People of Africa | Page 7

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 water, and life is very hard. All day people must work to get enough for food and clothes. It is a land without a king and without laws, where each must fight for himself. Yet these people, on their long journeys through the waterless waste,