GARDEN IN HEART OF DESERT

Evening Star, Issue 17324, 12 April 1920, Page 6

GARDEN IN HEART OF DESERT

Lecturing before- the Royal Geographical Society of England, Colonel Tilho, who has long been on a mission to the dark heart of Africa, the French Sudan, and Sahara, between Chad and the Nile, described the physical and climatic conditions of that unknown belt. Ho found Borlcu a vast depression, fertile, with many springs and thriving palm groves. This oasis is becoming a key of the French Central African Empire. It seems that across this sunny oasis during the war the Germans sent arms, and munitions to the natives. Formerly it was thought that Lake Chad might at one time- have had a watercourse connection with the Nile; and before the mouths of the Niger wore discovered in the Gulf of Guinea, travellers even suggested that that vast river (lowed east to join the Nile. Colonel Tilho finds a watershed enough to shut out all such theories. But he thinks that long ago there was in Contral Africa a kind of Caspian Sea, now nearly dried up, though many rivers rim into it or towards it—just "as the Caspian Sea, for all its miffhtv feeders, is slowly drying up. In Tibesti is found a triangular mass of mountains twice as big as Switzerland and bs high as the Pyrenees. There are extinct volcanoes, one 60 miles long and 12 miles broad at the top. Its crater is 20 miles round and half a mile dc-?p; formerly it was a lake, now its bed ia a thick deposit of carbonate of soda, like dazzling snow. Colonel Tilho says that, methodically developed, the French and British Sudan could furnish Europe with most of the raw materials we now get from America.