men among the sand-dunes to the south of El Wad,
were accustomed to lead a life of hardship and considerable
danger, and clearly did not trouble themselves
much as to what the morrow might bring
forth.W
e roused the sentry and went down with him
to interview them. They were by no means loth
to talk of their raid. At the very mention of it
the man we were speaking to relaxed his features
into a grim smile and gave vent to a low laugh of
retrospective triumph.
There has for centuries been a blood-feud between
the Shaambah and the Tawareks, and this has
resulted in much camel-stealing, caravan-raiding,
looting of camps and incidental bloodshed. Of late
years the Shaambah have been getting rather the
worst of the game, for while the Tawareks have
been making perpetual attacks upon their camps
and herds, the French authorities have when possible
prevented them from retaliating in the same manner.
Human endurance of wrong has its limits, and
when that human happens to be a Shaambah Arab
and the wrong is inflicted by his hereditary enemies,
the Tawareks, that limit is very soon reached.
Swearing and fuming at their forced inaction the
Shaambah for some time endured those Tawarek
raids ; but at length the limit to their patience was
reached, and they resolved at all costs to elude the
French, and to read their enemies a lesson which
they would not easily forget.
A hundred or so of these wild, dare-devil
Shaambah, mounted upon their meharis, or trotting
camels, met together at a point in the desert, and,
with all the glee of a party of schoolboys out for a
holiday, started off across the sand-dunes to wreak
their vengeance upon their foes.
They marched by easy stages, so as not to
exhaust their camels, until they came to a spot
‘ somewhere beyond Ghadames,’ where they found
a Tawarek camp. They surrounded this during the
night, and when day broke attacked it and killed
every man which it contained.
‘ That man killed two,’ said the sentry, who was
a Shaambah himself, and would, it was easy to see,
have given his soul to have been there.
The man indicated set his teeth and grinned at
the recollection. That had evidently been one of
the red-letter days of his life.
But though they eventually captured that camp,
the Shaambah by no means got off scot-free. There
were only a few male Tawareks in the tents, for
the majority of them were away on a trading expedition,
but those who were there, well knowing
that they could expect no quarter, fought like incarnate
fiends, and a Tawarek when fairly cornered
will take a lot of killing before he is done.
One of them having emptied his gun and
smashed it over the head of a Shaambah drew his
sword and attacked a man near him. The latter, in
order to guard his head, held up his gun with both
hands. He underrated, however, his opponent’s
strength. The Tawarek’s sword shore clean through
the barrel of the gun into the Arab’s head beyond
Having looted this camp, the Shaambah com