khaki cloth with a black basin-shaped hat like a Chinese coolie and the face of a complete idiot. In the ensuing dialogue the fettered Tuareg scores off the unfortunate white man continuously, but, as all plays must end happily, he is condemned to death. The execution of the plot is good, the technique admirable, although the performance was unduly protracted for our tastes. The one I witnessed lasted nearly four hours. The predominant rôle is that of the envied and handsome villain, the noble Tuareg. He is glorious in life and fearless in death.It is unfortunately impossible for lack of space to discuss the Kanuri or Fulani of Damergu. The latter affect the political life of the country but little. They shift continually to fresh tracts of bush or better water for the sake of their great black cattle, which used to be sold in the far north as well as in Hausaland. They do not mix with the Tuareg, though they are recognised by them, as anyone mustrecognise them, to be of a noble race. Slender, fine-featured, but dark-skinned, with the profiles of Assyrian statues, the Damergu Fulani are of the Bororoji section of this interesting people which, in the course of its sojourn and gradual movement along the fringe of the Sudan from west to east, has provided the ruling class in most of the Hausa States. The recent history of Sokoto, of Katsina and of Kano is their history. Their conquest of power in Hausaland is but another instance of the ascendancy of nobility and a glaring contradiction of the Socialist theory of equal birth. When they came to power they were illiterate and pagan and had no political virtues; their success was due to breeding and caste.The Bororoji are a darker section of the Fulani than many of the purer divisions in the south. In Northern Damergu they can be seen stalking through the bush with their herds of black kine, naked except for a loin skin and a peaked cap of liberty of embroidered cloth, but patently conscious of their birth. They come and go as they please, and no one interferes with them. Some may settle in towns or villages, living for a time on the produce of sales of cattle, in which they are rich. Most of them have no permanent habitation. A few can be seen in villages like Gangara, where they come to sell an occasional bull and buy a few ornaments or some such luxury as grain. Their women are slender, tall and straight, with fine oval faces and straight, jet-black hair. The triangular form of face from the cheek-bones to the chin is noticeable among the Bororoji as among the Rahazawa Fulani of the Katsina area, but the face is somewhat longer in proportion to the breadth than further south. Their appearance is Semitic, though the nose is never heavy but straight, and this is the case even more among the women than the men. Both sexes wear bead necklaces; the peaked cloth cap is the ornament of the men. The women have anklets and bracelets of copper and as many as six large copper curtain rings in their ears, the only disfigurement of their handsome faces. Of the customs, religion andorganisation of the Bororoji little is known. Like their cousins in the south, they anoint the wide-branching horns of their cattle, and when they drink milk, though none must be spilled, a little is left in the bottom of the calabash as an offering to the Eternal Spirit. The Fulani believe that one day they will return to the East, whence their tradition says that they came, but how or why or when they left this unknown home has not been explained. Obedient to tradition, numbers of them are settling year by year in the Nilotic Sudan.The last belt of bush between the Sahara and Sudan is reached a day’s march from Tanut. The Elakkos bush further east ceases completely in about Lat. 15° 20′ N.; on the road to Termit the vegetation becomes very scanty some way south of a belt of white sand dunes in Lat. 15° 30′ N.: north of them the country is pure steppe desert. The Damergu bush, however, extends as far north as Lat. 15° 50′ to the Taberghit valley on the eastern road to Air, and to Tembellaga on the western road. Damergu forms a salient in the line of the Sudan vegetation.The belt of sand dunes on the way to Termit is said to run eastward even beyond the Bilma-Chad road south of Agadem well, and gradually to broaden all the way; in the west it hardly reaches the edge of Damergu. Some fifty miles north of Talras in Elakkos the same zone of acacia trees, which occur in the hollows of the dunes on the Termit road, follows a depression called the Tegama valley.[55]The surface, like that of the steppe desert, is of heavy buff-coloured sand in long whale-back dunes.The Northern Damergu bush is different to the belt which runs along the southern side of the country. The trees and shrubs are principally of the acacia variety. The larger vegetation which is typical of the Sudan has disappeared, but the grasses and ground plants are still characteristic of the south. The burr grass which makes life burdensome to the traveller reigns supreme. The “Karengia” (Pennisetumdistichium) grows in clumps or small tufts some fifteen inches in height. In Northern Damergu the ground is densely carpeted with this grass. As soon as the summer rains are over it sheds a little seed with a crown of small sharp spikes. Leather and the bare human skin alone afford the burrs no hold; any other material seems to attract them irresistibly. In the presence of this pest the bush natives have found the only solution, which is to go almost naked; the clothed but unhappy European blasphemes until he is too weary to speak. Water is the only remedy; it softens the little burr and makes it possible to remove it without disintegrating entirely the mesh of one’s apparel, but water in this belt of land is scarce.The next watering-points after leaving Gamram are Farak, and Hannekar on the Menzaffer valley. The latter is now on the most direct road to Air, since the slightly more eastern track from the former point by In Asamed well to Tergulawen became impossible when the latter well was filled in during the late war. At Hannekar there is a large depression covered with thick undergrowth and small trees standing in a pool of water which lasts for some months after the rains. As the pool dries up, shallow wells are dug in the bed. The water supply at Farak is all contained in shallow wells, but as watering from them is a much slower process than sending cattle and camels to drink at a pool, it is customary for the local Tuareg and Fulani to stay in the Hannekar area as long as they can. After the rains and until the wells are re-dug at Farak there is consequently a period when there is practically no water there at all, as Barth found early in 1851. Nevertheless, since the permanent supply at Farak below the ground is greater than anywhere else in Northern Damergu, it has come to be considered the real starting-point of the eastern road to Air. Its importance as a rendezvous for pasturing tribes as well as for north-bound caravans explains the numerous disasters which have occurred there at the hands of Tuareg and Tebu raiders.North of Farak is a long hill falling away steeply on the side towards the wells. It gave Barth[56]the impression of forming a sharply defined southern border to the desert plateau between Damergu and Air. The existence of so marked an edge is, however, not borne out in fact, for no similar escarpment exists west of it on the road north of Hannekar, nor yet, as Foureau[57]points out, on the western road to Air, by Abellama. The hill of Farak, like another smaller one at Kidigi north of Hannekar, is an isolated elevation.Permanent habitation used to extend about one day’s march north of Farak, to the neighbourhood of In Asamed well, but after the latter was filled in, which I understand occurred during the 1917 revolt, when Tamatut well, further east, and Tergulawen on the borders of Air were also destroyed, Farak became the last village of the Sudan. Neither in recent years nor of old, however, did it ever possess the same permanency or importance as Gamram. Farak was always liable to be deserted at a moment’s notice in times of danger. To-day the skin and straw huts of the Ifadeyen and Kel Tamat tribes are scattered about in the dense bush all over the district. The camps change from year to year. When I passed this way there were Isherifan near Guliski and Ighelaf south-east of Gamram, Ifadeyen at Farak, and Ifadeyen and Kel Tamat at Hannekar.Since the more direct road from Farak by In Asamed to Tergulawen has been abandoned, there is now no water for caravans between that place or Hannekar and the Air plateau except at Milen,[58]which is one day south of the mountains. The present track from Farak, after crossing the Tekursat valley at a point near the site of In Asamed well, inclines slightly west and joins the direct track from Hannekar to Milen, running almost due north and south. The apparent angle made by the Farak-Milen track at In Asamed puzzledme when I came to plot it on paper from a compass traverse, for the extraordinary straightness of these old roads between important points, even in the rough hill country of Air, is very remarkable. I eventually realised that a line from Farak produced through In Asamed was on the direct bearing of the old well of Tergulawen. This disused track is the original southern end of what is called the “Tarei tan Kel Owi,” or Kel Owi road, in other words, of the main caravan track from Tripoli to Nigeria. The road in Air and in the south is usually called among the Tuareg after the confederation of tribes in control of the way. Down this eastern track came Barth and his companions in 1850-1.In Asamed, meaning in Temajegh “(The Well) of Cold Water,” was just over 100 feet deep; its existence shows that Damergu has been left behind and Azawagh has begun, for the former is a land of rain pools and shallow and seasonal wells, while the latter, north of the last Sudan bush, is a desert country with occasional very deep wells and no surface water. It is called Azawagh, a Temajegh name applied to several semi- or totally desert areas in the Sahara. The fact that it is not confined to the country south of Air must be borne in mind in seeking to identify the various areas referred to under this name by the Arab geographers. There is, for instance, an Azawad, a name corrupted in Arabic for Azawagh, north of Timbuctoo.North of the broad Tekursat valley, with scarcely any marked channel and sparsely covered slopes, is a low plateau with three small valleys, rejoicing in the uncouth name of Teworshekaken. Beyond is the Inafagak valley, and finally the smaller and probably tributary valley of Keta. From here to the Taberghit valley the bush thins out more and more; patches of bare sand become frequent, and the trees are considerably smaller. In none of these valleys has the rain-water left a definite bed of flow, though dry pool bottoms and short sections of channel may be seen here and there. The valleys are sometimes several miles from side to side; they were probably in the first instance longitudinal depressionsbetween heavy sand dunes formed along the direction of the prevalent wind; the sides are even now of too recent formation and too permeable to spill the rain-water into definite beds along the bottoms.At the southern edge of the immense Taberghit valley the character of the country changes quite definitely. The surface becomes dotted with little hummocks where the sand has been washed against a small bush or piece of scrub; otherwise the ground is bare. The few trees are grouped in scattered clumps. The ground vegetation is no longer predominantly “Karengia,” but one of several kinds of less offensive and more useful desert grasses impregnated with salt. The best camel fodder, curiously enough, is the true desert vegetation. The animals eat it avidly on account of the salt it contains, and even long periods of drought do not conquer its obstinate greenness. Its nutritive power is greater and it is more wholesome than the luxuriant Southland fodder.At Taberghit a track runs direct to Agades by way of Ihrayen spring. When both the eastern roads were in use, the Hannekar track was used by people going to Agades, while the more eastern Farak-In Asamed route by way of Tergulawen was frequented by caravans bound for Northern Air.A day before reaching Milen well you feel very strongly that the Sudan lies behind. The last bush has been left near Taberghit. In front is an open depression perhaps five miles wide and not more than fifty feet deep: it contains no stream bed, but here and there patches of dry cracked mud indicate the formation of short-lived rain pools. East and west the same stark valley runs as far as eye can see. Its course is clearly defined and it is without intersecting basins or tributaries or curves. On the far crest are loose buff-coloured sand dunes and then a few small acacias. The levels gradually rise in a series of folds, one of which contains the closed basin and disused Anu n’Banka[59]; another forms avalley called Kaffardá, which is like Taberghit but on a smaller scale. The folds lie parallel to one another along the line of the prevalent E.N.E. wind which always blows in Azawagh. This wind is one of the peculiarities for which the country is notorious. Both times I crossed this region it was blowing with great violence. In June it was suffocatingly hot; I camped one noonday to rest out of sheer exhaustion in a group of trees on the northern side of Taberghit. There was practically no shade: the leaves of the stunted trees were too thin to shelter even three persons. The temperature was over 110° F. in the shade, and visibility did not exceed a quarter of a mile, owing to the blowing sand and dust. Six months later I returned the same way. The same wind was blowing, but it was so cold at midday that I was unable to keep warm, even walking, with two woollen shirts, a drill coat, a leather jerkin and a blanket over my shoulders. Where a bush or sand dune offered shelter from the wind the sun was quite hot, but that night the thermometer fell to 31° F., after having registered 92° F. at 3 p.m. in a sheltered spot in the shade. It was very unpleasant. Barth’s experience of the wind and cold of Azawagh was much the same as mine. He writes: “The wind which came down with a cold blast from the N.N.E. was so strong that we had difficulty in pitching our tent;”[60]it was responsible for the most “miserable Christmas” he had ever spent. I was there a few days before Christmas in 1922 and can vouch for the accuracy of his verdict. Even the blinding glare and heat of June were preferable to the bleak cold of the winter nights.One effect of the constant wind is that the longitudinal dunes in Azawagh have retained their characteristic form more generally than further south. Their gentle rounded contours, which the wind tends to restore whenever the rain happens to have modified them, are characteristic. There is, of course, less precipitation here than further south, though it has been sufficient in Tagedufat to produce aconsiderable growth of desert vegetation along the bottom of the valley, where there are a number of small trees and an abundance of every conceivable type of salt bush and grass. It is said at certain seasons of the year to produce the finest camel fodder in this part of Africa.All over Azawagh are numerous deserted sites where millet used to be grown on the sandy slopes. The people who cultivated this arid country lived in temporary tents and huts except further north between Tagedufat and Milen, and consequently no trace of their dwellings remains. The evidence, however, of cleared and levelled patches and of broken earthenware is as unmistakable here as in Damergu. Between Keta and Tagedufat there is a succession of such clearings. It is borne in upon one that this heavy buff-coloured sand country where only desert vegetation now appears to thrive is in reality quite fertile so long as it receives any rain at all. The climate has probably not altered enough in recent times to account for the desertion of Azawagh; it seems rather to have been due to a decrease of the population. The Kel Azawagh, according to tradition, were numerous at a time when Damergu was thickly peopled, and there was not enough land available there or in Air to satisfy the needs of a people squeezed between the south and the north, whence the population was constantly being driven into the Sudan. It is clear that the Kel Azawagh who made these millet cultivations in a zone of desert steppe must have been of a fairly sedentary disposition, for a nomad people would have contented itself, as the modern Tuareg inhabitants of Azawagh do, with grazing herds and flocks on the excellent pastures.In referring to the Kel Tegama a plea was advanced that the name was primarily a geographical one, and one not properly appertaining to a single tribe. The name Kel Azawagh, to which the same considerations certainly apply, is found to some extent interchangeable with Kel Tegama. Now it will be shown later that the Tuareg of Air and Damergu only reached these lands comparativelylate in history; consequently an allusion in Ptolemy to a Tegama people appears to refer to a non-Tuareg folk in this or some other area of the same name. I see no reason to doubt that it was these Tegama and Azawagh areas which were meant by Ptolemy, and therefore conclude that before the Tuareg arrived they were possessed by a people to whom the millet clearings and village sites are probably due. The later Tuareg Tegama, or Kel Tegama, as we should more properly say, as well as the Kel Azawagh, were merely a section of People of the Veil who later lived in the areas, and in the course of time were named after them, though it is possible that the name Azawagh was one given by the Tuareg to an area previously called Tegama by its former inhabitants.We shall see[61]that among the ancient divisions of the People of the Veil in the Hawara group is a Kel Azawagh. The peculiarities of the Hawara clans would not connote any sedentary instinct in this tribe, whether it lived in this or in another area called Azawagh; but when we find in the Tetmokarak tribe of the Kel Geres group now living near Sokoto (whither they migrated from Air through this Azawagh area) a subsection called Tegama, and when we have learnt[62]that the Kel Geres are almost certainly a Hawara people, we can be even more inclined to the view just suggested regarding the use of the names Azawagh and Tegama and the origin of the people at various times living there. As a tribal name Kel Azawagh has now disappeared. The French 1/2,000,000 map displays it in the valley between Agades and the Tiggedi cliff, but out of place, for when still in use it was applicable to an area rather further east. Although it is no longer a proper name, it serves the Ifadeyen who now live in Azawagh for a descriptive term of themselves in accordance with the usual practice regarding local tribal nomenclature.In the periods between the rains the village sites in theTaberghit or Tagedufat valleys watered at the deep wells of Tagedufat, Anu n’Banka, Aghmat, Taberghit and presumably Tateus, though I know nothing of the last named. All these wells have now become silted up by wind-borne sand, but could easily be cleared if the population returned, as the water has not disappeared.The whole area between Taberghit and Tagedufat is covered with small mobile dunes; the two valleys themselves are, however, free of them. There is no loose sand at all in the Tagedufat valley, a curious phenomenon probably connected with the eddies formed by the prevalent wind in the channel of a depression between the higher banks. If this were true, the existence of dunes at Kaffarda would conversely point to its being an isolated basin, and this indeed is probably the case. Anu n’Banka is in a little hollow, the sides of which are also covered with small dunes. The bottom itself is clayey and free from blown sand, showing traces of having been a rain-pool at certain seasons. Surrounding the depression are millet clearings and a little rock outcrop. It is the most southerly point in Azawagh where stone occurs, and the outpost of the more conspicuous rock formations of the Tagedufat valley.Although the first part of the descent into Tagedufat is imperceptible, the appearance of the ground has changed considerably on account of the small crescentic dunes of very fine white sand which overlie the heavier buff-coloured sand of the surface. The crescentic type is characteristic of young dunes in process of formation,[63]their last stage being the long whale-back down of heavy particles which tend to settle or become cemented and eventually to support some vegetation. The Azawagh valleys present a series of interesting examples of the youngest type of dunes, which are still moving rapidly, superimposed upon the oldest fixed dune formations oriented along the line of the prevalent wind. It is curious that at no point has thefine and very mobile sand which is continually being carried in from the great Eastern Desert collected in large masses: the small crescentic bodies, the horns of which, of course, lie down wind, or, in other words, point west to south-west, are neither continuous nor contiguous. The underlying buff-coloured surface is covered with a number of small trees and scattered scrub or grass in isolated clumps. This vegetation becomes covered by the crescent dunes and in time uncovered as the white sand moves westward. Where this vegetation can be seen emerging from the crescentic formations on the windward side it is still alive, pointing to a fairly rapid motion of the body of sand. It is true that some of this desert scrub is sufficiently hardy to withstand a period of, it is said, as much as four years without any rain, and even then it only requires very little moisture in the air or some dew; the numerous small acacias, however, if wholly engulfed for any length of time, would die. Yet at no point is there either a wake of dead vegetation behind the larger crescentic dunes or even an unduly large proportion of dead trees. The progress of the small dunes is therefore undoubtedly rapid, and is due to the constant wind, which should, however, have tended to create larger masses. The crescentic dunes are rarely more than twelve feet high at the most; their individual area is, of course, relatively large owing to the very flat slipping angle of the fine grains. Barth records dunes as far as Tergulawen; but there is no evidence regarding the country east of this point,[64]which is probably too far north of the dune belt on the Termit road to be connected with that zone.The Tagedufat valley bottom, unlike the Milen and Taberghit valleys, is marked by a more continuous stream bed along which water flows every year for a short time during the rains. The most remarkable feature of the valley is a series of flat bare patches formed by the pools of rain-water; they are of no great size, but the surface isstained bluish-white by chemical incrustation. The Milen and Taberghit valleys, while possessing a few similar rain-pools, none of which survives for more than the briefest period, do not exhibit this complexion. The point is of particular interest in connection with a report given to me by my guide, Sidi, who was with me on the way south. He is a widely travelled and knowledgable man. He stated that the Tagedufat depression extended eastwards across the desert all the way to Fashi, and was marked along the whole of its course by such patches of chemical incrustation. My travelling companion, Buchanan, observed that the ground shortly before reaching Fashi was stained in the manner described. In the open desert, where in the immensity of space it is difficult to determine the direction of a very slightly accentuated valley, such noticeable features are valuable evidence.Considering the size of the Tagedufat basin south of Milen, the valley shown as extending towards Termit on the French 1/2,000,000 map and called Tegemi (Téguémi), is perhaps a confluent, or even an inaccurate representation, of the main valley itself. A recent Camel Corps[65]reconnaissance from Talras to Eghalgawen possibly followed up one such affluent in the east bank of the main channel of Tagedufat. The importance of the Tagedufat valley from the hydrographic point of view cannot be over-stated.Directly the Tagedufat valley is crossed the rock outcrop on the north bank becomes a striking feature. Increasing in size towards the west, it falls away below the surface to the east. Crescentic dunes reappear between the outcrops and continue almost all the way to Milen. On the north side of Tagedufat, near the track, for which it serves as a landmark, is a prominent mass of black rock called the Kashwar (Stone) n’Tawa or Tawar. Far away to the N.N.E. the relief becomes bolder, rising to a group of small summits clothed with loose sand, called the Rocks of Oghum. The remains of some stone houses, at one time the southernmostpermanent settlement of Air, appear in the loose sand near the hills. North of Oghum in a little depression filled with acacias is Gharus n’Zurru.[66]After a further stretch of dunes a small valley running northwards diversifies the general lie of the ground. It is called Maisumo, and contains another deep well which is still in use. This valley after a short distance runs into the Milen depression, with the conical hill of Tergulawen visible to the east and the little massif of Teskokrit to the west. The northern part of the latter group extends eastwards from the main summits as a steep ridge forming the northern bank of the Milen valley itself.East of Tergulawen again is a small and almost unknown group of hills called Masalet, where in recent years Kaossen, afterwards leader of the Air revolt in 1917, dug a well. It only yielded brackish water, which, though good enough for camels, proved too medicinal for the Tuareg, who filled it in again. It had been dug for political purposes largely in order to facilitate parties from and for the Southland participating in the yearly caravans which fetch salt from Bilma. Masalet was designed to obviate these parties making a detour along the River of Agades or via Eghalgawen: it provided an easterly watering-point in Azawagh corresponding with Tazizilet further north in Air itself. The unsatisfactory nature of the supply, especially for caravans engaged in crossing the eastern desert, did not, however, justify the risk of leaving so remote a watering-point available for Tebu raiding parties. The fact that Masalet was constructed in recent years is interesting, as showing that the Tuareg have not lost the art of locating deep water.The western road from Tanut to Agades via Aderbissinat and Abellama runs over much the same sort of country as that which I have just described between Farak and Milen. Aderbissinat well, seventy-five miles from Tanut and ninety-three miles from Agades, is a point of suchstrategic importance that the French from Zinder built a fort there during the war in order to secure their communications with Air. It has not been garrisoned of late, but proved of paramount importance during the operations of the column which marched from the south to relieve Agades during the rebellion of 1917. With the exception of the deep but copious well of Abellama, there is no useful permanent watering-place between western Damergu and Agades, as the spring of Ihrayen in the Tiggedi cliffs has too small an output to provide for many animals. Nineteen miles north of Aderbissinat the bush ceases. As at Taberghit further east, the country rises some 200 feet to an average level of 1700-1800 feet above the sea. Beyond Timbulaga sand dunes appear on the level buff-coloured steppe, which is covered with the usual scanty vegetation of desert grass in tussocks.[67]The ground then slopes gradually down to the deep well of Abellama in Lat. 16° 16′ 30″ N. and Long. 7° 47′ 20″ E. G. Abellama as a stage corresponds with Milen on the other road.On the easternmost or Tergulawen road Barth[68]shows that the country is again substantially the same. South of the “spacious” well, which is in a depression “ranging east and west,” with sand-hills on the south side bearing a sprinkling of desert herbage, the country is covered with small dunes on a “flat expanse of sand, mostly bare and clothed with trees only in favoured spots.” To the north is a great sandy plain running as far as the Ridge of Abadarjan, where the level descends to the upper basin of the River of Agades. The area is covered with “hád,” the most nutritious of desert plants and the most characteristic of the desert steppe of Africa. In all parts of the Sahara the distribution of the plant marks the division between the Desert and the Sown. This “hád” of the border line advances or recedes, sometimes from year to year, according to the rainfall. It is the tidal mark of the desert.The northern part of Azawagh is geographically important, as it contains the transverse valleys which collect the southern rainfall of Air and carry it westwards into the Niger basin. The course of the Beughqot (Beurkot) and Azelik[69]valleys is wrongly shown on the French maps. They do not unite until they have reached a far more southerly point than where they are shown to do so on the Cortier map. Furthermore, when they have joined, they turn S.W. and not S.E. A recent reconnaissance as far as Masalet proved that after these two valleys meet they turn west into a large depression which is probably the same one as that in which the well of Milen is situated, though it might, on the other hand, be the Tagedufat basin; this is a point which must for the moment remain undecided. On a solution of this problem depends the answer to the question as to whether Milen or Tagedufat is the principal basin into which the Air valleys east of Beughqot as far as Tazizilet drain. All that is clear is that they turn southwards and then westwards to join one of the two systems in question, and do not peter out in the desert as Cortier’s map suggests.West of Milen well the valley in which it is situated eventually joins the lower Tagedufat, which runs on S.W. or W. towards the Gulbi n’Kaba or the Tafassasset-T’immersoi basin. That the Tagedufat system does not enter the River of Agades over the Tiggedi cliff at some point near Ihrayen is probable owing to the fact that all this country has been subjected to a slight southerly tilt. The Tiggedi cliff, the Eghalgawen-T’in Wana massif, the cliff east of Akaraq and its continuation along the great valley, finally represented by the ridge of Abadarjan, as Barth rightly judged, are the northern boundary of this area, which slopes gently from north to south. The River of Agades receives hardly any left-bank tributaries.Milen well could never be found without a guide. The wide valley, with sand dunes on the south side and a steep north bank where the now omnipresent rock of Air appears, is bare, dry and stony. It shimmers in the heat. Teskokrit appears as a black mass in the west on a bank of milk-white mirage set round a group of trees. The bottom of the valley is a gravel plain with a small patch of bare rock in it which an unwitting traveller would most probably pass unheeding. In this patch of rock is a small hole with a large circular stone near by. The hole, barely three feet across, is the mouth of a well driven through hard sandstone all the way down to the water-bearing stratum, seventy feet below the ground. The mouth can scarcely be seen fifty yards away. The rounded stone is several inches thick and was said to have been used to cover up the mouth of the well to prevent its becoming silted up with driving sand.I came there in June, after more than forty hours’ march from Hannekar with four tired camels and two men, an Ifadeyen guide and an Arab of Ghat in the Fezzan. We had very little water left, so little, in fact, that it was all used in one pot to cook some rice for us three. The place was deserted and very lonely. The wind was driving the sand so hard that it stung the naked calves of my legs as I stood at the well with Ishnegga the guide, drawing water for the thirsty camels. Camels in hot weather drink a great deal, and hauling water in a two-gallon leather bucket from a seventy-foot well is hard work in a temperature of over 150° F. in the sun. The camels drank interminably. The last and best camel was still thirsty and remained to be watered. The beast was rather weak. It had a bad saddle sore, a hole about the size of a large man’s hand, in its back, and it was festering and full of maggots. We had all just done a journey of over 500 miles from Tanut to Termit and back, in thirty-five days, including nine days of halts, averaging, in other words, nearly twenty miles per marching day for twenty-six days. The camel hadbegun to drink. Then as we were drawing a full bucket the well rope broke six feet from my hand and fell to the bottom of the well with a splash. A vain hour was spent, while the rice cooked and got more and more full of sand, trying to fish up the rope and bucket with an iron hook made of the nose-piece of a camel bridle fastened to a knotted baggage rope. This too was lost after hooking the tangle, which it joined at the bottom of the well. Prospects looked gloomy as our thirst increased. I have distinct recollections of the sky and valley getting whiter and more metallic and the heat more intolerable. Finally, just enough rope was found by untying all the baggage to ladle up water a half-gallon at a time in a small canvas bucket. But the poor camel had to wait a long time to finish its drink, for the first of the supply to reach the top was used to refill the tanks.
[Illustration]F. R. del.Emery Walker Ltd. sc.[To face p.36.
[Illustration]F. R. del.Emery Walker Ltd. sc.[To face p.36.
[Illustration]F. R. del.Emery Walker Ltd. sc.[To face p.36.
[To face p.36.
The Sudan, though geographically in Central Africa, belongs to the Mediterranean civilisation. The great empires of the Niger, Melle and Songhai, the Fulani Empire of Sokoto, the Emirates of Kano and Katsina, and the Empire of Bornu, were all products of contact with the north. Commercially and culturally, the Sudan faced north with its back against an impenetrable belt of tropical forest inhabited by savage negro tribes, through whose dripping and steaming jungles there was little or no access to the sea. This orientation explains the high degree of civilisation which Barth found already past its “floruit” in 1850. It is obviously also the reason why the early explorers came from the north rather than from the nearer coast of the Atlantic between Sierra Leone and the mouths of the Niger.
With the arrival of the Europeans, ways down to the coast were gradually opened up, until finally in Nigeriaseven hundred miles of railway were built from Lagos to Kano. As a consequence trade has left the trans-Saharan roads where the Tuareg were masters. It is now carried to Europe and even to the Mediterranean by steamers sailing from Lagos and Liverpool. In more ways than one the advent of the white man in Central Africa has been disastrous for the Tuareg. Camel-borne trade on a large scale is doomed; caravan broking and long-distance desert transport are gone, never to return; even a trans-Saharan railway, whose commercial value must be as unreal as the dream of its advocates among French Colonial authorities, can never hope to compete with sea-borne traffic. Aircraft alone may one day revive the old camel roads, for they provide lines of watering-points along the shortest north and south routes.
If one may judge by the numbers and size of the market cities, which are the termini of the trans-Saharan routes in the Sudan, the Air road was by far the most important of the two in the centre. In Kano and in Katsina and in Sokoto the commercial genius of the Hausa people developed centres for the exchange of the European goods with the products, and more especially the raw materials, of Central Africa. To these cities also came the negro people of the south, to buy and sell or be sold as slaves. In a thickly populated and extremely fertile country the cities grew to immense size. Though in no sense properly a Tuareg country, Northern Nigeria and the neighbouring lands are visited and lived in by the People of the Veil. Every year it is the habit of many of this people to come from Air to Nigeria during the dry season. They earn a prosperous livelihood on transport work between the cities of Hausaland. They feed their camels on the richer pastures of the south when those in the north grow dry. But before the rains begin they move north again to the steppe and desert, for flooded rivers and excessive damp are conditions which the camels of the Veiled People do not relish. Quite large colonies of Tuareg have settled in some of these cities and have adopted a semi-sedentary life, maintaining theircharacteristics in inverse measure as intermarriage with the negroid peoples has become more frequent. The influx of Tuareg into Nigeria after the 1917 revolution in Air added considerably to the numbers living permanently under British rule. This migration was not as strange a phenomenon or so entirely the product of the Great War as at first sight it appears to be. The various waves of Tuareg which in succession entered Air have each in turn had the effect of driving the earlier populations further south. The trend of migration in North Africa from the earliest days, when the zone of permanent habitation of the negroid races extended as far as the Mediterranean, has always been southward. It has continued in modern times. The temptation of richer lands in Central Africa has always proved irresistible when local political or economic conditions altered in consequence of growing ethnic pressure to the extent of providing just that impetus necessary to overcome the human disinclination to leave homes which have been occupied for generations. The Kel Geres Tuareg left Air to settle in the country north of Sokoto when the mountains became over-populated; masses of Air Tuareg generally took up their habitation in Katsina and Kano after the unsuccessful revolution against the French during the late war. The motives were not strictly similar, but the effects were identical, and have been observable throughout the ages.
AIRand theSOUTHLANDF. R. del.Emery Walker Ltd. sc.
AIRand theSOUTHLANDF. R. del.Emery Walker Ltd. sc.
AIRand theSOUTHLAND
To-day at Kano, a village of some size named Faji, almost entirely Tuareg in population, has sprung up a few hundred yards from the walls of the city. Here the People of the Veil live like the Hausa in mud houses. They are engaged in retail trade or act as agents and brokers for their relations in Air when the latter come down in the dry season. In Katsina a quarter of the town and the country immediately north are thickly populated with Tuareg, for whom the Emir has a marked partiality, largely on account of his commercial propensities, which are powerfully stimulated by the ownership of several fine herds of camels. The Tuareg of Katsina, drawn from almost every tribe in Air,have formed a new tribal unit known as the Kel Katchena,[44]and are rapidly forgetting their older tribal allegiances. The results of these movements have always been much the same. Progressive mixing with the negroid people of the Sudan, the gradual acquisition of sedentary habits, and the cultivation of fat lands where life is easy, are combining to make these People of the Veil lose their characteristics as a northern race; their language cannot compete with Hausa, which isthelingua francaof the Sudan, as Arabic is that of North Africa. The retention of the Veil is the only exception: in fact many southerners associated with them have adopted it, although the rigorous proscription against revealing the mouth and face is being less strictly observed.
North of the country surrounding the great walled cities of red earth, and more or less coterminous with the northern frontiers of the Emirates of Katsina, Daura, Kano and Hadeija, there is a deep belt of country which marks the beginning of the transition between the Saharan and the Equatorial zones.[45]North of the open country around Kano, with its large trees that for a height of some feet from the ground, like those in English parks, have been stripped of leaves by the grazing flocks and herds, the rock outcrops become less frequent and eventually disappear entirely. They give place to scrub, bush and clearings through which the Anglo-French boundary runs. The frontier from Lake Chad to the Niger was delimited in 1907 and 1908 by an international expedition whose work has been described by Colonel Tilho with a wealth of detail which makes one regret that his labours did not extend a little further north, as far as the edge of the desert where the Saharan zone proper commences. The area mapped by Colonel Tilho hardly extends beyond the northern limit of the Hausa-speaking people. Along the roads leading to Air, or in other words along the great trade route, no work was done beyond the southern fringe of the area called Damergu, and there is consequently to the south of Air a considerable depth of unsurveyed country for which no maps are available.
The area between the international boundary and the somewhat arbitrary limits of Algeria and Tripolitania constitutes the French colony known as the “Territoires du Niger,”[46]the southern part of which is divided into provinces or “cercles,” roughly corresponding to the old nativeEmirates. French colonial policy in this part of Africa, in contrast with the system so successfully instituted by Sir F. Lugard in Nigeria, has been directed towards the removal of the more important native rulers. They have been replaced by a form of direct administration which is only now in process of being organised under French civilian officials. North of Katsina the Emirates of Maradi and Tessawa[47]have been combined into one province, and here almost the last Sultan of the “Territoires” survives, exercising authority only in the immediate vicinity of Tessawa itself. West of this is the province of Tahua; to the east is the old Emirate of Damagarim with its capital at Zinder, and east again is Gure, the northern part of which is known as Elakkos and Kuttus.
Once the belt of thick bush near the frontier is crossed the country resembles Northern Nigeria again, with park bush and broad open spaces, both cultivated and grass-grown. The villages are of the usual Central African type; the groups of conical huts are surrounded by millet stores, raised on legs like gigantic bee-hives, to contain the grain cultivated in the clearings around the settlements. The inhabitants are Hausa and Kanuri, though of late years a number of lower-caste Tuareg from Air have settled there as well. There is a considerable amount of rock outcrop in the form, round Zinder, of low peaks with great boulders, or, near Gure, of hills which terminate abruptly in a cliff of red rock, north of which is the district called Elakkos.
Through this belt of park bush runs east and west the road recently levelled and rendered passable for light cars in the dry season between Lake Chad and the Niger. The nomadic cattle-breeding Fulani come into this zone from the bush to the north and south; Maradi is a Fulani centre of some importance. A certain number of this people also come to Tessawa, but the Hausa population here have been at feud with them for many generations, and only the adventof European control has put an end to continual wars between the two Emirates.
PLATE 4DIOM IN ELAKKOSPUNCH AND JUDY SHOW
PLATE 4
DIOM IN ELAKKOS
DIOM IN ELAKKOS
DIOM IN ELAKKOS
PUNCH AND JUDY SHOW
PUNCH AND JUDY SHOW
PUNCH AND JUDY SHOW
Tessawa lies in a shallow depression which, like others further north on the way to Damergu, drain into the Gulbi n’Kaba, an affluent of the Niger containing running water only in its lower reaches in the neighbourhood of Sokoto. North of Tessawa and Damagarim the land becomes more sparsely populated and the bush thickens, except in the immediate vicinity of the villages, which now begin to be tenanted in increasing numbers by Kanuri. The bush contains herds of Fulani cattle and a certain amount of game; there are two or three varieties of gazelle, some bustard, guinea-fowl, ostriches and occasionally giraffes. The vegetation becomes more stunted as progress is made northward and large trees are rarer; the soil is sandy; rock outcrop is almost completely absent. The configuration of the ground is difficult to follow in the thick bush; the gentle slopes and valleys appear generally to drain westwards, but shallow closed basins are numerous. Plenty of water is obtainable in any of these depressions a few feet below the ground; the larger groups of wells, usually near the two or three hamlets of straw huts which form a village, are the resort of the Fulani with their cattle during the dry season. The vegetation and the general aspect of the country, however, are still those of the Sudan.
Damagarim differs but little from the Tessawa landscape except that the bush is thicker and there are fewer open spaces. East of the boulder-strewn hills of Zinder the more ambitious elevations of Gure are visible. Zinder itself consists of two contiguous towns; like Tessawa and the Hausa cities further south, they are built of red mud. Zinder is smaller than the analogous Nigerian cities. Since 1921 it has had no Sultan. The French headquarters of the Niger Territories till recently were situated here. In the past Zinder was of some importance; although the main caravan track from the north appears in the early days to have run direct to Katsina, a branch from Damergu went byway of Zinder as soon as Kano grew in importance. But in spite of the number and influence of the Tuareg who used to make Zinder their headquarters, neither Damagarim nor Gure has changed its essentially Sudanese character.
Within a few days’ march of Tessawa on the road north to Gangara in Damergu, several interesting features were observable. At Urufan village the Magazawa Hausa and Kanuri women were wearing the ornament known as the “Agades Cross,” peculiar to the Air Tuareg, in a simple as well as in a conventionalised form. Many of the women exhibited almost Mongolian traits in their eyes and cheek-bones. Their hair was done in what I believe to be a Kanuri fashion, that is to say, in a low crest along the top of the head, tightly matted and well greased, with a parting, or very often a shaved strip on each side, running the length of the skull; over the ears the hair was again tightly plaited and greased. Their dancing was different from the practice in Nigeria: the women dance with bent knees and a crouching body, so that the back is nearly horizontal. They shuffle up to the drum band one behind the other, the woman at the head of the line turning away at the end of each movement to take her place behind. The absence of sedentary Fulani influence is obvious as soon as music starts; the rattles and cymbals made of segments of calabash on a stick, peculiar to the Fulani in Nigeria, are not used.
Ethnically it is a very mixed area. In most cases each hamlet in a village group is inhabited by a different people. Magazawa Hausa, Kanuri from Damergu, and more recent Kanuri from Bornu predominate, but there are also nomadic Fulani and semi-nomadic Tuareg.
This is the edge of the country called Damergu, which, on the direct road from Tessawa, may be said to begin at the village group of Garari in a small valley, tributary of the Gulbi n’Kaba. Just before reaching the southern edge of the valley the thorn bush suddenly ceases. In the hollow are two or three hamlets of Kanuri, Bornuwi, sedentary Tuareg and Hausa with common wells in the valley bottom.Instead of interminable thorn scrub just so high that nothing can be seen above it, an open wind-swept plain of rolling downland covered with yellow-gold grass appears in front. On the sharp African horizon to the N. and N.E. are the blue peaks of Damergu, quite small and humble, but clear cut against the sky-line with all the dignity of isolation in a sea of waving sun-washed prairie.
Damergu begins and ends abruptly: as soon as the belt of bush which surrounds it on all sides is crossed, the ground lies open to the sky and visibility becomes good. There is no more suffocating feeling in the world than marching through Central African bush. The discomforts and disabilities of travelling are not compensated for by any advantage except a ready supply of firewood. The bushland around Damergu is particularly unpleasant. It is never so tall that one may not hope to see over the top of the ugly stunted trees at the next low rise, and never in reality low enough to allow one to satisfy one’s passionate longing. Visibility is limited to a few yards and one’s sense of direction is confounded. It is infernally hot, because the undergrowth effectively shelters one from any breeze. The country is uniformly rolling and unbeautiful. A high proportion of the trees are of the virulently thorny variety which arch over the rare paths and make life on camel or horseback intolerable. Walking is equally distasteful, as the ground is strewn with burr grass which enters every fold of clothing and mortifies the flesh like hot needles. Camels get lost pasturing, game appears in vast quantities and disappears before a shot can be fired. There are scorpions, snakes, centipedes and tarantulas, not to speak of bush folk who have an uncanny sense of their own whereabouts, and of yours as well. They are armed with poisoned arrows, and though I did not suffer from their unkind attentions, the bush through which I passed north of Daura has a bad reputation. There are vast areas with no accessible water in the dry season, but when it rains the trees drip their moisture down your neck. I know the particular and private hell which isin store for me one day for the many misdemeanours I have committed. It will be to wander eternally through Sudan bush in search of the desert, where one may see what will bring happiness or oblivion at a distance and where one may at least face Destiny in the open.
On each separate occasion when I entered Damergu, in the east returning from Termit, in the west going north from Tessawa, and in the north returning home by way of Nigeria, I experienced such a sense of relief and pleasure at emerging from the bush as to dull my perception of the really somewhat monotonous nature of the country. The winding hollows flow more or less aimlessly east or west, except in the Gangara area, where the drainage is definitely westwards into the Gulbi n’Kaba basin. The general level of the country is about 1700 feet above the sea. Except in the hollows around the rain pools the country is devoid of trees or scrub. Every here and there small groups of hills rise 300-400 feet above the surrounding country. They are so far apart that the next system only appears on the horizon. The black ferruginous outcrop forms conical peaks or stretches of pebbly surface, which break the round contours of the prairie. These little hills, set on a rolling golden prairie of very wide prospect, are the great characteristics of Damergu. The land is vast and generous in its proportions.
The hills of Gangara in the west mark the site of a group of four villages called Zungu and Gangara close under the principal peak, Malam Chidam to the east and Karawa to the south. The hills are a series of cones rising a few hundred feet from the plain and are connected at their bases; a series of gullies or ravines clothed with little bushes descends from them; there are no cliffs or great masses of bare rock; the slopes are covered with low scrub. The Gangara hills divide the Gulbi n’Kaba basin from a wide depression on the east which sweeps south towards the cone of Zawzawa near the large village of Kallilua, with Dambida and Mazia not far to the north. North and east of Gangara are the low hills of Dambansa, Birjintoro and Ollelua, while furthereast again in a confused medley of aimless valleys are Mount Ginea and the triple peaks of Akri. The Akritan[48]hills are a landmark for the towns of Jajiduna, Tanut and Gamram. These various groups are the signposts of Damergu; even a raw traveller can learn them in a short time. Between the more important villages and towns the scattered hamlets are of such frequent occurrence that, once the general lie of the land has been observed, travelling is easy.
It is a country of considerable potential wealth. It was known in the past as the granary of Air; even now great quantities of grain are exported to the north and to the more densely populated Hausa countries of the south. The long, broad downs, usually well fed by the summer rains, are admirably suited for growing millet and guinea corn. The surrounding margin of bush, especially on the northern side within reasonable distances of the plentiful water holes in open places, is full of the cattle of nomad Fulani and the camels of the Damergu Tuareg. The cultivable area to-day is limited only by the scarcity of population and some lack of enthusiasm for work. A periodic cycle of dry years with the inevitable sequels of drought and famine can only be guarded against by administrative measures, which have not been enforced since the fall of the Central African Empires. One after another they dominated this part of the world, but whether Melle, Songhai, Bornu or Sokoto was pre-eminent in the Central Sudan, Damergu remained an appanage of Air, whose destinies it followed and of which it is economically a part. After the first arrival of the Tuareg from the east, a progressive descent of other tribes from the north led to the establishment of a reigning class in the country, recruited among the People of Air. To them the sedentary Kanuri people, who then and since have constituted the majority of the population, were subjected. The Tuareg Sultans of Damergu in the early period of modern history ruled in Jajiduna, Gamram, Tademari and Demmili. Even when they fell under the political influence of Tessawa or ofDamagarim or were conquered by Melle, Songhai or Sokoto in turn, they remained in close touch with their relations in the north. The economic necessity of keeping open the great caravan road to Tripoli, which was a source of wealth to the Tuareg and to the south alike, was realised by everyone.
The more intense cultivation and thicker population of earlier days are proved by the profusion of deserted sites all over the country, where the passing of the villages has left no more tangible, if unmistakable, evidence than acres of cleared and levelled ground strewn with potsherds and heaps of stones. The greater population of those days and the administrative ability of the empires of the Sudan combined to counteract the effects of dry years by creating proportionately larger reserves of grain, which were so conspicuously absent just before the late war that a severe drought brought about wholesale emigration to the Southland.
The present-day villages in Damergu are all of the grass hut variety of the usual African type. In the past a few towns appear to have been built of mud. The ruins of old Dambiri show a walled mud-built town, although Demmili, once the seat of a Sultan who probably moved to Gangara when his village fell into decay, must have been wholly built of grass, for it has entirely disappeared. A lonely tree on a barren patch of ground marks its passing. The Gangara villages are all straw built, as are, among the larger settlements which have survived, Mazia and Kallilua. There are mud buildings, I believe, at Tademari and Jajiduna, and certainly at Tanut. The latter is the French centre of the country. It has an important grain market and a fort containing a small garrison of Senegalese troops. The principal native place was Jajiduna, where the first French post was established; but the town has rather declined since the move of the official capital to Tanut, where the water supply for caravans is better. At Jajiduna there is a Senussi “zawia,” one of the few points where the influence of this sect has taken root in Tuareg countries. The principal Senussi“zawia” in the Southland is at Kano, with another smaller one reported at Zinder.
PLATE 5GAMRAM
PLATE 5
GAMRAM
GAMRAM
GAMRAM
North of Jajiduna and north-east of Tanut is Gamram,[49]a town of some importance in the past for the Tuareg, and the seat of one of their rulers of Damergu. Now a small collection of straw huts is surrounded by the ruins of mud walls like any of the towns of Hausaland. Gamram was the Warden of the South on the marches of the desert. As the most northerly permanent settlement of the Sudan on the Tripoli road it became a point of vital strategic importance for the caravan traffic. The town has occupied many sites on the edge of a basin that becomes a lake in the rainy season. The present site is on the north side, but the most important settlement was probably to the south-west. The beauty of Gamram struck Barth very forcibly. It was the first definitely Sudanese settlement to which he had come after the inhospitable deserts and the mountains of the Sahara. He had suffered intense discomfort in the waste called Azawagh, intervening between Damergu and the Sudan, but when he came to Gamram, the rains had filled the lake which laps the feet of some immense acacias that are perpetually green. Their roots live in water, and when the pool dries up, wells only a few feet deep are dug under their shade. The trees are filled with the song of many birds and the sound of running lizards. The gardens around the edge of the basin produce vegetables and luxuries rarely encountered in the Sahara. There are eggs and chickens and milk and cheese in the market. All these things are found at Gamram, not in plenty but in just sufficient quantities to delight the traveller in barren lands. I came to Gamram a day after leaving the impenetrable bush of Elakkos and found it as good as Barth had described.
The town has lost its Tuareg character. It is now a small settlement of a few hundred Kanuri and mixed inhabitants. The Tuareg element in the immediate neighbourhood is accounted for by some sedentary serfs or slaves living inother hamlets near by. The noble Tuareg of the Isherifan tribe who used to possess Gamram wander in the district between this place and the bush of Guliski. They have not counted for very much since they were decimated in a raid by Belkho, the great leader of the Air Tuareg during the latter years of last century. Belkho had complained that the Isherifan at Gamram were interfering with the caravans which crossed Damergu, and as his people were especially interested in the traffic, he demanded an assurance that the annoyance should cease, failing which he would have to take measures. The Isherifan returned an insolent reply and Belkho warned them again. He offered to accept a fine in camels for their misbehaviour, but when this was refused, collected a body of some two hundred to three hundred men and came swiftly down the road from Tergulawen with hostile intent. He reached the town at nightfall. Next morning he fell on the Isherifan, who had prepared for the attack, defeated them, and carried off so many camels that each of the victorious participants, as one explained to me, secured five female beasts for his share. Since then, my informant remarked, “the Isherifan are not.”
Damergu has been the scene of many bloody raids in recent times. At Farak, one day from Gamram, a great assemblage of men and camels from the Southland, bound for Ghat, was caught by the Imuzurak under Danda. Merchandise and camels were looted and the personnel was massacred.
During the four years which elapsed after the journey of the Foureau-Lamy Mission took place in 1900, a series of important events occurred in Damergu which ultimately led to the occupation of Air. In July 1900 the French military territory of Zinder-Chad had come into official existence, with a base of operations under Colonel Peroz at Say, and subsequently at Sorbo Hausa, on the Niger.[50]In February 1901 Colonel Peroz set out towards Lake Chad. Sergeant Bouthel, left in command at Zinder by Lieut. Joalland of theVoulet Mission, entered Damergu, defeated the Imuzuraq tribe of Tuareg at Tademari or Tanamari and killed their chief, Musa. His place was taken by his brother, Danda, who became ruler of the country, while a third brother, afterwards killed at Bir Alali (Fort Pradie) east of Lake Chad, in January 1902, with the assistance of the Senussi organised Kanem against the French. Of all the Air Tuareg, the Kel Owi confederation of tribes alone, on account of their commercial relations with the Hausa countries and with the north, adopted a pacific attitude. The rest of the Air and the local Tuareg in Damergu set about fortifying Tademari, Jajiduna and Gamram and raided as far afield as Zinder. Their defeat by Sergeant Bouthel had so little effect that they soon plundered a Kel Owi caravan at Fall near Mount Ginea. The French in consequence were forced to occupy Gidjigawa near Kallilua in southern Damergu, and finally, when the Farak massacre occurred, Jajiduna itself, where a fort was built and a nucleus of camel corps established. The latter, however, was restricted in its action to a small area north of the post; operations did not even extend to Farak, only thirty odd miles away. The effect of this French expansion was nevertheless to make many of the prouder Tuareg, who would not submit but foresaw the inevitable, move eastwards. Some of them migrated as far afield as Kanem and Wadai, others only to Elakkos. It was the continuation of a movement which had begun after the advent of the Foureau-Lamy Mission. But even east of Chad the ubiquitous white men arrived; the migrants fought the French with conspicuous success at Bir Alali on two occasions, though they were finally defeated. Of these Tuareg of the Exodus, some returned to Air, but the rest moved yet further east to the strange land of Darfur, where they still live in voluntary exile near El Fasher.
The repeated attacks on the north- and south-bound caravans in Damergu induced the French to escort the larger convoys of 1902 and 1903 as far as Turayet on the borders of the Air mountains. The departure of the irreconcilablestowards the east, whence only a part was to return after the third encounter of Bir Alali, and the gradual penetration of the Southland, with the consequent pacification of the population, left the Imuzurak alone in Damergu in open defiance of the French. But in the meanwhile a second pillage had taken place at Farak, and, moreover, in Air itself the situation from every point of view was most unsatisfactory. The Sultan of the Air Tuareg was tossed about between the important Kel Owi confederation and their pacific policy on the one hand, and the irreconcilables of Damergu and Air on the other. In Gall in the south-east of Air had become a head-quarters of the raiders, and the Sultan began to find his position intolerable. He concluded by inviting the French to enter and take over. The occupation of Agades took place in the autumn of 1904 by a camel patrol under Lieut. Jean, when the modern history of Air and Damergu commenced.
Osman Mikitan, the Sultan of this critical period, lies buried in a square tomb of mud bricks in the Zungu hamlet of Gangara. He had changed places three times with Brahim as Sultan of the Air people, and died unregretted because he had sold his country to the foreigner.
The Tuareg of Damergu number among their tribes factions of many of the most famous Air clans. The Ikazkazan are represented by the section known generically as the Kel Ulli, the People of the Goats; these tribes include the Isherifan of Gamram and the Kel Tamat, in addition, of course, to many others in Air. The Imuzurak round Tanamari, with the Imaqoaran, Ibandeghan, Izagaran and Imarsutan are tribes which seem to represent the earliest Tuareg stock in the neighbourhood; some of them certainly belong to groups which, when the first migration into the plateau from the east occurred, never reached Air at all. The omnipresent Ifoghas reappear in Damergu near Tanut and roam northward; they are apparently cousins of the great division of the Ifoghas n’Adrar (Ifoghas of the Mountains), whose centre is around Kidal, north-east of Gao on the Niger. These Ifoghas of Damergu also I believeto have been left here in the course of the westward migration of the first wave of Tuareg, though some of them may have returned east after the initial movement. The Tamizgidda of Air apparently also had a section in Damergu in Barth’s day:[51]their name connects them with “the mosque,” and they are said by this explorer to have been regarded by the Arabs in his day[52]as “greatly Arabicised, having apparently been settled somewhere near a town.” A tribe of the same name occurs in the west; they also may be remnants, powerful as they were in Barth’s days, of a westward migration from the Chad area, or possibly of a returning wave which is known to have reached Air. The Tegama in Damergu, says Barth,[53]“form at present a very small tribe able to muster, at the utmost, three hundred spears; but most of them are mounted on horseback. Formerly, however, they were far more numerous, till Ibram, the father of the present chief, undertook, with the assistance of the Kel Geres, the unfortunate expedition against Sokoto. . . .” But this fighting certainly occurred at a more recent date than 1759, when, according to the Agades Chronicle, they were at war with the Kel Geres. Barth adds that they were said originally to have come from Janet, near Ghat, that they were already settled in the south long before the Kel Owi came to Air, and that they are found on the borders of Negroland in very ancient times. Ptolemy speaks of a Tegama people beyond Air towards Timbuctoo and the middle Sudan. Hornemann, from what he heard of them, “believed them to be Christians,” says Barth; though the only reference I can find in this authority is to the fact that they were probably idolatrous. I think Barth’s reference is to a generic group, now called the Kel Tegama, a collective name for the people living in the southern part of the area known as Tegama, which is on the west side of the northern borders of Damergu. Among the Kel Tegamato-day would be classed the Damergu Ifoghas and other tribes already mentioned. I fancy Barth has used a generic local and geographical name as a tribal name.
The belief that they were Christians is, however, particularly interesting. It is possible that these Tegama were not Tuareg at all, and that Barth’s informants may have been referring to the nomadic Fulani who pasture their cattle in the area where he met them, round In Asamed and Farak, though his description of the time spent in their company certainly points to their having in reality been Tuareg. Their “customs showed that they had fallen off much from ancient usages,” for not only did the women make advances to the eminent explorer, but even the men urged him to make free with their wives. He adds that the women had very regular features and fair skins and that the men were both taller and fairer than the Kel Owi, many of them dressing their hair in long tresses as a token of their being Inisilman or holy men (“despite their dissolute manners”), a peculiarity which connects them with the Ifoghas of Azger, who also are a tribe of “marabouts.”[54]His general description of the Tegama, taken in conjunction with their hunting and cattle-herding habits, corresponds so closely with the appearance of the Ifoghas of Damergu to-day that there is little doubt that Barth is referring to them, and that he should consequently more accurately have written, not “the Tegama” but the “Kel Tegama.” He distinctly states that they acknowledged the supremacy of the Sultan of Agades rather than that of the Kel Owi leaders, which will be seen to point to their early origin in the country. Normally resident in Northern Damergu, they move to Tegama and Azawagh after the rains to feed their cattle, goats and camels. The conquests of the later Tuareg immigrants reduced them to a low stage of poverty and degradation, though they have retained their nobility of caste, race and feature to a remarkable degree.
The history of Damergu shows clearly the predominantrôle which the Tuareg played among the lower-caste Kanuri sedentaries and the nomadic Fulani. The prepotency of a noble race among people of inferior class is one of the most interesting phenomena of history. The Kanuri in Damergu are, and probably have always been, numerically the stronger; they are armed with bows and arrows, the weaponpar excellencefor bush fighting. The Tuareg was less numerous at all times, but everywhere, except in the west, where he has been so long associated with the Sudan as to lose his nobility, disdained any weapon but the sword, knife or spear. Like the knight in medieval Europe, the Tuareg has always held that thearmes blancheswere the only weapons of a gentleman, yet with all these disadvantages his prestige was sufficient to ensure an ascendancy which would have continued but for the advent of the gun and gunpowder. In Damergu this prestige ensured the maintenance of the Tuareg Sultanates until the advent of the French. In the Southland all legends continue to magnify his prowess.
In Hausaland, at Dan Kaba in Katsina Emirate, a strolling player came one day to give a Punch and Judy show for the delectation of the village people, who were in part Hausa, in part sedentary Fulani, and in part nomadic cattle-owning Fulani. The old traditional play had been modernised, and although it was full of topical allusions to the Nigeria of 1922, enough of the past remained to show the reputation and moral ascendancy which the Tuareg enjoyed in the Southland. The showman’s apparatus was simple: divesting himself of his indigo robe, he arranged it on the ground over three sticks and crouched hidden beneath its folds. He had four dolls in all and worked them like those in our Punch and Judy shows in England. In the place of the squeaky voice of the Anglo-Saxon artist he used a bird whistle to conceal his words; the modulations of tone and inflexion in the dialogues and conversations between the puppets were remarkable. The Tuareg doll is the villain of the piece: his body is of blue rags, most unorthodoxly crowned with a white turban and armed with a huge sword and shield.Divested of the latter and crowned with a red turban, the same doll in the course of the play becomes the “dogari,” or native policeman of the Hausaland Emirs. The King of the Bush is a Fulani man, impersonated by a puppet made largely of orange cretonne with huge hair crest and bow and arrow. He suspects his wife, made of the same material but ornamented with cowries before and behind, of having relations with the Tuareg. She soothes and pets and sings to her suspicious husband, playing music on drums and calabash cymbals. Her mellifluous tones finally persuade him to go out a-hunting in the bush. Needless to say, in Act II she flirts outrageously with the attractive Man of the Open Lands, but is surprised by her husbandin flagrante delicto, most realistically performed, whereupon, in the next act, a tremendous fight ensues. The King of the Bush, discarding his bow and arrow, fights with an axe, the Tuareg with his sword. The latter is victorious and kills the King of the Bush. The wife calls in the “dogari” to avenge her husband and to please her Southland audience. In Act V the Tuareg is haled off before the British Political Officer, presented in khaki cloth with a black basin-shaped hat like a Chinese coolie and the face of a complete idiot. In the ensuing dialogue the fettered Tuareg scores off the unfortunate white man continuously, but, as all plays must end happily, he is condemned to death. The execution of the plot is good, the technique admirable, although the performance was unduly protracted for our tastes. The one I witnessed lasted nearly four hours. The predominant rôle is that of the envied and handsome villain, the noble Tuareg. He is glorious in life and fearless in death.
It is unfortunately impossible for lack of space to discuss the Kanuri or Fulani of Damergu. The latter affect the political life of the country but little. They shift continually to fresh tracts of bush or better water for the sake of their great black cattle, which used to be sold in the far north as well as in Hausaland. They do not mix with the Tuareg, though they are recognised by them, as anyone mustrecognise them, to be of a noble race. Slender, fine-featured, but dark-skinned, with the profiles of Assyrian statues, the Damergu Fulani are of the Bororoji section of this interesting people which, in the course of its sojourn and gradual movement along the fringe of the Sudan from west to east, has provided the ruling class in most of the Hausa States. The recent history of Sokoto, of Katsina and of Kano is their history. Their conquest of power in Hausaland is but another instance of the ascendancy of nobility and a glaring contradiction of the Socialist theory of equal birth. When they came to power they were illiterate and pagan and had no political virtues; their success was due to breeding and caste.
The Bororoji are a darker section of the Fulani than many of the purer divisions in the south. In Northern Damergu they can be seen stalking through the bush with their herds of black kine, naked except for a loin skin and a peaked cap of liberty of embroidered cloth, but patently conscious of their birth. They come and go as they please, and no one interferes with them. Some may settle in towns or villages, living for a time on the produce of sales of cattle, in which they are rich. Most of them have no permanent habitation. A few can be seen in villages like Gangara, where they come to sell an occasional bull and buy a few ornaments or some such luxury as grain. Their women are slender, tall and straight, with fine oval faces and straight, jet-black hair. The triangular form of face from the cheek-bones to the chin is noticeable among the Bororoji as among the Rahazawa Fulani of the Katsina area, but the face is somewhat longer in proportion to the breadth than further south. Their appearance is Semitic, though the nose is never heavy but straight, and this is the case even more among the women than the men. Both sexes wear bead necklaces; the peaked cloth cap is the ornament of the men. The women have anklets and bracelets of copper and as many as six large copper curtain rings in their ears, the only disfigurement of their handsome faces. Of the customs, religion andorganisation of the Bororoji little is known. Like their cousins in the south, they anoint the wide-branching horns of their cattle, and when they drink milk, though none must be spilled, a little is left in the bottom of the calabash as an offering to the Eternal Spirit. The Fulani believe that one day they will return to the East, whence their tradition says that they came, but how or why or when they left this unknown home has not been explained. Obedient to tradition, numbers of them are settling year by year in the Nilotic Sudan.
The last belt of bush between the Sahara and Sudan is reached a day’s march from Tanut. The Elakkos bush further east ceases completely in about Lat. 15° 20′ N.; on the road to Termit the vegetation becomes very scanty some way south of a belt of white sand dunes in Lat. 15° 30′ N.: north of them the country is pure steppe desert. The Damergu bush, however, extends as far north as Lat. 15° 50′ to the Taberghit valley on the eastern road to Air, and to Tembellaga on the western road. Damergu forms a salient in the line of the Sudan vegetation.
The belt of sand dunes on the way to Termit is said to run eastward even beyond the Bilma-Chad road south of Agadem well, and gradually to broaden all the way; in the west it hardly reaches the edge of Damergu. Some fifty miles north of Talras in Elakkos the same zone of acacia trees, which occur in the hollows of the dunes on the Termit road, follows a depression called the Tegama valley.[55]The surface, like that of the steppe desert, is of heavy buff-coloured sand in long whale-back dunes.
The Northern Damergu bush is different to the belt which runs along the southern side of the country. The trees and shrubs are principally of the acacia variety. The larger vegetation which is typical of the Sudan has disappeared, but the grasses and ground plants are still characteristic of the south. The burr grass which makes life burdensome to the traveller reigns supreme. The “Karengia” (Pennisetumdistichium) grows in clumps or small tufts some fifteen inches in height. In Northern Damergu the ground is densely carpeted with this grass. As soon as the summer rains are over it sheds a little seed with a crown of small sharp spikes. Leather and the bare human skin alone afford the burrs no hold; any other material seems to attract them irresistibly. In the presence of this pest the bush natives have found the only solution, which is to go almost naked; the clothed but unhappy European blasphemes until he is too weary to speak. Water is the only remedy; it softens the little burr and makes it possible to remove it without disintegrating entirely the mesh of one’s apparel, but water in this belt of land is scarce.
The next watering-points after leaving Gamram are Farak, and Hannekar on the Menzaffer valley. The latter is now on the most direct road to Air, since the slightly more eastern track from the former point by In Asamed well to Tergulawen became impossible when the latter well was filled in during the late war. At Hannekar there is a large depression covered with thick undergrowth and small trees standing in a pool of water which lasts for some months after the rains. As the pool dries up, shallow wells are dug in the bed. The water supply at Farak is all contained in shallow wells, but as watering from them is a much slower process than sending cattle and camels to drink at a pool, it is customary for the local Tuareg and Fulani to stay in the Hannekar area as long as they can. After the rains and until the wells are re-dug at Farak there is consequently a period when there is practically no water there at all, as Barth found early in 1851. Nevertheless, since the permanent supply at Farak below the ground is greater than anywhere else in Northern Damergu, it has come to be considered the real starting-point of the eastern road to Air. Its importance as a rendezvous for pasturing tribes as well as for north-bound caravans explains the numerous disasters which have occurred there at the hands of Tuareg and Tebu raiders.
North of Farak is a long hill falling away steeply on the side towards the wells. It gave Barth[56]the impression of forming a sharply defined southern border to the desert plateau between Damergu and Air. The existence of so marked an edge is, however, not borne out in fact, for no similar escarpment exists west of it on the road north of Hannekar, nor yet, as Foureau[57]points out, on the western road to Air, by Abellama. The hill of Farak, like another smaller one at Kidigi north of Hannekar, is an isolated elevation.
Permanent habitation used to extend about one day’s march north of Farak, to the neighbourhood of In Asamed well, but after the latter was filled in, which I understand occurred during the 1917 revolt, when Tamatut well, further east, and Tergulawen on the borders of Air were also destroyed, Farak became the last village of the Sudan. Neither in recent years nor of old, however, did it ever possess the same permanency or importance as Gamram. Farak was always liable to be deserted at a moment’s notice in times of danger. To-day the skin and straw huts of the Ifadeyen and Kel Tamat tribes are scattered about in the dense bush all over the district. The camps change from year to year. When I passed this way there were Isherifan near Guliski and Ighelaf south-east of Gamram, Ifadeyen at Farak, and Ifadeyen and Kel Tamat at Hannekar.
Since the more direct road from Farak by In Asamed to Tergulawen has been abandoned, there is now no water for caravans between that place or Hannekar and the Air plateau except at Milen,[58]which is one day south of the mountains. The present track from Farak, after crossing the Tekursat valley at a point near the site of In Asamed well, inclines slightly west and joins the direct track from Hannekar to Milen, running almost due north and south. The apparent angle made by the Farak-Milen track at In Asamed puzzledme when I came to plot it on paper from a compass traverse, for the extraordinary straightness of these old roads between important points, even in the rough hill country of Air, is very remarkable. I eventually realised that a line from Farak produced through In Asamed was on the direct bearing of the old well of Tergulawen. This disused track is the original southern end of what is called the “Tarei tan Kel Owi,” or Kel Owi road, in other words, of the main caravan track from Tripoli to Nigeria. The road in Air and in the south is usually called among the Tuareg after the confederation of tribes in control of the way. Down this eastern track came Barth and his companions in 1850-1.
In Asamed, meaning in Temajegh “(The Well) of Cold Water,” was just over 100 feet deep; its existence shows that Damergu has been left behind and Azawagh has begun, for the former is a land of rain pools and shallow and seasonal wells, while the latter, north of the last Sudan bush, is a desert country with occasional very deep wells and no surface water. It is called Azawagh, a Temajegh name applied to several semi- or totally desert areas in the Sahara. The fact that it is not confined to the country south of Air must be borne in mind in seeking to identify the various areas referred to under this name by the Arab geographers. There is, for instance, an Azawad, a name corrupted in Arabic for Azawagh, north of Timbuctoo.
North of the broad Tekursat valley, with scarcely any marked channel and sparsely covered slopes, is a low plateau with three small valleys, rejoicing in the uncouth name of Teworshekaken. Beyond is the Inafagak valley, and finally the smaller and probably tributary valley of Keta. From here to the Taberghit valley the bush thins out more and more; patches of bare sand become frequent, and the trees are considerably smaller. In none of these valleys has the rain-water left a definite bed of flow, though dry pool bottoms and short sections of channel may be seen here and there. The valleys are sometimes several miles from side to side; they were probably in the first instance longitudinal depressionsbetween heavy sand dunes formed along the direction of the prevalent wind; the sides are even now of too recent formation and too permeable to spill the rain-water into definite beds along the bottoms.
At the southern edge of the immense Taberghit valley the character of the country changes quite definitely. The surface becomes dotted with little hummocks where the sand has been washed against a small bush or piece of scrub; otherwise the ground is bare. The few trees are grouped in scattered clumps. The ground vegetation is no longer predominantly “Karengia,” but one of several kinds of less offensive and more useful desert grasses impregnated with salt. The best camel fodder, curiously enough, is the true desert vegetation. The animals eat it avidly on account of the salt it contains, and even long periods of drought do not conquer its obstinate greenness. Its nutritive power is greater and it is more wholesome than the luxuriant Southland fodder.
At Taberghit a track runs direct to Agades by way of Ihrayen spring. When both the eastern roads were in use, the Hannekar track was used by people going to Agades, while the more eastern Farak-In Asamed route by way of Tergulawen was frequented by caravans bound for Northern Air.
A day before reaching Milen well you feel very strongly that the Sudan lies behind. The last bush has been left near Taberghit. In front is an open depression perhaps five miles wide and not more than fifty feet deep: it contains no stream bed, but here and there patches of dry cracked mud indicate the formation of short-lived rain pools. East and west the same stark valley runs as far as eye can see. Its course is clearly defined and it is without intersecting basins or tributaries or curves. On the far crest are loose buff-coloured sand dunes and then a few small acacias. The levels gradually rise in a series of folds, one of which contains the closed basin and disused Anu n’Banka[59]; another forms avalley called Kaffardá, which is like Taberghit but on a smaller scale. The folds lie parallel to one another along the line of the prevalent E.N.E. wind which always blows in Azawagh. This wind is one of the peculiarities for which the country is notorious. Both times I crossed this region it was blowing with great violence. In June it was suffocatingly hot; I camped one noonday to rest out of sheer exhaustion in a group of trees on the northern side of Taberghit. There was practically no shade: the leaves of the stunted trees were too thin to shelter even three persons. The temperature was over 110° F. in the shade, and visibility did not exceed a quarter of a mile, owing to the blowing sand and dust. Six months later I returned the same way. The same wind was blowing, but it was so cold at midday that I was unable to keep warm, even walking, with two woollen shirts, a drill coat, a leather jerkin and a blanket over my shoulders. Where a bush or sand dune offered shelter from the wind the sun was quite hot, but that night the thermometer fell to 31° F., after having registered 92° F. at 3 p.m. in a sheltered spot in the shade. It was very unpleasant. Barth’s experience of the wind and cold of Azawagh was much the same as mine. He writes: “The wind which came down with a cold blast from the N.N.E. was so strong that we had difficulty in pitching our tent;”[60]it was responsible for the most “miserable Christmas” he had ever spent. I was there a few days before Christmas in 1922 and can vouch for the accuracy of his verdict. Even the blinding glare and heat of June were preferable to the bleak cold of the winter nights.
One effect of the constant wind is that the longitudinal dunes in Azawagh have retained their characteristic form more generally than further south. Their gentle rounded contours, which the wind tends to restore whenever the rain happens to have modified them, are characteristic. There is, of course, less precipitation here than further south, though it has been sufficient in Tagedufat to produce aconsiderable growth of desert vegetation along the bottom of the valley, where there are a number of small trees and an abundance of every conceivable type of salt bush and grass. It is said at certain seasons of the year to produce the finest camel fodder in this part of Africa.
All over Azawagh are numerous deserted sites where millet used to be grown on the sandy slopes. The people who cultivated this arid country lived in temporary tents and huts except further north between Tagedufat and Milen, and consequently no trace of their dwellings remains. The evidence, however, of cleared and levelled patches and of broken earthenware is as unmistakable here as in Damergu. Between Keta and Tagedufat there is a succession of such clearings. It is borne in upon one that this heavy buff-coloured sand country where only desert vegetation now appears to thrive is in reality quite fertile so long as it receives any rain at all. The climate has probably not altered enough in recent times to account for the desertion of Azawagh; it seems rather to have been due to a decrease of the population. The Kel Azawagh, according to tradition, were numerous at a time when Damergu was thickly peopled, and there was not enough land available there or in Air to satisfy the needs of a people squeezed between the south and the north, whence the population was constantly being driven into the Sudan. It is clear that the Kel Azawagh who made these millet cultivations in a zone of desert steppe must have been of a fairly sedentary disposition, for a nomad people would have contented itself, as the modern Tuareg inhabitants of Azawagh do, with grazing herds and flocks on the excellent pastures.
In referring to the Kel Tegama a plea was advanced that the name was primarily a geographical one, and one not properly appertaining to a single tribe. The name Kel Azawagh, to which the same considerations certainly apply, is found to some extent interchangeable with Kel Tegama. Now it will be shown later that the Tuareg of Air and Damergu only reached these lands comparativelylate in history; consequently an allusion in Ptolemy to a Tegama people appears to refer to a non-Tuareg folk in this or some other area of the same name. I see no reason to doubt that it was these Tegama and Azawagh areas which were meant by Ptolemy, and therefore conclude that before the Tuareg arrived they were possessed by a people to whom the millet clearings and village sites are probably due. The later Tuareg Tegama, or Kel Tegama, as we should more properly say, as well as the Kel Azawagh, were merely a section of People of the Veil who later lived in the areas, and in the course of time were named after them, though it is possible that the name Azawagh was one given by the Tuareg to an area previously called Tegama by its former inhabitants.
We shall see[61]that among the ancient divisions of the People of the Veil in the Hawara group is a Kel Azawagh. The peculiarities of the Hawara clans would not connote any sedentary instinct in this tribe, whether it lived in this or in another area called Azawagh; but when we find in the Tetmokarak tribe of the Kel Geres group now living near Sokoto (whither they migrated from Air through this Azawagh area) a subsection called Tegama, and when we have learnt[62]that the Kel Geres are almost certainly a Hawara people, we can be even more inclined to the view just suggested regarding the use of the names Azawagh and Tegama and the origin of the people at various times living there. As a tribal name Kel Azawagh has now disappeared. The French 1/2,000,000 map displays it in the valley between Agades and the Tiggedi cliff, but out of place, for when still in use it was applicable to an area rather further east. Although it is no longer a proper name, it serves the Ifadeyen who now live in Azawagh for a descriptive term of themselves in accordance with the usual practice regarding local tribal nomenclature.
In the periods between the rains the village sites in theTaberghit or Tagedufat valleys watered at the deep wells of Tagedufat, Anu n’Banka, Aghmat, Taberghit and presumably Tateus, though I know nothing of the last named. All these wells have now become silted up by wind-borne sand, but could easily be cleared if the population returned, as the water has not disappeared.
The whole area between Taberghit and Tagedufat is covered with small mobile dunes; the two valleys themselves are, however, free of them. There is no loose sand at all in the Tagedufat valley, a curious phenomenon probably connected with the eddies formed by the prevalent wind in the channel of a depression between the higher banks. If this were true, the existence of dunes at Kaffarda would conversely point to its being an isolated basin, and this indeed is probably the case. Anu n’Banka is in a little hollow, the sides of which are also covered with small dunes. The bottom itself is clayey and free from blown sand, showing traces of having been a rain-pool at certain seasons. Surrounding the depression are millet clearings and a little rock outcrop. It is the most southerly point in Azawagh where stone occurs, and the outpost of the more conspicuous rock formations of the Tagedufat valley.
Although the first part of the descent into Tagedufat is imperceptible, the appearance of the ground has changed considerably on account of the small crescentic dunes of very fine white sand which overlie the heavier buff-coloured sand of the surface. The crescentic type is characteristic of young dunes in process of formation,[63]their last stage being the long whale-back down of heavy particles which tend to settle or become cemented and eventually to support some vegetation. The Azawagh valleys present a series of interesting examples of the youngest type of dunes, which are still moving rapidly, superimposed upon the oldest fixed dune formations oriented along the line of the prevalent wind. It is curious that at no point has thefine and very mobile sand which is continually being carried in from the great Eastern Desert collected in large masses: the small crescentic bodies, the horns of which, of course, lie down wind, or, in other words, point west to south-west, are neither continuous nor contiguous. The underlying buff-coloured surface is covered with a number of small trees and scattered scrub or grass in isolated clumps. This vegetation becomes covered by the crescent dunes and in time uncovered as the white sand moves westward. Where this vegetation can be seen emerging from the crescentic formations on the windward side it is still alive, pointing to a fairly rapid motion of the body of sand. It is true that some of this desert scrub is sufficiently hardy to withstand a period of, it is said, as much as four years without any rain, and even then it only requires very little moisture in the air or some dew; the numerous small acacias, however, if wholly engulfed for any length of time, would die. Yet at no point is there either a wake of dead vegetation behind the larger crescentic dunes or even an unduly large proportion of dead trees. The progress of the small dunes is therefore undoubtedly rapid, and is due to the constant wind, which should, however, have tended to create larger masses. The crescentic dunes are rarely more than twelve feet high at the most; their individual area is, of course, relatively large owing to the very flat slipping angle of the fine grains. Barth records dunes as far as Tergulawen; but there is no evidence regarding the country east of this point,[64]which is probably too far north of the dune belt on the Termit road to be connected with that zone.
The Tagedufat valley bottom, unlike the Milen and Taberghit valleys, is marked by a more continuous stream bed along which water flows every year for a short time during the rains. The most remarkable feature of the valley is a series of flat bare patches formed by the pools of rain-water; they are of no great size, but the surface isstained bluish-white by chemical incrustation. The Milen and Taberghit valleys, while possessing a few similar rain-pools, none of which survives for more than the briefest period, do not exhibit this complexion. The point is of particular interest in connection with a report given to me by my guide, Sidi, who was with me on the way south. He is a widely travelled and knowledgable man. He stated that the Tagedufat depression extended eastwards across the desert all the way to Fashi, and was marked along the whole of its course by such patches of chemical incrustation. My travelling companion, Buchanan, observed that the ground shortly before reaching Fashi was stained in the manner described. In the open desert, where in the immensity of space it is difficult to determine the direction of a very slightly accentuated valley, such noticeable features are valuable evidence.
Considering the size of the Tagedufat basin south of Milen, the valley shown as extending towards Termit on the French 1/2,000,000 map and called Tegemi (Téguémi), is perhaps a confluent, or even an inaccurate representation, of the main valley itself. A recent Camel Corps[65]reconnaissance from Talras to Eghalgawen possibly followed up one such affluent in the east bank of the main channel of Tagedufat. The importance of the Tagedufat valley from the hydrographic point of view cannot be over-stated.
Directly the Tagedufat valley is crossed the rock outcrop on the north bank becomes a striking feature. Increasing in size towards the west, it falls away below the surface to the east. Crescentic dunes reappear between the outcrops and continue almost all the way to Milen. On the north side of Tagedufat, near the track, for which it serves as a landmark, is a prominent mass of black rock called the Kashwar (Stone) n’Tawa or Tawar. Far away to the N.N.E. the relief becomes bolder, rising to a group of small summits clothed with loose sand, called the Rocks of Oghum. The remains of some stone houses, at one time the southernmostpermanent settlement of Air, appear in the loose sand near the hills. North of Oghum in a little depression filled with acacias is Gharus n’Zurru.[66]After a further stretch of dunes a small valley running northwards diversifies the general lie of the ground. It is called Maisumo, and contains another deep well which is still in use. This valley after a short distance runs into the Milen depression, with the conical hill of Tergulawen visible to the east and the little massif of Teskokrit to the west. The northern part of the latter group extends eastwards from the main summits as a steep ridge forming the northern bank of the Milen valley itself.
East of Tergulawen again is a small and almost unknown group of hills called Masalet, where in recent years Kaossen, afterwards leader of the Air revolt in 1917, dug a well. It only yielded brackish water, which, though good enough for camels, proved too medicinal for the Tuareg, who filled it in again. It had been dug for political purposes largely in order to facilitate parties from and for the Southland participating in the yearly caravans which fetch salt from Bilma. Masalet was designed to obviate these parties making a detour along the River of Agades or via Eghalgawen: it provided an easterly watering-point in Azawagh corresponding with Tazizilet further north in Air itself. The unsatisfactory nature of the supply, especially for caravans engaged in crossing the eastern desert, did not, however, justify the risk of leaving so remote a watering-point available for Tebu raiding parties. The fact that Masalet was constructed in recent years is interesting, as showing that the Tuareg have not lost the art of locating deep water.
The western road from Tanut to Agades via Aderbissinat and Abellama runs over much the same sort of country as that which I have just described between Farak and Milen. Aderbissinat well, seventy-five miles from Tanut and ninety-three miles from Agades, is a point of suchstrategic importance that the French from Zinder built a fort there during the war in order to secure their communications with Air. It has not been garrisoned of late, but proved of paramount importance during the operations of the column which marched from the south to relieve Agades during the rebellion of 1917. With the exception of the deep but copious well of Abellama, there is no useful permanent watering-place between western Damergu and Agades, as the spring of Ihrayen in the Tiggedi cliffs has too small an output to provide for many animals. Nineteen miles north of Aderbissinat the bush ceases. As at Taberghit further east, the country rises some 200 feet to an average level of 1700-1800 feet above the sea. Beyond Timbulaga sand dunes appear on the level buff-coloured steppe, which is covered with the usual scanty vegetation of desert grass in tussocks.[67]The ground then slopes gradually down to the deep well of Abellama in Lat. 16° 16′ 30″ N. and Long. 7° 47′ 20″ E. G. Abellama as a stage corresponds with Milen on the other road.
On the easternmost or Tergulawen road Barth[68]shows that the country is again substantially the same. South of the “spacious” well, which is in a depression “ranging east and west,” with sand-hills on the south side bearing a sprinkling of desert herbage, the country is covered with small dunes on a “flat expanse of sand, mostly bare and clothed with trees only in favoured spots.” To the north is a great sandy plain running as far as the Ridge of Abadarjan, where the level descends to the upper basin of the River of Agades. The area is covered with “hád,” the most nutritious of desert plants and the most characteristic of the desert steppe of Africa. In all parts of the Sahara the distribution of the plant marks the division between the Desert and the Sown. This “hád” of the border line advances or recedes, sometimes from year to year, according to the rainfall. It is the tidal mark of the desert.
The northern part of Azawagh is geographically important, as it contains the transverse valleys which collect the southern rainfall of Air and carry it westwards into the Niger basin. The course of the Beughqot (Beurkot) and Azelik[69]valleys is wrongly shown on the French maps. They do not unite until they have reached a far more southerly point than where they are shown to do so on the Cortier map. Furthermore, when they have joined, they turn S.W. and not S.E. A recent reconnaissance as far as Masalet proved that after these two valleys meet they turn west into a large depression which is probably the same one as that in which the well of Milen is situated, though it might, on the other hand, be the Tagedufat basin; this is a point which must for the moment remain undecided. On a solution of this problem depends the answer to the question as to whether Milen or Tagedufat is the principal basin into which the Air valleys east of Beughqot as far as Tazizilet drain. All that is clear is that they turn southwards and then westwards to join one of the two systems in question, and do not peter out in the desert as Cortier’s map suggests.
West of Milen well the valley in which it is situated eventually joins the lower Tagedufat, which runs on S.W. or W. towards the Gulbi n’Kaba or the Tafassasset-T’immersoi basin. That the Tagedufat system does not enter the River of Agades over the Tiggedi cliff at some point near Ihrayen is probable owing to the fact that all this country has been subjected to a slight southerly tilt. The Tiggedi cliff, the Eghalgawen-T’in Wana massif, the cliff east of Akaraq and its continuation along the great valley, finally represented by the ridge of Abadarjan, as Barth rightly judged, are the northern boundary of this area, which slopes gently from north to south. The River of Agades receives hardly any left-bank tributaries.
Milen well could never be found without a guide. The wide valley, with sand dunes on the south side and a steep north bank where the now omnipresent rock of Air appears, is bare, dry and stony. It shimmers in the heat. Teskokrit appears as a black mass in the west on a bank of milk-white mirage set round a group of trees. The bottom of the valley is a gravel plain with a small patch of bare rock in it which an unwitting traveller would most probably pass unheeding. In this patch of rock is a small hole with a large circular stone near by. The hole, barely three feet across, is the mouth of a well driven through hard sandstone all the way down to the water-bearing stratum, seventy feet below the ground. The mouth can scarcely be seen fifty yards away. The rounded stone is several inches thick and was said to have been used to cover up the mouth of the well to prevent its becoming silted up with driving sand.
I came there in June, after more than forty hours’ march from Hannekar with four tired camels and two men, an Ifadeyen guide and an Arab of Ghat in the Fezzan. We had very little water left, so little, in fact, that it was all used in one pot to cook some rice for us three. The place was deserted and very lonely. The wind was driving the sand so hard that it stung the naked calves of my legs as I stood at the well with Ishnegga the guide, drawing water for the thirsty camels. Camels in hot weather drink a great deal, and hauling water in a two-gallon leather bucket from a seventy-foot well is hard work in a temperature of over 150° F. in the sun. The camels drank interminably. The last and best camel was still thirsty and remained to be watered. The beast was rather weak. It had a bad saddle sore, a hole about the size of a large man’s hand, in its back, and it was festering and full of maggots. We had all just done a journey of over 500 miles from Tanut to Termit and back, in thirty-five days, including nine days of halts, averaging, in other words, nearly twenty miles per marching day for twenty-six days. The camel hadbegun to drink. Then as we were drawing a full bucket the well rope broke six feet from my hand and fell to the bottom of the well with a splash. A vain hour was spent, while the rice cooked and got more and more full of sand, trying to fish up the rope and bucket with an iron hook made of the nose-piece of a camel bridle fastened to a knotted baggage rope. This too was lost after hooking the tangle, which it joined at the bottom of the well. Prospects looked gloomy as our thirst increased. I have distinct recollections of the sky and valley getting whiter and more metallic and the heat more intolerable. Finally, just enough rope was found by untying all the baggage to ladle up water a half-gallon at a time in a small canvas bucket. But the poor camel had to wait a long time to finish its drink, for the first of the supply to reach the top was used to refill the tanks.