The Tousside is the smoking volcano of the western Tibesti, its summit still venting sulphurous fumes and streaked with pale mineral crusts, rising directly above the Soborom solfatara at its foot. Among the Teda the great volcanic peaks of the range are treated as living and hazardous heights rather than ordinary mountains, and the visibly exhaling Tousside is the sharpest instance of that regard. Nineteenth-century and later travellers record the reticence with which such summits are named and approached. Its sacred charge and that of the healing field below it belong to a single stretch of feared ground, though the ethnography keeps the awe owed the smoking peak distinct from the cure sought at its springs.