Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/134

118 destruction of many sekkaias, or beloved and popular fountains, most of which are sacred to some legend or story concerning a revered wall or powerful emir of earlier days. To find a spring, to dig a well or to make an aqueduct for the service of man carries with it great merit before Allah; but to destroy this, to deprive the population of water, were it only for a minute, is, according to Moslem reshids, a crime of which only the rumi, or white man, is capable. One has only to phrase this to make it easy to understand what a subtle and difficult task the European faces in what would ordinarily be a simple problem of engineering.

Hafid led the way across the city, until we came to the basket suk, where the artisans were making baskets and sacks from laurel twigs and palm-leaves. We had no more than arrived when in through the gate came a kafla, or caravan, of twenty camels, carrying great loads of the dried branches of the palm brought to these basketweavers from the far-away oases in the south. As we stepped aside into the shadow of the door and surrendered the street to the towering animals, I read in their eyes fright, pain and despair in contrast to the placid and supercilious expression of their two-hump Asiatic brothers, who have not the appearance of slaves under the absolute domination of man. In fact the Bactrian camel occasionally turns on and attacks his driver, whereas the Arabs and Berbers never expect a protest from their beasts. What accounts for the difference in the psychology of the two species? Perhaps the African camel was captured and enslaved long before the Asiatic one, which still preserves within its nature the atavistic love