Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/308

292 began repeating after the muezzin that there is no God but Allah, One and Eternal. As the man pressed his hands to his face and made his obeisances, he heard and saw nothing around him, for he was then in direct contact with the Creator of all men, animals and inanimate things. He did not complain of his lot, since Allah knew what was destined for him and he, a poor meskin, was sure of a recompense for his resignation to Fate and for his faithfulness to Allah. Asking nothing, he performed his acts of adoration and homage, raised his pock-marked face to the darkening sky and repeated:

"Allah the Merciful, the Protector, the Just, the King of Kings, the Chief! &hellip;"

Later in the evening, after a delightful dinner in the house of Monsieur Le Glay, the "Emperor of the Berbers" gave me many curious details about Morocco and confirmed once more my strong conviction that man is the product of climate, soil, religious belief and circumstance only in his exterior forms and that the native from the district of Abda or from Erg on the edge of the Sahara is inherently exactly the same as the native from the shores of the Orkhon, of the Behring Sea or of the Yangtze Kiang, the citizen of Winnipeg, New York, Paris, Berlin or Warsaw, in that he possesses a soul that is always unquiet and sad and is longing for wisdom which is beyond his reach and not the direct product of his own brain and for faith in God and in man, the work of His eternal will.

One of the guests who was at the dinner was to be Monsieur Le Glay's locum-tenens, while he was away at Rabat, and invited us to visit him in the Keshla the