We had, however, grown tired of looking out, and were just arranging ourselves on the ground, when familiar noises sounded outside, and Omar's voice crying joyfully, "Le chameau arrive!"
Perhaps, above all else which was interesting on the road to Mazagan, the little Arab settlements, composed entirely of tents, interested us most. In them, was lived the truly nomad, gipsy life of the wandering Arab, who is a herdsman by heritage, and in following that vocation a roamer par excellence. They live, these Arabs, in tents: the sides are made of straw and wattle hurdles; over the top is stretched an immense piece of brown or black camel's-hair cloth. The tents are barely five feet high in the middle, less at the edges: squat brown mushrooms they look, or something like the keels of boats turned bottom upwards. All of them were open in front, "very public" the world would say; which primitive and open-air mode of living was indeed their great feature. Some of them were divided off down the middle by a hurdle, thus forming two "rooms": the hurdles were occasionally faggots, without straw. Around the tents lay the flocks, chewing the cud or browsing on the scanty grass-land: children ran out to us with bowls of milk: when the grass gave out within reach all round, the tents were taken down, the hillsides deserted, and the families wandered in search of pastures new, carrying a few chickens, some pots and pans, two or three bundles of rags, and leaving behind a good many parasites and a bare patch.
Thus Arab life in Southern Morocco—a thriftless, desultory existence, yet with the charm of continual change and of living with the earth. "To take no thought for the morrow" is the practice of all Moors, whether Arabs or Berbers: no Moor spends money on anything which will not bring him in immediate profit, and this accounts for the fact that trees and forests are never planted, or schemes started for working mines, or roads made, or bridges built; even if the capital were forthcoming, what would be the use of spending money only to be repaid little by little, year by year?—a man may die before he profits for all his trouble!
After all, argues the Moor, who could wish to alter Morocco? Is it not perfect as it is?—veritably, "the tail of the peacock," the sun of the universe!
Its very imperfections are among those things which in this fanatical Mohammedan land so fascinate the traveller. Its sad colours, its air steeped in mystery, its courtly unknowable people, its wild tribes, its white shut houses, its concealed women, its mad fanaticism, its magnificent stoicism—one and all are sufficient to hold the European, and to call him back again long after El Moghreb has forgotten his face. Another of those chains has been forged which bind certain places and certain countries to a soul, each henceforth belonging the one to the other, and each gaining a little something thereby; nor can the links of these chains be broken, since unseen possessions, such as they, are among those things which no power on earth can touch, which can neither be given nor taken away.
It's North you may run to the rime-ringed sun,
Or South to the blind Horn's hate;
Or East all the way into Mississippi Bay,
Or West to the Golden Gate,
Where the blindest bluffs hold good, dear lass,