Definition of "Zaara"

The lions of Mount Atlas, the summit of which is sometimes covered with snow, have neither the courage, the strength, nor the ferocity of the lions of Biledulgerid or of Zaara, whose plains are covered with burning sands. It is chiefly in these fervid deserts that we meet with those terrible lions, who are the dread of travellers, and the scourge of the neighbouring provinces… In the vast deserts of Zaara, in those that seem to separate two very different races of men, the Negroes and the Moors, in the unpeopled regions that lie about the territories of the [sic – meaning Hottentos], and, in general, in all those southern parts of Africa and Asia, which man has disdained to inhabit, the lions are still very numerous, and continue in their natural state.

1781, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, “Lions”, in William Smellie, transl., Histoire Naturelle

This ancient and faithful domestic, the pride of our island, uniting the useful, the brave and the docile, though sought by foreign nations and perpetuated on the continent, is nearly extinct where he probably was an aborigine, or is bastardized by numberless crosses, everyone of which degenerate from the invaluable character of the parent, who was deemed worthy to enter the Roman amphitheatre, and, in the presence of the masters of the worlds, encounter the pard, and assail even the lord of the savage tribes, whose courage was sublimed by torrid suns, and found none gallant enough to oppose him on the deserts of Zaara or the plains of Numidia.

1800, Cynographia Britannica, English Mastiff

The evil has not rested here; emissaries have been dispatched to every part of Europe with bales of these patents; fictitious plats, and maps of the country, have been offered to the public's eye; rivers and streams have been made to flow where nature has denied water; mountains have been sunk into meadows, and rocks as barren as the sandy deserts of Zaara, have been represented as possessing the fertility of the banks of the Nile. Thousands of ignorant and innocent persons have been defrauded, and, with their families, plunged into irretrievable ruin by these nefarious practices.

1803, St. George Tucker, editor, Blackstone's Commentaries: with Notes of Reference