Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/299

Rh of the tribe pride and the queenly gift of love with the desire for equality. Who shall ever search out the true thread of the drama? At least, so much one can gather from the old books—that, when the Saadite sultans erected in Marrakesh the pantheon for their dead, they paid for the marble from Carrara with sugar and with the Italian and Spanish slaves who had been dragging out lives of bondage in the mountains of the Atlas. Some echoes come down out of the past from these words of the old chroniclers, waking conjecture and suggesting epics, tragic and unspoken.

Filled with these thoughts and impressions I came back to Marrakesh from the excursion into these mountains where the great caids govern, as feudal masters, the tragic Sous, the despised Draa and the oldest Berber tribes, which have given warlike and splendid monarchs to the whole of Maghreb.