The Nomadic Alternative – Page 119

adaptability and their knowledge of the wasteland and its resources that "they often eat where the Bedouin starve". In all Arabia they alone could afford to "pay no heed for the morrow, what ye shall eat and what ye shall drink".

The Nemadi are among the poorest people in the world. They hunt (1969) with dogs for addax and oryx antelopes in the sands of El-Djouf, the Saharan Empty Quarter. In Moorish society they occupy the fifth and lowest caste and belong to the category "Ignorant Irreligious Thieves". Sometimes they say they are Muslims but this facade of feigned religiosity is simply designed to protect them from proselytizers. In practice they have no religion and attribute this to their own laziness. No Muslim food taboo, no fear of the pig, has any hold over them. They will eat wild boar if they can catch it. But usually they cut strips of antelope meat and dry them in the sun. The result is called tichtar which, when crumbled, gives a gamey flavour to couscous. They trade it with townspeople for a few basic needs. They have virtually no material culture of their own and no possessions either, but a few cooking pots and knives, the most ragged tents, and a few strips of Sudanese cloth to drape over brushwood shelters which shield them from the sun.

As companions they have the dogs they love, which eat when the men go hungry.

The Nemadi's hair is black and straight, their skin fair and their shoulders wide. Some have blue eyes. Their teeth shine with unexpected whiteness, unlike the teeth of the sweet-sucking Moorish townsmen, which are well decayed by the time they are twenty. They walk with long lilting strides. They are the most expert trackers in this part of the desert for their ancestors were the Messoufites who guided the caravans from Morocco to the Niger in mediaeval times. The Arab traveller Ib'n Battuta marvelled at his Messoufite guide, an old man blind in one eye, half-blind in the other, who escorted the caravan without fault across the sands in 1353. "The desert here is beautiful and brilliant, and the soul finds its ease. Antelopes abound, and frequently a herd passes so close to