HABITAT AND CONDITIONS OF THE DATE. 155 



uninhabitable and uninhabited. Arab poesy represents it as a living 

 being, created by God on the sixth day, at the same time as man. 

 To express under what conditions it prospers, the imagination of the 

 Saharan exaggerates the true, to render it the more palpable. " This 

 king of the oasis," he says, "must plunge his feet in the water and 

 raise his head in the fire of heaven." Science, to a certain extent, 

 confirms this seeming hyperbole ; for it needs 5100 of heat accumu- 

 lated during eight months for the date to ripen its fruit perfectly. If 

 the sum of heat be less, the fruits set, but they do not grow to their 

 full dimensions, remain bitter to the taste, and fail in the sugar and 

 farina, which form their nutritive properties. 



These conditions are realized in the climate of the Sahara. The 

 mean temperature of the year averages from sixty-eight to seventy- 

 six degrees, according to the locality. The heat commences in April, 

 and does not cease until October. The thermometer seldom sinks in 

 the cold season more than two degrees below zero, and the date 

 can endure six degrees below zero. 



Rain, as already stated, is rare in the Sahara ; it falls in winter, 

 and stimulates into a newly awakened life the vegetation which has 

 been drained of vigour by a summer sun. Sometimes they descend 

 in torrents, but these torrents, like our summer showers, are of briefest 

 duration. At Tongourt and Ouraegla whole years pass by without a 

 drop of rain. Does not the reader understand, then, the gratefulness 

 of the Arabs towards a tree which can derive its nourishment from 

 the burning sand, the scarcely less burning airs of heaven, and the 

 brackish waters beneath the soil which are fatal to all other kinds of 

 vegetation which retains its verdure fresh in the glare of a pitiless 

 sun which resists successfully the winds that bow to the ground its 

 flexible stem which provides him with beams and coverings for his 

 tent, cordage for the harness of his horses and camels, fruit to satisfy 

 his hunger and wine to quench his thirst which is, moreover, "a 

 thing of beauty," and gladsome to the eye ? 



" Those groups of lovely date-trees bending 

 Languidly their leaf-crowned heads, 



