Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/342

326 watch Madame Pariel's little dog frisking about under the palms and waiting for the dates which the birds dropped as they worked among the bunches.

In the evening, when we had dressed and come in from our quarters in the smaller bungalow in the garden to the larger house, filled with its objects of African art, beautiful pictures, magazines and books and radiating a sense of culture, I found myself musing over what a blessed thing this culture is. During my forced flight across central Asia three and four years ago I always compelled my companions, no matter in what extreme of difficulty we happened to be placed, to wash morning and night and always before partaking of food, to keep their washable garments, few as they were, clean, and to preserve some aesthetic forms or manners at our very simple meals, even though it might be during a Mongolian dinner, when mutton fat was dripping from our elbows. Yet in spite of all these precautions I remember now most clearly that, after some months of wandering, of hunger and cold and of sleeping beside open camp-fires, when we arrived at the house of a colonist who prepared for us real beds with clean sheets and pillow-cases, I was so moved that the tears welled up into my eyes. And some months later, when I saw the electric lights in Urga, I actually wept.

I feel that a member of the white race, consciously struggling for the highest forms of civilization, takes on an actual phsysiological need of culture and that he really suffers morally from the lack of it, as though he were deprived of the essential conditions of life and were