Part 4
After this splendid sand-road came a stretch of rocky going, followed by a zone of waterfalls we had to get round by a march on the plateau. The lower we got the more picturesque the landscape became; the cliffs, gaining in height what we lost in altitude, grew more and more imposing, the crests more jagged, the ridges more often broken by gaps. Isolated peaks appeared here and there, whose pure outlines and bold summits put climbing out of the question. On all sides there rose in the distance rocks, some broad, some slender, but all of the same height and grouped irregularly, so that sometimes, when very close together, they looked like groups of men.
On the 17th of December we reached the foot of the last ledges, on the western borders of Ennedi, at the altitude of about 1800 feet—that is to say, about that of the depression separating Erdi from the plateaux of Erdebe—and pitched our tents in the valley of Archeï, the most picturesque of the beautiful valleys of the Ennedi. The century-long erosion of wind and water, carving the great sandstone masses that line the valley, lavished throughout the landscape the most admirable effects of natural architecture. The approaches of the great grotto, above all, and of the sheet of water teeming with little fish, were a pure delight for the eyes: the sheer cliffs, fretted into colonnades crowned with turrets and belfries, were burnt to tones of faded ochre that made the blue of the sky seem deeper and more luminous still.
[Illustration: MOURDIA WOMEN AND CHILDREN, PLATEAU OF ERDÉBÉ (1000 m.), ENNEDI]
[Illustration: THE FORT OF FADA, ENNEDI]
[Illustration: CAVES OF ARCHEÏ, ENNEDI]
From this exploration it became apparent that Ennedi is, roughly speaking, a triangle covering about 12,000 square miles (30,000 square kilometres). It consists of a succession of sandstone plateaux rising in tiers from the base level of 1600 feet to that of 4300 and possibly even 4800 or 5000 feet in the parts of the country which had to be left out of our investigations (Basso and eastern Erdébé). It falls by steep slopes to the plains of the Libyan desert. The plateaux of Ennedi are ravined by many valleys, most of them very deep, whose waters only flow for a few days or weeks each year after the rains (August and September). These waters hurl themselves from ledge to ledge in waterfalls, hollowing out at the foot of each fall natural cisterns in the rock, where the water remains a longer or shorter time according as it is well or ill sheltered from the torrent beds. The roads usually follow the torrent beds, except when blocked by masses of crumbled rock, in which case a more or less awkward circuit has to be made. At the points where the main valleys converge great muddy ponds are usually formed, but they are shallow and short-lived. In all the valleys splendid grazing-land is found, where not only camels but also thousands of oxen could live if the problem of drinking-troughs did not present itself every year in the height of the dry season. For at that moment the natural cisterns that have still kept some store of water are grown few in number, and are nearly always very hard to get at. Most of the great temporary pools are dry, and subterranean water is no longer found except in the great wadis, where the wells (that have to be dug out afresh every year) go as deep as 20 or 25 yards.
The inhabitants of Ennedi, nomads or semi-nomads, are very poor; the chief tribes are the Bideyats (or Annas), the Gaedas, and the Mourdias, which all together represent hardly more than 2000 souls. But they are by tradition so addicted to brigandage and so untamable that as large a troop of police is needed to keep them in hand as for a population of 40,000 in the settled regions.
Ennedi has no vegetable food resources; there are neither palm plantations, nor native gardens, nor millet fields. And yet the soil is more fertile than in Borkou and the periods of drought shorter. The chief agricultural interest of the region lies in its excellent pasture, where the camels find abundant provender of very good quality.
_In Mortcha._—From Archei I went to the post of Fada, 40 miles or so to the north-west, for a few days’ rest, after which I undertook a new series of reconnaissances westwards, for the purpose of exploring the still imperfectly known desert regions of northern Mortcha, too often visited by the raids of the refractory tribes. I was thus enabled during the early days of January 1915 to trace the course of the temporary rivers that receive the waters from the western slopes of Ennedi. For a few days every year these rivers roll down a volume of water sufficient to stop the march of caravans and convoys for a longer or shorter time, and continue their course for 200 or 300 kilometres before each of them reaches the pool in which it ends. As they have not force enough to go further, all one finds beyond the terminal pool is a valley-way more or less clearly marked, and blocked with sand from place to place, but still visible for fairly long distances. It has been concluded that they formerly ran into the ancient lake of Djourab, the level of which is from 200 to 300 yards lower. The most interesting of these rivers from the geographical point of view is the wadi Soala, which in the central and lower parts of its course separates the granitic zone of Mortcha from the sandstone of Ennedi.
The whole region is one succession of good grazing-grounds for camels, but which can be made use of only a few months a year while there is water in the temporary pools. The one that lasts longest, that of Elléla, in which the wadi Oum-Hadjar comes to an end, is not entirely dry till April or May when the annual rains have been normal, in which case it makes direct communication possible between Borkou and Wadaï.
_Between Ennedi and Borkou._—I next set out northwards from Ennedi in the direction of Madadi and Wadi-Doum, which had been adopted for the time being as their headquarters by some rebel bands from Tibesti, which attacked indifferently the caravans from Wadaï going to Arouelli for salt and our unescorted convoys of supplies circulating between the posts of Faya, Fada, and Ounianga. At the moment when I arrived in the neighbourhood they had just carried out successfully several of these surprise attacks, and were making off to their mountains to get their booty into a safe place. Unable to go after them, for my camels, exhausted by three months’ reconnoitring and hard fare, could not challenge those of the rebels for speed, I decided to return without delay to Faya to organize reprisals.
On the way I passed through a low-lying zone of country once occupied by lakes and marshes of considerable extent and of about 1000 feet in altitude, or 250 or 300 feet higher than the region of the ancient lakes of Borkou and Djourab, with which it is connected by a continuous valley, the bed of which, very clearly visible in places, is often buried in sand. This lake-zone seems to be the end of the great depression I had crossed two months earlier, between the massifs of Erdi and Ennedi. Except in the immediate neighbourhood of the springs of Madadi and around the permanent pool of the Wadi Doum (or Touhou) the soil is absolutely barren, consisting either of very pure siliceous sand or of soft friable earth, whitish in colour and as fine as flour, into which we sank to the ankles at every step, raising thick clouds of stifling dust. Towards the south stretched chains of shifting sand- dunes, separating that depression from the last foothills of Ennedi, while to the north extended endless rocky terraces, in which were hollowed here and there basins of 1 or 2 square miles, wells of water impregnated with soda.
_The Holy War._—The Turco-Senoussist propaganda against the French and English was beginning to make its pernicious effects felt among the nomads of Borkou and Ennedi. The easy successes achieved by the rebels against caravans and convoys unprotected by escorts had just given them a great idea of their military power, and increased their numbers and audacity. The withdrawal towards their base of the Italian forces in Tripoli, and particularly the abandonment of Mourzouk, where a Senoussist governor had taken up his residence, had inflamed the minds of the Toubous, whose warlike ardour had never burnt so fiercely: it seemed to them likely that a backward movement of the French occupying Tibesti, Borkou, and Ennedi would speedly take place if their commissariat lines were seriously threatened in the direction of Lake Chad and Wadaï. Turkey’s entrance into the war on the side of Germany against France and England had counterbalanced the successes won over the Germans in the Cameroons and deeply stirred the imaginations of these devout Mohammedans, who refused to recognize any other chief than the distant Sultan of Stamboul, Caliph of the Prophet and Commander of the Faithful. And one after another the Duzzas of Borkou, the Gouras of Gouro, the Arnas of Tibesti, and the Gaïdas of Ennedi fell from their allegiance.
Now, at that moment the requirements of the escort-service for our convoys of supplies were such that out of the hundred and sixty men of each of my companies in Borkou and Ennedi, less than twenty rifles were sometimes left to guard the posts of Faya and Fada. It was hardly before the month of April 1915, when the food-transport was almost finished, that it became possible to remedy this dispersal of our forces and organize the punitive expeditions rendered indispensable by the incessant raids of the rebels. That task was an awkward one, for we were short of good camels and above all of good agents of information, while our elusive adversary was kept acquainted with our slightest movement by certain elements of the population theoretically faithful to us.
It would evidently have been too much for us to hope that we should speedily obtain the submission of the malcontents, given the very considerable extent of their space for movements of all kinds, and also their extreme mobility; but we could henceforth return blow for blow, chase them to their mountain lairs, and give them the impression that, after playing for some time the pleasant part of hunters, they were henceforth going to play the much less pleasant one of game.
One after another Captains Lauzanne and Châteauvieux, Lieutenants Lafage and Calinon, at the head of mixed detachments of regular soldiers and Arab and Toubou auxiliaries, made their way into the wildest fastnesses of Eastern Tibesti, Borkou, and Ennedi. Captain Lauzanne, in particular, succeeded in tracking the Gourmas into the distant solitudes of Ouri, 200 miles north of Gouro, at the foot of the eastern spurs of the Tibesti, and after them their cousins the Koussadas into the very crater of Emi Koussi, till then regarded as impregnable. The fame of these two expeditions was noised abroad in the country to such an extent that by the end of the month of July the general situation of Borkou had greatly improved, and we could turn our thoughts to the consolidation of our prestige by an offensive action against the rebels of Miski, and by a junction of our troops with those of Zouar and Bardaï, the two military posts entrusted with the supervision and pacification of western and central Tibesti.
=7. Exploration of Tibesti.=
In the month of September 1916 I was authorized to proceed from Borkou to Tibesti for the purpose of getting in touch with the rebel tribes who intended to attack the caravans fitted out in Kanem and Wadaï for the carrying of supplies to the garrisons of Borkou and Ennedi. The garrison of Tibesti was to attempt, to the best of its ability, to co-operate with this action in such a way that the hostile bands, threatened at once on the south, the west, and the north, might either be induced to submit or else to disperse in the eastern part of the Tibestian massif, the part furthest away from the region to be traversed by our convoys of supplies.
The rebels were comparatively few in number—about 2000 combatants—and divided into clans living in different regions; but they were of extreme mobility, well armed, and abundantly supplied with ammunition. Their tactics, which were very skilful, consisted in avoiding on all occasions a fight in the open, in hiding in the labyrinth of their well-nigh inaccessible rocks to fire at short range on the enemy when he passed near enough, in decamping at top speed to hide again a little further on, and so draw little groups of adversaries in the direction of death- traps, where of course well-planned ambuscades lay in wait for them.
The strength of the reconnoitring detachment was forty-four black soldiers, officered by four Europeans—one of them a doctor—and accompanied by some thirty auxiliaries (guides, goumiers,[1] camel drivers, and servants). It carried food for two months, and the barrels and skins required for three days’ water. The train included about 120 camels.
The mountainous country to be crossed set an extremely awkward problem: many points where water would have to be found were often hard for the camels to reach. Pasture-grounds were rare and scanty. The tracks, inexistent or deceptive, would now stretch away across successive heaps of sharp-edged pebbles, and now twist and turn endlessly along winding torrent beds, deep sunk between sheer banks. To cross from one valley to the next one had to climb a succession of cliff ledges, rising tier on tier to several hundred metres by the merest suggestion of paths winding along the sides of spurs formed by the rolling down of _débris_ from above; when the slopes grew too steep, the baggage had to be carried up from one shelf to the next on men’s heads. Our camels, used to the easy going of the great sandy plains, were discouraged by the asperities of the sharp-angled rocks, by the narrow ledges, the steep and slippery steps, the loose pebbles, the excessively sharp turns; and so only short distances could be covered in spite of long hours under way and intense fatigue.
It goes without saying that we had no sort of map of these unknown regions, and that we were utterly at the mercy of the guides whom by good or evil fortune the patrols put at our disposition. Accordingly, the choice of our routes was dictated to us at once by the necessity of reducing to a minimum the efforts and privations of our camels and by that of keeping within the limits familiar to our ordinary and occasional guides. It may be added that the latter showed the utmost unwillingness to lead us into regions where the unsubdued tribes habitually take refuge; for these tribes are in the habit of holding them responsible, on their own heads and those of the members of their families, for all the harm and losses incurred when fights arise with our detachments.
The general plan of this series of operations included, first of all, the reconnoitring of Emi Koussi, an extinct volcano 3400 metres high, followed by an inroad into the valley of Miski, the usual meeting-ground of the Tibestian freebooters threatening the roads to Kanem. The central position of the valley is strengthened by the natural shelter afforded by high mountains and almost impassable rocky foothills, through which lead only two defiles, both of them long and dangerous.
From Miski I meant to make a rapid plunge into the valley of Yebbi, in the heart of central Tibesti, firstly to try to get into connection with a detachment of the garrison of Bardai, and then to make an attempt to reach the plateaux of Goumeur. Lastly, I thought I might be able to get over on to the western slope of the massif, explore its chief valleys, and effect a junction with the Zouar camel corps before returning to Borkou. I succeeded in carrying out this programme in its main lines, except for the operation in the direction of Goumeur, which had to be replaced at the last minute by a reconnaissance pushed as far as the post of Bardai. I was away, in all, for seventy-two days, or barely a fortnight in excess of my estimate.
_From the Plains of Borkou to the Foot of Emi Koussi._—The name of Borkou is given by geographers to the group of low-lying stretches of country separating the mountain mass of Tibesti from that of Ennedi; it was confined at first to the depression, some 10 kilometres wide by 100 in length, that extends from east to west, from Faya to Ain Galakka.
This hollow was long filled by a lake, of which numerous and conclusive traces are still found: beds of lake shells, whole skeletons of fishes up to a yard and half long, calcareous crust covering long streaks of rock, platforms of white clay marking the line of flats where the last pools left by the waters of the former lake have held out longest before drying up, and so forth. This lake was fed by mighty watercourses, coming down from the mountains of Tibesti and Ennedi; it poured its overflow through the valley of the Jurab into the Kirri, the deepest, largest, and most recently dried up among the ancient lakes and lowlands of the Chad.
From Borkou to Emi Koussi there is a large choice of routes. The best, owing to the number of points at which water and pasturage may be found, is that which passes by way of Yarda to Yono. Hereabouts we leave behind the region of the oases characterized by numerous depressions in which water is found close to the soil in practically unlimited quantities, in wells less than a yard deep and in salt pools. From that point one enters the rocky zone where there is no more water underground, but only natural cisterns forming reservoirs with the water that streams down into them, and dries up a longer or shorter time after the passage of the accidental rains that filled them.
The general look of the country is fairly uniform. It is a vast sandstone plateau sloping from north to south, ravined with narrow gullies running in a general direction from north-east to south-west, and which are real rivers of sand in which the shifting dunes pile themselves up and overlap to the point of being impassable at times to laden beasts of burden. This direction, from north-east to south-west, being that of the prevailing wind in Borkou, the parallelism of these gullies and the general appearance of the landscape give colour to the supposition that they were hollowed out of the sandstone by the erosive action of the dunes driven before the wind.
The rocky plateau is commanded at intervals by a few blackish peaks of low relief, among which the most noticeable are those of Kazzar, near Yarda, 75 metres above the surrounding country; Olochi, near Dourkou, 130 metres; Ehi Kourri, near Kouroudi, 350 metres in relief. From the height of these natural observatories nothing is to be seen, in whatever direction one turns, but vast dark-tinted expanses strewn with stones, where no sort of topographical order can be discerned. So confused and scattered are the rocky masses that the impression they leave is less that of a sequence of alternating plateaux and valleys than of a chaos of disconnected reefs rising above a sea of sand, amid breakers of billowy dunes. Much going and coming was needed before I could form an exact notion of the physiognomy of these regions, for the fact is that their valleys are more or less blocked, at longish intervals, by heaps of rock debris and sand, and so divided into a succession of elongated hollows communicating only by subterranean infiltration. In these hollows may be found, here and there, layers of shells that enable us to fix the period when they were still underwater at a comparatively recent and no doubt Quaternary epoch. From place to place there still exist permanent salt pools, of greater or less depth, and usually at the foot of the cliffs that shut in some of these valleys on the east. One supposes that the strong back draughts of the north-east wind have mainly concentrated their action on those points of the surface where the sandstone was softest; in the excavations thus produced the sheet of subterranean water has been able to make its appearance in the open air, and under the influence of a persistent evaporation, due to the extreme dryness of the air and the intensity of the solar heat, the salts in solution in the water have undergone a progressive concentration, sometimes to the point of floating on the surface of the pool with the appearance of translucent blocks of ice.
Having left Faya on September 4 we arrived on the 11th at the foot of Emi Koussi, 125 miles to the north, passing on our way by Korou Koranga, where we renewed our supply of water. The spot is one of the most picturesque I saw during this journey to Tibesti; it is a natural cistern hollowed by the action of the falling waters in the deep and narrow bed of the wadi Elleboe, a torrential river that comes down from Emi Koussi. The way to it lies through a defile more than a mile long, so narrow that two men cannot walk abreast. The water lies at the bottom of a grotto, dark in spite of being open to the sky, and whose walls wind in and out in such a way that not only the drying desert winds cannot get to it, but that even the sun’s rays only penetrate to it for a few minutes each day about noon, and only get down to the level of the water during May and July, when the sun reaches the local zenith. I had neither the time nor the means to measure the length and depth, the approach between precipitous walls being so difficult; but the supply of water is such that the cistern has never been dry so long as the guides can remember, however long may have been the drought during which the torrent has ceased to flow; the water stays clear, cool, and pleasant to the taste, without the slightest salty flavour.
The cistern of Derso, on the contrary, at the foot of Emi Koussi, near the pasturage of Yono, is broad, spacious, and subject to the drying action of sun and winds; a score of yards deep, it is easy to get at; but its greenish water, stagnant and thick with organic matter, has to be filtered before it can be drunk without disgust, and a period of twelve or fifteen months’ drought is usually enough to dry it up altogether.
_Ascent of Emi Koussi._—In all probability the rebels of the regions we had just come through had withdrawn towards their strongholds on the top of Emi Koussi. A light detachment was sent out to make sure that this was so, while the greater number of our camels were left to rest in the pasturage of Yono, where I had a little zeriba built for the storage of our baggage and provisions and the security of the men I left to guard them.