The plain between the Atlas Mountains and the sea, called the Tell raise grain. The Shott plateau, so called after many small salt lakes, is a grazing country and the mountain slopes are more and more being used for wine-growing, while large irrigation works are under construction to allow the raising of tropical fruit for the European market. Iron and copper deposits have been discovered and railroads connect them with Algiers (the capital) and with Oran and Bizerta, the three main harbours on the Mediterranean.
Tunis, immediately to the east of the department of Algiers, is still nominally an independent state with a king of its own, but since 1881 it has been practically a French protectorate. But as France has no surplus population, most of the immigrants are Italians. The latter have a hard time competing with the Jews who moved to this part of the world centuries ago when it was still a Turkish possession, where they had a better chance to survive than under Christian rule.
Next to Tunis, the capital, the city of Sfax is the most important town. Two thousand years ago the land of Tunis was of more importance than it is to-day for then it formed part of the territory of Kart-hadshat, which the Romans called Carthage. The harbour, which had room for 220 vessels, may still be seen. Otherwise very little remains, for when the Romans really wanted to do a job, they did it thoroughly and their hatred of Carthage (inspired of course by fear and jealousy) was such that they did not leave a single house standing when they finally took the city in 146 B.C. They burned it down to the ground. The charred ruins, lying sixteen feet below the level of the present soil, are all that remains of a city that once upon a time had almost a million inhabitants.
The north-western corner of Africa is officially known as the independent sultanate of Morocco. There is still a sultan but since 1912 lie too is merely a puppet of France. Not that he ever amounted to much. The Kabyles, the mountain folk of the AntiAtlas, were too strongly entrenched to bother much about this distant majesty who for safety’s sake varied constantly between his two capitals, Morocco in the south and the holy city of Fez in the north. These handy mountains were such a menace that the valley people never undertook to cultivate their fields. Their harvests would be stolen anyway.
One can say a great deal against French rule in these parts of Africa, but when it comes to the safety of the public highroads. They have performed wonders. They moved the center of government to Rabat, a city on the Atlantic, where the French navy can lend a helping hand in case of need. Rabat is several hundred miles north of Agadir, another Atlantic port which unexpectedly got into the limelight four years before the outbreak of the Great War when the Germans sent a gunboat there to remind France that Morocco must not become another Algiers, an incident which helped a great deal to bring about the final disastrous conflict of 1914.
A small corner of Morocco just opposite Gibraltar is a Spanish colony. It was given to Spain as a peace-offering when France took possession of Morocco. The two cities of Ceuta and Melilla are best known from the newspaper stories of recent date mentioning the defeats which the unwilling Spanish troops suffered at the hands of the natives, the so-called Riff-Kabyles.
To the west of the Riff Mountains lies Tangier, the internationalist city where during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the European ambassadors accredited to the court of the Sultan of Morocco used to reside. The Sultan did not want them too near his own court and Tangier was therefore chosen as their place of residence.
The future of this entire mountainous triangle is no longer a matter of doubt. In another fifty years, that whole region will be French, together with the second natural division of Africa which we shall discuss now – that of the great brown desert, the As-Sahara of the Arabs, the Sahara of our modern maps.
The Sahara, which is almost as large as the continent of Europe, runs all the way from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and on the other side of the Red Sea it continues under the guise of the Arabian Peninsula. In the north, except for the Atlas triangle of Morocco, Algiers and Tunis, the Sahara is bordered by the Mediterranean and in the south by the Sudan. The Sahara is a plateau, but not a very high one, for most of it lies at an altitude of only 1200 feet. Here and there are the remnants of old mountain ridges, worn away by wind and sand. There are a fair number of oases where the subterranean water allows a few thrifty Arabs to lead a not over-opulent existence. The density of population is 0.04 per square mile which means that the Sahara is practically uninhabited. The best known among the wandering desert tribes are the Tuaregs, excellent fighters. The other Saharians are a mixture of Semite (or Arab) and Hamite (or Egyptian) and Sudanese Negro.