THE GREAT EGYPTIAN OASIS. 183 



strongest being the only right they recognize, and each man for 

 himself the only principle they respect. A troop of Touaregs, for 

 instance, descends upon an oasis, and summons its inhabitants to 

 deliver up immediately a certain number of bags of dates. In case 

 of refusal they withdraw, but the people of the oasis may prepare to 

 defend themselves with arms, for the dreaded blow will very shortly 

 be delivered. The Touaregs, leaving their maharis and their baggage 

 at a convenient distance, penetrate at night into the palm-gardens, 

 scale the walls, and, unless very energetically repelled, seize upon the 

 tribute they had demanded. 



Nothing is there to be remarked in the Arabs of the q'sours but 

 their misery and degradation. A French officer, M. Tremblet, has 

 described with exactness and force their physiognomy, manners, 

 character, ideas, and history.* One rises from the perusal of his 

 book with a painful impression. In the narrow and pestilential 

 streets of the q'sours, where vermin are as numerous as men and 

 women, in those mud palaces where the sultans are enthroned in 

 rags, the same passions, the same ambitions, the same all-potent 

 appetites, the same struggles, intrigues, and crimes prevail, as occupy 

 so large a place in the history of the great states of Europe and 

 Asia. 



Among the inhabitants of the Desert I would include the posses- 

 sors of the great Egyptian oasis, that ancient cradle of civilization 

 that strange and mysterious land which, after throbbing with so 

 full and brilliant a life in the days of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies, 

 slumbered for centuries under the leaden domination of the Moslem. 

 Let us note only that the Egyptian people have undergone no special 

 modification ; the features of the fellahs of to-day are exactly thoso 

 which we trace in the pictures that cover the walls of palace and 

 tomb, the monuments that carry us back in imagination to the 

 erection of the Pyramids or the glories of hundred-gated Thebes. It is 

 the o]d Egypto-Berber race, wherein we recognize the mixture of the 

 black and Shemitic blood, or perhaps the still incomplete result of the 

 * Tremblet, " Les Francais dans le Desert " (Paris, 1863). 



