X INTRODUCTION 



trees in the centre of the Libyan Desert than he had to 

 leave it. 



We now reahse from the work of Mr. Harding King 

 in 1913 and from Mrs. Forbes's book, with its admirable 

 photographs and both vivid and circumstantial descrip- 

 tions, what this series of oases, salt lakes, and underground 

 fountains means in the middle of the Libyan Desert. It 

 is one of the vestiges of a formerly well-watered country 

 ten, twenty or more thousand years ago. It was a more 

 habitable region possibly at a distance in time not ex- 

 ceeding five thousand years. To it came, long ago, when 

 the intervening desert was much more traversable, clans 

 of the Tu, Tebu or Tibu people, nowadays the dominating 

 population of Fazan and Tibesti. A few Tebu — one or 

 two hundred — still linger in Kufara on sufferance, the 

 semi-slaves of the Zwiya Arabs. The author is able to 

 give her readers an admirable photograph of one of these 

 lingering Tebu of Kufara. 



/ "^ Who and what are the variously named Tu, Teda, 

 I Tibu, or Tebu tribes? They are seemingly of consider- 

 able antiquity, the Garamantes of Herodotos and the 

 Romans, the Tedamansii of Claudius Ptolomaeus, the 

 Alexandrian geographer of the second century. They 

 represent one of the numerous races between the White 

 man and the Negro, but in their purer and more northern 

 extension they are a people with a preponderance of white 

 jman stock. The skin is dark- tinted and the hair has a 

 kink, a curl about it ; but the physiognomy is that of the 

 [Mediterranean peoples, except for the occasionally tumid 

 lips. They do not indeed differ very much in appear- 

 ance, facially, from the Hamitic peoples of North-east 

 Africa; but their language is utterly dissimilar. With 

 this and that corruption, change, and deficiency, it has 

 become the speech of Bornu (Kanuri), Kanem, Ennedi, 

 northern Darfur, Tibesti, Tummo, and southern Fazan. 



