Part 12

Of the underground rivers the best known is the Oued Rir, which is met with about fifty miles to the south of Biskra, and extends as far as Temacin, fourteen miles south-west of Touggourt. Its course is marked by a number of oases, some of which have been created, and others much improved by the Artesian wells of the French engineers. The first experiment of this sort was tried as early as 1856 at the oasis of Tamerna. After twenty-two days of work, in the presence of a crowd of incredulous and scarcely friendly natives the bore produced a veritable river of a thousand gallons a minute.

“In the desert a fountain is springing.”

At this welcome spectacle, the ingrained distrust of and smothered hostility towards the stranger and his methods vanished; all gave way to a transport of joy and enthusiasm. The work thus begun has been continued with great success, chiefly by French companies; new wells have been sunk and old wells repaired; and it is estimated that the value of the oases of the Rir has increased fivefold, and their population more than doubled.

Similar results have been attained elsewhere. But while they increase the productiveness of the oases, and at the same time improve the routes and the condition of the nomads, they do not warrant any hopes of extensive cultivation in the Sahara. The conditions of life continue difficult. The oases are very unhealthy; their sedentary inhabitants are the prey of malignant fevers and chronic diseases. The summer climate is appalling; a variation between freezing-point and 120° Fahrenheit in the twenty-four hours is not unknown. Those of the inhabitants, Arabs or Berbers, who have an admixture of the blood of the Soudanese negroes, are best fitted to support such trying conditions. As a place of residence for Europeans the Sahara cannot be recommended with any confidence.

Of the sedentary peoples of the Sahara the most interesting are the Mozabites; of the nomads the Touaregs, who range over the vast region to the extreme south. Both are considered to be of Berber origin. The Mozabites have already been mentioned as traders in Algiers. Their country, the Mzab, is situate in one of the most sterile parts of the Sahara, on the rocky promontory which separates the eastern and western depressions. It lies about 400 miles due south of Algiers. Here with amazing toil they have created a fertile region. They have dug wells and found water, and have built dams to intercept and retain the occasional rainfall. The contrast of their fertile gardens with the bare and fantastic rocks which surround them, a land of exaggerated sterility where Nature herself seems dead, is described by travellers as very striking. The industry and commercial aptitude of the Mozabites is very remarkable. They excel as money-lenders and in small banking business. It is said that among them a Jew must work with his hands.

During the last few years, without attracting much attention from the outer world, France has quietly conquered the Sahara, or at all events brought its nomad tribes under effective control. The Touaregs, neither very numerous nor very well armed, have succumbed to persistent pressure and a few trifling defeats. Some are settling on the fringe of the oases; others drifting into the service of the State. The systematic brigands of centuries will pass, it has been said, in a few years from the Stone Age to the age of aviation. They recognize, not without humour, that their rôle of levying contributions has fallen into other hands. A captain of spahis in garrison at Timbuctoo, was ordered to pursue a caravan which had made off in the night without paying the market dues. “We also,” said the Touaregs, “when we stop a caravan, do so to collect _le droit de passage_.”

The conquest of the desert, long delayed, has only been achieved by the regular employment of the camel. For nearly a century, since Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, the French had made spasmodic efforts to utilize this animal, but with little success. The camel corps were regarded with ridicule and contempt, and the peculiarities of the beast were little understood. A common belief in fabulous stories of its powers of speed and endurance, its capacity for doing without food and water, occasioned much suffering and immense loss. In fact it requires, year in year out, as much sustenance as other herbivorous beasts of its bulk; where it differs from others is in its power to support extreme irregularity in its meals. This quality, and especially its ability to take in at one drink enough water for several days, render it of unequalled value for desert journeyings. The camel can work for six months in the year on the meagre diet which the sparse vegetation of the Sahara affords; it is necessary for his existence that he should spend the remaining six in complete rest at pasture, where he feeds voraciously from morning to night without losing a minute. “But it must not be believed,” says M. Gautier, “that the camel on active service does not eat; he feeds when he has the opportunity, and the opportunities must not be rare. For a caravan of camels traversing the desert, the stomach of the beasts is the sovereign lord of marches and halts, the director of the daily programme; day and night, the fatigue and hunger and sleep of the men do not enter into the account; everything is subordinated to the single necessity of nourishment for the herd. Whenever a little edible vegetation is met with, at whatever point of the itinerary, a halt is made for several hours or several days; in the intervals, even as happens sometimes, of two or three hundred kilometres or of five or six days, progress, slow and regular, is made without truce, almost without sleep, beneath sun and stars alike. One can only stop at a pasturage; a voyage in the Sahara is a hunt for a blade of grass.”

God, says the proverb, having made the desert, repaired the mischief by creating the camel. Considered absolutely it is an inferior beast of burden to the horse and mule, considered relatively to the conditions of the Sahara it is invaluable. But it must be treated according to its necessities. In the mines of Algeria, for props in the galleries, pine is preferred to oak; oak breaks suddenly when the limit of its strength is reached, pine on the contrary cracks and creaks,—it gives warning. The camel is as the oak, he gives no warning. Exhausted, he stops abruptly like a motor-car which has run short of petrol; he crouches and dies, with plenty of dignity and with an air of thinking of something else. So have ended countless camels in the service of France. But since 1902 camel corps have been raised on a scientific basis; the animal used being almost invariably the _méhari_, a species of dromedary. A body of natives of the tribe of the Chaamba has been organized, each of whom in return for a definite sum of money supplies two or three camels, which are his own property, to exchange, to sell, to traffic with as he pleases. He is, in fact, a contractor. For a further sum he provides his own food, clothing and equipment. This system seems to be a reversion to an ancient custom, which the very word “soldier” recalls.

The effect has been magical. Almost without a blow the Touareg has recognized his master. The Chaamba patrol the desert and enforce French conceptions of law and order. Communications have been opened in all directions; the tremendous journey between Algeria and the West African possessions of France is now frequently made without danger and without exciting remark. The _méharistes_ have solved the problem so long insoluble.

But a greater project is agitating the minds of the forward Colonial party, the linking of the French possessions by a Trans-Saharian railway. The scheme is not a new one. It was much discussed thirty years ago. The French Government appointed a scientific commission to study the matter, and the French public, ever ready to support a vast engineering scheme, was eager to subscribe the necessary capital. The murder by Touaregs of the Flatters mission administered a cold douche, and for the time being the subject dropped. It has been revived of late by M. Leroy Beaulieu and other writers. Two lines are projected, one to Lake Tchad, the other to Timbuctoo. The distance to be covered is enormous, in each case about 2700 miles, of which 2000 is desert. The engineering difficulties are not great, but the commercial prospects of such a line seem very poor. A train or two a year would deal with all the existing traffic, and there appears little scope for development. It is suggested that the Upper Niger may become another Nile, but even then its trade would seek an outlet rather to the Atlantic than to the Mediterranean and across the Great Sahara. The post route to South America might be shortened a little, but at what cost and inconvenience! The best hope for the would-be railway builders lies in the discovery of minerals. A mining industry would develop the Sahara as it has developed the bare uplands of the Transvaal and the icy wastes of Klondyke. But of this there is no present indication.

Meantime, in the extreme west, on the borders of Morocco, the railway has been extended as far as Colomb-Béchar, a distance of 728 kilometres to the south-west of Oran. This is a strategic line. It is in the direction of Morocco that the eyes of the army of Africa are now turned. French writers are never tired of repeating that Barbary is one, and should be undivided, that the masters of Tunis and Algeria must be lords of Morocco too. The safety of Algeria itself is said to depend on the French control of Morocco. Such is ever the language of him who would go forward. We have said it ourselves often enough, and to fix the limits of empire is sometimes more difficult than to advance them.

It may be worth while to note what is the present military force of France in North Africa. According to the project for the Budget of 1911, the force in Algeria consists of 2134 officers and 52,927 men; in Tunisia of 698 officers and 17,007 men. The cavalry numbers in all 440 officers and 9074 men. The number of native troops is singularly small, about 15,000 infantry and 1800 spahis. Judging by our experience in India it would be possible to make a far larger use of native military talent, to the great advantage of the population, and to the consolidation of the French hold on the country. The native troops employed in the late Morocco campaign, especially the Tunisians, bore themselves with the greatest credit.

In the Sahara special companies have been recently raised. They contain a certain admixture of French troops:—24 officers and 123 men to 817 men. It would seem a special field for the raising of a force of natural cavalry and camel-men.

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_X—TIMGAD_

The Roman frontier—Lambessa—The Empire ruined by bad finance—African Emperors—The plan of Timgad—Buildings, inscriptions, and mosaics— Prosperity of Roman Africa—Local patriotism—The Roman tradition.

“As in those realms where Cæsars once bore sway, Defaced by time and tottering to decay, There in the ruin heedless of the dead, The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed.” GOLDSMITH.

East and west of Batna lay the Roman frontier line during the first two centuries of the Empire. It was marked by a series of cities, partly military, partly commercial; extensive ruins bespeak their ancient importance. As elsewhere in Europe and North Africa the fall of the Empire seldom meant the abandonment of the city sites; they continued to be occupied by successive generations of men, even though, like Rome herself, for a period they sank to insignificance. And their ruined buildings, public and private, offered a convenient quarry to the builders of subsequent ages. It results that we are scarcely able to find an ancient city in which the original plan of house and street has not been seriously interfered with. While, as in many English towns, the main lines of the streets often follow the Roman thoroughfares, we have seldom the opportunity of studying the scheme as a whole, although all through Southern and Western Europe innumerable individual features exist more or less well preserved.

We owe the existence of Pompeii and Herculaneum to the accident of their overwhelming by ashes and lava from Vesuvius. The former has been laid bare; the excavation of the latter, a much more serious matter, awaits the day when the disposers of wealth, public or private, shall see fit to undertake a work, which promises the greatest results. It happens by a piece of exceptional good fortune that here, on the southern edge of Barbary, Pompeii has a serious rival. The Roman city of Thamagudi, now called Timgad, has since its destruction at the time of the Arab invasion of A.D. 692 never been the habitation of man. To this cause alone may its present condition be attributed. It has passed twelve centuries in a great silence. Its ruined temples and baths have been the haunt of the panther and the jackal. No neighbouring town despoiled its stones, or ground its marbles to make mortar. Its columns lay prone, its temples and houses were for the most part levelled with the ground; yet a massive arch or two told through the centuries to the watcher from afar that here once stood a Roman city.

The night of centuries is past; the long silence is broken; the jackals have fled to their mountains; and a Latin race is tenderly safeguarding its heritage. Once again a road leads to the portals of the ancient city, and with infinite skill and care the debris has been cleared away. Columns have been re-erected, masonry replaced in its original position and fragments of inscriptions pieced together; a very triumph of that vast capacity for taking pains which is such an important element of French genius. One charm of the place to the visitor is that it is not exploited as a tourist resort. A little museum has been set up to hold the treasures found among the ruins, a modest hotel has been built, and the neighbouring Arabs have been encouraged to hold a weekly market outside the walls; but there is no turnstile to be passed, you are not delivered over to a guide, no tout is permitted to worry you, and you are free to pass to and fro, to go in and out as you list as long as you don’t steal or deface anything. So for a contemplative mind every possible attraction is conserved.

The Roman conquest and civilization—or rather assimilation—of North Africa were slow, tentative and reluctant. Scipio Æmilianus burnt Carthage in 146 B.C.; it was more than a hundred years later that Julius Cæsar handed over Cirta to the soldiers of Sittius. Under Augustus a camp was established at Theveste (Tebessa), and the Third Legion, Augusta, was stationed there with the object of protecting the territory of Cirta, and the proconsular province which is now Tunisia. Under the shelter of this post, during the first century of our era, the great corn lands enclosed by the Aurès mountains were gradually brought under Roman control. The building of Thamagudi in the reign of Trajan, in the year A.D. 100, is evidence of the importance to which this region had by that time risen. This process continued during the next two centuries. No doubt as the population of Italy declined, and her fertility decreased, Rome came to rely more and more on the corn of Africa, and more land was continually brought under cultivation. This is the significance of such a city as Timgad, lying over 3000 feet above the sea on a slope of the Aurès mountains.

Our ideas of the Roman Empire are perhaps coloured by the title of Gibbon’s great work. We are disposed to think that its decline began with its establishment. Gibbon had always at the back of his mind the belief that Christianity was the cause of its ultimate ruin, and that the Empire began to totter on the day when the first Roman citizen was baptised a Christian. But for two or three hundred years, though the Empire was frequently torn by political dissensions, its material prosperity was very great. We know now that it was ruined in the end by its financial errors, its unwise and unjust system of land taxation, the grasping greed of Treasury officials and the anxiety of upstart Emperors to gratify their supporters in the army and the Roman mob at anybody’s cost.

It is a vice of civilizations to believe themselves invulnerable. As late as the fifth century it was inconceivable to a Roman gentleman that the mighty structure could be swept away; and it is perhaps true that even then it might have been saved by a return to sounder systems of finance. Even so to-day the European nations are arming to the teeth against each other, instead of husbanding their resources and concerting measures of defence against races more numerous and more prolific. The uprising of the Asiatic peoples is a fact to which we cannot be other than wilfully blind. A beginning of the trouble may be upon us at any minute.

Timgad was built by the soldiers of the Third Legion, then stationed at Tebessa. Its head-quarters were shortly afterwards moved to Lambessa, and during the second and third centuries the frontier outposts were gradually pushed forward. They occupied a line on the south side of the Aurès range, extending to the south and south-east of Biskra and then branching north-west to Bou-Saida. At least in some districts a ditch and rampart marked the limits of the Empire.

Lambessa grew into a large city said to have contained 60,000 inhabitants. Its considerable ruins, of which the most important are the Prætorium and certain arches, are visible to-day. The importance of the position is realized by the French, who have large barracks and a force of 4000 men at Batna, only a few miles off. Striking evidence of the success of Rome’s treatment of subject races is to be found in the fact that with all the wealth of numerous great cities to protect, her military force in North Africa consisted only of one legion of 5500 men and auxiliary forces of infantry and cavalry, making a total of 15,000 men. At first the legionaries were raised in Europe, chiefly in Gaul, but in the second century they were recruited entirely among the indigenous population. Retired soldiers were granted lands and exemptions on the condition that their sons enlisted. In this way towns like Lambessa, half military, half commercial, grew up. The actual number of emigrants from Italy was small; with her declining population she had no emigrants to send.

There is, therefore, reason to believe that the inhabitants of such cities as Timgad were not to any appreciable extent colonists from Europe; they were rather Romanized Berbers. The names as they appear in inscriptions corroborate this. They are not Latin, if Latin in form. This point is of great importance in considering not only the nature of the Roman rule in North Africa, but also the history and possibilities of the Berber population. They were Romanized once, they are Arabized to-day; what may they be to-morrow?

As we stand in the Forum of Timgad to-day, we may reflect that this noble city was built and inhabited by the ancestors of the gabbling native crowd which is holding its market at the gate. Doubtless in their simple minds these robed figures are wondering what in the world we come for. They must be aware that it is not a religious exercise; we have our holy places to which they observe that some of us betake ourselves on Sunday mornings; no Christian marabout lies buried here, and we are therefore not votaries making a pilgrimage. Yet is our conduct not mere levity; we wander about with little books in our hands and are very earnest and sometimes vociferous to our companions. Perhaps the most enlightened native opinion inclines to the belief that we are working a spell or enchantment, it may be for the benefit of our motor-cars, which we bring with us to the gate.

Rome, the great mother, welcomed all to her bosom, and it seems that all were glad to come. Little by little the African townships became Latin or Roman municipalities. Roman citizenship became the ambition and the pride of their inhabitants. No higher honour could be inscribed on a tombstone than _Civitatem Romanam consecutus_. And the Roman religion helped the process of consolidation. Olympus was no close borough. There was always room for another deity. We know, in fact, that the Romans were ever ready to welcome a fresh cult. It was the political, not the religious attitude of the Christians which brought them within the reach of the law and under the displeasure of the Emperors. So the Berbers’ gods were Romanized like themselves. Baal Ammon became Saturnus Augustus. The open sanctuaries gave way to closed temples of classical design. Human sacrifice was abandoned. And the Berbers learnt to raise shrines to the Roman allegorical deities, Concord, Fortune, Peace, and Victory; above all to worship the existing order in the divine person of the Emperor. His personal character had nothing whatever to do with this. The infamous Caracalla was the object of as much veneration as the philosopher saint Marcus Aurelius. At the beginning of the third century Africa gave many of its sons to the purple. Macrinus, who attained it by the murder of Caracalla, was a native of the district of Cæsarea. His successor, Elagabalus, of execrated memory, was the son of a former commandant of the Third Legion. And the Gordians, representing as they did the noblest blood in Rome, the blood of the Gracchi and of Trajan, came to the throne from the proconsulate of Africa. Concerning the younger Gordian Gibbon has left us a memorable sentence, which at once exhibits the antithetical bias of his style, and a certain sly humour of which he was master. “His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were intended for use rather than for ostentation.[9] The Roman people acknowledged in the features of the younger Gordian the resemblance of Scipio Africanus, recollected with pleasure that his mother was the granddaughter of Antoninus Pius, and rested the public hope on those latent virtues which had hitherto, as they fondly imagined, lain concealed in the luxurious indolence of a private life.”

Footnote 9:

“By each of his concubines the younger Gordian left three or four children. His literary productions, though less numerous, were by no means contemptible.”—Note to Gibbon.