The Sahara Of Africa

To form a correct conception of the Sahara, says the Edinburgh Review, our readers must dismiss from their minds all .he long and fantaslic conceptions which hnve been nliached, from time immemorial, to the interior of North África. - Insteadof a torrid región, where boundless steppes of burning sand, are abandoned to the roving horsemen of the desert, and to beasis ofprey, and whero the last vestiges of Moorish civilization expire, long befcre the traveler arrivés at Negrolnnd and the savnge communities of the interior, the Sahara is now ascertained to consist of a vast archipelogo of Oases; cach of them peopled by a tribe of the Moorish race or its oíTsets, more civilized and more capable oí receiving the lessons of civilization, than the houseless Arabs of the Teil ; - cuhivating the date tree with application and ingenuity, nhabjting walled lowns, living undera rpgular government, for the most part of .1 popular form ; carrying to some perfection certain branches of native manufactures, and keeping up an extensive system of commercial inlercourse with the northern and central parts of the African continent, and from Mogador lo Mecca, by the enterprise and uctivity of their caravans. Each of the Oases of the Sahara - which are divided from one another by sandy tracis, bearing shurbs and plants fit only for the nourishment of cattle - presents an animated groupof owns and villages. Every village is encircled by a profusión of fruit-bearingree?. l he palm is the monarch ol their orchards - as much by :he grace of its 'orm as by the value of its productions; md the pomeg'anite, the fig-tree, atid the apricot cluster around its lofly stem. - The lions and tho other beasls of prey, vith which poetry has peopled the African wilds are to be met with only in the mountains of the Teil - never in the plnin of the Saliara. The robber tribes of the Taurichs frequent the southern frontier of the Sahara and the last tracts of habtable land which intervene between tho Oases and the real Desert ; but, in the Saïara itself. Communications carried on after the fashion of the country, are regular and secure. War is, indeed of freouentoccurrence between the neighborug tribes - either for the possession of disputed terriiories, or the revengs of suposed injuries; but all thatis yet known ol' these singular communitics,shovs them o be living in a complelely constituted state of civil society - eminently adnpted o the peculiar part of the globe which hey mhabit - giverned by ihe strong raditions of a primitive people, and fulilling with energy and intelligence the trange vocation of t!:eir life.