Waterbury evening Democrat., 1904-10-03
THE ADVANCE OF SAHARA
Progress of the Arid Region South ward Has Been Ascertained
 by Explorers.

SC1Snt1SLE nave long QlSaST66Q OVST the question of the antiquity of the Sa- hara desert, and over the manner in which it was formed. They agree, how ever, states Youths Companion, that the dryness has much increased in the centuries since Rome was mighty em- pire. Lieut.. Col Poroz, of the French army, who has recently made an arduous journey from the Niger river to Lake Tchad, has brought back much interest ing information regarding the progress of the arid region southward.
 The country which extends from the Niger to Lake Tchad, he says, between 13 and Is degrees, north latitude. is com pletely barren of permanent water bodies. For more than 800 miles 1t is tropical region, without water course. Only yesterday-as geoIogists count time-all this was different. The Niger received from the left immense affiuents, veritable floods, rising even in the lofty mountains about the plateau of Hogan, the highest region of central Sahara. Then giraffes and elephants, the colonel believes, wandered even to the borders of the Mediterranean Nu- / midia. seeking the abundant vegeta- tion.
 Then came the Mohammedan con- quest, with its tribes of nomadic Arabs, and the invasion of the Tuaregs from the east, accelerating the Saharan devas- tation.
 These invaders burned over great tracts of land, destroying vegetation, and leaving nothing to hold the fallen water in check. The hygrometric state of the atmosphere was impoverished. 1 The vapor no longer was condensed. The rain failed, vegetation disappeared, and the soil and rocks were left exposed to the direct action of heat and cold, and of the winds. The decomposition of the granite filled the dry river-beds with sand for great distances.
 The advance of this phenomenon has not stopped at the edge of the tropics. The Sahara, he believes, has gained toward the south the regions, recently verdant, of Air and of Azawad It touches now Adar, Gober, Tesgawa, and and even the sultanate of Binder, an in- land city which was given to France in the last settlement of Anglo French boundaries in Africa. It is established on all the northern parts of Lake Tchad Although it appears slow, it's march is l extremely rapid, compared with other 1 geologic phenomena. Earth, the Ger man, explorer. found water in abund- ance. 50 years ago, where Col Peroz's expedition suffered from thirst. The ] old men of North Adar showed the Frenchman rivers which in their youth
 flowed full many months of the year. but are now dry. Lakes yesterday per- manent, which Peroz expected to find full, were dry, and did not replenish ex- .cept during the two months of winter.
 As proof that part, at least, of the
 damage has been wrought by man, Col. Peroz says that in IfiGen, in a corner of
 a valley indicated by a Tuareg, he was able to uncover the stumps of forest which the Tuareg said they had de-
 stroyed 25 years ago in order to devote the fertile soil covered by it to raising millet.
 tEven now our line of communication I from the Niger to Lake Tchad, 9 he says. l tls actually semi-desert. It is cut by spaces of many hundreds of kilometers l where the desert is absolute. If we l do not take care the places still free l will be dried up successively, just as those have been dried up which mark the route that Earth followed from
 Air to Damerghu 50 years ago"