They could not view without concern a part of the
world in which men wore several garments, ate bread and vegetables, and
slept under cover in a walled village, and one wild fellow, who carried a
very old flint-lock musket, lamented the drought that had forced them from
their homes to a place so full of men. So far as I was able to observe the
matter, the Berber muleteers of El Arbi bel Hadj ben Haidah looked with
great scorn upon these Bedouins, and their contempt was reciprocated. In
the eyes of the Berbers these men were outcasts and "eaters of sand," and
in the eyes of the Bedouins the muleteers were puling, town-bred slaves,
who dared not say their right hands were their own.
Perhaps the difficulty in the way of a proper understanding was largely
physical. The Berbers believe they came to Morocco from Canaan, forced out
of Palestine by the movement of the Jews under Joshua. They settled in the
mountains of the "Far West," and have never been absorbed or driven out by
their Arab conquerors. Strong, sturdy, temperate men, devoid of
imagination, and of the impulse to create or develop an artistic side to
their lives, they can have nothing in common with the slenderly built,
far-seeing Arab of the plains, who dreams dreams and sees visions all the
days of his life.
Pages:
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245