Fountains in the Sand | Page 5

"But not like yourself," he went on. "He picks them up, bad and good,
and when they don't look nice he works at them with iron things; I've
seen them! He makes very pretty stones, much prettier than yours. Then
he sends them away."
"How do you know this?"
"I've looked in at his window."
A modern "atelier" of flints--this was an amusing revelation.
Maybe--who knows?--half the museums of Europe are stocked with
these superior products.
Sages will be interested to learn that Professor Koken, of Tübingen, in
a learned pamphlet, lays it down that these flints of Gafsa belong to the
Mesvinian, Strepyian, Præchellean--to say nothing of the Mousterian,
Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and other types. So be it. He
further says, what is more intelligible to the uninitiated, that a bed of
hard conglomerate which crops up at Gafsa on either side of the Oued
Baiesh, has been raised in days of yore; it was raised so slowly that the
river found time to carve itself a bed through it during the process of
elevation; nevertheless, a certain class of these artificial implements,
embedded since God knows when, already formed part of this natural
conglomerate ere it began to uplift itself. This will give some idea of
the abysm of time that lies between us and the skin-clad men that lived

here in olden days.
An abysm of time...
But I remembered the cave-wench of the Meda Hill. And my
companion to-day was of the same grade, a characteristic semi-nomad
boy of the poorest class; an orphan, of course (they are nearly all
orphans), and quite abandoned. His whole vocabulary could not have
exceeded one hundred and fifty words; he had never heard of the
Apostle of Allah or his sacred book; he could only run, and throw
stones, and endure, like a beast, those ceaseless illnesses of which only
death, an early death as a rule, is allowed to cure them. His clothing
was an undershirt and the inevitable burnous, brown with dirt.
"What have you done to-day?" I asked him.
"Nothing."
"And yesterday?"
"Nothing. Why should I do anything?"
"Don't you ever wash?"
"I have nobody to wash me."
Yet they appreciate the use of unguents. The other day a man
accidentally poured a glassful of oil into the dusty street. Within a
moment a crowd of boys were gathered around, dabbling their hands
into it and then rubbing them on their hair; those that possessed boots
began by ornamenting them, and thence conveyed the stuff to their
heads--the ground was licked dry in a twinkling; their faces glistened
with the greasy mixture. "That's good," they said.
Such, I daresay, were the pastimes of those prehistoric imps of the
throwing-disks, and their clothing must have been much the same.
For what is the burnous save a glorified aboriginal beast-skin? It has
the same principle of construction; the major part covers the human
back and sides; the beast's head forms the hood; where the forefeet
meet, the thing is tied together across the breast, leaving a large open
slit below, and a smaller one above, where the man's head emerges.
The character of the race is summed up in that hopeless garment, which
unfits the wearer for every pleasure and every duty of modern life. An
article of everyday clothing which prevents a man from using his upper
limbs, which swathes them up, like a silkworm in its cocoon--can
anything more insane be imagined? Wrapped therein for nearly all their
lives, the whole race grows round-shouldered; the gastric region, which

ought to be protected in this climate of extremes, is exposed; the
heating of their heads, night and day, with its hood, cannot but injure
their brains; their hands become weak as those of women, with
claw-like movements of the fingers and an inability to open the palm to
the full.
No wonder it takes ten Arabs to fight one negro; no wonder their
spiritual life is apathetic, unfruitful, since the digits that explore and
design, following up the vagrant fancies of the imagination, are
practically atrophied. You will see beggars who find it too troublesome,
on cold days, to extricate their hands for the purpose of demanding
alms! Man has been described as a tool-making animal, but the burnous
effectually counteracts that wholesome tendency; it is a mummifying
vesture, a step in the direction of fossilification. Will the natives ever
realize that the abolition of this sleeveless and buttonless anachronism
is one of the conditions of their betterment? Have they made the
burnous, or vice-versa? No matter. They came together somehow, and
suited one another.
The burnous is the epitome of Arab inefficiency.
They call it simple, but like other things that go by that name, it defeats
it own objects of facilitating the common operations of life. It