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The Sahara is little known, chiefly because the oases in the centre are occupied by intensely hostile and warlike tribes, whose animosity is chiefly directed towards the French, whom they hate with a deadly hatred. But the edges of the great desert have been visited, and on the northern limits two animals are found the addax antelope, and Loder's gazelle.
Fezzan, with its numerous and large oases, offers for investigation to the physiologist, the three distinct species or varieties of the human race which overspread all Central Africa, viz., The Arabs and Moors, the Touaricks, and the Negroes, and these all mixed and blended together, of all shades of colour, stature, and configuration. The Arabs and Moors abound this side Mourzuk.
They pay no duties whatever. Not the smallest land-tax, or miri, is levied; an immunity which, I believe, all the fertile oases of the Hedjaz enjoyed previous to the invasion by the Wahabys: these, however, had no sooner taken possession of the town, than they taxed the soil, according to their established rule.
Far away the domes of the desert city shimmered like white fire in the strange light that hovers over the Sahara before the hour of sunset. Behind those distant, dazzling bubbles of unearthly whiteness, the valley-like oases of the southern desert, El Souf, dimpled the yellow dunes here and there with basins of dark green.
There is nothing like a border of The Desert. The "Grand Desert" and "Petite Desert" of the French, are equally incorrect and absurd. All is Sahara, or waste, uncultivated lands, and oases scattered thick within them, as spots on the back of the leopard . Saw the Rais late, who had heard all about my conversation with Ettanee, and jokingly said, "Wâr, wâr, that old fellow, aye?"
There are a certain number of decayed ancient cities here and there, and there are occasional oases of limited fertility, but the general conditions are as just described. With the exception of the one railway from the Caspian to Samarcand, the means of transport are chiefly pack animals.
I believe there are many cases of good pasture land in the midst of this sterile country; fertile spots, small when compared with the vast area of indifferent country around them, but large in themselves. And these pastoral oases are more cultivated than the worthless land amid which they are placed.
In these dry lists of names which abound in Chronicles, we now and then come across points of interest, oases in the desert, which need but to be pondered sympathetically to yield interesting suggestions. Here for example, buried in a dreary genealogical table, is a little touch which repays meditating on.
Some came from other oases in the salt and stony plains where once an inland sea covered all, while the others hailed from the north where the Sierras de Guara rise merging into the giant Pyrenees.
Two immense steppes, waterless, and scorching hot in summer, lay on the route, while it traversed the oases of Kizil-Arvat, Merv, Charjui, and Bokhara. In the northern section of the last lay the famous city of Samarcand, the eastern terminus of the road.
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