The desert nomads (or Bedouins) have a hard life. If springs dry up and pastures fail, the flocks starve. Then the nomads must either starve or rob, and they rob. In speaking of this custom, an Arab chief once said: "It has been a part of the customs and nature of the Arabs from the earliest time to make war upon each other as well as upon neighboring nations. The poor Arab needs a horse so that he can ride to fall upon the goods of his enemy, take possession of them, and grow rich, and the rich Arab likewise needs a horse to protect his fortune and his head." Since the Arab depends so much upon his horse, he has bred a kind of horse that shows more endurance than any other horse in the world.
Why should the nomad's property be only flocks that can walk, and bundles that can be carried on beasts? No desert nomad owns a piece of land. Why should he? Where he wants to pitch his tent, there he pitches it. When he wants to move, he goes. Grass and water are the only things worth having, and he must move to get them.
577. Caravans and signal fires.—Because nomads are such robbers, the traders of the desert nearly always travel in large caravans for protection. To be safe from robbers the Berbers of the Atlas Mountains have built their towns upon the tops of hills, where defense is easy. In parts of southern Tunis these hill Berbers have regularly kept sentinels on high rocks overlooking the vil lage. There, night and day, winter and summer, year in and year out, men for generation after generation have watched, with live coals at hand, ready to start a signal fire. At the first sight of the enemy, the fire would be lighted. Seeing it, the watchman on a distant hill would light his fire, to signal the next lonely watcher. Thus the news of danger would be passed from village to vil lage, until all were called to arms. Even a city like Sfax, on the coast of Tunis, still has a solid stone wall higher than the houses, and all the people were living inside of the wall when the French took possession in 1881.
The Bedouins can rarely read, but they have good memories and know many stories such as those in the book called Arabian Nights, which they tell around the camp fire, and thus pass them on from generation to generation and from century to century.
578. The sand oasis of Suf.—In the north ern Sahara a traveler may leave one of the oases and cross about sixty miles of waterless, wave-like sand dunes, which spread before him like the waves of the sea. After many hours he beholds a dark green spot in the white sand. It is the tops of palm trees in the oasis of Suf. Long ago plants growing here showed the Arabs that there was moisture beneath this sand. This discovery made the place graduallybecome the home of thousands of people. Because date palm trees can
send their roots through many feet of earth to reach moisture in the ground beneath, date gardens can be made to flourish in some places where there are no surface springs or streams. These trees are capable of supporting many people. When a palm garden is to be planted, the people dig a wide pit eight or ten yards deep. In this pit the trees are planted. Because the sand dunes move before the wind, sand would soon bury the palm trees if the people did not prevent it. This they do by carrying the sand in baskets out to the desert, where they dump it in piles. Each day the wind blows some of it back and so, from childhood to old age, the Soufas are tugging baskets of sand out of their little date gardens, and piling it on the surrounding sand hills. This awful labor reminds us of how the Dutch pump water out of their land; but carrying sand is a much harder job, because the Dutch get the wind to do their lifting (Sec. 441).
All the people of Suf live in stone houses beside their palm gardens. Camels, goats, and sheep can find a scanty living in the damp places between the dunes. So the people have wool and milk. Why are they not nomads? The eyes of these people are trained in a most astonishing way. If a Soufa wants to get his camel, he will go to the place where he last saw it and follow the pad foot tracks across the sand. He can tell the track of his own camel from that of his neighbor's camel. One of us could scarcely tell the difference between a camel's track and that of a horse.
579. The oases with wells.—In another part of the desert west of Suf, most of the surface is bare rock, in which water from occasional rains has cut such a network of channels that the name of this region is M'zab, meaning "the net." The valleysare full of earth, and beneath the earth there is water, but it is too far down for even the roots of the palm trees to reach it. By irrigating the oases with water lifted from wells, thousands of people, called Mozabites, live here. The water is drawn up in big leather buckets that are fastened to the ends of ropes. A rope passes over a pulley at the top of the well and runs thence to a donkey or a camel (Fig. 450). As the beast walks away from the well, he draws the leather bucket up to the top, and the water is dumped. It then flows away to the gardens through a carefully lined channel. If the wells yield water all the time, the privilege of using it is sold, and all day and all night one can hear the creaking of the pulley, the yells of the donkey driver, the thump of the beast's feet, and the splash of the water as it falls from the bucket. The labor is hard, but the Mozabites, like the Soufas and the nomads of the pastures, are big strong men.