Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/341





AR-FOR, or the "Country of For," more commonly called Darfur, by fusing the two words in a similar fashion to that in which the French say "Angleterre," instead of "Pays des Anglais," is the region which stretches west of Kordofân on the route to the river Niger. Dar-Fôr does not entirely belong to the Nile basin. Its western slope, which has as yet been explored but by few travellers, appears to lose its waters in depressions with no outlet; but if the rainfall were sufficiently abundant the wadies of this region, changed into permanent watercourses, would ultimately reach Lake Tsad.

The streams draining in the direction of the Nile also run dry in the plains, except in the season of the kharif, when the streamlets rising in the southern part of Mount Marrah fall into the Bahr-el-Arab. Wady-Melek, or Wed-el-Mek, that is to say the "Royal Valley," also called Wady-Mas-Sûl, which runs to the north-east of Dar-Fôr towards the great bond of the Nile, is also flooded with water during rainy years, possibly for ten or fifteen days together; but it never reaches the Nile, its mouth being blocked by shifting sands. The enormous fluvial bed, nearly always dry, might roll down a volume equal to that of the Rhone or the Rhine. Its sandstone or limestone cliffs, here and there interrupted by lava streams, are from 3 to 30 miles apart, whilst the hollows are filled with trees, which form a continuous line like a band of verdure in the midst of the desert.

The eastern half of Dar-Fôr, belonging to the Nile basin, is the most important part from a political point of view, probably on account of the commercial attraction exercised by the Nilotic towns, and because, in the neighbourhood of the mountains, where water is more plentiful, the people naturally settle down in larger numbers. In this respect Dar-Fôr is a second Kordofân, but on a much larger scale. Around a central district dotted with settled villages stretches the zone of the wilderness and grassy savannahs.

A country of this description can scarcely have any fixed boundaries; here camps, wells, clumps of acacias or brushwood, and bleached bones are the signs by which the traveller knows he is crossing from one district into another. As fur as