Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/195

Rh Islam has not been dead; it has not even been sleeping, but has simply been silent and waiting. Now it is no longer silent and in some places will not even wait. The hour calling to action has come.

While I was formulating these thoughts, the sun disappeared behind the mountains, and Fez seemed for a moment to have been extinguished. It lay there gray and threatening, held tight between its binding walls. This was my last strong impression of the city of Idris. It was as if an invisible genie, or perhaps some ordinary Moroccan djinn, had chosen thus picturesquely to reveal to me the color and the sentiments of the soul of Maghreb.

During my months in North Africa this soul of Maghreb attracted me much more strongly than the inner life of either Algeria or Tunisia, because of its primitiveness, because of the greater barbarity and severity of its followers of Islam, because of the greater purity of the remnants of ancient native cults and because of its elemental sentiments and tendencies. Inspired by this interest I took advantage of ever-continuing opportunities to talk exhaustively with Arabs, Berbers, Kabyles and other natives and drew out from these contacts not only the superficial and everyday thoughts, but those that were ordinarily hidden, passionate and deep, like the interiors of their sacred temples, guarded from the entrance of an unbeliever by the law of horm. Often one word, one unfinished phrase, was enough to make a dark matter clear and to clothe an apparently clear one in a shroud of mystery. Years of travel among peoples in all stages of life and development have given me some ability to see into the human soul and an intuition in searching out and