Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/141



OF the Tawareks — or Touaregs, as the French spell the name,—the inhabitants of the open Sahara, and, in spite of European treaties and French spheres of influence, the real rulers of the country, very little is known. Most of the information that we have concerning them was gathered from some members of this race who were captured during a desert raid and confined for some time in a fort at Algiers. They are, however, known to be an educated race, as a rule, nearly white in color, who, since they inhabit practically the whole of the Sahara, possess a territory more than half the size of the United States.

Ethnographically speaking, they belong to what is known as the Caucasic race—the race that originated in that part of Africa that lies to the north of the Sudan, when the Sahara was a highly productive country, dotted with swamps and intersected by huge rivers, in which crocodiles, hippopotami, elephants, and other tropical creatures abounded. This race, according to scientists, were our own immediate ancestors, and the Mediterranean branch of it to which the Tawareks belong are closely related to the Iberians, Corsicans, Italians, and Greeks. Owing perhaps to the fact that as the northern part of Africa gradually dried up it afforded insufficient sustenance for its inhabitants. these European branches of the race in the dim ages of the past left their country in several successive migrations and settled in the more fertile lands lying to the north of the Mediterranean, where under happier circumstances they rapidly increased and became highly civilized races.

The Tawareks, however, remained in the ancestral home of their family, which during the course of ages has so changed that at the present time it forms one of