Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 87, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 April 1916 — TRIPOLI IS FLOURISHING [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

TRIPOLI IS FLOURISHING

TRIPOLI, the highly-inflammable land of Arab and Berber, has exchanged its peace-time industries for the industry of war, and according to a statement prepared by the National Geographic society, the newer industry adds little to the normal hazard of Tripolitan life. Danger is the daily bread and meat of the dweller in Tripoli, and, in this country flecked with occasional oases and fringed with narrow strips of coastal vegetation, even the principal native pursuits for wealth and happiness are accompanied by hidden terror and grave risk. The principal sources of income to Tripolitans are those of sponge gathering, of esparto picking and of carrying on the transsaharan caravan trade. Whether the native son seeks to make his “pile” searching the slimy bottom of the Mediterranean for sponges, or gathering esparto grass in the morning mists of the desert, or following the caravan of a thousand camels back from the coast through 1,500 miles of Saharan desert to the distant Sudan, he takes not only his labor and capital for profit but also hits health and life. More often than not he reaps disability or death as his reward. Perils of Sponge Gatherers. The wild seas that now and again boil over the northern coast of Africa are the smallest part of the sponge diver’s hazard. Paralysis is always just ahead of this venturesome laborer who, day by day making foolhardy rapid ascents from the sea bed under press of keen competition, sooner or later experiences the return to shipboard in terrific dizziness, which forms the usual prelude to partial or complete paralysis. Strange as it may seem, many partially-paralyzed divers are able to continue their calling, and the unfitted, helpless cripple in the upper air feels normal circulation return to arms and lege when lowered into the sea on the sponge grounds. And the Arab divers of Tripoli, believing the disease indispensable to the vocation, and inured to hazard in their peculiar fatherland, dive phlegmatically through a few fat seasons until crippled or killed by their chosen trade.

Back in the plateau lands of the Sahara, behind the coastal greens in the silent, treeless, untenanted desert wastes, where the alluring mystery of the desert broods under the blighting heat of day and beckons In fanciful shapes over the dunes’ at night, stretch vast fields of wiry esparto grass, from which paper is manufactured in great mills in England. In 'these fields, working for the starvation wage of twenty cents a day or less, picking the grass and tying it in large bales to be loaded on camel trains for Tripoli City, the port of Trlpolltania, is another corps of workers who adventure their safety in their work. Picking the Esparto Grass. Day begins for the esparto picker in the moonlight of early morning. In the chill of desert morning the picker leaves his nearby shack for the field, and begins his rapid task of breaking the longest wiry blades, leg high, from the most matured clump. And in the heart of these clumps ever and again lurks his danger i,n the form of his arch enemy, the deadly viper. In the clumps, also, are hidden the venomous North African rock scorpions, whose stings now and again prove fatal. It is the poisonous vipers, however, that make the work of esparto picking a sporting game with death. Of the $2,000,000 of export trade enjoyed by Tripoli before, the war, onefifth of it was produced by the sponge divers, more than one-third of it by the esparto pickers and considerably more than one-sixth was brought over the wide, treacherous desert from the Sudan. Many caravans, some of a few and some of thousand camels, fitted out in Tripoli, undertook the danger-fraught journeys to the great marts of Sudanese trade —Timbuktu Kano, Kanen, Kuka, Bornu apd Wadi. These journeys sometimes lasted two years around, and brought their undertakers into every species of danger that the desert affords. Robbers infpst all the lanes across the desert, and, besides these, all the inner desert lies subject to the vengeful caprice of the masked Tuaregs, the strange people who are at war with all wbo cross their paths and do not pay a sufficient tribute. • ' i The bones of the camels and men of

a myriad of caravans of the past bleach along the desert trails, caravans that mostly came to harm at the hands of marauders; but there are some among them destroyed by thirst, by the sand storm or by the water of wells poisoned in inter-tribal wars. Of all three risky Tripolitan trades, the caravan trade is the most risky; and the old caravan men will find little in the newer Industry of war for which their peace-time labors have not fully prepared them.