Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania Part 10

If a caravan is to be plundered, however, the best horses are used, and in addition to his lance the raider carries a heavy knife. Perhaps a few firearms may be carried, but they are generally either flintlocks or the older matchlocks. It is only within a few years that the modern rifle with metal cartridge has found favor with the Bedouin.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A group of Arabs with their dromedaries]

The great Arabian peninsula, seemingly so far out of the world, produces many things, some of which the world cannot do well without. First of all, it is the home of the camel. Perhaps a more awkward and ungainly animal has not been domesticated, but certainly none is more useful. We are told by students of natural history that the camel is the descendant of the llama kind which seems to have originated in the South American Andes. Just how or when the descent from the New World, which is really the Old World, to the Old World, which is really the New World, was made we are not informed; nevertheless, it looks as though the natural history student has the right end of the argument. After the animal got to Arabia it "developed." And while the result may not have been very artistic, no one will deny that it was good workmanship; for the world has never produced a more useful helper to mankind.

Practically all the riding animals are of the one-hump or Arabian species. They are much larger and stronger than the two-hump animals.

One variety is slim and comparatively light in weight. These animals, as a rule, are trained to a swift gait, and are used solely as riding animals. They are called dromedaries, a word that means swift-runner.

Most of the other species are reared for the same purpose as domestic cattle. Some are valuable as beasts of burden, others are shorn for their coating, still others are kept for their milk and flesh. A well-trained dromedary will sell for three hundred dollars and upward; a pack animal rarely brings more than one-fourth as much. The milk of the camel is equal to that of the best domestic cows and is greatly prized.

The hair of several species surpa.s.ses sheep's wool in texture and is used in the finer kinds of cloth, and it is the most precious textile in high-priced Oriental rugs and shawls. Ordinarily, however, camel's hair is coa.r.s.e and is used for the cheapest textiles. Arabia is the source from which a large proportion of the camels used in the caravan trade of Asia and Africa is obtained. Fermented camel's milk is much used all over western Asia.

The Arabian horse has been famous in literature and in song for more than two thousand years. The district of Nejd has been the chief breeding locality for these horses for many centuries. Contrary to tradition, however, even the finest animals are neither so large nor so swift as American thoroughbred horses. The qualities that have made the Arabian horse famous are its beautiful proportions, endurance, and intelligence. Young colts mingle freely with their owners and attendants, and they need, therefore, only the training to make them saddle-wise; they require no "breaking." Brought up with the family and treated with the greatest kindness from its birth the colt learns to regard his master as his best friend.

Ordinarily but little water is given them, and they are so well trained that a good animal will go a whole day in summer and two days in winter without drink. The pure, full-blood Arabian is never sold. It may be acquired only by gift, by capture in war, or by legacy. Animals of mixed breed, however, are freely sold, most of them going to Turkey and to India.

Mocha coffee is another product for which Arabia is renowned. The coffee berry bearing this name is of the peaberry variety--that is, only one of the two seeds within the husk comes to maturity. Most of the coffee is grown in Yemen and the adjoining vilayets, and it received its name because it was formerly marketed at the port of Mocha. Of late years it has been shipped from Hodeida.

The business is in the hands of Arab merchants, and the coffee is carried to Hodeida by caravans. On its way it is carefully sorted by hand into three or more grades. The finest grade is sold to wealthy Turkish customers at from three to five dollars per pound; the inferior grades command prices varying from thirty cents to twice or three times as much. Very little of the product ever pa.s.ses outside of Turkey. All the Mocha coffee grown in Yemen would not much more than supply New York City.

The pearl fisheries along the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf are also controlled by Arab traders. From there are obtained some of the finest pearls to be found, and also many tons of mother-of-pearl sh.e.l.ls. The yearly product of the fisheries is thought to exceed more than two millions of dollars in value. The pearls are found in a species of oyster, and to obtain them the divers must go to the bottom in from thirty to ninety feet of water. Expert divers can remain under water as long as two minutes.

The oysters are taken ash.o.r.e to be opened, and Turkish inspectors are on hand to levy a tax on the product. A few pearls may escape him, especially if he is temporarily blinded by the glare of several piasters; but the pearl industry is taxed for about all that it is worth.

Mecca, the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad, is the city to which every disciple of Islam is supposed to make a pilgrimage at least once in his lifetime. The chief income of the inhabitants of Mecca is obtained by renting rooms and entertaining the visiting pilgrims who flock thither.

In the centre of the city is the so-called Sacred Mosque, or area, which is entirely enclosed by a covered structure of colonnades having minarets and cupolas. Within the centre of this enclosed s.p.a.ce is a cube-shaped building called the Kaaba, which contains the famous sacred Black Stone. This stone, probably of meteoric origin, gives to the building its sanct.i.ty, and is an object of the greatest veneration to every pious Moslem, who kisses it repeatedly. There is also within the enclosure a building containing the holy well, Zemzem, the only well in Mecca.

No unbeliever is permitted to enter the sacred enclosure, much less to pollute the Holy Kaaba by his presence. A few infidels disguised as pilgrims, at the risk of their lives, have visited this sacred place.

The preparations for pilgrimage are unique. The pilgrims a.s.semble near Mecca during the holy month and begin the sacred rites by bathing and a.s.suming the sacred garb. This suit consists of two woollen wrappers, one worn around the middle of the body and the other around the shoulders. With bare head and slippers covering neither heel nor instep the pilgrim sets forth on his holy journey.

While wearing this dress he is admonished to bring his thoughts into harmony with the sanct.i.ty of the territory he now traverses. He is not to shave, anoint his head, pare his nails, or bathe until the end of the pilgrimage. Among the various rites to be performed after reaching Mecca is walking seven times around the Kaaba, first slowly, then quickly.

Before leaving the city the pilgrim drinks water from the holy well, Zemzem.

Many pious pilgrims visit Medina, now the terminus of a railway, before going on to Mecca. This is another of the sacred cities of Islam, since it is the scene of Muhammad's labors after his hegira from Mecca; it also contains his tomb. Formerly no unbeliever was permitted to traverse the streets of Medina or look upon the tomb of the great prophet, but tourists are now allowed within the gates. The city is enclosed by a wall forty feet high which is flanked with thirty towers. Two of its four gates are ma.s.sive structures with double towers. Like Mecca, Medina is supported chiefly by pilgrims.

CHAPTER X

THE SAHARA

An expanse of land as large as the main body of the United States stretches across the northern part of Africa. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and from the foot of the Atlas Mountains to the Sudan, it is a weird panorama of rock waste--level, rugged, shingly, and mountainous, according to locality. In places only it is penetrated by large and permanently flowing streams. On the eastern borderland the Nile pours a mighty flood, winding a sinuous pa.s.sage along its self-made flood-plain, the Egypt of history. In the west the Niger has forced its way into the confines of the desert and then, as if rebuffed, turns its course southward.

This great domain of the simoom has every diversity of surface. The higher summits of the Tarso Mountains are eight thousand feet above sea level; the Shott, a chain of salt lakes south of the Atlas Mountains, are about one hundred feet below sea level. The depression in which these lakes is situated probably was once the head of the Gulf of Sidra; but the never-ceasing winds have partly filled the depression, cutting off the head of the gulf in the same manner that wind-blown sands severed what is now Imperial Valley from the Gulf of California. Around the briny lakes are marshes of quicksands, and woe betide the luckless traveller who strays to the one side or the other of the beaten trails.

Unless help is at hand, life will have neither joys nor troubles for him after a few brief minutes of struggle.

The Sahara proper begins at the south slope of the Atlas Mountains.

Where there are no Atlas Mountains, it begins almost at the Mediterranean's edge. In the valleys of the Atlas and along the Mediterranean coast there is a strip of fertile land, wide here, narrow there, that produces grain and fruit. The Arabs call it the _Tell_. "Beyond the Tell is Sah-ra," or the Sahara. This is the name which the Arabs apply to the archipelago of fertile spots, or oases.

Beyond the zone of oases is the desert. One becomes instantly and painfully aware that it is a desert on leaving the last oasis. Go a thousand miles southward, eastward, or westward from Tripoli, and one encounters but a single thing--an ocean of orange-colored rock waste, the Guebla of the Arabs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: On the sands of the desert]

The desert is a desert for want of water only. There is no lack of nutrition in the soil, nor is there anything in surface or temperature that makes a desert unproductive. Temperature and winds reach great extremes in fierceness, however. The temperature of the air in the noonday sun will often exceed one hundred and forty-five degrees; it may reach one hundred and fifty-five degrees. In the shade it frequently climbs to one hundred and thirty degrees in the vicinity of the tropics.

Unless one is at a considerable alt.i.tude there is not much relief at night, though the thermometer may drop to ninety degrees. Farther north, however, and at an alt.i.tude of five thousand feet or more, the temperature of the night is even more cruel than that of the day.

Immediately after sunset a sharp chill becomes perceptible. At first it is a welcome relief from the intolerable heat. By nine o'clock it begins to cut like a stiletto, and at midnight the water suspended in shallow dishes clinks into ice. The drivers burrow deep into the sand and wrap woollen baracans about them; the camels shiver and even blubber like whipped bullies.

The air is so dry, however, that the extreme heat of day is by no means insupportable. Sunstroke is almost unknown, and even the tragedy of perishing for want of water is very rare; for the caravan drivers know just where to find water, and there are many hidden watering places that are known to the crafty Tuaregs and Bedouins. Many of the watering places are wells that have been sunk in various localities along the caravan trails. The intense heat, great depth of rock waste, and dry air are not favorable to the above-ground flow of rivers. But nearly every river has an underground flow that is pretty likely to exist all the year round.

One may follow a stream of considerable volume down the southern slope of the Atlas Mountains. The volume of water grows less and less until at last it apparently disappears. Not all is lost by evaporation, however; possibly the greater part sinks into the porous rock waste. And the rock waste?--perhaps it may be twenty, fifty, or one hundred and fifty feet deep. At all events, the water sinks until it reaches bed rock or clay through which it cannot pa.s.s. Then it flows along what may once have been an above-ground channel until fierce winds and cloud-bursts buried it deep.

But the half-savage dwellers of the desert know just where to tap these underground reservoirs and streams; even the dumb animals know instinctively where to look for water. It is merely a question of instinct coupled with experience, and the animal's judgment is about as good as the man's. When one finds the spot, it is necessary only to dig.

The water may be two feet below the surface or it may be ten feet. When the moist sand is reached the task is half over. A foot or two more and the hole begins to fill. The water is hot, brackish, and repulsive to the taste, but it is water--and in the desert, water is water!

The simoom is also an inst.i.tution of the desert. The simoom is unmistakably a wind, and surely no one who has not had the experience can appreciate it. Even the West India hurricanes or the typhoons of the China Sea are more kindly. They have plenty of destructive energy, it is true, but the simoom has all this and much else besides. It comes not without warning, but the warning and the wind are not far apart. The approach of the simoom is a dense black cloud of whirling and seething fine dust. As it strikes one, the choking, suffocating blast of hot air and dust overcomes everything that has life. The caravan men and the animals as well turn their backs to the wind and lie down with faces close to the ground. In a minute or two the full strength of the blast is on and the simoom is picking up not only the fine rock waste, but the coa.r.s.er fragments as well, and is hurling them along at Empire State Express velocity. One might as well try to face a hail of leaden bullets. It is a cruel blast that neither animal nor human being can withstand. The camels crouch with their heads pointing away from the wind and nostrils close to the ground; their drivers lie p.r.o.ne with faces in little hollows scooped in the sand.

Perhaps the full blast of the simoom may last an hour--perhaps two or even three hours. In lighter strain it may continue a whole day. When, finally, it ceases the air is thick with fine dust; one can see scarcely a rod away. Sun and sky are hidden, and the blackness of a tornado or of a London fog prevails. The fine dust floating in the air may not settle for several days. Perhaps a week afterward there may be a haze that partly obscures the sun. The dust, finer than the finest flour, pervades everything in the desert. One's clothing is full of it; one's hair becomes harsh and matted; the skin becomes rough, cracks and peels; the eyes are inflamed; mouth, lips, and nostrils are swollen. But the great bodily discomfort resulting from the simoom does not last forever; it gives place to bodily irritation of some other sort, which is indeed a grateful change merely because it is a change.

The sand dunes of the Sahara are interesting to those who are not compelled to travel among them, but to the unfortunates who traverse them they are almost heart-breaking. Imagine oneself standing on an elevation a few hundred feet higher than the surrounding country. There is but one landscape--waves upon waves of the loose rock waste, for convenience called sand, as far as the eye can reach. Sometimes the waves are in long windrows, but oftener they are short and choppy like the surface waves of midocean.

Unlike the ocean waves, in which only the form moves forward, while the water composing it moves up and down only, the sand dune and the material of which it is composed are both moving in the direction of the wind. A breeze even of five or six miles an hour will keep the lighter surface dust moving freely, while a twelve-mile wind will not only sweep along much larger particles but it also carries more of them.

And just as the surface, or "skin," friction forms waves at the surface of water, it also piles the desert sand in wave-like dunes.

The loose bits of rock waste are carried along, up the windward slope of the dune until they roll over its crest, where, no longer impelled by the wind, they come to rest. Thus, the crest, built forward by new material constantly added, is advancing. Valleys are filled; old stream channels are obliterated; and the inequalities of the surface are levelled off until the whole landscape is one of shifting, drifting sand.

Notwithstanding all these drawbacks, the Sahara and the arid lands southward to the Sudan are by no means dest.i.tute of life and wealth. It is an almost universal custom to speak of the barren condition of the desert. The contrary is the truth; there is no soil elsewhere so fertile and productive. It is vastly superior even to the soil of the lands reclaimed from the bottom of the North Sea.

Water is the magic wand that makes the sands of the Sahara bring forth crops that are marvellous both in quant.i.ty and quality. No fruit grown elsewhere in the world can compare with that grown on desert lands, and the French engineers are planning the means whereby water may be obtained. Surface water that is available to irrigate the wastes of the Sahara does not exist. The level of the Nile is so far below the surface on both sides of its own flood-plain that its waters cannot be used for the reclamation of any part of the Libyan Desert, and the same is practically true of the Niger, which barely more than touches the borders of the Sahara. The few wadys, or "dry washes," are dest.i.tute of water except when a cloud-burst may fill them; but this happens at intervals of years only.

The engineer takes into his confidence a caravan driver--perhaps an Arab, possibly a Berber, but quite as likely a slave. And the long experience has taught the caravan man where to find the precious water.

The engineer then brings his science into play and drives an artesian well. The well thus driven may be a "gusher," but for most of them pumps are required to raise the water to the surface. The best well, however, furnishes water enough to irrigate but a very small area. Indeed, all the lands of the Sahara together irrigated by artesian wells would make an area scarcely larger than the State of Delaware, and all the water thus obtained would not supply New York City!

Nevertheless, the water obtained by artesian wells has proved a great blessing to the dwellers of the desert. If the water is found along one or another of the numerous caravan routes, an increase in caravan commerce is apt to result, for along many routes the volume of caravan commerce depends very largely on the number of wells. The location of artesian wells has also led to the opening of trade along new routes as well, for wherever water can be found there will be camels to drink it.

The date palm is essentially a plant of the desert, or, rather, of the oasis. Nowhere else does it grow in such profusion as in northern Africa. The number of productive trees there is estimated to be anywhere from ten million to twenty million, though the estimate is but little better than a guess. At its full growth the date palm is a most beautiful object. Usually the feathered tops of the trees are the only foliage to relieve the harsh landscape. Like the bamboo, every part of the tree is used. The leaves may be made into fans, or shredded and woven into mats. The wood is used in making the framework of buildings, and the waste material is very handy as fuel. A refreshing fermented drink and a most vile liquor are prepared from the juice. But the fruit, when properly prepared, is the chief food of many thousands of men and beasts. Even the stones, or "pits," of the dried fruit are useful; those which are not sent to Italy to be used for adulterating coffee are made into an "oil-meal" for fodder.

Esparto gra.s.s, called "alfa" or "halfa" by the Arabs, is another unique product of the Sahara. In spite of its name, it is not a gra.s.s but a flowering plant whose stalk has a tough fibre useful in making cordage and paper. When the plant turns brown and has become dry to the root, the esparto picker gets busy.

By four o'clock in the morning he is at work, his heavy woollen baracan, or blanket, wrapped tightly about him, for the air is not only chilly but almost freezing cold. By sunrise the chill begins to disappear, and a few brief moments is the only interval between piercing chill and midsummer heat. The baracan is quickly shed and the fez, if the picker is rich enough to possess one, is discarded for an esparto hat with rim of mammoth proportions. Esparto gra.s.s sandals protect his feet.

Almost all the animal life of the Sahara is deadly, and the esparto gra.s.s picker is constantly facing danger. The clump of esparto, into the bottom of which he must reach to cut the mature stalks, is quite likely to be the lair of a poisonous viper; and if the reptile sinks its fangs into the flesh of the unfortunate picker, long weeks of suffering and disability--perhaps death--are in store for him. Between the bite of a rattler and that of an esparto viper there is little to choose.

The scorpion is another peril to the esparto picker. The great rock-scorpion of the Sahara is about as ugly as the centipede of Arizona and Mexico; in size it is also about as large--from six to ten inches in length. Its sting, too, is about as dangerous as the fangs of the rattler. But the esparto picker has a method of heroic treatment for both the bite of the viper and the sting of the scorpion. He squats calmly upon the sand while a brother picker cuts out the flesh that has been pierced. If he survives the twenty-four hours following, he is pretty likely to pull through. If not--well, the vultures know when and where to look.

The esparto gra.s.s is delivered to the nearest local market compressed in bales of five or six hundred weight, held together by a coa.r.s.e netting of esparto weave, and shipped to Europe. Nearly all of it goes to Great Britain. There it is shredded and made into cordage, coa.r.s.e cloth, or paper.

But the esparto has a rival so far as its use in making paper is concerned. The wood pulp of Norway and the United States is slowly displacing it, and in time esparto will be but little used except for making cordage or gunny cloth. Already the French Government is having troubles of its own in providing employment for the esparto pickers, but it is not likely that such a useful plant will be discarded; on the contrary, its use is likely to increase in the future.