Most people at home picture the desert to themselves as
wholly dead, flat, and sandy. To talk about the fauna and flora of
Sahara sounds in their ears like self-contradictory nonsense. But, as a
matter of fact, that uniform and lifeless desert of the popular fancy
exists only in those sister arts that George II.--good, practical
man--so heartily despised, 'boetry and bainting.' The desert of real
life, though less impressive, is far more varied. It has its ups and
downs, its hills and valleys. It has its sandy plains and its rocky
ridges. It has its lakes and ponds, and even its rivers. It has its
plants and animals, its oases and palm-groves. In short, like everything
else on earth, it's a good deal more complex than people imagine.
One may take Sahara as a very good example of the actual desert of
physical geography, in contradistinction to the level and lifeless
desert that stretches like the sea over illimitable spaces in verse or
canvas. And here, I fear, I am going to dispel another common and
cherished illusion. It is my fate to be an iconoclast, and perhaps long
practice has made me rather like the trade than otherwise. A popular
belief exists all over Europe that the late M. Roudaire--that De Lesseps
who never quite 'came off'--proposed to cut a canal from the
Mediterranean into the heart of Africa, which was intended, in the
stereotyped phrase of journalism, to 'flood Sahara,' and convert the
desert into an inland sea.
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