Habits still draw very closely on the Arcadian. Water is their drink; their food milk and wheat not fermented, and subjected to scarcely any cooking. To their grain and milk they add dried fruits, fresh acorns, palmetto root, truffles, the lotus berry, and the like. The country produces the plants which yield sago and arrow-root.
Hunting was not the primitive state of man, nor flesh his original diet. If all the literature of the world were destroyed except that of the Hudson’s Bay Company, such a belief might be pardonable in future times. We put ourselves in a similar predicament when we take the pictures of early Greece as the first steps of the human race. The names of the first slayers of animals and eaters of flesh have been recorded, and yet we treat as a fable all that is enumerated of these times, because they talk of living upon acorns. A garden was the residence of our first parents.
I had made one step backward towards the reality of early fable, when I wandered in the indubitable Hesperides and plucked their golden fruit; but now, amongst the cork forests, and seeing acorns and glands plucked and fed upon, I made a second, and reached the golden age itself.
A man may thus travel and find food wherever he stretches out his hand, or lays him down to rest. I do not say it is a very agreeable diet, perhaps not a very nutritious one; but still here are roots, and plants, and glands, which will sustain life without the aid of cookery; and populations might spread and multiply, sustained by the spontaneous gifts of the earth. The first peopling of the globe remains the greatest of wonders; for what can be to us more unaccountable than the ease of their travels, the order of their society, the distinctness of their character, the rapidity of their growth?
The Douar for which we were bound was beyond the hills. We had, therefore, to cross them, and from the summit the view opened to the eastward a totally different scene. From this height the country behind looked like a swelling sea—before us it was all in heaps. No vacant space and no rocky side, but as if earth had been carted to the spot by tunnelling giants, and shot out there.
We found the Douar perched on the summit of a knoll;—the circle of tents looked like a diadem upon its brow. Our tent was pitched in the centre, that is, at the top. As soon as it was in order, our Tibi came to bid us welcome: he was a simple, sedulous man, and from the first to the last moment was just the same. They paraded us round the circle, and we were passed from group to group to be examined, patted, and discussed. The round of visits ended at the Sheik, and I was ushered in among his three wives;—and here was a busy scene. The tent, though I speak from recollection, was little short of forty feet in length and twenty in width; the cross-bar supporting it in the middle might be ten or twelve feet high; the covering swept down, so that towards the extremities you had to crouch or creep. In the centre and around were piled up stores of provisions, clothing, and the like, arranged for the convenience of sitting or sleeping. There were three or four small fires, chiefly of embers, on which were boiling large brown jars with long necks, as if preparing for some great feast. The principal wife would soon by her appearance have arrested my attention, had she allowed me or any one else to be ignorant of her presence and authority. She was comely, bold, haughty, supple in body, dexterous of hand. Seated within reach of the two or three fires, she was proceeding to dispose of the cooking viands, which, with a huge ladle, she heaped up in corresponding dishes. She was giving her orders without intermitting her work, and all the work of the tent—culinary, at least,—seemed to pass through her hands.
The dish was kuscoussoo, so I was not to lose such an opportunity. What had been despatched was for the supply of guests who had arrived before us: she now had to recommence for us. When I had succeeded in conveying to her my desire to be instructed in the process of its manufacture, she gazed at me, and asked what I had eaten all my life, and what the women in my country did? After briefly satisfying her curiosity, she made a place for me beside herself, and though her hands never ceased to flutter about and skim over the contents of her tray, like a bird’s wings, nor her tongue to run on; when any part of the operation required attention, she did not fail to awaken mine.
FOOTNOTES:
[246] These arms are represented by the verge of the papyri of the mummies. The bodies were buried with the face turned to the west. In sacrificing to the manes they turned to the west.—Schol. Apoll. Rhod. vol. i. p. 580. In sacrificing on Mount Moriah Abraham turned to the west.
[247] The last bard of Clanronald, in making an affidavit before a magistrate, enumerated his ancestors to the ninth generation.