Sahara is an Arabic word 1 means dun or mouse-coloured. For the Arabs it signified originally a flat, barren expanse of grey-brown earth. This is the meaning it has in pre-islamic Arab literature. Sah’ra is the colour of death. El Yakubi, a geographer of the ninth century, 2 uses the word Sah’ra as synonymous with cemetery. But in the same century it 3 appears in a work entitled “The Conquest of North Africa” by an Egyptian Ibn el Hakam, probably for the first time, to designate a part of the North African desert. To the European the oases are part of the Sahara, like emeralds set 4 dull bronze. To the casual visitor, in fact, the oases are undoubtedly the highlights of his experience of the desert. But 5 who inhabit the desert, and particularly the nomads, 6 associate the Sahara 7 the grey pallor of death. 8 they speak of it, they are not thinking of the palm-groves, the wells and the oases as living islands in an ocean of barren sand and rubble.