Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 2.djvu/381

 thousand palms, yielding dates of an excellent quality, besides other fruit-trees, such as the orange, apricot, fig, and in the shade, vegetables and tobacco. But like most of the Suharian oases, these gardens belong not to the cultivators, but to the warlike nomads, who claim the larger share of the crops. Grouped under the general name of Trûd, and associated with the Rebaïas, Ferjans, and other marauders, these Arab pastors, who aro said to have arrived in the district towards the end of the fourteenth century, pitch their tents in the neighbourhood of the oases, leaving the cultivation of the land entirely in the hands of the industrious Adwans.

El-Wed, the chief of the Sûf oases, comprises a group of about one thousand

houses, and like others in the neighbourhood, is the seat of a religious confraternity, which maintains commercial and friendly relations with all the brotherhoods of North Africa. Guemar and Kwinin are also populous communities; but most of the inhabitants of Kwinin are nearly blind, from the action of the fine sand with which the air is frequently charged. The Sûf is the only part of the Sahara in which recent marine shells, a buccinum and a balanus, have hitherto been found. But most geologists are of opinion that these isolated shells are not now in situ, but have been brought from a distance by natural agencies.

Like the oases of the Wed Righ, those of the Wed Jeddi belong also to the