Page:Among the Women of the Sahara.djvu/17

Rh the raw material into shape for the market. But their knowledge stops there; they do not know who makes the cotton stuffs and silk handkerchiefs brought to the desert by caravans. Understand well what I mean; they don't know whether it is a man, an angel, a demon, or what they call a jinn, who produces these things. Of course, however, I am only speaking of those whom our effete civilization has not yet touched, or given a smattering either of its science or its vice; and these include the greater number, in fact, the mass, of the true women of the true Sahara.

The dreary expanse of their native land does not, however, suppress their gaiety. Their laugh still rings out high and clear. The narrow limits of the tent or of the clay hut do not shackle the freedom of their movements; the poverty of their language does not prevent them from instinctively recognizing the innate poetry of the songs they transmit from generation to generation. And about them there is a something—I know not what, so difficult is it to define—irresistibly attractive to us Europeans, which is better than intelligence, and better than physical beauty. It is, maybe, that perfect resignation (after more than one crisis of furious revolt) to their fate, as fixed by the angel-writer, the scribe of Allah himself, combined with the absolute harmony of their voices, their smiles, their gestures, their costumes and their ornaments, with the piquant and