CHAPTER VI.

ANIMAL LIFE IN THE DESERT.

The artist who wishes to represent the broad expanse of Ocean's "liquid plain," does not fail to animate it with the white canvas of the labouring ships. If he paints the Desert, his picture would be divided by a horizontal line into two parts--the blue heaven, the yellow sand; the latter, an undulating sea, with a few clumps of palms in the background, and in the foreground, to enliven the too monotonous scene, a group or so of camels. The camel is, in fact, the indispensable accessory of every view of the Desert, as the ship of every marine painting; which justifies once more the Arab designation of "ship of the Desert" or "terrestrial ship" (_gouareb el beurr_).

In Book the First I have spoken of the Camel properly so-called, or camel with two humps, which is peculiar to Central and Eastern Asia. The camel of Arabia and Africa is the dromedary. The latter is employed conjointly with the two-humped camel in the westernmost countries of Asia: in Egypt, and in Nubia, he is much more widely spread than his congener, which is nearly unknown in the rest of Africa. The dromedary has but one hump. His hair is soft, woolly, moderately long about the body, longer and much thicker on the hump, the head, the neck, and the shoulders. Its colour varies from a reddish-brown to a clear yellow. Zoologists recognize three varieties of this species:--The _Brown dromedary_, also called, but improperly, the Caucasian dromedary--he is brown, like the Bactrian camel, and his short squat limbs indicate strength rather than agility; the _White dromedary_, of a very transparent colour, and of slender figure; and the _Egyptian dromedary_, larger than either of the preceding, and with body and limbs uniformly clothed in short gray hair. But the Arabs distinguish only two races: the _Djemel_, or camel of burden, which is no other, probably, than the Caucasian dromedary; and the _Mahari_, or camel for the saddle and war, whose name seems to apply equally to the two other varieties.

The mahari is to the djemel what our chargers are to our carthorses, or, as the Arabs say, what the _djend_ (noble) is to the _kheddim_ (the servant). He has a very sure foot, a free, sustained, and rapid trot; he is sober, enduring, and courageous; a true courser, and the nomade's inseparable friend and companion. His training is a matter of the highest importance, and skilfully adapted to develop all his best qualities and highest faculties.

The Arabs of the Tell assert that the maharis accomplish in one day ten times the march of a caravan, or a hundred leagues; but the best in blood and breeding do not generally exceed a daily journey of from thirty-five to forty leagues.

The young mahari has his place in the Arab's tent. The children play with him; he is a recognized member of the family; custom and gratitude attach him to his masters, whom he divines to be his friends.

If the djemel be not as noble as the mahari, he is not less useful. Without him, all relations would be suspended between the peoples of the Sahara; the Soudan, wide, populous, and fertile as it is, would be a _terra incognita_; he is the sole means of intercommunication possible in the arid wastes of the Desert.

Alike living and dead, he is the fortune of his master.

Living, he carries the tents and the provisions; he makes war, he carries on commerce; that he might be patient, God (say the Arabs) created him without gall; he fears neither hunger nor thirst, fatigue nor heat; his hair is woven into the burnous and the tent-stuff; the milk of the female nourishes rich and poor, and fattens the horses; it is "a spring which does not dry up."[73]

Dead, all his flesh is excellent eating; his hump (_deroua_) forms the daintiest dish at the banquet; in the bottles made of his skin, the water is neither consumed by wind nor sun; the shoes fashioned from it may tread unhurt upon the viper, and will save the traveller's feet from burning wounds (_haffa_); denuded of its hair, afterwards soaked in water, and simply applied to a wooden saddle, without nails or pegs, it adheres to it, like the bark to the tree, and communicates to the whole a solidity which will defy war, the chase, and the foray.

The superiority of the mahari consists in this, that to all his own peculiar qualities he adds those of the djemel. His inferiority arises from the difficulty of his training, which consumes for more than a year all his master's time without compensation, and from the fact that animals of his race are few in number.

* * * * *

If we turn to the poet or the artist for a picture of the Desert, we find it peopled with animals of a very unsatisfactory character: the lion, the leopard, the panther, in quest of prey, seeking whom they may devour, or troops of hyænas and jackals, tearing with keen teeth the corpses of men and animals.

"With these, lean dogs in herds obscene repair, And every kind that snuffs the tainted air."--(_Lucan._)

Others diversify the scene with the graceful form of the gazelle, with the ungainly body, immensely long neck, and spotted hide of the giraffe; or with the ostrich, the camel of the bird-world, spreading his plumes to the wind, and flying with swift feet from the hunter or the wild beast that pursues him. But, in truth, these are bold fancies, artistic or poetic licenses, rather than exact representations of what one really sees in the Desert; and most of the animals with which we people, at our pleasure, the immense solitudes of Africa and Asia actually belong to neighbouring regions of a less arid character. And, in the first place, the lion of the Desert is a myth, or nearly so. "When you speak," says Carrette, "to the inhabitants of the Desert of these ferocious beasts which Europeans give them as companions, they reply with imperturbable coolness, 'You have, then, in your own country, lions which drink air and browse on leaves? But, among us, lions must have running water and live flesh. Therefore they only appear in those parts of the Sahara where are wooded hills and an abundance of water. We dread nothing but the viper (_lefa_) and the innumerable swarms of mosquitoes; the latter being found wherever any humidity prevails.'"[74]

What Carrette relates of the lion is also true of the other carnivora, of the panther and the leopard, as well as of the hyæna and the jackal. It is surely easy to understand that these animals greatly prefer to sojourn in fertile and well-watered countries, where they enjoy freshness, shelter, copious supplies of water, and abundant prey, than in hot glaring plains of sand, which offer them no asylum, and where they run the risk of perishing of hunger and thirst. It is, then, only on exceptional occasions that the lions and other large _felidæ_ of Africa issue from their caverns or their lairs, and wander into the Desert (properly so called) in pursuit of prey. The hyæna and the jackal venture there more willingly. We know that these carnivora only attack living animals at the last extremity; their food is the dead and even putrid flesh; it is a nutriment which costs them less trouble to obtain, and probably, also, most pleases their taste. Thus, it is by no means an uncommon occurrence to see them in the towns and _q'sours_, devouring the carrion, or in the cemeteries disinterring the corpses; they follow also in the Desert the caravans and detachments of troops on the march, and at night prowl around their encampments, in the hope of some windfall, which they seldom expect in vain, but which the dogs, the vultures (_Cathartes percnopterus_ and _vultur fulvus_), the _gypaëtos_, and the crows rarely fail to dispute with them.

The region of the table-lands, or Saharan Steppes, the valleys of Erosion, and certain parts of the Gobi--Persia, Syria, and Arabia--which are not absolutely deprived of rain, or which are refreshed by mountain-streams, nourish several species of mammifers: gazelles, hedgehogs, porcupines, hares, offering both to man and the carnivora an abundant variety of game. Of all these animals, the most interesting are the gazelles, several species of which inhabit the desert region. I shall refer in the first place to the gazelle properly so called, or _Antilope dorcas_, so remarkable for the grace of his movements, his slender limbs, and the expressive gentleness of his eyes. This beautiful species is common in Central Sahara, Nubia, and Asia. He lives in numerous troops, is of small stature, with a yellowish or yellow-brown skin on the back, and a white belly, a brown or blackish belt marking the sides. The horns, larger and stronger in the male than in the female, have a double curve, are lyrated, and without projections. The Ariel Gazelle is about twenty inches high at the shoulder. The _Gazella Soemmeringii_ belongs to Abyssinia and Sennaar. The gazelle _nanguer_ is found as far as Morocco, Nubia, and in the Cordofou; some varieties occur at the Senegal. Finally, the oryx-leucoryx inhabits Tropical Africa, and rarely makes his appearance in the Deserts; he differs from the gazelle in his arched horns, but his skin is nearly the same. Although the gazelles are generally considered extremely timid animals, which, moreover, their weakness would fully justify, they display on emergency a surprising courage. When they cannot escape from danger through agility, they bravely confront the enemy which attacks them. Menaced by a panther or a leopard, they form themselves into a circle, which, bristling everywhere with keen-pointed horns, compels the antagonist to retreat.

In the deserts of Africa and Arabia the traveller frequently meets with small rodents, which excavate their burrows in the sandy soil, and only issue from them at night in quest of food. These are the jerboas and jerbilles. The jerboas are easily recognized by the length of their hind-legs and the disposition of their toes--three to each hind-foot, the middle larger than the rest; five to each fore-foot; and all furnished with sharp, strong, crooked claws; their structure resembling that of the _raptores_ among birds. These animals leap with great celerity, and to an extraordinary distance. The tail, which is a fifth longer than the body, and terminated by a tuft of black hair, forms at one and the same time a sort of balance, a rudder, and a lever. It enables the jerboa to preserve his equilibrium, and to direct himself when he has taken his spring; or, in a state of repose, furnishes him with a substantial support.

The jerboas constitute, in the family of _dipodidæ_, a tribe composed of several species, which are found in eastern and central Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The jerbilles, owing to the similarity of name, are often confounded with the jerboas; but the only things they have in common are a certain conformity of habits, and a nearly equal aptitude for leaping.

Otherwise, their organization rather resembles that of the rat, along with which it is classed by zoologists. Their hind-legs are much shorter than those of the jerboa, and their tail is garnished with but a few short, stiff hairs. Like the jerboas, they inhabit the sandy wildernesses of Africa, Asia, and eastern Europe.

These small animals, exclusively frugivorous and graminivorous, seem able, in the solitary places where they make their retreats, to multiply themselves _ad infinitum_; but, while a great number perish through famine, they are also decimated by a host of enemies in the reptiles of the Desert, and especially by the terrible horned viper, or _cerastes_, and a great saurian, intermediate between the lizard and crocodile--the "varan of the Desert."

The horned viper (_vipera cerastes_) is thus named on account of the two horns or protuberances on its forehead, which give it a physiognomy more hideous, perhaps, than that of any of its congeners. It attains the length of two to three feet. Its head is depressed, very obtuse, swollen behind the eyes, and, so to speak, truncated in front. Its body, cased in shells of a tawny-like yellow, marked with brown spots, blends curiously with the sand, half-buried in which it lurks to surprise its prey or escape from its enemies. The cerastes frequents the deserts of Lybia, Arabia, the Sahara, and the valley of the Nile. Its bite is exceedingly dangerous.

The _varans_, or _monitors_, called also _tupinambis_ by the ancient naturalists, form a genus represented in tropical climes by several species of great size. English writers commonly designate them monitors, the French sauvegardes, because they frequent the haunts of crocodiles and alligators, and give warning of their approach by a whistling sound. Two species belong to Africa: one, aquatic, the varan of the Nile (_varanus dracæna_); the other, sand-burrowing, the varan of the Desert (_varanus sunius_, or _arenarius_), called by the Arabs _onaran-el-ard_. Their usual size is from three feet to three feet four inches. The varan of the Nile wears an armour of alternately green and black scales. Its congener exhibits a mixture of brown and yellow, more suitable to its sandy lairs. It is rare in the Sahara, but common enough in the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Nubia.

Poor as may be the Fauna of the Desert, there is yet cause enough for astonishment that the species which compose it, especially the herbivora, should be able to find subsistence in these seas of sand, where they can find but a few saline plants scattered at rare intervals, and where fresh water is almost wholly wanting. It is, however, well known now-a-days that the wilderness provides its denizens with an aliment, which is sometimes very abundant, suitable for man, the camel, and the beasts, and is considered identical by many authorities with the _manna_ of the Bible.[75] This substance is a cryptogamous vegetable, variously christened _lichen esculentus_ (Acharius), _lecanora esculenta_ (Pallas), _luttarut_ (by the Arabs), and _vasseh-el-ard_, or "earth-dung" (by the Algerines). It sometimes forms on the sand, in the morning, a layer one or two inches in thickness, and appears to have dropped from heaven, or to have sprung spontaneously from the soil, during the night. It is probable that its spores, transported by the wind, are developed by the humidity which is condensed through the nocturnal coldness.

A shower of this lichen was observed, in April 1846, in the Russian government of Wilna. It covered the soil for three or four inches in depth, and the inhabitants lived upon it for several days. Its form is that of a small, anfractuous, rounded grain, about the size of a pea, externally of a gray colour, but white and farinaceous within. Its taste is weak, amygdalaceous, with a faint, mushroom-like aroma. Boiled in water, it swells, becomes gelatinous, and may be served up in various ways. In the Sahara, as well as in Arabia, it adheres to any foreign body. Cattle feed upon it eagerly. It certainly facilitates digestion, and contains all the assimilating principles which form the constituents of the wholesomest vegetable food. Such as it is, the _lichen esculentus_ is an inestimable boon to the wandering tribes of the Desert, who would perish of hunger in years of famine but for its heaven-sent nutriment.