The circumstances of the disaster, so vividly recounted by Duveyrier to the Paris Geographical Society on 22nd April, 1881, had followed the publication of his account of a people whom he had described picturesquely, but with some exaggeration, as the “Knights of the Desert.” The massacre created a profound impression in France. The Tuareg came to be regarded as an insurmountable obstacle to the French penetration of North Africa, and expeditions into their country were discontinued. The disaster of Bir Gharama remained unavenged until 1902, when a detachment of Camel Corps under Lieut. Cottonest met the pick of the Ahaggar Tuareg in battle at Tit within their own mountains and killed 93 men out of 299 present, the French patrol losing only 4 killed and 2 wounded out of 120 native soldiers and Arab scouts. Despite the small numbers involved, the fight at Tit broke the resistance of Ahaggar, for it proved the vanity of matching a few old flintlocks and spears and swords against magazine rifles.[8] But if it demonstrated the futility of overt resistance, it also established for all time the courage of the camel riders of the desert, who hurled themselves against a barrier of rifle fire, unprotected by primeval forest or sheltering jungle, in order to maintain their age-long defiance of the mastery of foreign people. Considering the magnitude of the results they achieve, Saharan, like Arabian, battles involve surprisingly small numbers. The size of armed bodies moving over the desert is limited by the capacity of the wells; the output of water not only regulates the mass of raiding bands, but also determines their strategy, as well as the routes of trading caravans, which are compelled to move in large bodies in order to ensure even a small measure of protection. Only the realisation of this rather self-evident fact enabled the French in the course of years to deal with raiders in Southern Algeria by organising Camel Corps patrols of relatively small size and great mobility. The privations which these raiders are willing to endure made it impossible to fight them with a European establishment.