ANCIENT AFRICA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 April 1938, Page 8

ANCIENT AFRICA

WITHOUT CAMELS AND PALM TREES. Novelists have written about North Africa, and set their scenes with palm trees and described the slow striding camel, the caravans passing out from the last vestiges of civilisation to the wide stretches of desert sand, and tourists have admired the palms and date trees that rear their heads gracefully beneath the blue sky of Morocco, and we are so used to these pictures of North Africa that it is hard to realise that neither palm tree, date tree nor camel are natives of North Africa but have all been imported. Even cactus, which in its strange, grotesque shapes, is found everywhere sometimes in veritable forests of cactus, also comes from other countries. ' If we could travel back to the fourth century of our era, North Africa, which today enchants us with its beauties, we should find a very barren place. In those days there were no palm trees in Africa. The date trees came into Africa in the wake of the all-conquering Arabs with the coran and the Crescent of Islam. ■ Camels, without which no picture of North Africa would be complete, were introduced into the land in the days of Septimus Severus. Septimus Severus had married „a Syrian, and it was she who proposed that camels would find conditions in Africa similar to those in Asia, and that the camel could render useful service in the new possessions of the Roman Empire. Cactus was introduced into North Africa by the Portugese only in the fifteenth century. It was the Portugese who introduced nearly all the palms which make North Africa so pleasant. The avenues of palms at Casablanca and at Rabat which delight the eye with their lovely forms and beautiful tints of pale green all came from Portugal, which in turn had imported them from America and Oceania. Olive trees, orange trees, the former with their deep hues of green, the

latter dotting some Moorish garden, gold among the leaves, are not natives of Africa, but were imported from Asia, particularly from Syria and Palestine. The eucalyptus tree, which flourishes in all its splendour in North Africa, is from farther still, for it comes all the way from Australia, and was introduced only in the nineteenth century.