[Sidenote:  Resistance to conquest.]

Though the desert and steppe have bred conquerors, they are the last parts of the earth’s surface to yield to conquest from without.  The untameable spirit of freedom in the shepherd tribes finds an ally against aggression in the trackless sands, meager water and food supply of their wilderness.  Pursuit of the retreating tribesmen is dangerous and often futile.  They need only to burn off the pasture and fill up or pollute the water-holes to cripple the transportation and commissariat of the invading army.  This is the way the Damaras have fought the German subjugation of Southwest Africa.[1109] Moreover, the paucity of economic and political possibilities in deserts and grasslands discourages conquest.  Conquest pays only where it is a police measure to check depredations on the bordering agricultural lands, or where such barren areas are transit lands to a desirable territory beyond.  It is chiefly the “Gates of Herat” and the lure of India which have drawn Russian dominion across the scorched plains of Turkestan.  France has assumed the big task of controlling the Sahara to secure a safe passway between French Tunisia and the rich Niger basin of the French Sudan.  The recent British-Egyptian expansion southward across the Nubian steppes had for its objective the better watered districts of the upper Nile above Khartum.  This desert advance is essentially a latter day phenomenon, the outcome of modern territorial standards; it is attended or secured by the railroad.  To this fact the projected Trans-Saharan line is the strongest witness.

Nature everywhere postpones, obstructs, jeopardizes the political conquest of arid lands.  The unstable, fanatical tribesmen of the Egyptian Sudan, temporarily but effectively united under the Mahdi, made it necessary for Kitchener to do again in 1898 the work of subjugation which Gordon had done thirty years before.  The body of the Arabian people is still free.  The Turkish sovereignty over them to-day is nominal, rather an alliance with a people whom it is dangerous to provoke and difficult to attack.  Only the coast provinces of Hejaz, Yemen and Hasa are subject to Turkey, while the tribes of the interior and of the southeastern seaboard are wholly independent.[1110] The Turkoman tribes of Trans-Caspia have been subordinated to Russia largely by a process of extermination.[1111] China is satisfied with a nominal dominion over the roaming populations of Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan.  The French pacification and control of Northwest Africa meets a peculiar problem, due to the extreme restlessness and restiveness of the dominant Arab race.  The whole population is unstable as water; a disturbance or movement in one tribe is soon communicated to the whole mass.[1112]

[Sidenote:  Curtailment of nomadism.]