Foureau’s achievement was of immense value to France, not merely because it demonstrated that the desert could be crossed from one edge to the other, but because it proved the truth of the explorer’s oft-repeated assertion that the first step in the conquest and pacification of the Sahara was to break the power of the great Touareg confederation. These robber tribes occupying the oases which stretch from Ghadames in the east to Tuat in the west, formed a cordon which stretched right across the desert south of Algeria, completely masking the southern frontiers of that colony. The Touareg were to the central Sahara what the Sioux and the Apaches were to our Western plains. From their inaccessible strongholds amid the hills and oases of the mid-desert, they kept watch upon the trade-routes, levied blackmail upon or plundered caravans, murdered explorers and pioneers, sacked frontier towns, and preyed on the trans-Saharan trade as the Barbary corsairs had preyed on the Mediterranean merchantmen. Consequently the Sahara was in a constant state of turmoil and insecurity; theft, pillage, and massacre were so common as scarcely to evoke comment. Armed to the teeth, mounted on their swift _méhari_, bands of these masked riders would wipe out a whole caravan or swoop down upon some defenseless oasis-town, regaining their distant desert strongholds long before a force could be organized to pursue them. Fearless, arrogant, treacherous, and inhumanly cruel, the only law they recognized was that of superior force. Until the great robber confederation was smashed France could not hope to solve the Saharan question. “You will never traverse the Touareg country,” Foureau said in one of his reports, “with any kind of security except by depending on force and by establishing all along the route well-manned positions, the garrisons of which will police the road throughout. This you will have to do if you wish to open up communications between the Sudan and Algeria.”