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 commonly 
used in Europe, for the great Northern 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, 
affording 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 1 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 
