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Rh several tracts under grass, corn and date-palms, and containing some permanent reservoirs in the beds of the Wadis Sofejin and Zemzem, where the plateau falls from a mean height of 2000 ft. to 1000 and 530 ft. respectively. But it again rises rapidly southwards to a somewhat uniform level of 1600 or 1700 ft., and here the main caravan route from Tripoli to Murzuk and Lake Chad traverses for a distance of fully 130 m. a monotonous region of sandstone, underlying-clays, marls, gypsum and fossiliferous siliceous deposits. In its northern section this part of the Hammada, as it is locally called in a pre-eminent sense, is relieved by a few patches of herbage, scrub and brushwood, with a little water left in the rocky cavities by the heavy showers which occasionally fall.

The explorations of Henri Duveyrier, Victor Largeau, Erwin von Bary and H. S. Cowper during the second half of the 19th century showed that Tripoli was not only inhabited primitive man, but was the seat of a flourishing Neolithic culture, comparable to and in many respects resembling that of Iberia, Brittany and the British Isles. As in

other parts of Mauretania, many now arid and uninhabitable wastes are strewn with monolithic and other remains, which occur in great variety of form and in vast numbers, as many as 10,000, chiefly of the menhir type, having been enumerated in the Mejana steppe alone. All kinds of megalithic structures are found-dolmens and circles like Stonehenge, Cairns, underground cells excavated in the live rock, barrows topped with huge slabs, cup stones, mounds in the form of step pyramids, and sacrificial altars. Most remarkable are the “Senams,” or trilithons of the Jebel Msid and other districts, some still standing, some in ruins, the purpose of which has not been determined. They occur either singly or in rows, and consist of two square uprights 10 ft. high standing on a common pedestal and supporting a huge transverse beam. In the Terrgurt valley “there had been originally no less than eighteen or twenty megalithic trilithons, in a line, each with its massive altar placed before it” (Cowper), There is reason to believe that the builders of these prehistoric monuments are represented by the Berber people, who still form the substraturn, and in some places the bulk, of the inhabitants of Tripoli proper. But even here the Berbers have for the most part been driven to the Ghurian and Tarhona uplands by the Arab nomads, who now occupy the Jefara flats