CHAPTER XI

THE SHIP OF THE DESERT AND HIS OCEAN OF SAND

A camel may be a cumbersome, ungainly and unlovely creature, and may be destined to be succeeded by the automobile, to which he seems to have taken a violent dislike; but there is no underrating the great and valuable part which he has played in the development of the African provinces and protectorates of France. He has borne most of their burdens, literally; has ploughed their fields, pumped their water, and even exploited the tourists, to say nothing of having been the companion of the Mussulman faithful on their pilgrimages.

The camel caravans which set out across the desert from Tlemcen, Tunis, and Constantine (there are no camels nearer Algiers than Arba) are in charge of a very exalted personage,--or he thinks he is. His official title is _gellâby_. Each and every beast of burden is loaded to the limit, and pads his way with his great nubbly hoofs across untold leagues of sand or brush-covered soil without complaint. At every stop, however, and every time a start is made, he always gives vent to shrieks and groans; but as this procedure takes place at each end of a day's journey as well, it is probably pure bluff, as the camel-sheik claims. To one unused to it the noise seems like the wails which are supposed to come up out of the inferno.

The camel of Africa, so-called, is really not a camel, _he is a dromedary_; the camel has two humps, the dromedary but one, _but camel is the word commonly used_. The two-humped quadruped, then, is a camel,--the direct descendant of the camel of Asia, whilst that of the single hump is the dromedary of Africa. The distinction must be remembered by all who talk or write on the subject, with the same precision that one differentiates between African and Indian elephants.

The camel has by no means the rude health and strength which has so often been attributed to him, indeed he is a very delicate beast and demands a climate dry and hot. Cold and snow and persistent rains are death to a camel. A camel must be well nourished, and with a certain regularity, or he soon becomes ill and dies. He is easily frightened and can spread a panic among his fellows with the rapidity of wild-fire.

For the most part the camel is kindly and temperate, but he can get in a rage and can be very dangerous to all who approach him on foot.

The camel of the south cannot live in the north and vice versa. They are not acclimated to the varying conditions. One judges a good camel (dromedary) by his hump; firm and hard, it is a sure sign of a good-natured, hard-working, friendly sort of a camel; if flabby and mangy, then beware.

A camel eats normally thirty or forty kilos of fodder a day, and must be allowed four hours to do it in. As to drink, once in two or three days in summer is enough, but in winter he can go perhaps ten days, and his food bill is increased nothing thereby.

He can carry 150-160 kilos, a parcel hung over each side in saddle-bag fashion. The _mehari_, or long-distance, fast-gaited camel of the Sahara, is to the ordinary dromedary what a blooded Arabian is to a Percheron. He can better stand hunger and thirst, and on an average needs drink only once in five days; furthermore is not as liable to fright as is the _djemel_, as the Arab calls the camel, and is more

patient and more courageous. Less rapid than a race-horse for short distances, the _mehari_, well-trained and well-driven, can make his hundred kilometres a day, day in and day out.

The saddle is called a _rahala_ and has a concave seat, a large, high back, and an elevated pommel. The rider sits in the bowl-like saddle, his legs crossed on the beast's neck. The _mehari_ is driven through a ring in its nose, to which is attached a rope of camel's hair. The beast is somewhat difficult to drive, more so than the _djemel_, and only its master can get good results. To mount, the beast kneels as do ordinary camels.

_En route_ the _mehari_ does not graze, but waits for a decent interval and takes its meal comfortably. A _mehari_, not accustomed to the sight of a horse, is often put into a terrible fright thereby. The education of a _mehari_ is very difficult; it takes a year to break one.

The policing of the great Saharan tracts would not be possible without troops mounted on _mehara_,--the plural of the word _mehari_,--and France owes much of the development of her African provinces to the _mehari_ and the slower-going camel.

The dromedary, or camel, as it is referred to in common speech, was an importation into Algeria away back in some unrecalled epoch, at any rate anterior to the Arab invasion of the eleventh century.

The _mehari_ was a warlike beast as far back into antiquity as the days of Herodotus, Tacitus, and Pliny. Herodotus, recounting the battle of Sardes, said, according to Pliny: "_Camelos inter jumeuta pascit Oriens, quorum duo genera Bactriani et Arabici...._"

If an Arab is owner of a thousand camels, he wards off any evil that may befall them by leading out the oldest and blinding it with a rod of white hot iron.

A camel that has fallen ill may be cured, many superstitious Arabs believe, by allowing it to witness the operation of searing the hoofs of another, tied and thrown upon the ground. This is auto-suggestion surely, though where the curative powers come in it is hard to see.

When a _bayra_, a female camel, has given birth to five camels, the last being a male, her ears are bored and she is sent out to pasture, never more to be put to the rough work of caravaning. Like putting an old horse to pasture in perpetuity, it seems a humane act, and it solves the race question in the camel world, or would if the camels only knew the why and the wherefore.

The camel's feet are admirably made for the sands of the desert; they form by nature a sort of adapted _ski_ or snow-shoe. The hoof (though really it is no hoof) is bifurcated and has no horny substance, merely a short, crooked claw, or nail, at the rear of each bifurcation, a sort of elastic sole--the predecessor of rubber heels, no doubt--covering the base. The camel travels well in sand, but with difficulty over stony ground, where frequently the Arabs envelop his feet with cloths or leather wrappings.

The camel possesses further four other callosities, one on each knee, and he uses them all four every time he gets up or lies down. These callous places are something the beast is born with; they get ragged and mangy-looking with time, but they are there from birth.

The boss, or hump, of the camel-dromedary is mere gristle; it contains no bone, and is more or less abundant according to the health of the animal.

A well-fed and happy camel, starting out on a long march, regards his well-rounded hump with pride. Excessive travel and forced marches diminish its shape and size and the beast seemingly becomes ashamed and literally feels sore about it. But, like the conquered general on a battle-field who loses his sword, he ultimately gets it all back again, and a little rest, a change of diet, and a good, long drink--"a camel's neck," you might call it--makes a difference with the camel and his hump in the course of a very few days.

A camel gets unruly and cries out at times, and often becomes unmanageable, but an application of a sticky gob of tar or pitch on his forehead usually quiets him down.

The baby camels usually come into the world one at a time; and can stand up on their four legs the first day, and run around like their elders at the end of a week.

At the age of four years the young camel is put to work, and carries a rider, two barrels of wine or two gunny-sacks filled with crockery or ironware indiscriminately. His average life is twenty years, and, as with the horse, one reckons his age by his teeth.

The Arab gets an astonishing amount of work out of an apparently unwilling camel. He encourages him with punches, and beatings and oaths and songs. Yes, the Arab camel-driver even sings to his camel to induce him to get along faster, and plays a screechy air on the _galoubet_; and the curious thing is that the flagging energies of a camel will revive immediately his driver begins to drone. It is a custom which has come down from antiquity, and soon one may expect every caravan to carry its own phonograph and megaphone.

The chief of these airs, rendered into French for us by a lisping, blue-eyed Arab, was, as near as may be:--

"Battez pour nous, Battez pour nous, O Chameaux! Battez pour nous, Battez pour nous, Chameaux, pour vos maîtres!"

No very great rhyme or rhythm there, but it suits the camel's taste in poesy.

To "vagabond" with a camel caravan would be the very ideal of a simple life. The life of a caravan to-day is as it was in Bible times, except that one carries a "Smith and Wesson" or a "Colt" instead of a spear.

The following essential facts apply to all the camel caravans making their respective ways from the coast towns of the northern provinces down into the Soudan and the Sahara. The caravan usually makes its day's journey between wells, or at least plans to stop at a source of water at night rather than push on; this in case one has not been previously passed by, and every one become refreshed a short time before.

A dozen to thirty kilometres or so a day is the average commercial caravan journey,--for a part of the outfit walks, it must be remembered,--and an eight or ten weeks' itinerary is the duration of the average journey. Such food as is carried is generally of pounded dates and figs in the form of a paste, which the dry climate more or less petrifies.

The Arab trader, the chief of the trading caravan, and the city merchant _en voyage_, be he Arab. Turk, or Jew, is a man of position, the others are mere helpers, employés or perhaps slaves.

At each important halting-place of a caravan the Sheik's great tent is unstrapped from its camel bearer and set up on a _pied de terre_ in as likely a spot as may be found. The Arab tent is no haphazard shack or shelter; it is a thing of convention, and has its shape and size laid down by tradition.

The great central post or pillar has a height of two and a half metres, and the _perches_, or entrance posts, have a height of two metres, and a considerable inclination, whereas the central one is perpendicular.

The tent proper, the covering, is invariably of

alternate black and brown or brown and white woollen bands, sewn together with a stout thread of camel's-hair. These bands are called _felidj_ and have a width usually of seventy-five centimetres.

Within there is no furniture properly called, simply the provision for a nomad life, sacks of grain, dates, figs or olives, a few pots and pans, harness, etc., and a few smaller sacks or bags, _cachettes_, where the womenfolk hide their earrings, corals, and brooches. These last are usually used as pillows at night. It is a law of somebody--perhaps the Prophet--that none of the Arabs' tent accessories must be of wood or iron, save the tent poles, which are of both, being made of wood and shod with iron; thus all utensils and other furnishings are of skins or mats, and dishes of woven grass, and all cords are of spun camel's-hair. A few copper pots and pans there are of necessity, and a few rude crockery bowls.

The desert caravans form to-day the same classic pictures as of yore as they thread the trails and paths, obscure and involved enough to the stranger, but plain sailing to the chief or guide of a caravan who precedes the following "squadrons" as a Malay pilot precedes his ship.

"At the head of his dusty caravan, Laden with treasures from realms afar

* * * * *

Through the clouds of dust by the caravan raised Came the flash of harness and jewelled sheath."

The chief of a tribe, or even a caravan, is a very grand personage among his fellows, and when he is _en route_ rides apart and sleeps in a palanquin or _attouch_, an _attouch_ being no other thing than a cabin on a ship; here a cabin on the ship of the desert.

The _attouch_, to be _à la mode_, must have a tall, chimney-like ventilator rising in the middle and tipped with ostrich plumes. Generally this retreat is large enough to shelter two persons,--always persons of importance in an ostrich-feather-tipped _attouch_, a sheik and his favourite wife, for example.

The caravans of to-day vary in size from a dozen to fifty camels to a train of four, five, or seven hundred (in Tripoli). Under certain conditions, after a long journey, the camel carriers--the freighters--are usually allowed to rest a matter of days, weeks, or even months, according to the lack of necessitous conditions for pushing on and for recuperation. One of the chief trading towns of the Tripoli caravans to-day in Africa is Kano, a place ruled by a native chief and inhabited by a black population. The chief, for a consideration, affords shelter and protection, and the Arabs of the caravan open up shop and do business in the real county-fair style that they knew before county fairs were even thought of. Native products are bought or traded for in return, and such currency as passes is a sort of wampum made of shells and a few Maria Theresa dollars. Barter, or mere swapping, with a bonus on one side or the other, is the usual caravan Arabs' idea of merchandizing, and the European can as often get a native-made woollen burnous or a camel's-hair blanket by the exchange of a "dollar watch" or a "Seth Thomas clock," as he can by giving up two or three gold _louis_.

The proper benediction to cast down on the head of any Sheik who may have shown you a courtesy _en route_ is to say in simple French:--"_Merci, noble Sheik, de ta générosité. Que la bénédiction d'Allah descende sur toi, sur tes femmes, tes enfants, tes troupeaux et ta tribu._" If you can give him a slab of milk chocolate or a piece of "pepsin" chewing gum, he will appreciate that, too.

The negroes and negresses accompanying the caravans walk, but the Arab either rides camel-back or horseback, like the veritable king of his own little kingdom, which, virtually, every Arab is when he is on the open plain.

The Touaregs, south of Touggourt, one of the real, genuine, Simon-pure tribes of desert Arabs, are not given to the trafficking and merchandizing of those who live down on the coast. Their chief, and in many cases, sole occupation consists in catering for the migratory caravan outfits, selling them dates and mutton and water, for if a Touareg can discover anywhere an unworked oasis with a spring, he has got something which to him is very nearly as good as a gold mine.

Among the Touaregs there are blacks and whites; the whites dress like the conventional Arabs, but the blacks after a fashion more like that of the savage blacks further south. The three superimposed blouses are never too great a weight or thickness for the genuine Arab, even in the blazing furnace of the Sahara. They ward off heat and cold alike.

One of Napoleon's famous sayings, forgotten almost in favour of others still more famous, was: "Of all obstacles which oppose an army on the march, the greatest, the most difficult to remove, is the desert."

One imagines the desert as a great, flat,

sandy plain with illimitable horizons, like the flat bed of a dried-out ocean. This is a misconception of our youth, brought about by too diligent an application to the precepts of the copy-book and the school geography. All things are possible in the _vrai désert_. The oasis is not the only interpolation in the monotonous landscape. There are great _chotts_ or marsh tracts, even depressions where a murky alkaline water, unfit for man or beast, is always to be found, vast stretches of rocky plateau, great dunes of sand and even jutting peaks of bare and wind-swept rock, with surfaces as smooth as if washed by the waves of the ocean. These are the common desert characteristics throughout the Sahara, from the Gulf of Gabès to the Moroccan frontier and beyond. Occasionally there are the palpable evidences of new-made volcanic soil, and even granite and sandstone eminences half buried in some engulfing wave of sand swept up by the last sirocco that passed that way.

Over all, however, is an evident and almost impenetrable haze. At a certain moment of one's progress in the desert, he sees nothing of distinction before or behind or right or left, and at the next finds himself close to a pyramid of rock fifty feet high. Really the desert is very bewildering and enigmatic, and the Arab who navigates it with his caravan is like the sailor on the deep sea. He has to take his bearings every once and again or he is lost and perhaps engulfed.

It is the fashion to write and speak of the mystery of the desert, but in truth there is no mystery about it, albeit its moods are varied and inexplicable at times. To the solitary traveller there is an interest in the desert unknown to seas, or mountains, or even to rolling

prairies. Above is a sky of stainless beauty, and the splendour of a pitiless, blinding glare; the sirocco caresses you like a lion with flaming breath; all round lie drifted sand-heaps, where the wind leaves its trace in solid waves. Flayed rocks are here, skeletons of mountains, and hard, unbroken, sun-dried plains, over which he who rides is spurred by the idea that the bursting of a water-skin, or the pricking of a camel's hoof, would be a certain lingering death of torture. The springs seem to cry the warning words, "Drink and away!" There is nothing mysterious or dull about such a land, indeed it is very real and exciting, and man has as much opportunity here as anywhere of measuring his forces with Nature's, and of emerging, if possible, triumphant from the trial. This explains the Arab's proverb: "Voyaging is victory." In the desert, even more than upon the ocean, there is present death; hardship is there, and piracy, and ship-wreck.

Newcomers to Algeria and Tunisia talk of the monotonous calm of the sand dunes of the desert; but those who know its silences best find nothing monotonous about them. It is as the automobilist expresses it with regard to the great tree-lined "Routes Nationales" of France--"there is sameness, but not monotony." One does not become ennuied in the desert. He may be alone within a circle of many miles radius, but each glint and glimmer of sunlight, each leaping gazelle and Saharan hare--really a jack-rabbit--keeps him company, and when a camel caravan or a patrol of Spahis rises on the horizon, he feels as "crowded" as he would in a "bridge crush" in New York, or on the Boulevard des Italiens on a fête-day.

Here at one side is a shepherd's striped tent, surrounded by bleating sheep and goats and tended by a lean, lonesome Arab who is apparently bored stiff with lonesomeness. His is a lonesome life indeed, like that of a shepherd anywhere, and when night comes--often drear and chill even in the Sahara--he slips under his tent flap, pulls his burnous up around his ears and trusts to luck that no jackal will make away with a kid or lamb while he sleeps. He is not paid to sleep by the owner of the flock (a franc and a quarter a day, out of which he feeds himself), but still, sleep he must. Fatigue comes even to a lazy Arab sheep-herder, and he'd rather fall sound asleep beside a brazier inside his tent than doze intermittently before a fire of brushwood in the open. Who would not, at a franc and a quarter a day; particularly as the day includes the night! There is no eight-hour day in the desert.

Before he sleeps, he munches a "_pain Arab_" and pulls his _matoui_ from his belt, from which he fills his pipe with _kif_ and soon smokes himself into insensibility. Poor sheep and goats, what may not happen to them whilst their guardian is in his paradise of burnt hemp!

In the little oasis settlements where there are natural springs, and not at the _Bordjs_ or government posts of relays, one's sight is gladdened with flowering fig and almond blooms or fruits and bizarre spiny cacti with pink laurel and palms in all the subtropical profusion of a happy sunlight land. The chief characteristics of an oasis are the superb giant palm-trees, their _aigrettes_ reaching skywards almost to infinity, the azure blue cut into fantastic, fairy shapes, which no artist can paint and no kodakist snap in all their fleeting grace.

Here dwell a few score of sheep, goat, horse, or camel owning Arabs, who mysteriously live off of nothing at all, except when they sell a kid or a baby camel to a passing caravan. It is the simple life with a vengeance! And the children play about in the shadow of the tents naked as worms, and, as they grow up, marry, and adopt by instinct the same idle life. They know no ideas of progress, and perhaps are the happier for it.

The colour effects in the desert are things to make an artist rave. The dunes change colour with each hour of the day, and the silver light of the sunrise and the streaky blood-red and orange of the sunsets are marvels to be seen nowhere else on earth.

The temperature in the desert frequently changes with a suddenness that would be remarked in Paris, the place par excellence in Europe where the changes in temperature are most trying; or in Marseilles, where, from a subtropical summer sun, one can be transplanted on the breath of the _mistral_ into the midst of an Alpine winter in the twinkling of an eye. Fifty degrees centigrade at high noon in the desert may be followed by ten degrees at midnight. That's a change of seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, and that's something.