A harka of the terrible masked Touareg—“the Blue-Veiled Silent Ones”—who have terrorized the Sahara as the Sioux terrorized the Western plains] Quite unforgettable is the memory of my first excursion into the green depths of Tozeur. All about me the stately date-palms rose in a wilderness of vertical lines. Fascinating brooks gurgled across my path to lose themselves amid the trees. The air was heavy with the fragrance of peach and orange blossoms. Toiling amid the groves were bronzed, bare-limbed, brawny men in snowy turbans. Groups of tattooed women in flowing garments of blue homespun shuffled by, baskets of produce balanced on their heads, their heavy necklaces and anklets tinkling. Bathing in a secluded pool were some naked nut-brown maids who, uttering cries of feigned dismay, fled precipitately at our approach. From the leafy depths beyond came the plaintive strains of some reed instrument. My guide said that it was an Arab boy tootling on a native flute. But I knew better. The music _I_ heard came from the Pipes of Pan. CHAPTER X THE CONQUEST OF THE SAHARA The ring of colonies, regencies, protectorates, spheres of influence, military districts, and mandated territories which comprise France’s colonial empire on the continent of Africa have the Sahara for their core. Their front windows overlook the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the Senegal, the Niger, and the Congo, but in every case their back doors open upon the desert. The linking of these distant and disconnected possessions, which have so long beckoned to each other across the enormous gulf, is, then, the ultimate aim of the French empire-builders; and every move which France has made on the checker-board of Africa during the last half-century or more has had in view such a consolidation. In other words, it has long since been realized by the government at Paris that the Sahara must be made a means of communication rather than of obstruction if the republic’s vast holdings in the Dark Continent are to be an empire in anything save name. No nation was ever confronted with a task of such titanic dimensions nor one calling for such patience, energy, and courage; not England in India, nor Russia in Siberia, nor the United States beyond the Mississippi. But the reward is commensurate with the task, for if France succeeds in subjugating the Sahara, and thereby bringing into easy communication with each other those of her possessions which abut upon it, she will have created a continuous and homogeneous overseas domain, approximately equivalent in area to the continent of Europe, sweeping almost without a break from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Guinea and the Congo, from the Atlantic to the valley of the Nile.