The reason of course is that a large income is cheaply obtained by taxing imported tobacco. If this were at all interfered with, new taxes, which would certainly be unpopular, would be required. There is a good deal of interest in the story of the tobacco plantations. Many prisoners of the Civil War in England were sold to Virginia and other places. Even nowadays there is some romance in the history of a cigar. In the Dutch island of Sumatra the jungle is cleared away by the natives under the orders of an English manager. Chinese coolies are then imported. The estate provides each coolie with tools, tea, a barber, and sufficient cash to buy rice, fish, or pork, as well as a little over for his opium, to spend in fireworks, and to propitiate his demons. The coolie grows the tobacco, which is bought from him and manufactured by the estate. Some of it goes to India, where it is used as the outer wrapper of cigars.[59] [59] Dunning, _Tobacco_, 1876. For adulterating tobacco all sorts of leaves are occasionally employed, such as those of the dock, chicory, burdock, foxglove, comfrey, elm, coltsfoot, plantain, beech, cabbage, lettuce (steeped in tar oil), etc., etc. The substance nicotine is a deadly and dangerous poison. When young people smoke tobacco, it has been quite conclusively proved that they will very probably not reach their full growth, but be miserable weaklings, stunted, half-developed, and below the proper standard of a man. This is not surprising, if one reflects on the constitution of tobacco smoke. This contains "nicotine, empyreumatic resin, oil, ammonia, carbonic acid, carbonic oxide, hydrocyanic acid, sulphuretted hydrogen, carburetted hydrogen, and paraffin."[60] [60] _Journal Society of Arts_, March, 1896. CHAPTER X ON DESERTS What are deserts like?--Camel-riding--Afterglow--Darwin in South America--Big Bad Lands--Plants which train themselves to endure thirst--Cactus and euphorbia--Curious shapes--Grey hairs--Iceplant--Esparto grass--Retama--Colocynth--Sudden flowering of the Karoo--Short-lived flowers--Colorado Desert--Date palms on the Nile--Irrigation in Egypt--The creaking Sakkieh--Alexandria hills--The Nile and Euphrates. Across the whole of Africa, at its very broadest part, from the dominions of the Emperor of the Sahara at Cape Juby on the Atlantic, and to the very borders of British India, stretches a desert of the most uncompromising character. It is famous in history: the strongest races of man, the great religions of the world, as well as most cultivated plants and domestic animals, have originated in some part of this dreary waste. One cannot really appreciate deserts unless one has really seen them. But it is necessary to try to describe what they are like.