People of Africa | Page 7

and
children all mount camels and horses and donkeys, and the whole tribe
moves to another oasis. These people drink camels' milk and eat the
dates and bananas and other fruit they find where they pitch their tents.
They also bring these fruits to the Berber towns, and exchange them for
flour to make bread and for coffee to drink. Coffee is a berry which is
first roasted, then, when water is boiled and poured on to it, it makes a
strong, brown liquid which Arabs and Europeans like to drink. The
women weave camels' hair into clothes and blankets, and goats' hair
into tent-covers. The Bedouin men are always ready to fight with their
guns and lances; sometimes they are robbers, but most of them travel
from place to place, only fighting if others attack them. There is always
a chief in each tribe of Bedouin, and in each village of the Berbers, but
away in the desert there are many bands of robbers who will not obey
any law, and everyone has to fight for himself against these people. The
Bedouin love their animals, especially their camels and their horses. It
is quite natural that they should do so, because often a man would die
in the desert if his horse or camel would not work well and carry him
faithfully until they reached water. Sometimes when the people lose
their way in the pathless sand, the horses and camels can find it.
5. The Desert Peoples (c) Traders
The third kind of people who are found in the Sahara are the traders.
These, like the Bedouin, are Arabs, but often their homes are in some

town, either on the edge of the desert or in Egypt. They travel from the
great North African towns and from Egypt, across the desert to the rich
countries south of it, where the dark-skinned people live. There, south
of the Sahara, they buy ivory and dyed goat-skins and other things in
exchange for cloth and beads, and return with their merchandise to the
northern towns again. Many years ago they used to capture slaves, but
they cannot often do so now, because the Christian Europeans try to
stop trading in slaves. The journeys of the traders take many months,
because often they have to go by a long road in order to find water. So
they travel from oasis to oasis seeking shade and water. Sometimes
they have to ride three or four days to reach the next drinking-place.
Then they have to carry water for themselves in goat-skins. The camels
can live for a few days without water, though they get very weak. For
this reason, everyone who makes long journeys in the Sahara has to
ride on a camel. A horse can travel more quickly, but he, like a man,
must have water every day. So the camel is sometimes called the "Ship
of the Desert," because he, best of all, can carry men across the
waterless sand. When traders travel across the desert with their
merchandise, they are very much afraid of the desert robbers, who steal
what they can from travellers. So they journey in large companies
called "caravans," with a paid guide to show them the best and the
quickest way from oasis to oasis, and with many men armed with guns
and spears paid to ride along by the side of the camels carrying the
merchandise, and to fight if robbers come to steal. These Sahara
robbers are very bad people, who fight, and steal all they can get, and
always kill everyone they can. So everyone who crosses the Sahara has
to be ready to fight for his life as well as his property. The desert is so
vast, and has so many hills and hiding-places, that it is easy for the
robbers to get away after they have robbed a caravan. Then, as silence
once more falls on the place of the struggle, the cries of the jackals and
hyenas and vultures are heard, as they come from miles away drawn by
the smell of blood. Swiftly they gather to feed on the bodies of the slain,
and soon the wind blows the sand smooth and clean, where a few hours
before it was trampled and stained with blood. Perhaps only a few
whitened bones remain to show what has happened.
6. The North of Africa

So we have learned something about the people who live in the North
of Africa. In Egypt, the land of the great River Nile, the people can
grow rich and prosperous. They have time to learn, but, except the
Copts, many of whom are goldsmiths, they seem to have quite
forgotten how to make the beautiful things the old Egyptians made. In
the desert, the Sahara, there is little