These salt lakes stretch with only two short breaks in a line from the
Mediterranean at the
Gulf of Gabès to the
Algerian frontier, which they penetrate for a considerable distance. The French term "
chott" is a transliteration of the
Arabic shat, a term for a broad canal, an estuary or lake. These
shats however are, strictly speaking, not lakes at all at the present day. They are smooth depressed areas (in the case of the largest, the Shat el Jerid, lying a few feet below the level of the Mediterranean), which for more than half the year are expanses of dried mud covered with a thick incrustation of white or grey salt. This salt covering gives them at a distance the appearance of big sheets of water. During the winter, however, when the effect of the rare winter rains is felt, there may actually be 3 or 4 ft. of water in these
shats, which by liquefying the mud makes them perfectly impassable. Otherwise, for about seven months of the year they can be crossed on foot or on horseback. It would seem probable that at one time these
shats (at any rate the Shat el Jerid) were an inlet of the Mediterranean, which by the elevation of a narrow strip of land on the Gulf of Gabès has been cut off from them. It is, however, a region of past
volcanic activity, and these salt depressions may be due to that cause. Man is probably the principal agent at the present day in causing these
shats to be without water. All around these salt lakes there are numerous
springs, gushing from the sandy
hillocks. Almost all these springs are at a very hot temperature, often at boiling point. Some of them are charged with salt, others are perfectly fresh and sweet, though boiling hot. So abundant is their volume that in several places they form actual ever-flowing rivers. Only for the intervention of man these rivers would at all times find their way into the adjoining depressions, which they would maintain as lakes of water. But for a long period past the freshwater streams (which predominate) have been used for
irrigation to such a degree that very little of the precious water is allowed to run to waste into the lake basins; so that these latter receive only a few salt streams, which deposit on their surface the salt they contain and then evaporate. This abundant supply of fresh warm water maintains
oases of extraordinary luxuriance in a country where rain falls very rarely. Perennial streams of the description referred to are found between the Algerian frontier and
Gabès on the coast. The town at
Gabès itself is on the fringe of a splendid oasis, which is maintained by the water of an ever-running stream emptying itself into the sea at Gabès after a course of not more than 20 miles. Later proposals, made as part of
Operation Plowshare, posited that
nuclear explosives could be used to dig the proposed canal from the Mediterranean to the Chott el Fejej and other below-sea-level basins of the Sahara; these proposals were also fruitless. ==See also==