PEOPLE OF THE VEIL [Decoration] MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA . MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO PLATE 1 [Illustration: AGELLAL VILLAGE AND MOUNTAINS] [_Frontispiece._ PEOPLE OF THE VEIL _Being an Account of the Habits, Organisation and History of the Wandering Tuareg Tribes which inhabit the Mountains of Air or Asben in the Central Sahara_ BY FRANCIS RENNELL RODD ⵍⵆⵔⵗⵙ “NAUGHT BUT GOOD” WITH ILLUSTRATIONS MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1926 COPYRIGHT PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN PREFACE This book was originally intended to be an account of the people and mountains of Air in the Central Sahara, where I made a journey during most of 1922 with Angus Buchanan and T. A. Glover. The former had visited the area on a previous occasion and had described the people and places he had seen in his book, _Out of the World—North of Nigeria_. It therefore seemed more profitable to inquire into some of the problems surrounding the inhabitants of the Sahara whom we encountered, and thus deal with Air and its Tuareg population rather less objectively than had my fellow-traveller. In the course of the succeeding years, as I became more and more immersed in considering various scientific aspects of the Sahara, I came to the conclusion that neither had the Tuareg people nor had this vast area of the earth’s surface been at all adequately examined. Most studies had been objective and, as is unhappily the case with this book, confined to one area. A comprehensive account of the history and ethnology of the Sahara still requires to be written.