Nomad

“ The nomad must be constantly wandering and seeking good pasture, if he is to gain a comfortable position. The glowing heat of the sun is in this respect his terrible enemy and continual adversary.
The starry heaven by night and the moon he recognises as his friends and protectors; and he gladly welcomes the moment when these guardians overcome the enemy, and drive off the beaming sun, when noon is followed by afternoon, and the evening comes on with its cool breeze, on the track of the departed solar heat. ”

“ And over these mighty tundra-plains of Asia, stretching infinitely onward from one sky-line to the other, the nomad wanders with his reindeer herds, a glorious, free life! Where he wills he pitches his tent, his reindeer around him; and at his will again he goes on his way. I almost envied him. He has no goal to struggle towards, no anxieties to endure—he has merely to live! ”

“ As ships, great and small, sail the sea, so sailed the caravans of the nomad tribes in the desert which surges on unchecked to Egypt: nomads who come and go, north and south, east and west, under the burning sun and the throbbing stars, as Allah has written their comings and goings in His book: men in white, journeying with their women, their children, and their trains of beasts, singing as they pass, and at night under the black tents resting to the music of the tom-tom and raïta. ”

“ They are as dry and lean as the ground on which they live, and nature in their country obliges them to lead a nomad life. Wide, simple, and dreary is the desert, and simple and free is the nomad's life. The hard struggle for existence has sharpened their senses. ”

“ Plenty of duds on the Nomad—for any old climate. And money—don't make me laugh! Vagabonds need money?" He backed toward the open manhole of the Nomad, still grinning.
Carr hesitated, resisting the impulse to take Mado at his word. He looked around. The landing stage had been deserted, but people now were approaching. People not to be tolerated at the moment. ”

“ By way of variation, now and then we swept past a desert oasis, where stood a few stunted palm-trees near which a tribe of nomads had set up their black tents of goat's-hair and were spending a week-end on the river bank before trekking afresh into the heart of the desert.
Your real Arab nomad is essentially a child of nature. He spends his life in the wilderness and has a rooted objection—nay, it is, in truth, a positive terror—to visiting any town, big or little. ”

“ The Nomad’s relation to nature is a very different one from the Agriculturist’s. But the consciousness of union among men—of their belonging to one another—was first excited at the nomadic stage; and it is therefore not surprising if a large proportion of the names of nations point back to that age.
A nation calls itself by a common name when the consciousness of the union of its members first arises. Names in which the nation confesses itself to be a wandering, restless society, point back to the nomadic stage of civilisation. ”

“ But while discarding much that seems inconsiderable before such wide and splendid horizons, this nomad loads himself with the incubus of dream-states; while standing alone, he grows into a ferocious brigand. ”

“ Decidedly there is much to be said for the life of a nomad, but whether or not I should place him among the inhabitants of the underworld I am not sure; for he toils not, neither does he spin, and his bitterest enemies cannot accuse him of taking thought for the morrow. ”

“ The nomad retires into his tent, raises the lower end of the felt curtain, and while the west wind, rustling through the fretted wood-work, lulls him to sleep, the women outside set to work on a half-finished piece of felt. It is certainly an interesting sight to see how six, often more, of the daughters of the desert, in rank and file, roll out under their firm footsteps the felt which is wrapped up between two rush mats. An elderly lady leads this industrial dance and gives the time. It is she who can always tell in what place the stuff will be loose or uneven. ”

“ He is purely a shepherd, carrying with him the simplest and lightest tents, tools, and weapons for his needs. The type of society is that of the patriarchal family, for each nomad tribe consists of a group of relatives; and, under the direction of their chief, not only the men of the clan, but the women and children, all take an active part in tending the flocks and in practising the simple arts of skin-curing and the weaving of hair and wool. So long as the pasture-lands can support his flocks, the nomad is content to leave the settled agriculturist beyond the desert edge in peace. ”

“ So we see clans, born in the highlands of Yemen, thrust by stronger clans into the desert, where, unwillingly, they became nomad to keep themselves alive. We see them wandering, every year moving a little further north or a little further east as chance has sent them down one or other of the well-roads of the wilderness, till finally this pressure drives them from the desert again into the sown, with the like unwillingness of their first shrinking experiment in nomad life. ”

“ With all the instincts of the nomad—unkempt, unkept, and owning no master—their home is the street, where they are born and die, a boon and a bane to mankind. They are the former because they are the scavengers—sometimes the only scavengers—that clean the streets of the refuse thrown into them, and which would otherwise putrefy and breed disease. ”

“ In what I call the nomad lands, on the other hand, on the right of the Senegal, on the Niger beyond Timbuktu (if we except the actual banks of the river) , we shall find that the chief articles of export are gum and the products of flocks of sheep, which are indeed the only things the nomad tribes have to offer to our traders.
It is absolutely useless to attempt to impose on these people a yoke against which they would never cease to rebel, and which, moreover, they would have the power as well as the will to throw off. ”

“ No European can have any idea of the voracious appetite of a nomad.
The caravan has been scarcely an hour encamped before everybody has supped and retired to rest; the older members of the family within the tent, the younger [80] ones in the open air, their flocks around them. Only where a marriageable maiden lives is there any movement to be found. Among the nomad tribes of Central Asia, Islamism has not succeeded in carrying into effect its rigorous restrictions on the social intercourse of the sexes. The harem is here entirely unknown. ”

“ We have traced in this history the development side by side of these two ways of living, and we have pointed out that as the civilizations grew more extensive and better organized, the arms, the mobility, and the intelligence of the nomads also improved. The nomad was not simply an uncivilized man, he was a man specialized and specializing along his own line. From the very beginning of history the nomad and the settled people have been in reaction. ”

“ She related it to me in incoherent fragments, that seemed to rise up at random from a disordered memory, and she mixed up deliciously childish observations with them; a whole vision of a Nomad world, born of a squirrel's brain that had leapt from tent to tent, from encampment to encampment, from tribe to tribe. And all this was done with the severe looks that this reserved people always preserve, with the appearance of a brass idol, and rather comic gravity. ”

“ Yes, I have remained alive but I know not yet how far I shall succeed in keeping up this state: have you any idea how hard are the transitions from a nomad to a settled life? I was a redskin, a carefree nomad, who folds up and casts off all that is human, as he would a tent. Now I am laying 135 a granite foundation for an earthly home and I, having little faith, am cold and trembling. Will it be warm when the white snow covers my new home? What do you think, my friend, is the best heating system?
I promised Thomas Magnus that night that I would not kill myself. ”

“ Among the Nomads, then, the dark, cloudy heaven of night is the sympathetic mythical figure; they imagine it conquering, or if it is overcome, give to its fall a tragic character, so that it falls lamented and worthy rather of victory than of ruin; and the Nomad’s grief for the defeated power is propagated from age to age far beyond the mythical period. The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter is still lamented from time to time by the daughters of Israel. It is just the reverse with the myth of the Agriculturist. ”

“ The Nomad has his very house set on wheels; the Nomad, and in a still higher degree the Ape, are all for 'liberty;' the privilege to flit continually is indispensable for them. Alas, in how many ways, does our humour, in this swift-rolling self-abrading Time, shew itself nomadic, apelike ”

“ In his domestic circle, the nomad presents us a picture of the most absolute indolence. In his eyes it is the greatest shame for a man to apply his hand to any domestic occupation. He has nothing to do but to tend his horse; that duty once over, he hurries to his neighbour, or joins one of the group that squat on the ground before the tents, discussing topics connected with politics, recent raids, or horseflesh. In the meantime the inevitable Tchilim, a sort of Persian pipe, in which the tobacco is not moistened, passes from hand to hand. ”

“ I refer to the civilized nomad, whose wanderings are not prompted by hope of gain, nor determined by pleasure, but simply compelled by certain necessities of his being,—the man whose inner secret nature is totally at variance with the stable conditions of a society to which he belongs only by accident. ”

“ The nomad cares less for a particular territory than for his goods and chattels, when he goes to war. [605] The Desert, and the roamer who roves over its broad surface, have no history proper. Only isolated vague memories, such as can attach themselves to a great geographical territory, are at our command as points of support for the history of the Hebrew nomads. ”

“ Whether desert oasis or mountain village, all go to make up a part of the social fabric of the Sahara, and the nomad camps the other part. Each depends on the other. The nomads rely on the sedentary people for markets for the goods transported by their caravans—foreign, or products of their camps—and for such foods as are the outcome of cultivation. ”

“ This explains the fact that the nomad herdsman not only travels along definite routes, but restricts himself to a strictly limited range. His path may occasionally cross that of another herdsman, but it is never the same, for each respects the rights of the other, and is prevented by the rest of his tribe from encroaching upon them. ”

“ It is always the more sterile steppes that are thus occupied; and this is easily accounted for: where fertile districts occur the nomad life is no longer necessary. Even a wandering tribe, entering upon such a tract, would no longer have a motive for leaving it, and would soon become attached to the soil,—in other words, would cease to be wanderers; and whether they turned their attention to the pursuit of agriculture, or not, they would be certain to give up their tent-life, and fix themselves in a permanent abode. This has been the history of many Asiatic tribes ”

“ But there end the main possessions of any nomad’s dwelling. The arms that defend them go abroad with the menfolk, or remain concealed. By their very humbleness these belongings have two qualifications that are commendable: they are easily moved from place to place; they are little to lose if abandoned in the panic of a raid.
A TUAREG HOME
In their desert environment the nomads live in a constant atmosphere of sand, and surely there is nothing with greater discomfiting qualities. ”

“ Forms of defense against nomad depredations.
The raided territory, if a modern civilized state, organizes its border communities into a native mounted police, as the English have done in Bornu, Sokoto and the Egyptian Sudan, and as the Russians did with their Cossack riders along the successive frontiers of Muscovite advance into the steppes; or it takes into its employ, as we have seen, the nearest nomad tribes to repress or punish every hostile movement beyond. ”

“ It was inevitable that nomad folk and the settled folk should clash, that the nomads should seem hard barbarians to the settled peoples, and the settled peoples soft and effeminate and very good plunder to the nomad peoples. Along the fringes of the developing civilizations there must have been a constant raiding and bickering between hardy nomad tribes and mountain tribes and the more numerous and less warlike peoples in the towns and villages. ”

“ The countries known as Balk and Bokara, Yarkand and Khiva, with several others of equal note, are merely the central points of oases,—large towns, supported rather by commerce than by the produce of agriculture, and having nomad tribes dwelling within sight of their walls. Even the present boundaries of Asiatic Turkey, Arabia and Persia, contain within them a large proportion of nomadic population ”

“ DISPLACEMENT OF THE POPULATION The instinct of the nomad largely prevails in all savage races, but in none does it prevail to a greater extent than among the black tribes of Central Africa. It is one of their marked characteristics, and a fruitful source of trouble. ”

“ There are immense Arabian plains where nomad robbers have practised their profession, from a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary; yet those plains and the nomad bands that pitch their tents beneath the Oriental sun remain very much as they were in the days of Abraham. ”

“ The nomadic tribes also form zeríbas during their constant wanderings, staying in camp for a month or two at a time. Each nomad clan wanders in an orbit of its own, and reoccupies its former zeríbas at the different pastures year after year. ”