Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/175

Rh the merchants felt the feet, chests and hands of the blacks and spoke in response to the man's representations to them. Hafid bent close to me and whispered:

"We must keep perfectly quiet, in order not to frighten these men. Just there begins the suk El-Ghezel, formerly the slave suk. Christians oppose slavery, while Moslems preserve this ancient institution, as the Koran does not forbid it but only prescribes that the treatment of the slaves shall be good. The traffic is carried on secretly in Fez, but more boldly in the south, where the authority over, and lifting a heavy stone and stretching out their The slaves who are brought here and sold are purchased in the Sudan and in Central Africa. If the abd knows a little of our law, he can ask for a contract, setting forth the period of his slavery and granting him liberty and the status of a citizen at the end of his servitude."

"And women?" I asked.

"These are not brought into the market, owing to the fear of the French authorities; yet women slaves exist and are sold from hand to hand, only with greater secrecy and with much more of an air of mystery than is observed in handling the men."

As we watched, the slaves put their rags of bournouses over themselves and went away in the midst of the group, leaving me there in the shadow with Hafid to ponder over the quite unexpected revelation of the night. Slavery, with good treatment of the purchased human being, a contract and the possibility of gaining liberty and citizenship, with the almost unavoidable attachment that grows up under these conditions in the family for the slave and in the slave for the family of his master—the