United States or Comoros ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The French Government had sent out the expedition to examine the Tuaregs' country, and to mark out a suitable route for a railway through the Sahara to connect the French possessions in the north and south. It was not the first time that the Colonel had travelled in the Sahara, and he knew the Tuaregs well. Therefore he was on his guard. Everything seemed most promising.
So far as we know, neither Aryan nor Semite ever depended upon a hunting and fishing stage. They doubtless did, but not in the time of any history that we know. The Bedouins, etc., wandering tribes to-day, and, among the Semitic, the Tuaregs of the Sahara, are a purely nomadic or pastoral race; yet are very much above the negroes of the south, who depend upon hunting and fishing.
Indeed, no bodies of armed men throughout the whole of the great African continent, including even the Tuaregs, were so reckless in their attacks, or so fiendish in their wholesale butchery of those who resented the ruin and devastation of their homes.
Even the Tuaregs, the untamed bandits whose faces were always muffled in black, received him into their tents of red dyed leather, where he joked with their wives and daughters, the "little queens," who were accustomed to ride alone, fifty miles on their trotting camels, to visit a sweetheart. "But my picture was with him," thought Lilla.
What use is it to till fields and rear palms when the Tuaregs always reap the harvest? The French have had many fights with the Tuaregs, and the railway which was to pass through their country and connect Algiers with Timbuktu is still only a cherished project. Yet this tribe which has so bravely defended its freedom against the stranger does not number more than half a million people.
When the lines that are projected from the Mediterranean coast shall have traversed the stronghold of the Tuaregs to penetrate the wealth of the Sudan and the Kongo, the Sahara will have become merely an incident. Excepting the arctic and the antarctic regions, with their fortifications of eternal ice and snow, intrepid explorers have made known nearly every part of the world.
Wargla or perhaps Golea at one time appears to have been the extreme limit of the Stone age in Algeria, but quite recently traces of primitive man have been discovered amongst the Tuaregs.
The Frenchmen mapped parts of the Sahara which no European had ever succeeded in reaching before even the great German traveller, who had crossed the Sahara in all directions, had not been there. The most dangerous tracts were left behind, and the Tuaregs had offered no resistance: indeed some of their chiefs had been friendly.
The Bedouin, the Tuaregs and some of the blacks, ride the camel with ease and dignity; but an Englishman, Italian or American on a camel looks and feels wholly out of place, and at the end of a day's journey is an object of pity and a subject for soothing lotions.
A similar reluctance to mention the names of the dead is reported of peoples so widely separated from each other as the Samoyeds of Siberia and the Todas of Southern India; the Mongols of Tartary and the Tuaregs of the Sahara; the Ainos of Japan and the Akamba and Nandi of Eastern Africa; the Tinguianes of the Philippines and the inhabitants of the Nicobar Islands, of Borneo, of Madagascar, and of Tasmania.
Word Of The Day