The Nomadic Alternative – Page 19

they are closer to the first state, and more removed from all bad habits that have infected the souls of settlers through many ugly blameworthy customs …” They are

healthier in body and better in character than the hill people who have plenty of everything. Their complexions are clearer, their bodies cleaner, their figures more perfect, their characters less intemperate and their minds keener as far as knowledge and perception are concerned … and I tentatively suggest the reason for it. A great amount of food, and the moisture it contains, generates harmful superfluous matter in the body, which, in turn, produces a disproportionate widening of the body … the mind and the ability to think are dulled. The result is stupidity, carelessness and general intemperance.

Today settled governments are herding these same desert peoples into shanty towns in the interests of ‘progress’.

To the infuriation of the feminists, some writers have suggested that the difference between the temperament of the wanderer and settler is a difference of sex. Men are the adventurers off on the hunt, women the traditional guardians of hearth and home. The marriage bond aimed at comforting the mother while her husband and his men friends went off on a rampage. This is not so. Women are simply the guardians of continuity. It is the gipsy women who keep their men on the road. In Mauretania I asked a wild-looking chief of the Laghiri tribe of nomads why he refused to settle down.

To which he replied, “Mais j’aime bien m’installer dans une maison en ville. La vie en brousse est emmerdante. On ne peut pas prendre une douche. Ce sont les femmes qui aiment la brousse. Elles disent que la brousse apporte la santé et le bonheur.” Male exclusiveness rises to a peak off not on the hunting field. It is easier for a man and woman to travel with each other, than live at home together.

Hence the honeymoon and holiday.

The wanderer-settler antithesis is, of course, wholly arbitrary, and perhaps corresponds to the innate faculty of the human mind to divide all objects of experience into opposite categories. In practice there are endless permutations between the two extremes. No wanderer wanders all the time. No settler settles. But the antithesis