Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/38

22 of sketches carved on the rocks by the hand of prehistoric man, the remains of hunting spoils, the stone implements he used and the traces of the household fires he burned. Here beneath the Murjajo generation after generation of various races and tribes must have succeeded one another. To the rocky sides of this range there must have clung diverse peoples and civilizations, whose individual cults and tribes fought for the possession of these sun-bathed slopes, where there is always such treasure of warmth, of light, of tempering and balmy winds from the sea and of an almost incomprehensible spirit of joy that never leaves the newcomer from the moment he touches the shore of this great peaceful harbor of Oran.

What tribes, what races had their origin here in those early periods of human history, or migrated here from other territories, perhaps years of marches from these shores? From what nations sprang those unknown hunters, now returned to dust, who in these caverns of Algeria left great heaps of bones of elephants, of immense buffaloes, lions, rhinoceroses and hippopotami; beside them the shells of mussels and other edible mollusks; and, among all these, stone hatchets, arrow-heads and spear-points? To what races belonged those artists who graved their pictures with flints on the cavern walls and on the cliffs of rivers that have now been dried for centuries? Who coursed these unlimited stretches where the Sahara today spreads a pall over an empire but where once the sea bathed the rocks of Erg and the Anti Atlas? What human agglomerations existed there when the continent of Africa had quite another form and while