Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/175

 women are fattened for matrimony, and in several tribes their upper incisors are made to project forward so as to raise the upper and rest on the lower lip.

Despite their tribal feuds and caste prejudices, the Mohammedan Moors have always combined against the hated Christian. The French have failed to reduce by dividing them, and although far less numerous than the black populations of the Senegal basin, they have resisted the encroachments of the whites far more resolutely. In war they are pitiless, after the battle sparing only the women and children. The Negroes have many axioms breathing the spirit of hatred which they cherish against their Berber oppressors. "A tent shelters nothing honest unless it be the horse that carries it;" "If a a Moor and a viper cross thy path, kill the Moor," are sayings current among the Jolofs, and perhaps sufficiently accounted for by the Arab maxim that the Negro "must be trampled under foot and impoverished to make him submissive and respectful."

Although split up into endless clans, sects, and sub-groups of all sorts, the Moors constitute two natural divisions only, the northern tribes, who never leave the steppes verging on the desert, and the Guebla, or southern tribes, who migrate to and fro between the fluvial trading stations and the camping-grounds of the interior. But for political and commercial convenience the French have classed them in the three great groups of the Trarzas, Braknas, and Dwaïsh, to whom they assign a collective responsibility for the observance of the treaties. In virtue of these treaties they can no longer cross the Senegal except as guests and friends, the only Moorish tribe now settled on the left bank being the Dakalifas, to the west of Lake Paniéful. é The Negro Wolofs still remember the time when the Ganar district north of the Lower Senegal was occupied by them. But they were compelled to withdraw