Note 22 — ON STEPPES AND DESERTS.

p. 9.—“The western portion of Mount Atlas.”

The question of the position of the Atlas of the ancients has often been agitated in our own day. In making this inquiry, ancient Phœnician traditions are confounded with the statements of the Greeks and Romans regarding Mount Atlas at a less remote period. The elder Professor Ideler, who combined a profound knowledge of languages with that of astronomy and mathematics, was the first to throw light on this obscure subject; and I trust I may be pardoned if I insert the communications with which I have been favoured by this enlightened observer.

“The Phœnicians ventured at a very early period in the world’s history to penetrate beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. They founded Gades and Tartessus on the Spanish, and Lixus, together with many other cities on the Mauritanian coasts of the Atlantic Ocean. They sailed northward along these shores 111to the Cassiterides, from whence they obtained tin, and to the Prussian coasts where they procured amber found there; whilst southward they penetrated as far as Madeira and the Cape de Verd Islands. Amongst other regions they visited the Archipelago of the Canary Isles, where their attention was arrested by the Peak of Teneriffe, whose great height appears to be even more considerable than it actually is from the circumstance of the mountain projecting directly from the sea. Through their colonies established in Greece, especially under Cadmus in Bœotia, the Greeks were made acquainted with the existence of this mountain which soared high above the region of clouds, and with the ‘Fortunate Islands’ on which this mountain was situated, and which were adorned with fruits of all kinds, and particularly with the golden orange. By the transmission of this tradition through the songs of the bards, Homer became acquainted with these remote regions, and he speaks of an Atlas to whom all the depths of ocean are known, and who bears upon his shoulders the great columns which separate from one another the heavens and the earth,^[EL] and of the Elysian Plains, described as a wondrously beautiful land in the west.”^[EM] Hesiod expresses himself in a similar manner regarding Atlas, whom he represents as the neighbour of the Hesperides.^[EN] The Elysian Plains, which he places at the western limits of the earth, he terms the ‘Islands of the Blessed.’^[EO] Later poets have still further embellished these myths of Atlas, the Hesperides, their golden apples, and the Islands of the Blessed, which are destined to be the abode of good men after death, and have connected them with the expeditions of the Tyrian God of Commerce, Melicertes, the Hercules of the Greeks.

“The Greeks did not enter into rivalship with the Phœnicians and Carthaginians in the art of navigation until a comparatively late period. They indeed visited the shores of the Atlantic, but they never appear to have advanced very far. It is doubtful whether they had penetrated as far as the Canary Isles and the Peak of Teneriffe; but be this as it may, they were aware that Mount Atlas, which their poets had described 112as a very high mountain situated on the western limits of the earth, must be sought on the western coast of Africa. This too was the locality assigned to it by their later geographers Strabo, Ptolemy, and others. As however no mountain of any great elevation was to be met with in the north-west of Africa, much perplexity was entertained regarding the actual position of Mount Atlas, which was sought sometimes on the coast, sometimes in the interior of the country, and sometimes in the vicinity of the Mediterranean, or further southward. In the first century of the Christian era, when the armies of Rome had penetrated to the interior of Mauritania and Numidia, it was usual to give the name of Atlas to the mountain chain which traverses Africa from west to east in a parallel direction with the Mediterranean. Pliny and Solinus were both, however, fully aware that the description of Atlas given by the Greek and Roman poets did not apply to this mountain range, and they therefore deemed it expedient to transfer the site of Mount Atlas, which they described in picturesque terms, in accordance with poetic legends, to the terra incognita of Central Africa. The Atlas of Homer and Hesiod can, therefore, be none other than the Peak of Teneriffe, while the Atlas of Greek and Roman geographers must be sought in the north of Africa.”

I will only venture to add the following remarks to the learned explanations of Professor Ideler. According to Pliny and Solinus, Atlas rises from the midst of a sandy plain (e medio arenarum), and its declivity affords pasture to elephants, which have undoubtedly never been known in Teneriffe. That which we now term Atlas is a long mountain ridge. How could the Romans have recognised one isolated conical elevation in this mountain range of Herodotus? May the cause not be ascribed to the optical illusion by which every mountain chain, when seen laterally from an oblique point of view, appears to be of a narrow and conical form? I have often, when at sea, mistaken long mountain ranges for isolated mountains. According to Höst, Mount Atlas is covered with perpetual snow near Morocco. Its elevation must therefore be upwards of 11,500 feet at that particular spot. It seems to me very remarkable that the barbarians, the ancient Mauritanians, if we are to believe the testimony of Pliny, called Mount Atlas Dyris. This mountain chain 113is still called by the Arabs Daran, a word that is almost identical in its consonants with Dyris. Hornius,^[EP] on the other hand, thinks that he recognises the term Dyris in the word Ayadyrma, the name applied by the Guanches to the Peak of Teneriffe.^[EQ]

As our present geological knowledge of the mountainous parts of North Africa, which, however, must be admitted to be very limited, does not make us acquainted with any traces of volcanic eruptions within historic times, it seems the more remarkable that so many indications should be found in the writings of the Ancients of a belief in the existence of such phenomena in the Western Atlas and the contiguous west coast of the continent. The streams of fire so often mentioned in Hanno’s Ship’s Journal might indeed have been tracks of burning grass, or beacon fires lighted by the wild inhabitants of the coasts as a signal to warn each other of threatening danger on the first appearance of hostile vessels. The high summit of the “Chariot of the Gods,” of which Hanno speaks (the θεῶν ὄχημα), may also have had some faint reference to the Peak of Teneriffe; but farther on he describes a singular configuration of the land. He finds in the gulf, near the Western Horn, a large island, in which there is a salt lake, which again contains a smaller island. South of the Bay of the Gorilla Apes the same conformation is repeated. Does he refer to coral structures, lagoon islands (Atolls), and to volcanic crater lakes, in the middle of which a conical mountain has been upheaved? The Triton Lake was not in the neighbourhood of the lesser Syrtis, but on the western shores of the Atlantic.^[ER] The lake disappeared in an earthquake, which was attended with great fire-eruptions. Diodorus^[ES] says expressly πυρὸς εκφυτήματα μεγάλα. But the most wonderful configuration is ascribed to the hollow Atlas, in a passage hitherto but little noticed in one of the philosophical 114Dialexes of Maximus Tyrius, a Platonic philosopher who lived in Rome under Commodus. His Atlas is situated “on the continent where the Western Lybians inhabit a projecting peninsula.” The mountain has a deep semi-circular abyss on the side nearest the sea; and its declivities are so steep that they cannot be descended. The abyss is filled with trees, and “one looks down upon their summits and the fruits they bear as if one were looking into a well.”^[ET] The description is so minute and graphic that it no doubt sprung from the recollection of some actual view.