ARTESIAN WELLS. 161 



We have already seen that the Desert of Erosion is watered by 

 means of artesian wells, natural or artificial. The latter have been 

 known to the peoples of the Sahara from the remotest antiquity ; 

 but the implements and the methods employed to bore or preserve 

 them were, as the reader will suppose, very rude and unsatisfactory. 

 The sides of the well are only supported by a framework of palm- 

 wood, which decays very quickly ; the well gets choked ; divers 

 descend with baskets to clear away the sand ; but after awhile the 

 evil exceeds their power of remedying it. " Then, for want of 

 water," says M. Martins, "the palms grow sick and perish; the 

 villages are emptied of their population ; the oasis contracts its 

 boundaries, and gradually disappears. The Desert resumes possession 

 of the demesne which the labour of man had temporarily won for it." 

 Fortunately, in the track of the French army have trodden the 

 French engineers, with all the wonderful apparatus that Science 

 places at their disposal, and in numerous places they have excavated 

 true artesian wells, similar to those which supply some of our great 

 towns. And thus many oases which were on the point of perishing 

 have been saved, others have been created, and the conquest of the 

 Desert by modern industry is henceforth no more than a question 

 of time. 



The oases of the Sandy Desert, as I have said, are not watered. 

 They only possess such wells as suffice, more or less, for the needs of 

 the poor cultivators. As for the palms, and other nutritive vege- 

 tables, they are planted at the bottom of conical excavations some 

 eighteen, twenty-five, or thirty feet in depth ; so that at a short 

 distance you only see their crests rising above the sandy soil like 

 large tufts of herbage. The slopes around these hollow gardens are 

 stayed indifferently well by a matting of palm leaves. The well 

 itself is placed in the centre, and its depth does not exceed five-and- 

 twenty feet. Nothing can be more precarious than these oases, which 

 a gust of wind may bury under an avalanche of sand. Yet the men 

 are cleaner in their person, neater in attire, and livelier in spirit - 



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