Rev. H, B. Tristram on the Ornithology of N. Africa. 277 



XXIX. — On the Ornithology of Northern Africa. By the Rev. 

 H. B. Tristram, M.A., F.L.S. (Part II. The Sahara.) 



[Continued from page 162.] 



(Plate IX.) 



Though I speak of " The Sahara " as the term is commouly 

 used in Europe, for the great Nox'thern Desert of Africa, yet the 

 employment of this word in such a sense is not strictly accurate. 

 The Arabs divide Africa north of the Line into three portions, 

 the Tell, the Sahara, and the Desert ; the Tell being the corn- 

 growing country from the coast to the Atlas ; the Sahara, the 

 sandy pasture land where flocks and herds roam, from the Atlas 

 through the Hauts Plateaux or Steppes, to the region where all 

 regular supply of water fails ; and the Desert, the region which 

 extends thence almost to the watershed of the Niger — arid, salt, 

 afibrding no sustenance to cattle or sheep, but where the camel 

 snatches a scanty subsistence, and which is, excepting in its 

 rare oases, equally inhospitable to man. It is to the feathered 

 denizens of these vast tracts south of the Atlas that I propose to 

 confine my observations in this paper, i. e. to the birds which 

 inhabit the deserts, or resort to the various oases which I visited 

 from 1855 to 1857. 



If any reader of these remarks has formed his idea of the 

 great African Desert from Turner's well-known picture, with its 

 unbroken horizon line on all sides, a dying camel in the fore- 

 ground, and a vulture soaring aloft the only objects to break its 

 monotony, let him at once dispel the misty illusion. Imagine 

 rather what the north-eastern portion of England would be if 

 completely drained of its streams and denuded of its vegetation : 

 wooded dells transformed into rocky naked nullahs, and tillage 

 plains covered with a soil pulverized by the combined action of 

 heat, wind, and attrition. 



With all its monotony, the Desert has its varieties. One day 

 you laboriously pick your steps among bare rocks, now sharp 

 enough to wound the tough sole of your camel, now so slippery 

 that the Arab can scarce make good his footing. Another day 

 you plunge for miles knee-deep in loose suffocating sand-drifts, 

 ever-changing, and threatening to bury you when you halt. 



VOL. I. U 



