 Chapter 9 of From Tangier to Tripoli by Frank G. Carpenter This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. The Tell and its Farms The French have done good work in colonizing Algeria and have greatly increased its value as a farming country. The colonization department has laid out new towns and farm sites. Some of the lands are given away and others sold at auction on long time. There are agricultural banks for the benefit of the farmers and special inducements to settlers in low steamship and railroad rates. There are 800,000 Europeans settled in Algeria. More than half of these are French. There are also many Spaniards, Italians and people from Malta, Sicily and other islands of the Mediterranean Sea. Already about one-seventh of the whole population is of European origin and the best lands of the country are being rapidly bought of the Mohammedans by these invading Christians. The European population has doubled within 30 years. The cities are growing. There are French towns all over the country and the Christian element is everywhere in control. Parago, where I am writing, contains more than 5,000 European inhabitants and has all the surroundings of a rural city of France. Its streets are wide and well shaded and it has a large public garden in which the band plays several times a week. Its stores are like those of France and it has no end of cafes and restaurants. There are scores of other such cities throughout the tell, many of which, like Bleda, Tlempsen and Orléans Ville, are populous and prosperous. The tell of Northern Africa has been noted for many generations with the granaries of the world. It fed Carthage from the time when it was founded by Queen Dito 8 or 900 years before Christ. It was the bread land of Rome in the days of her glory and the Arabs and Moors grew fat upon it for centuries before the French came. It comprises the valleys between the mountains running along the coast and the high plateaus of the atlas which fall away into the Sahara as well as a rich coastal strip here and there. It runs clear across Algeria and Tunisia and in round numbers is 7 or 800 miles long from west to east and from 30 to 100 miles wide. It contains altogether an area almost as large as New England and fully as large as the state of Illinois. It has between 35 and 50 million acres of excellent lands but this is in patches some large and some small. I have gone through regions such as Oran where the soil is as rich as the Mississippi Valley and through others where the vineyards grow in a fat red loam like that of the best coffee plantations of Sao Paulo, Brazil. As it is now winter only the stubble is left on the great grain fields but there are straw stacks dotting the landscape everywhere and the trains are loaded with wheat and other cereals. The wheat is handled in four bushel bags piled high on freight cars and then covered with tarpolins. The straw is carefully saved for it is the chief stock food long feed as some of our farmers would call it. The stacks are covered with a thatch as carefully put on as the roof of a house. In the department of Oran where the soil forms a natural cement when mixed with water the whole outside of the stack is plastered with mud. I have seen hundreds of stacks larger than any hay stack in our country so covered. Some of the Algerian regions through which I have been traveling for the past week or so remind me of California. The sun here is just as bright and it is so strong that the clouds paint velvety blue shadows on the fields and hills. The sky is the same heavenly blue and the clouds are as fleecy white. The same fruits grow here as in California and the crops look much the same. In other respects however Algeria is far different from any part of the United States. There are no fences anywhere and but few barns where the cattle can be pastured all the year round so there is little need of stables. I have seen no haystacks since I came into the country though I did observe some alfalfa fields near Talymsen. The country people live in stone structures covered with stucco and washed with the brightest of colors. I saw a sky blue farmhouse yesterday and stopped at a rose pink one the other afternoon. There are excellent roads but no four-wheeled wagons on them. Almost every vehicle is of the cart variety and there are more mules and donkeys than horses. Oxen are largely used for plowing. Now and then one sees a great awkward camel stalking sourly onward and frequently there passes a caravan of mules or a drove of donkeys loaded with grain. Not a little of the tell is irrigated. There is an enormous dam near the town of Parago which holds back a lake containing 14 million cubic meters of water and another not far away near Saint-Denis-du-Sig which contains six millions more. Wherever the water can be stored it is conducted over the lands and a great deal of irrigation is done by means of wells. The motive power for drawing up the water being a blindfolded donkey, mule, or ox and sometimes a camel. These Algerians are a nation of farmers. Over one half of the Europeans and more than three-fourths of the natives are engaged in agriculture and there are in addition an enormous number of native stock farmers. The Arabs own a great deal of land in the plains while such of the mountains as our fertile are covered with little farms some of which are not much bigger than a city backyard. A large part of the tell is devoted to grain. Algeria produces millions of bushels of cereals every year. There are about four million acres annually planted to wheat and something like three million acres to barley. In addition some oats and corn are raised. The corn however does not grow nearly so well in our country. Wheat is by far the most important grain crop and a large part of that grown is suitable for making macaroni. Both the French and the natives cultivate wheat but among the latter it is done in a most slovenly way. There are but few modern agricultural implements and only the foreigners who run big farms plow more than two or three inches deep. They have French plows with wheels in front. The shares cut well into the soil but it requires a team of six or eight animals for each plow. Such a team is usually composed of oxen though sometimes it is a combination of oxen, horses and mules and not infrequently a donkey aids in the work. The native plow is little more than a forked stick with a sort of iron shoe shaped like a trowel as a plow point. This shoe is about ten inches long and a quarter of an inch thick and is only to turn the earth to a depth of two or three inches. It is not as good as a single shovel plow by any means. Such a plow has but one handle and the native does not press down upon it but merely steadies it with one hand as he walks behind in the furrow. The tongue is fastened to a stick which rests under the bellies of the two horses forming the native team. This stick is fastened to the horses by breast straps without traces of any kind. Since the natives are unable to do deep plowing with such implements much of the grain is planted in and out amid the bushes and undergrowth. Along many of the foothills of the Atlas Mountains the fields contain more bushes than wheat while in places the wheat grows among thistles each of which has a head as big around as a pint cup. The average wheat yield is not much more than one half as great as that of the United States and less than one third that of France. It is only about eight bushels per acre. These Algerians do nearly all of their reaping by hand and that with the sickle. It would be impossible to run a mower and reaper through the fields covered with brush and it is only on the large farms that threshing machines are employed. Most of the grain is trodden out by oxen or other animals. I see threshing floors everywhere near the straw stacks. There are circles of well-pounded earth upon which the animals are driven around over the snow until the grain is ground out. After that the straw is raked off and the wheat, barley, or oats is thrown into the air against the wind to remove the chaff. The straw is then stacked and the grain put in large bags for shipment. If it is to be carried to market upon camels the bags used will contain six or eight bushels each as two bags of grain make a load for one camel. If it is to go upon donkeys or mules each bag will contain half as much. There are no elevators in the farming districts nor at the stations. The grain is frequently hauled on great wagons with five, six, or seven mules to each wagon and a snarling dog on top to guard the load. The driver, who is usually an Arab or Kabbal, walks alongside. A donkey will carry only one bag of wheat at a load thousands of bushels being thus transported. The bag rests on the little fellow's back without being fastened and the donkey as usual moves along without bridle or halter. It's Arab master following behind. Most of the farm labor is done by the Kabbals. The Arabs and Moors are lazy but these white Africans like money quite as well and will work for it. I see them everywhere in the grain fields in the vineyards and in the orchards and gardens. They are employed by the French farmers who come down in gangs from their homes in the Atlas Mountains to aid in the harvest. At such times they live in little straw shacks built for the purpose. They cook their own food on fires out of doors and sleep on the ground. Wages are best at the time of picking the grapes when many European laborers are attracted from across the Mediterranean. The vineyards of the tell are quite as important as the grain fields. I've never seen grapes grow so luxuriously or produce so abundantly anywhere else. The vines are cut back every year making their stems knotted and gnarled. The main stems are not knee high. From these stumps long branches put out from season to season and these bear the fruit. Some of the grapes are of a rich navy blue, not large but full of juice and sweetness. Others are crimson and others white. The latter are as big as dams and plums and surpass in flavor and color the finest malagas. I measured some that were served for dessert at the hotel here at Parago last night. They were three and a half inches in circumference or more than an inch in diameter. They tasted as sweet as maple syrup and their flavor was delicious. The best of the grapes in the market sell for about one cent a pound. I've seen excellent vineyards everywhere I have gone. Algeria has thousands and thousands of acres devoted to them and they extend from one end of it to the other. The French are careful as to the introduction of fruit diseases into the colonies having passed stringent laws to safeguard the importation of trees, plants and vines as well as of flowers and fresh fruits. The country is now producing more than enough wines every year to give several gallons to every man, woman and child in the United States yet her grape growing lands have scarcely been touched. I see vast areas of vacant lands among the vineyards and new vines are being set out. It is said that there is not a place in northern Algeria which cannot be made to raise grapes. Wine is cheaper here than mineral water. I have two bottles every day on my table at the hotel and if I buy a lunch at a railroad restaurant a quart is thrown in without extra charge. The wine is good too. It is the pure juice of the grape. Algeria raises all sorts of fresh garden stuff. At our hotel we have green peas and beans as well as asparagus, celery and lettuce. Radishes are raised in great quantities. Eggplants and tomatoes thrive while onions and potatoes yield two crops per annum. Vegetables by the shipload go to France throughout the year and Paris, Lyon, Marseille and other French cities rely upon this country for their winter supplies of fresh food and garden stuff. Fast steamers carry the food and vegetables across the Mediterranean in a day so that within 36 hours they may be spread out for sale in the all-central in Paris. The tell can produce almost everything grown in the United States. It has apples, peaches and pears, also figs and olives, oranges and lemons. The olive thrives well up into the Atlas Mountains. Many of the trees are centuries old. They live so long that the people have a saying that he who plants an olive is laying up treasures for his children's children. The natives consume large quantities of olive oil. Even the cabals make it in a rude way and store it in their huts for the winter. It is used for cooking and as much the same place that butter has with us. Enormous quantities of figs are grown and fig orchards are to be seen everywhere. The fruit is fine, although not equal to that raised in Smyrna. Some of the varieties are white and others blue. Figs are as common here as apples in America and quite as freely eaten. The natives dry them and store them away for winter use and millions of pounds are exported. Smyrna does a great deal of stock farming. Not only in the tell, but in the ranges of the Atlas Mountains and on the high plateaus upheld by them are large flocks of sheep and goats. They are to be found also all along the edges of the desert of Sahara. Of the numerous cattle, donkeys, mules and camels, more than nine-tenths belong to the natives. The sheep here are fine, large, long-walled animals. Many, I should say, more than either are south-downs or shrubs and seem free from disease. They are white and brown in color, many of the white sheep having brown faces. Their ears are long and silky and hang down somewhat like those of a spaniel. Thousands of pairs of our American shoes are made of Algerian goat skins. The goats are black and brown. They are of good size, but in their milking qualities do not compare with those of Morocco. The goats are always raised with the sheep. I have yet to see one flock which did not contain both animals and I have passed millions on my way through Algeria. The flocks are always watched by shepherds, white-gowned, bare-footed men or boys who live out in the fields with them. On the edges of the desert there are many nomadic shepherds who live in tents, driving their sheep, goats and other stock from place to place to find pasture. The horses here are largely of Arabian origin. They are well-made and tough, many of them being fine-riding animals. Some French horses have been brought in for heavy draft and many of those about the wharves of the cities show a strain of perseron or Norman blood. Draft horses are usually worked single-file and a long team of five or six horses harnessed up tandem is not uncommon. Sometimes they are harnessed three abreast, a team of seven will often have two leaders tandem and behind them two abreast with three abreast next the wagon. Algeria has enough national roadway if stretched out in one line to reach from San Francisco to New York. Furthermore, these roads are better than most of those we have in the United States. There is as smooth as asphalt and are so laid out that the slope is everywhere along the easiest possible lines. This facilitates fast travel and the hauling of big loads. Indeed, I doubt whether these roads are surpassed anywhere in the world. One can easily travel over the country in an automobile and there are frequent motor car excursions from Algiers into the wild scenery of the Atlas Mountains. These roads, which were begun by the French as a military necessity, are still kept up for the army. Everywhere the troops go new roads have been made until they are now extended into the more settled parts of the Atlas and down to the very edge of the Sahara. End of Chapter 9 Chapter 10 of From Tangier to Tripoli by Frank G. Carpenter This Libravox recording is in the public domain. In the heart of the Sahara I am at Beni Unif in southwestern Algeria in one of the wildest parts of the greatest desert on Earth on all sides of me stretching to the west, south and east for hundreds of miles is the Sahara. It is so big that if you could lift up its sandy, rocky surface like a quilt and carry it across the Atlantic it would cover every bit of the United States and hide a part of Canada and the Gulf of Mexico as well. It is longer than the Mediterranean Sea and larger than all Europe. In some places it is 2,000 miles wide. Here at Beni Unif I am more than 400 miles south of the port of Iran and about 1,200 miles from Timbuktu on the Niger where the great fertile belt of north-central Africa begins. This little town is on the very edge of the French Sahara. Just west of it are wild, rocky mountains as bare as the asphalt of our American city streets and as thirsty as was Davis when he begged Lazarus to cool his parched tongue. They mark the boundary between Algeria and Morocco but the desert goes on farther westward and on the southwest it does not stop until it reaches the Atlantic Ocean. I came here from Oran on the military railroad built by the French to guard their people in Algeria from the Burgans of Morocco. Railway travel in northern Africa is far different from that of the United States. In comparison with us these people are still a century or so behind the times. Express trains do not make more than 15 or 20 miles an hour and the railroad clocks at the stations are purposely kept five minutes behind other timepieces in order that passengers may not get left. The methods of ticket selling and baggage checking are such that one must be at the train at least a quarter of an hour before starting. Once there he will have to wait his turn with a crowd of Arabs each of whom consumes at least two minutes at the ticket office and twice that time with the baggage master. If the ticket is a return the agent figures out a reduction off the regular fare and makes a memorandum of the amount in a ledger as well as on the ticket itself. The ordinary tickets are somewhat like ours but the returns and excursion certificates are the size of a legal document and quite as imposing. Everything must be weighed and only about 70 pounds of baggage are allowed free. There is a tax of two cents for checking and the agent registers the weight whether it is below 70 pounds or not. The checks are not made of cardboard or brass as in our country but are merely receipts on a thin tough paper so arranged that one half of each receipt can be given to the passenger while the other is doubled up and tied with a string to the baggage. Most of the natives carry their belongings and bags not unlike coffee sacks and much of the checked luggage is of that nature. At the stations the poorer Arabs throw these bags over their shoulders and march off with them. First and second class passengers may take numerous valises and bundles into the cars. I am now traveling with nine packages all of which go into the compartment with me. At every change the porters take my stuff in and out for me but at such low rates that the cost of handling is little. Four cents is a big enough fee for one man and a single good Husky Arab can carry all my baggage. The first and second class compartments are comfortable. I can travel first class sometimes having a whole compartment for myself and my son. The cars are divided into little box-like rooms by partitions running crosswise. They are usually entered from the sides so that it is not possible to go through a whole train as in our country. The seats are well cushioned and as the windows are large and clean we can get a fine view of the country as we go along. The second and third class cars are divided up in the same way. The second class being almost as good as the first. The third class seats are bareboard benches usually filled with Arabs, Moors and Cabales with a sprinkling of soldiers. The latter receive such small wages that they cannot travel in luxury. Some years ago dining cars were put on some of these Algerian trains but many still stop at the stations for lunch and dinner. At every station there is a lunch room called a Bouvet. The usual rate for dinner is about 40 cents for which one gets an excellent meal with a customary quart bottle of white or red wine thrown in. Luncheons are often put up and brought to the cars at a cost of about 50 cents each. For that one gets two slices of roast beef or half a chicken, several boiled eggs and also cheese, sweet cakes and fruit and of course the wine. I have no reason figures of the railroad wages but they must be exceedingly low. A crossroads depot which in our country would hardly be thought worthy of an agent requires half a dozen guards and the large stations proportionately more. There are always a manager, a baggage master, a telegraph operator, a ticket seller and a number of porters. It takes half a dozen men to start a train. The engineer blows the whistle, one of the guards rings the bell and others run from car to car and shut the doors while they cry. Get on gentlemen if you please. On the train itself there are many employees, engineers, firemen and breakmen in apparently excessive numbers. Every train has its mail clerk and its baggage man and often an express messenger as well. We left Oran in the afternoon and as the night fell we're still in the fertile tell. Wrapping myself in my blanket with my camera under my head as a pillow I slept fitfully all night and awoke on the high plateau of the Atlas Mountains beyond which is the desert. We were passing through a great plain of yellow sandy soil covered here and there with stones and spotted everywhere with bunches of dry alpha grass. Only in one direction were there any hills to be seen and they were bleak, barren and rocky. The alpha was growing right in the sands a long, wiry grass which is gathered by the thousands of tons and shipped to Europe for the making of paper. It is cut by the Arabs and handled by French companies that have an immense capital. It grows in bunches, much bigger than one's fist while others sprout out of mounds that would fill a half-bushel measure. The clumps are about the height of my waist. The grass looks tough and dry but nevertheless large flocks of white and brown sheep and black goats and camels feed upon it. I saw such animals scattered over the plains each flock watched by a white gown shepherd who looked like a ghost as he stood among his stock in the early morning. He passed many tent villages occupied by such shepherds and their families. The tents are of a coarse black and white cloth woven in stripes. They are so stretched out that one has to get down upon his knees and crawl in. The cloth is made by the wives of the shepherds out of camel's hair and sheep's wool. Throughout the desert this is used for canvas. Leaving the Atlas region we came into the Sahara itself. There was still some vegetation but it was only in patches here and there or along the banks of dried up streams. Now the land was flat and now it rose into rocky mountains which were black in the morning. As I looked out over the plains I saw the sunrise. First came a faint streak of yellow away off to the east which grew until it drew a sheet of light over the horizon. A few minutes later a pale yellow sun could be seen through this veil. As it rose the veil disappeared and a blazing white ball jumped out into the sky. For a time a thin fleecy mist hovered over the sands but this soon gave way to the clear air of the desert. As we kept on with our journey the Sahara seemed always changing. We passed for miles over bare rock almost as smooth as a floor and then through regions where the rocks were ragged and cut up into all sorts of shapes. At times there were boulders and again small pebbles of different colors red, brown and black. Here about Beni Unif the desert is largely limestone while farther south along the Sioux Fane river I passed through rolling dunes and plains covered with boulders. The old descriptions represent the Sahara as a dreary waste of barren sand as flat as the sea. A vast wilderness where travelers must perish if they try to go through it. The real Sahara has wide expanses of sand it has plains as big as a good-sized state of the Union which are covered with stones but a great part of it is rolling. It is largely a plateau broken by lofty mountains and cut up by water courses called wadis which are dry the greater part of the year. Its average height above the sea is about as great as that of the mountains of Virginia though in many places it is as high as the Alleghenies and higher. In addition to its rolling character the desert offers other obstacles to railroad building. One is the long stretches over which the track must go without available water another is the enormous cost of hauling the fuel while a third is the creeping sand dune. The sand dunes are sometimes 600 feet high rising from the desert in the shape of a crescent with its horns turned away from the winds. The sand is rolled up by the wind from the bottom to the top each grain going over and over until it falls inside the crescent. As this continues the dunes increase in size they move along slowly and if a railroad be in their way they will swallow it up. I have seen similar dunes on the great Peruvian desert at the foot of the Andes and have been told that they are the chief obstacles to railroad building in that region. These dunes grow solid and hard as the wind blows against them. During my travels through them not far from Benny O'Neath I rode up them on horseback finding the sand almost as firm as that of a sea beach. There are vast areas in the Sahara which have no vegetation whatever but in many other parts there is grass during parts of the year. Grass grows everywhere on the edges of the desert and along the dried up water courses the beds of which contain some moisture. In many places there is a slight rain fall in certain months. The smallest bit of water causes the grass to spring up and the Arabs drive their flocks to such places to pasture. Where the grass will not grow there are sometimes thorn bushes which camels will eat. Along the railroad to the Atlas mountains there is in places a thin growth of tough grass upon which thousands of animals feed. Strange to say the flocks are fat although it looks as though they were grazing upon the bare stones. As I have said the road to Benny O'Neath was built for military purposes. It is an absolute necessity for the French control of the Sahara. The depots are all of red sandstone one story in height with a stone wall about the roof and a high wall of stone surrounding the station yard. At intervals of four feet all around these walls have portholes or slits three inches wide and a foot long. Through these openings rifles are thrust to defend the station in case of need. In the roof are other portholes and both gate and windows are barred so that they can be securely fastened. Often a station consists of nothing but this fort-like building although there may be sometimes an oasis or a mud village nearby. The stops at these places are not more than from three to five minutes unless the engine has to take on water. The supply pipes eight inches in diameter are wrapped with straw to retard evaporation and from these the train boilers and tanks are filled. At every good size station the coming of the trains is an event. Soldiers and officers gorgeously clad are there colonels and lieutenants in uniform soldiers with high red caps wide red belts blue or red jackets in full red or white pantaloons. They are jaunty fellows and remind one of Athos, Porthos and Aramis the three musketeers of Dumas Novel. Guns are everywhere. Not only the soldiers carry them they also come to the train and the baggage man, the guards even the hotel clerk are armed. Benny Unif is within almost a stone's throw of the Moroccan boundary and at the gate of a pass through the mountains that separated from Algeria the brigands of these parts of Morocco still make raids upon the oases and attack travelers and caravans going to and fro over the desert. One base of such expeditions is the oasis of Tafelult not far from here where some of the worst scoundrels of this part of the world. These expeditions are known as barcas. They are often composed of hundreds and even thousands of animals and men. One which came through here some years ago had about 4,000 men mounted on camels and a barca of 500 camels is not uncommon. It was a barca like this that brought about the battle of Figuig named after an oasis about 8 miles from Benny Unif where it took place. Figuig is one of the richest settlements of eastern Morocco. It has about a million date trees and its people have always been noted for their prosperity and trade. They are also famous as haters of Christians and until lately it was death to any Christian to enter their oases. At a time when the railroad reached this point the governor general of Algeria made an expedition from the end of the road then at Duvivier to Benny Unif and then to Figuig. He was accompanied by a detachment of Spabies the bravest of these African soldiers and three companies of the foreign legion under the command of general O'Connor. It was then well known that a Christian who went into Figuig did so at the risk of his life and one of the Arab officials of the town warned the governor general that he had better keep out. He did not heed the warning and the result was a fight which lasted 5 hours after which the French retreated. This battle was entirely with rivals on both sides and after their victory the moors thought they were equal to anything the French could ring against them. A day or so later the foreign legion and three squadrons of the army reappeared. Their force altogether numbering 4500. They brought with them some mountain guns and other cannon and placing these more than a mile away opened fire with mellonite shells upon the oasis and its villages. The result astounded the natives. Their mud brick houses were blown to atoms and the minarets of their mosques cut in two. The moors who had never heard or seen came almost on their knees to beg the French to desist. Since then the railroad has been extended to Benign Unith and beyond and a thriving settlement has grown up here at the gate to the pass. The French have made the whole region peaceful so that it is possible to travel almost anywhere through it. French troops are stationed at every large oasis while camel soldiers scour the country and heliograph the least sign of disturbance. These camel police are natives mounted on Mabaris beasts which can go 100 miles day after day without tiring. Many of the camel police are Torex who find it pays better to be employed by the French than to rob the caravans as they did in the past. Others are Targys from a warlike tribe in the eastern part of the Algerian Sahara. These Mabari troops patrol the country act as scouts for the French officers and are ready to fight bravely in time of trouble. A large number of them watch the pass at Benign Unith. Patrolling at wide distances apart they bring in reports of the conditions existing all along the desert frontier. The French have established also a mail service for the Sahara. The Arab postmen carry mail bags on their fast Mabaris. Every military station is thus served and in some places such as Colombe Car and Adrar there are post offices where money orders are issued and a regular mail service is supplied. Here at Benign Unith is a branch of the foreign legion made up of adventurers and homeless and friendless men of all nationalities. There are also several companies of military criminals who have been deported from France and sent down from other parts of Algeria for punishment. These men are put to making roads and bridges and doing all kinds of hard labor. I met one of the legion last night in a Moorish café who told me he was an American. His complexion was that of a mulatto but as he wore the red trousers, blue jacket and tall red cap of the Spahi I took him for an Arab. I was drinking coffee at one of the tables when sitting down on the couch. He told me he came from San Francisco that he had served as a marine in the French Navy and had finally drifted into the army. He said that the food and treatment were so bad that he could not stand it and that his pay was only one cent a day. Finally he deserted and succeeded in getting to the Mediterranean where he had hidden himself away in the hold of a German steamer. Just as the ship was raising anchor he came on board and discovered him through a Hindu cabin boy who pointed out his hiding place. He was then put in prison at the port of Namur where the sheriff set him to cleaning his horses. One day, taking the best horse in the stable, he rode across into Spanish Morocco to Malilla. There he again tried to get off, this time on a Spanish ship. He was caught once more however and shipped down here into the heart of the Sahara. He is expecting to be sent on into the desert, far from the railroad. Of all the Arabs employed by the French, the Toregs are doing the best work. They are organized into companies equipped with good modern guns. They have practically abandoned brigandage and now mounted on camels they sweep over the desert aiding the French to keep the natives in order. The French captain who is chief of the Arab Bureau here tells me that the Toregs are by no means a bad people. They are bloodthirstyness being largely a matter of imagination. It is true that they have been robbers in the past, but now that they are employed by the government, they make splendid soldiers. They are paid from twenty to twenty four dollars a month, which is a fortune to them. Each man owns his own camel and takes care of it and of himself. But as the food for both man and beast costs practically nothing he considers himself rich. These Toregs are descendants of the Berber or white race of the Atlas Mountains who have been crowded off into the desert. They once lived in the heart of the Sands so far south of the Mediterranean that most of them had never seen it, although for centuries they controlled all communication between it and the Sudan. They have long been noted as the robbers of the Sahara. They are tall, slender and wiry figure with regular features and swore these skins. They are especially distinguished by the fact that they wear veils night and day. Their veils are usually white but sometimes black or blue. They wind them about their heads like a turban, passing them over the nose and mouth and across the forehead so that only the eyes can be seen. A well-bred Toreg never takes off his veil either to eat or to sleep. This strange habit makes the French call them the mask pirates of the Sahara. It is said that the veil was originally adopted to keep out the dust but that it is now a mark of fashion and modesty. Another story told me is that the Toreg men first put on veils from shame over a piece of cowardice. They were surprised by their enemies and were so frightened that they threw down their arms and ran leaving their families. There upon the women picked up the swords, spears and daggers and defeated the enemy. From that day until now the men to show their admiration for the conduct of their wives have adopted the veil while the Toreg women still go with uncovered faces. The Toreg woman wears a long roll of cotton stuff wrapped around the body, a pair of cotton trousers and a head shawl. She is fond of trinkets to hang about her neck and it is said that an old sardine can is a suitable gift for an admirer to bestow on a Toreg lady. The standard of beauty is fatness and the only cruel custom among them is forcing the girls to drink great bowls of curdled milk to make them stout and therefore handsome. The women are said to be cultivated in their own way even to the extent of writing poetry and they are very sociable among themselves. Many of the Toreg's live in tent villages moving about from place to place. They own camels and sheep and some of them have gardens. As a general thing they are miserably poor. The money received by those in the French service being far more than most of them made when their sole profession was robbing travelers crossing the desert. Recording by Betty B. A visit to an Oasis Republic I have just returned from the great Oasis of Fagig on the boundary between Algeria and Morocco. It lies here in the heart of the Sahara desert 400 miles south of the Mediterranean and 1,000 miles from Timbuktu in the French Sudan. If I should go westward through Morocco about as far as from New York to Pittsburgh I should strike the port of Mogador on the Atlantic Ocean. While if I took camels and travel to the east I should have to go through the Sahara for a distance as great as from Philadelphia to Salt Lake City before I found anything green and came to the valley of the Nile. Fagig was long a caravan center and even today the freight from a number of Oasis is shipped here on camels. The products of Telfelel in Morocco whence come the best dates and of Tuat, a large collection of Oasis in the Algerian Sahara 300 to 400 miles to the south were brought to Fagig as a distributing point. Now a large part of this freight has been diverted to Cologne Bekar and Beni Unif to be sent northward by the railroad. Fagig is about as far north as desert camels can come without danger of taking cold. If they go farther they get sick and die. For this reason the goods from other Oasis were once brought here and then sent to the Mediterranean on donkeys or mules. The exchanges were made at Fagig and caused it to become a commercial center. Its merchants were among the shrewdest of the Sahara and sent regular caravans to Tlemcen and to Malilla in Spanish Africa on the Mediterranean Sea. Since the French completed their railroad to Beni Unif, Fagig has been losing its trade. In fact the caravan trade of the Sahara has fallen off generally. The trains of 1,000 more camels guarded by soldiers which used to start across the Great Desert with perhaps half a million dollars worth of ivory, gold dust and slaves have dwindled to bands containing 100 camels or less and the caravans diminish every year. Some European merchandise is carried across from Tripoli, Tunisia and Algeria to the Sudan, but most of the goods for that section go to the ports of West Africa by steamer and are taken by railroad and river to the headwaters of the Niger. We started out from this fortified town of Beni Unif where camel troops were making their way through the streets. Officers in uniform were dashing about on Arabian horses and companies of soldiers in bright reds and blues were marching in various directions. The French government does not permit travelers here to go alone into this part of Morocco. And it was only upon my showing Captain Pariel the chief of the Arabian Bureau here the letter which I have from our secretary of war to the governor general of Algeria that two Arab soldiers were detailed to accompany us. These men were armed with repeating rifles. They rode Arabian horses and kept right in front of or close behind us during our journey. In addition to them I had with my son Jack and Mr. Pasquale the proprietor of the Hotel du Sahara and one of the leading merchants of this part of the world. Mr. Pasquale who speaks Arab as well as French and English acted as our guide and interpreter during the day. He has a branch store in one of the largest of the Fagid villages and as many friends among the people. We started at Daybreak the sun was just rising as we left Beni Unif. We came up a red copper ball out of the eastern horizon and in a few moments took on a white heat only to be shrouded half an hour later by the thick sky which sent down on us tonight the Soraco or wind storm of the desert. We rode along single file each of the soldiers sat on a red Arab saddle with a high pommel and back and their horses were good. Mr. Pasquale wrote a white Morocco mare which he said was worth $70 and upon which he had recently ridden 75 miles in one day. Jack and I were mounted with English saddles on two pure Arabian three-year-old colts which belied the general nature commonly attributed to their breeding. They bucked, trotted and galloped and at irregular intervals acted worse than the average western Bronco when a tender foot rides him. We managed to keep our seats however in the winding walls of the Oasis enclosures. It took us about an hour to reach the Moroccan frontier crossing it between two high mountains we at once entered a beautiful valley filled with thousands of date palms. This valley contains the Oasis of Fagith which consists of great date plantations standing at the entrance between Mount Teria and Mount Zenaga each an arid stony brown mass about 6,000 feet high you could see a forest of green leafed palms ranging in width from 2 to 3 miles and extending up a ravine for a distance of 7 miles or more. On both sides and beyond were nothing but sand, rocks and mountains perfectly bare dry and thirsty. Palms formed a great green sheet in this setting with the round brown watchtowers made of sun-dried brick and the yellow minarets of the village mosques of it. On a hill in the center we could see the mud houses of the village of Zenaga but the other towns of the Oasis were hidden in the forest of palms. This Oasis has about the largest number of palms in one solid block of any in the Sahara. Mr. Pascale thinks there are more than a million trees and I am sure I saw two or 300,000 in front of and below me as I stood on the york one of the highest parts of the village. Many of the Sahara Oasis lie along dried up water courses which are flooded during a part of the year. Fugeek is fed by hot springs which rise out of a hill almost in the center and are conducted by underground drains about a foot square made of stones and cement through the 15 or 20,000 acres covered by trees. Some of these springs are lukewarm while others have a temperature of about 160 degrees Fahrenheit. The largest of the springs are found in the date plantations on the highlands of the town of El Abid near the center of the fertile tract. Who first constructed these underground drains that carry the water from level to level no one seems to know. The Arabs answer the question by saying we do not know when they were built but it was many many years ago. It may have been two centuries ago and it may have been longer. These drains are kept in order today and new ones are constructed from time to time. There must be hundreds of miles of them where they reach every part of the oasis being connected with great reservoirs in each of the village plantations where the water is stored when not needed for irrigation. Each tree gets a good drink at least twice a week. I visited El Abid and its springs. The palms grow all about them. In some places they are only two or three feet apart so that the branches meet overhead and shut out the sun. Some of the springs are in great vats summer in hollows or ravines and others in wells or square tanks. During our visit the Arabs were bathing in one of them and crowds of gowned men with rags about their heads looked out at me over their long beards as I took these notes. At one place Jack attempted to take a photograph but the Arabs protested and looked angry only to smile again and they were told that we were merely taking pictures of the palms and springs and that we had very good looking men in France and America and hence did not need to take home pictures of the natives of Phageeg. 15,000 acres is a pretty big farm yet as I estimated that is just about the extent of these oases. This Phageeg farm however is like nothing you can imagine. It is divided into little pens or gardens each of which have a different plantation. Many of the holdings are not more than a quarter of an acre in size and each is surrounded by walls from 8 to 12 feet in height. These are of sun-dried brick plastered with mud. They usually face upon the roads which are so narrow that as I rode through them on my horse I could easily touch the mud brick walls on both sides. Here and there where a wall was broken at the top I could look many of the date palms reach high above the wall while others are not more than 6 feet in height but still they bear fruit. There are about 8 inches in diameter and seem to carry the same thickness from the ground upward. The highest were not over 20 feet tall I judge. At the top the palms branch out in great fan-like green leaves and from the roots of the leaves hang the clusters of red and yellow dates. The fruit is long, flat and smooth and of much the same shape as a butter nut with a shell on. I saw many clusters any one of which I am sure held half a bushel of dates and not a few trees were half a dozen clusters or more. We ate them fresh from the trees they were sweet as honey and their flavor cannot be imagined by those who have tasted only the mushy dark brown dates of our grocery stores. Under these palms apricots, peaches, pears pomegranates and fruits of white nature were growing and below them in some places were beans onions and other vegetables three crops being produced on the same soil at the same time. Outside the date plantations were unirrigated fields where grain had been planted to take advantage of the slight rainfall which comes during certain months of the year. These fields are also given some water from the springs. As we went on our journey we could see how important the date palm is to these people of the desert. It is their bread, firewood and lumber. Over the ditches that here and there across the streets were bridges of palm wood. I observed the doors and the walls of the date gardens. Each plot has but one door and that not higher than my waist. Indeed some of the doors are cut so low that the common razor back hog would lose his bristles if he should try to go through them. These gates are palm planks pulled out by hand and rudely pegged together. The date tree forms the pillars that uphold the house roofs. It is used as beams and rafters and it is made into ladders for the watchtowers. The towers are a mud brick but there is more or less palm wood in them and the platforms on which spies sit at the time of date harvest to guard the crop against thieves are of the same material. I was much interested in the palms. They look ragged and rough but the taller trees there are no leaves except at the top. I am told that each ring of bark represents a year's growth. If this is true many of the palms must be a century old. They begin to bear at 10 or 12 years yielding crops every two years thereafter. The dates here are not as good as those of some other parts of the Sahara. They are better for instance in Tugor and in Biskara. Stranger even than the palm trees out of the way land. Each of these oases has its little village and every small desert settlement is a community of its own kind. The villages of Figeeg are seven. The first and largest contains more than 3,000 people. It is known as Sanaga. The next largest is El Udegir and the third is El Abid which I have described as having the hot springs and as furnishing water for the greater part of the Figeeg plantations. The four other villages are named El Maze Fukani, El Maze Tatani, El Haman Fukani and El Hamam Tatani. These seven Figeeg villages have more than 15,000 inhabitants but taken together they constitute a little United States of their own with the Congress but no president. Each village governs itself while a common council of the combined villages governs the oasis. Each village government consists of a council of 17 members of whom 5 are landowners and 12 are laborers. The common council has 21 members elected by all the villages. It passes only upon matters relating to the whole corporation of Figeeg. The village councils regulate all things affecting their respective villages. They appoint the local judges and make the town laws. Matters of peace and war with villages outside Figeeg and all questions regarding the water supply are dealt with by the common council. Come with me and look at one of these oasis communities. We shall go through the town of El Abid. The municipality contains about 2,000 souls but it is not in the least like any town of that size in our country. In the first place I doubt whether it covers more than 20 acres and as one looks at it through the palm trees he sees only the mud walls that enclose it with the flat roofed fieldless mud buildings rising above them here and there. We enter El Abid by a gate in the wall perhaps 10 feet high and about 5 feet in width which is shut at night by rough doors of palm wood hung on rude wooden hinges. There are two gates to the town and outside one of them some camels a part of a caravan which has just come in from the desert are now lying on the ground chewing their cuds while the Arab driver sits meditating in the midst of his freight which he has unloaded for the time. As we go through the gate we pass donkeys laden with grain and sugar and turning this way and that find ourselves in dark covered streets in which we might lose our way had we not guides. The town of El Abid reminds me of the catacombs. There are houses built over the streets with only here and there a hole for the light. Outside is the fierce glare of the African sun. Here in the main streets it is almost as dark as in some subterranean cavern or in the tomb of T in the valley of the Nile above Cairo. The streets cut the town at all angles some are too narrow for horses so that one must dismount and go through them on foot. In some of the wider streets ledges have been built along the walls upon which shrouded figures lie and sleep or sit cross-legged in chat. At intervals we see men squatting on the ground hugging the walls while they work away at their trades. I notice several tailors making gowns a cobbler or so sewing on yellow slippers and one or two peddlers. There are many little boys with sore heads closely shaven and sore eyes with flies buzzing about them. They stop and stare at us. As we go on many bearded Arabs scowl at our camera. There are no Arab women to be seen although now and then I catch a glimpse of sheeted figures running out of our way. In the Jewish quarter I see some girls with earrings as big around as the bottom of a pint cup. The Jewish men are dressed like the Arabs. The town of Zanaga which we next visit is very similar to El Abid save that its streets are a little wider and it has a business section. This surrounds a square which does not cover more than a quarter of an acre. I have seen many a stable yard quite as large. Around this are a number of small stores with a motley crowd of Arabs shopping and chatting outside them. Some of the men are buying wool and other sugar and tea. The average store is not much bigger than a good sized dog kennel and the customers stand in the street while they bargain. We left our horses in the square in charge of the guides and visited one of the principal citizens a merchant of wealth. He was worth probably $500. We met our host in the square and waited a short time in the street outside that he might go in and tell his women to go to their own quarters as strange men were coming. A moment later the door was opened. We entered first a courtyard roofed by the sky and surrounded by stables. In one stall was a loom at which a woman had been weaving a blanket. In another a boy was cutting up palm roots for firewood. This court was surrounded by mud buildings about 40 feet high. There were two floors with a gallery around the second floor. These buildings contain the living rooms of the family, all of which face on the gallery. Such rooms are used chiefly for sitting or loafing, the sleeping places being on the roof. Except when the weather is bad all the geeks sleep with only the sky for a cover. The whole population practicing the open air cure. Crossing the yard we were taken up to the second floor in the first room of the house. It was some 20 feet square and perfectly bare. This is 25 feet in height. The walls were whitewashed and the ceiling was decorated with palm leaves dyed red and green. The room seemed well lighted although it had only one little window high up in the wall. This had no glass and was barred with iron. With the single exception of a rug about as big as a bed quilt man built out from the wall as in some Moorish houses. Nevertheless, our host seemed to think his house very fine and I doubt not that the rug was better than those in many other homes in the town. He motioned us to sit down upon it and then fearing that we might not be comfortable with our legs under us he had several soapboxes brought in and asked us to sit upon them. We preferred the rug. After we had taken our seats dark-faced bearded men, relatives and friends of our host came in and were introduced to us. They were all Arabs and we sat together in Arab fashion cross-legged upon the rug. After a short time a slave appeared with a musk melon and a bowl of ripe dates fresh from the trees. We ate them with our fingers while we watched the man of the house make the tea. First he put a handful of green tea into the pot and then a bunch of sugar. He filled the pot with lumps of sugar which he broke with a tack hammer from a round sugar loaf as hard as rock candy. He then poured on boiling water from a kettle brought in by a slave and left the liquor to steep. As the sugar melted he added more from the loaf and now and then put in more mint tasting the tea from time to time until he thought it just right. He poured it carefully into little wine glasses at the same height. When all the glasses were even he handed them around. We drank the tea slowly chatting as we did so. Our host made a second pot and a third and each of us took three glasses as etiquette prescribes. The mint gave the tea a delicious flavor. It was not a mint julep but a sort of mint syrup and on the whole it was about as good as any tea I have tasted. End of chapter 11 Chapter 12 of From Tangier to Tripoli by Frank G. Carpenter This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Betty B. The Garden Spots of the Desert Very few of us appreciate the extent of the fertile spots of the Sahara. I have visited a number of the Oasis and through conversation with explorers and travelers of this part of the world have learned much about others. They are scattered at wide distances apart throughout the Sahara. Often for miles and miles there will be none. Then again they will pepper the rocky wastes as though the Lord had sewn patches of green from out of the sky. It is estimated that there are altogether something like 80,000 square miles of such garden spots scattered here and there upon this ocean of sand. 80,000 square miles. That means a territory about twice as large as the state of Ohio and one infinitely richer. Suppose we could pick out of our country enough of its richest hot beds to cover Virginia and Kentucky and patch them together. That will give some idea of the extent of the Oasis. To appreciate them however we must see them lying in the midst of a region larger than the United States all the rest of which is absolutely sterile. We must imagine them surrounded by sand, stones, boulders and all sorts of arid formations. There is no green of any kind from miles about only a vast ways to blazing white dazzling yellow or eye aching red. Often the distance the mountains may be blue changing to a warm rose tint at sunset but all is arid and bare. Sometimes the Oasis form a string or rather a chain of green islands marking the root of some sunken stream flowing through the sea of sand. Sometimes many of them are clustered in one place showing the presence of a subterranean lake or of springs or wells far from any other apparent water supply. The desert has been described as a vast ocean with the Oasis as its islands. These Sahara islands however lie below and not above the level of their sandy sea. They are always found in depressions where the scanty waters have drained in and formed reservoirs. Much of the desert has a bed of stiff clay under it. The water may sink down through a hundred or more feet of gravel and rock but when it comes to this clay bed it flows on until it strikes a hollow and if this hollow be high enough and deep enough the result is an Oasis. In the district known as L. Erg depressions of this kind furnished wells which can irrigate 8 million date palms. The place where I am riding is in the Wadi Saura a great underground stream that flows far below the surface for several hundred miles and then breaks out and supplies the Oasis of Tuat which are among the largest of the western Sahara. I have already described the extensive date plantations of Fagig. That Oasis is not at all like the Oasis of Tarlah which I visited during a 30 mile over the desert from Bani Onif. Tarlah is one of many islands of the desert scattered along the branches of the Wadi Saura. It is found on the Susphani River which unites with the Wadi gear near Iigli to form the Saura, the ladder flowing on southward from there to feed the Oasis of Tuat. From Tarlah to Iigli a distance of more than a hundred miles the river flows so far below the earth that there is no vegetation whatever. Just east of Fagig the Susphani comes out in a trickling stream and the result is a cluster of garden spots covering a distance of several miles. These green places are sometimes so narrow that one could throw a stone over them. They are often not more than 100 feet wide rocking out at times to 300 feet or more. The riverbed is frequently dry on Oasis, but little pools of water now and then come to the surface and near them date trees loaded with fruit go out of the thirsty sand. At Tarlah such palms are to be seen for 8 or 10 miles up and down the riverbed. I rode through them for at least 6 miles under bunches of ripe dates all the way. I stopped near a village which was inhabited not long ago but is now deserted except at times of harvest. Its people have moved across the sands to Fagig in order that they may be better protected from the brigands of the region although they still cultivate their little date farms and when the crop is ripe come back to their huts and towers to watch them. The Arabs say that if you thrust a stick into the desert and water it you will soon have a tree. I can easily believe it. The sands of the Sahara are wonderfully fertile and if they could all be watered this would be the garden spot of the globe. As it is the rainfall of the whole region does not average more than 5 inches per year. Though there are some places on the highlands that have occasional rains and at certain seasons the water falls there off and on for several days. When this occurs vegetation springs up as though by magic the ground is carpeted with grass and wildflowers of many kinds burst into bloom. In coming to Tarlah I rode through patches of thorn bushes scattered at wide distances apart. Such vegetation is found all along this part of the Sufani the moisture not being sufficient for anything else. As I rode by I saw a drove of camels feeding on the thorn bushes and stopped and made photographs of them. Nearer the dry riverbed where the moisture was greater were thick bunches of alfagrass and other desert plants and flowers then came the region of date trees. The soil of the Sahara is not like that of any country where rain is common. Indeed the lack of rain is one cause of its great latent fertility. Other lands are leached by the water the brooks and streams carrying a great part of their potash and other fertilizing matter out to the sea. This is not so here the rocks may disintegrate more slowly but the weathering goes on all the same. There is no place where the changes of temperature are more sudden and marked. The sun is red hot during the day but after sunset the atmosphere becomes so cold that blankets are by no means uncomfortable. I always carry an overcoat in my rides over the desert and find that I need it. The changes are such that the rocks split and crumble under them. The desert winds are as strong as those of the sea and when the sarago blows the sand cuts one's face. It dashes the sharp grains against the rocks and grinds them down without the action of water so that all the rich fertilizing materials stay in the rock particles which make the soil. The oases will grow almost anything that is grown in California. They produce luscious oranges, grapes, melons and olives as well as apples, peaches, pomegranates and pears. In the northern Sahara they have wheat, barley, millet and sorghum and in the south tobacco and cotton. I see eggplants, onions, tomatoes and cucumbers for sale in the markets together with peas, beans, turnips and currets. The chief product however is dates. The date palm thrives throughout the Sahara if it can only have water. It is the money crop of every oasis in the chief support of the people. Indeed an oasis is known not by the number of its inhabitants but by the number of date palms it contains and its inhabitants are rich or poor according as the dates produced are good or indifferent. In some places the people eat little else and dates are fed to the animals and even to dogs. Such dates are not like those we have in America. They are a dry variety which can be stored away and kept for years. Those sent to the United States are of a soft variety so full of juice that they have to be drained before they are packed. Other dates might be called table dates. These are delicious when eaten fresh on the trees. We have them every day with our dinner and served at breakfast with the coffee and rolls. They are fat and yellow as sweet as sugar and as plump as prunes before they are dried. Among the oasis fed by underground rivers those of Tuat produce some of the best dates although their product is not so good as the dates of Tafelot. Tuat is controlled by the French Toreggs on camels under the employ of the Algerian patroller to keep order and the people have become peaceful and thriving. It is not one oasis only but it is composed of five large groups of oases in the very center of the Sahara comprising three or four hundred petty states. It is scattered over a region as big as Indiana and has all told a population of 120,000 Arabs Berbers and blacks. Tuat produces opium, lecho, cotton, and some wheat and barley. A large part of its date crop is brought by caravans up the valley of the Sahara by way of Igli to the railroad at this point to be shipped from here northward to Iran and thence to Europe. The oases of Tuat are a great center of the caravan trade. They lie about 800 miles from Timbuktu in the Sudan and a like distance from Mogador on the Atlantic from Tangier to the Strait of Gibraltar and from Tripoli on the Mediterranean. The French are now diverting the Tripoli caravan trade to their Tunisian port of Gabbas the route to which is much shorter. Among the best dates known to the world come from Tafelot. They are very large and sweet and are shipped in great quantities to Europe as tidbits for the holiday season. Tafelot like Tuat comprises a number of separate oases all together 300 fortified villages. Its chief town is Abouam which has the biggest market of the western Sahara. It is a desert trade center sending two immense caravans every year to Timbuktu almost a thousand miles directly south of it. The people of Tafelot are independent and warlike. They are fanatical Mohammedans and have caused no end of trouble. They occasionally declare a holy war and recognize raids into Algeria. The population which numbers more than a million is about the worst in Morocco. Since the family of the Sultan comes from that region the Tafelotites have a great influence in all parts of Morocco. I am now at the town of Colombekar just south of Ben-Younif and at the end of the railroad which runs up to Oran. It is proposed to push the line a distance of 11 or 1200 miles farther. If this is done the French will have a railway clear across the Sahara and much of the traffic which now goes on camels to Tripoli and to the Atlantic will be carried over this road. The track is a narrow gauge but is well built and carries considerable freight. Though the trains are slow they are infinitely superior to camels. Already a great deal of the caravan trade of the Sahara has been diverted to the Atlantic. The products of the western Sudan are carried up the Niger to Timbuktu and Jinn and then sent overland to the railroad which the French have built from the port of St. Louis to Caius on the Senegal river. That whole territory is controlled by the French and there are French soldiers stationed in Timbuktu. The southern part of the Sahara is policed from that region and the chief imports come from Europe via the Atlantic Ocean instead of across country on camels. There is another scheme to extend the Biscara line which runs down into the Algerian Sahara from Constantine not far from the Tunisian boundary so in time we may cross the Sahara by rail. The French are rapidly prospecting the desert. Their civil engineers have gone over it from here to Timbuktu and report that the chief difficulty in running a railroad between the two points will be the question of fuel. The fuel now used is briquettes made of coal dust each being the size of an ordinary building block and the expense of transportation is already almost prohibitive. This cost will be increased as the line goes farther south. If we should discover as Thomas Edison long tried to do a way of getting the full energy of the coal without turning it into steam that might solve the problem. As it is now, fully 90% of the heat energy is lost. By such an invention, coal would be ten times as efficient as it is now and the Trans-Saharan Railroad would be a commercial possibility. The caravans which bring goods here from the OACs are as clumsy a means of transportation as can be imagined. On a long trip each freight camel carries only about 300 pounds and the usual rate of travel is not more than two miles an hour. Every dozen camels have to have a driver and each caravan is equipped with water bottles of pig skin and provisions for the people on the journey. Many of these caravans stop for the camels to feed on the thorn bushes as they go over the desert. Others carry provisions for a part of the way. The routes are always along the lines of the OACs as a camel can go only from three to five days an hour. On a long journey the beasts are kept from drinking for some time before starting in order that they may be thirsty and fill the reservoirs inside them just as they depart. I find a great difference in the camels down here in the Sahara. There are some which go as easily as a gated Kentucky Saddler and others that jar one more than a hard trotting horse. The Mabaris seem to be all legs they are well cared for and are as beautiful as camels can be. With the larger caravans there are usually some of these Mabaris ridden by soldiers or the chiefs of the tribes armed with guns. Sometimes Touregs so mounted are employed as guards. The freight camels on the other hand are dingy and scarred. They always look sullen and will bite at you as they pass. They groan, grumble and even shed tears from them and seem angry from daylight to dark. It takes two or three months for a caravan to cross the Sahara whereas by railroad one could make the journey in three or four days. End of Chapter 12 Chapter 13 of From Tangier to Tripoli by Frank G. Carpenter This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. An African capital I am in the blazing white many terraced city of Algiers. My hotel is the De La Regence on the Place du gouvernement next to the mosque of Jamel Jadid. It is within a stone's throw of the great palace occupied by the government offices and just off the Boulevard de la République in the very heart of the city. From my window I look out over the Bay of Algiers and the wide Mediterranean with its ships going out and coming in. The foothills of the Atlas mountains line the opposite side of the bay and the city rises from the water in terrace above terrace until it reaches the great white citadel that form the residence and chief fortification of the paradical days of the past. Down at the wharves where the city begins are mighty breakwaters that extend out like arms at each end embracing steamers and steam vessels from all parts of the world. More than 4,000 big vessels and 12,000 coasters aggregating over 3 million tons pass in and out of those arms every year. There are great Atlantic liners which call here on their way from New York to Naples and Genoa. Big steamers from China and Japan and also fast ships from Marseille which bring the males on their 500 mile voyage in less than 24 hours. These boats give Algiers daily communication with ports of France and are always loaded with passengers and freight. Their rates are so low that French laborers and mechanics cross over by hundreds. Come with me down to the wharves and see something of the enormous trade that Algeria does with all parts of the world. Its commerce is worth having for it amounts to many millions of dollars a year. The balance of trade is with France but the resources of the colony are being rapidly developed so that in time Algeria will no doubt sell more than she buys. But let us go down to the harbor. Running back from the water for a distance of perhaps 500 feet is a level space covered with warehouses. We reach this by stone steps making our way in and out through mountains of cargo. Enormous wagons hauled by from three to six horses are moving about. Directed by drivers in turbans and gowns. The railroad engines are shunting cars this way and that and an army of bear-caved, big-trouser discrease are loading and unloading all kinds of goods. Corkbark, which is one of the chief exports, is stacked up like cordwood. Hogsheads of wine numbering thousands are piled one on the top of the other and there are great mounds of bags of wheat and other grain ready for shipment. Heaps of boxes packed with dates are waiting to start for Paris. There are also enormous quantities of goods coming in. Both on the wars and out in the harbor are immense loads of coal. Ralph Gears is one of the chief coaling stations of the Mediterranean. Nearly all the ships which call here take on fuel. The shipping arrangements are of the best. The trains from the interior come right down to the sea so that freight can be taken on board ships almost direct from the cars. Now turn your back to the sea and take a look at Algiers climbing the hills all about you. You must throw your head back and rest it well on your shoulders or you can't see it at all. The city begins with a wall about 100 feet high. The wall consists of vaults and warehouses with one of the fine boulevards of the world above them. The pavement of the thoroughfare forms the roofs of these buildings that rises the rest of the city. The street is the boulevard de la République. With the warehouses below it cost more than $40 million. It was constructed on a long-time concession by an English company and I understand that it has paid big dividends. It is a wide avenue with a stone balustrade along it pacing the busiest part of the harbor. On the other side of the boulevard are buildings which contain some of the chief banks, shops and business establishments of the city. The stores are on the ground floor only. Above them are apartments with iron balconies across their fronts. The buildings are of yellow stucco of the even height of six stories and so constructed that the ground floors open up upon an arcade as in the rue de Rivoli in Paris. Foot passengers climb to this boulevard from the wharves by stone steps which wind their way up while at each end there are long inclined roadways up and down which a stream of vehicles steadily moves. On the boulevard itself gaily dressed to Europeans mixed with stately Arabs walk to and fro. Streetcars filled with passengers are continually passing and riding in them one may have a magnificent view of the harbor and shopping. Beginning with the boulevard de la République is the French Quarter or what might be called modern the white catacomb like dwellings of the Moors and Arabs being on the hill higher up. Here the streets near the harbor would not be out of place in Paris or in any other city of France. They are smooth and paved with wood blocks. They are walled with French buildings nearly all of which jut out over the sidewalks so that the shoppers are protected from the fierce rays of the African sun. This is the case with the rue Bab Azoun which runs just behind and parallel with the boulevard de la République. It is a fashionable promenade of the business section and from four to six o'clock every day it is filled with people buying and selling. The stores are like those of Europe. The goods are usually French and their price marks show that they cause no more than in France. The best shops are along the north side of the street only. They have plate glass store windows filled with beautiful goods so that the avenue filled in by pillars looks like a museum. The promenades are stranger than those at any national exposition on earth. They comprise men and women of all classes from the Islanders of the Mediterranean Sea to the Orientals of the Atlas and the Desert of Sahara. Europe is well represented. There are French officers in their gay uniforms, jaunty French soldiers in high red caps, blue jackets and bulging suave pantaloons the color of work dust and French ladies wearing the latest costumes from Paris. The French dandy is here also the grisette. The Mohammedan world walks along with the Christian veiled Muslim ladies who have just left the harem of some rich Arab pass by wearing white trousers each leg of which is as big around as a flower barrel. Their pantaloons hang in folds and I am told that it takes 14 yards of stuff to make an entire pair. They are tied in at the calves or the ankles and are sometimes loaded with shot to keep them in shape. Unveiled juices dressed in gay colors and bright shawls with thin black handkerchiefs glued to their foreheads walk along in couples and cobalt women bronze faced and tattooed ragged and dirty gown to come close behind. As four o'clock approaches the great cave with a human stream of all colors flowing through it. Another fine business street is the Rue d'Isle. This is the main road to Mustapha Superieur, the fashionable villa center on the hills high above the city. It has many new buildings. The old structures have been torn down the fortified wall which once girdled Algiers has been removed and other improvements have been made. It is down in the French quarter where the city post office is situated. The French have given Algeria the best of postal facilities and that at rates much lower than ours to Hawaii, Puerto Rico or the Philippines. All kinds of goods can be sent by mail at low cost and there is an enormous mail order business with France and Europe. The telegraph and telephone lines are controlled by the government and the toll show the benefit of government management. There is low as in France and half of our charge either at home or in our possessions. All the chief Algerian cities have telephones. Algiers is a city of amusement halls libraries and schools. It has a city theater subsidized by the government. Movie shows patronized by all classes. A casino which is a kind of second-class vaudeville and regular concerts by the military bands in the Place du gouvernement and at Mustapha Superieur. It has many clubs and in the winter there are fashionable society gatherings. The Governor General then gives balls and receptions and the French army adds to the gaiety. Mustapha Superior situated on the hill 600 feet above the harbor has magnificent villas with tropical gardens which are occupied at that time by rich Europeans and there are also large winter hotels filled with Americans and English. There are streetcar lines equipped with our own electric service to all of the suburbs. Each car has first, second and third class compartments. The fare is being regulated by the part of the car in which one rides. The city has a university with departments of law, medicine, science and letters. This institution is magnificently situated on the hills overlooking the harbor. It has about 1300 students and is patronized not only by the French but by the Arabs and the Moors. There are also agricultural schools and technical schools of various kinds throughout the colony and Mohammedan high schools where Arab pupils are prepared for native employment. There is a normal college in Algiers and not far from it a military school like that at West Point. Between the ages of 8 and 14 all the children of French citizens and indeed all children except those of Arabs are compelled to attend school. There are common schools everywhere. I have found them on the edge of Morocco far down in the desert of Sahara and also in Grand Cabilia high up in the Atlas Mountains. In most of the native schools both French and Arabic are taught and in many places the little ones write texts from the Quran on their wooden slates and commit them to memory. Foreign and native religious houses are found in all of the large towns. There are Muslim shrines and mosque's on all sides. The French have a cathedral in Algiers and the Roman Catholic Church has an archbishop. There is a Scotch Presbyterian Church in Mustafa, Superior and there are Protestant pastors and Jewish rabbis who share in the government grants for religious support. One might think that the modernizing of their city would change the character of the Arabs and that they would throw off the walls of the Arabian nights and adopt those of our present day world. They do not. Come with me into the native quarter which adjoins the French section as closely as a patch on a quilt. We climb to it by a staircase of stone steps and enter another world. Here the streets are too narrow for carriages or horses. With the exception of a few crossroads the walls are so close together that the fat Jews are squeezed as they go in such places as the Rue de Diabla or Street of the Devil the houses are built over the streets and one climbs through dark pipes as it were from one level to another. It makes me think of the homes of the cave dwellers. The French city was gay and noisy this old quarter is sullen and silent. Sober faced men in turbines and gowns and women with sheets of white linen fasten so tightly over their faces that they seem to be pasted on and shuffle along in slippers. There are voluminous breeches billowing about them. The city is all a pill and most of the streets consist of staircases climbing from level to level. The shops are in striking contrast with those of the Rue de Diabla on each side of us are holes in the wall in which grim looking Arabs sit surrounded by goods or work away at their trades. Here is a shoemaker with four helpers in a box like sell not more than eight feet square. Just above is a carpenter in a space hardly big enough for his bench while farther on are men in similar quarters making jewelry of horns using their toes to hold the objects they are polishing as we use our fingers. How strange the crowd looks there are bare-legged biscuits who have come in from the desert to act as porters hearing great loads on their backs. There are bells with turbans and big cats from the farms and there are many fat moza bites the Jews of the Sahara who have come to town to make fortunes by trading with the Christians and Arabs. Now and then a native soldier makes his way through the crowd and a Jewish woman unveiled waddles along. Indeed old Algiers is the same it has been from century to century far back into the time of the days when these people had Christian slaves and their sons were the terror of Europe. The scenes are those of the Arabian knights and the scriptures and every few steps we pass a man who might be in Abraham or in Isaac and are crowded against the wall by men who remind us of the 40 thieves. The pious Mohammedan is also in evidence turbaned men are praying in business hours while merchants are to be seen reading the Quran in their shops between sales. Those scenes like this we climb through the citadel which was both the palace and the fortification of the days of the past. This rises high over the rest of the town and is now occupied by French troops. There are soldiers at the gates who watch us as we pass through. The citadel is surrounded by walls with great portholes through which were thrust 200 guns commanding the city and harbor. There is one building which the day devoted to his return turned into a French church and a third, a tower built right over the entrance gate contained the throne room where the day held court. Outside this room is a chain which hangs down over the entrance gate. Upon it were stung the heads of Christians and criminals be headed according to orders from the court above. I am told that the heads were usually shown for 24 hours after which they were taken down and given to the church. Such were some of the capers these Muslims were cutting before high heaven when John Quincy Adams was president of the United States. They played no such tricks on the Yankees, however, for a Commodore Decatur had taught them better. Nevertheless they were still bulldozing Europe and preying upon the shipping of the Mediterranean Sea. They enslaved and murdered Christians and insulted the powers when they objected. One morning late in the 20s he happened to be feeling especially bad the reigning day held an interview with the French consul. He may have been having trouble with his numerous wives, his breakfast may not have agreed with him, or he may have been dissatisfied with the number of Christian heads hung upon the chain below his judgment seat. At any rate he grew angry during the interview and struck the French consul in the face with his fan. The blow was not heavy, but it cost him his kingdom. France immediately declared war. It conquered the army of the day and since then Algeria has been a dependency of France. End of Chapter 13 Chapter 14 of From Tangier to Tripoli by Frank G. Carpenter This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recorded by Betty B. Bahansin, King of the Amazons. This is the story of my audience with Bahansin whose army of female warriors once sent cold chills down the backs of French soldiers and whose conquest gave France to homey. Bahansin fought battle after battle with the French and caused them no end of trouble. His wars with them cost millions. Indeed at one time the chamber of deputies at Paris made a single appropriation of $600,000 to carry them on. He made treaty after treaty with France only to break them and it was long before the French were able to subdue him and take possession of his kingdom. After that he was held in close captivity and prevented from having any intercourse with his country and people. Bahansin was first carried off to the West Indies and imprisoned in Martinique the little island belonging to France. Later he was given a villa there and allowed to drive about with his favorite wife and one of his sons. Finally he was brought from Martinique to Blida about 30 miles from Algiers here he died shortly after my audience with him. The cause of his transfer was largely his ill health and his fear of the volcano Montpellet. When the great eruption occurred Bahansin became frightfully excited and every earth tremor thereafter sent him into fits of terror that the volcanic disturbances might extend to his home. His nerves became so shattered that the French feared he would die so it was ordered that he be transferred to Algeria and kept under surveillance at Blida. Blida is a military station with barracks inside and a great fort on the foothills of the Atlas Mountains nearby. It has the chief army stud of the Algerian cavalry and its surroundings are such that it would have been useless for the French. He was given a villa outside the city walls but he was always surrounded by spies and police. Bahansin very well knew that it was out of the question for him to think of making his way off to the sea and also that the 2,000 miles of desert between him and Dahome were patrolled by French soldiers on swift camels. While in Martinique he had made all sorts of promises of good behavior if he were in the country. He continued to make such promises here and it is believed that the chief cause of his death was his homesickness for the land of the Amazons. I have the honor of having had the last newspaper interview with this notorious monarch. The interview was not full of meat for the king was too sick to talk much and as to the honor I doubt much if that term applies to the meeting with one who had probably offered up human sacrifices who had killed many Christians and who had most likely sharpened his ivory teeth upon the human flesh of the Caucasian race. At any rate I saw and talked with Bahansin in his prison villa at Bleida. My way to the villa was over a road fenced in by high walls above which waved the green branches of olive and orange trees. We passed by gardens filled with roses, by vineyards loaded with fat blue grapes and by enough fig trees I verily believe to have clad the 6,000 eaves of Bahansin's Amazon army. Finally we came to a gate labeled La Possible, the Peaceable. It was indeed a facetious name for the dwelling place of this, the bloodthirstiest of kings. Nevertheless it was there that Bahansin was living with his four wives and his numerous children. The villa was a large structure surrounded by a veranda 12 feet wide with the rooms opening out upon it and standing in an orange grove of several acres. As I went up the walk I passed the two pet donkeys of the king's little ebony princes which were feeding under the trees. As I neared the house I was met by Bahansin's aide to camp or the man who came nearest to being his high court chamberlain. He was dressed in white duck. Martinique who had been with the king for some years and spoke French fluently. Taking my card he asked me to stay outside while he learned whether his majesty would receive my party. Within a few moments he returned and led us upstairs to the veranda. Here we waited while the high court chamberlain crawled in through one of the windows and passed out several cane seated chairs to us asking us to rest upon them until his majesty was ready. As we tarried the crown prince Ouelino, an intelligent young fellow of 18, as black as your boots and with typical negro features came around the corner and we chatted with him. He spoke French well and understood a few words of English. He was only six years old when his father was carried away from his kingdom and like the old king he said he wanted to go back to Dahome. He was quite dignified in bearing himself with what might be called an imperial heir. He told me that Bahansin had been ill ever since he came to Algeria that the weather did not agree with him or with his four wives and that they all wanted to go back either to Martinique or on to Dahome. He said he feared his father would die if a change were not made at once. After a few moments word came that the king would receive us so we went with Prince Ouelino to the veranda to the other side of the house and were admitted to the imperial presence. As the room in which the ex-king of Dahome was lying opened on to the porch we came right upon him as we entered the door. He rested on a sort of cot with a white pillow under his head. His black body was covered with only a gray blue cape which fell back as he half rose showing his skin almost to the waist. He had on a curious black cap covered with golden embroidery which fitted his head closely coming low down over the forehead covering the ears and falling almost to the shoulders. As he talked with me he now and then pulled his gown up but it kept falling back exposing four or five square feet of oily black skin. Upon my presentation he reached out a naked black arm and shook my hand saying in French Bonjour. As we chatted I could see two of his wives who were waiting upon him. One of these seemed to be undergoing some kind of punishment for she was on her knees leaning over a chair in the back of the room. The other was crouched low on the floor on the opposite side of the cot from where I stood. Both were jet black and of the most pronounced negro type. Their woolly hair clung close to their scalps in small kinky curls. Their flat noses and white teeth and each wore great plugs in her ears. Their black necks, arms and shoulders were perfectly bare. Their white skirts fitting up close to the armpits where they were tied by twisted white bands knotted over the breast. At the time of his death Bahansin had only four wives a paltry allowance in comparison with the days of his prime when he had three-fourths of the young women of his whole nation to choose from. All of his amazons were at his command and hundreds of them were young girls of eighteen or more years of age. The king was sixty-three years old when he died and the women I saw with him were, I judge, each forty or fifty years old. No one knows how many children he had. He left several little ones in Algeria and some in Martinique and he had in his family also several good-sized girls and the crown prince whom I have described. One of my first questions to the king was asked to his health. He replied that he was ill and that he desired to go back to Dahomey his native country. He said Algeria was too cold for him and that he could not keep warm. He asserted that he was not dangerous to the French, that his army was long since disbanded, that he would make no further wars and that there was no reason why he should not go home. He asked Bahansin to tell me something about his country, Dahomey. He described it as a beautiful land rich in its resources and basking in the tropical sun from one year's end to another. His eyes lighted up as he spoke of it and it seemed to me I saw his thick lips quiver. I referred to the stories which had been published of his amazons and asked him whether those girl soldiers were as brave as they had been painted. At this, the king's lips tightened and we thought I could see the lust of battle come into his blurry old eyes. He replied that the amazons were brave and faithful but that the French had outnumbered and overpowered them and that now he was only a captive in the hands of his enemies. I told him that I was a journalist that I would tell the American people I had spoken with him and that I could carry a greeting from him to them if he wished. To Ami. Friends, we are all friends. He then reached out his naked black arm from under the cape again exposing his skin to the waist and shook hands with me as I said goodbye. As I went down the steps upon leaving I saw the French white guard watching me and I was told that his majesty was never alone for a moment. If he drove out with his wives a soldier or a policeman went with them to prevent a terrible attempt at escape. His captivity was in fact always before him. He was warned again and again that he would surely be recaptured if he attempted to run away and that although there were in Algeria many Sudanese negroes as black as himself there were none like Bahansin. He was assured that the news of his loss would be the police and the spies on the search and that at the same time his guards kept him always in sight. Outside this surveillance the king was fairly well treated by his French captors. He had all his expenses paid by the government. His villa was free his French cooks cost him nothing and his provisions and his scanty clothing were supplied without charge. He had in addition to all this an allowance of money of 18,000 francs a year which means about $3,600 of our money or just about $10 a day. This certainly ought to have suffice to keep him in tobacco and to furnish now and then a new air plug for each of his wives. Everything goes by contrast however and such as some was as nothing to this negro king who once numbered his assets by millions of francs and his subjects by hundreds of thousands. Since the conquest of Dahome the French have turned things upside down and are fast developing the country. They have established schools in all the villages and at Porto Novo the seat of government there is an experimental farm. Cotton plantations have been set out between four and five hundred vessels now called there annually and the commerce is growing. Two railroads have been built and a telegraph line joins Cotonou with Behenson's old capital Abome and with the river Niger, Timbuktu and the Senegal. The Dahome people are of the same race as our negroes. Their country is on the Gulf of Guinea where most of the slaves were caught in early days. They are a pure negro stock belonging to the fan branch of the Yu family. The people go about half naked. They believe in witches and have their witch doctors. When Behenson was in the height of his power travelers who passed through Dahome gave vivid pictures of him and his army. He was one of the greatest protesters' graves once every year with human blood. He was then so great that when his people approached him they had to crawl up to him with their faces in the dust. The annual grave sprinkling which took place in October lasted several weeks. The Amazons acted as the executioners the victims who supplied the blood being usually captives taken in war. When the time for the killing arrived were dressed in white shirts tied hand and foot and placed in baskets on the top of a platform. The king first made a speech and then the Amazons hurled the victims down into a crowd where they met with a horrible death. I have seen it stated that their skulls were used to adorn the palace walls and that this king had a sleeping chamber paved with the heads of his enemies. The army of Amazons was one of the strangest features of King Bahanson's outfit. Most of them were young women from 18 to 25 years of age and many had been trained to fight from their childhood. Others were wives who had been unfaithful to their husbands and others women who had been divorced on account of their bad tempers because of their failure to have children or for some other reason which caused their husbands to want to get rid of them. They were there upon handed over to the king and if they had a requisite physical vigor were drilled for the Amazon Corps. These Amazons were armed with swords, battle axes and guns. They were wonderfully brave and were trained to endure pain of all kinds. They were the king's special guard and fought better than the male warriors in the wars with the French. It is also said that after a woman joined the army she was shut off from marriage the virgins among them being bound to perpetual maidenhood unless they were desired by the king. They were trained to ferocity and the French say that in battle their recklessness was increased by a liberal allowance of gin. The girls had just enough liquor to make them devilish without interfering with their fighting. These famous black women warriors had a uniform of their own. They were chips of horns on their heads and had sleeveless garments of blue and white cloth which fell to the knees. Under these were short trousers which made it easy to distinguish them from the half-naked male warriors. In times of peace they also wore bells around their necks as a warning to tell men not in the army to keep out of their way. The other sex was afraid of them too and fled upon their approach as it was death to be caught paying them special attentions. The women took vows of chastity upon entering the army being in fact regarded somewhat as were the Vestal Virgins of old Rome. I have heard that many of these Amazons were beautiful, but if so they must have been far different from the African Queens I saw during my audience with their former commander and king. It is said that these women warriors were at their best during the last war which Bahansin waged with the French. During that struggle he caused a number of them to be beheaded on a charge of cowardice and tried in every way to make them perfectly fearless and indifferent to pain. Among the most terrible trials of their courage was a climb up walls of cactus bushes 16 feet high to a roof several hundred feet long carpeted with cactus. These barefooted and bare-legged girls climbed the bristling walls and passed over the roof covered with cactus thorns. Then as the story goes they ran back and showed themselves to the king. Their faces wreathed with smiles although their feet and legs were covered with blood. End of chapter 14