The Nomadic Alternative – Page 118

Within denies all value to power imposed from without. And when Behemoth seems to bar all escape routes, the few excavate the strata of human experience, rake around in the lowest levels of human society and lay bare a bed of values more archaic than those of the Neolithic Revolution.

To a Bedouin Arab or Moor the hunting caste - and for that matter the fishing caste - are the lowest of the low. The hunter is a pariah, lower than the entertainer or musician, more despised and feared than the metal-workers, inferior to the peasant or slave.

In the sands of Eastern Mauretania there lives such a caste of hunters and I have seen them. Doughty saw their equivalents in Arabia - "a people of antiquity", aboriginals of the land, who wandered from Syria to Yemen, human wreckage to make a stiff-necked Pharisee or Saduccee shudder, and the modern Bedouin curse as "Hounds of the Wilderness".¹ Doughty's Solubba or Sleib hunted antelopes and gazelles, but they were also "tinkers of kettles and menders of arms, small time carpenters, song-makers and storytellers", accredited with powers of the occult. (Thus in an Arabian context they followed the same occupations as the Gipsies in an Indo-Aryan one.) Doughty says they made crude iron hatchets and grasshooks, saddle-trees and milk-bowls, but were less competent in this craft than the Sunna or smith's caste. During the lean dry season, they clustered as para-sites around the Bedouin camps. But with the first sprinkling of moisture they had exhausted their hosts' hospitality, and loading a few asses with water skins, made off into the wilderness. "They only are free of the Arabian deserts to travel withersoever they would; paying to all men a petty tribute they are molested by none."

They were desperately poor. Having nothing, they cared to have nothing. Yet Doughty was amazed at the "full-faced shining flesh beauty of their ragged children" and "fairer looks than the hard-bitten Beduw". They were tolerant and gentle as they were despised and oppressed. They horrified all others by their carefree attitude to food taboos or any sort of ritual observance. They were "eaters of vile worms", of locusts and wild honey. Yet such was their