The Nomadic Alternative – Page 56

waters and allowed them to flow their natural course over the land.

One Sumerian myth compares the forced impregnation of the earth to unnatural sexual activity, and many modern irrigation schemes have resulted in a hard crust of salt scabbing the land.

As the number of mouths increases, the fields become smaller, conditions more squalid, the people angry and restless, disease more virulent and the Pyramid impotent in the face of unauthorized land grabs. "The land is diminished", says an Old Kingdom text, "bare but its taxes are heavy." A man covets his neighbour's ox and ass and field.

"What's your field?" asked a frustrated member of the Academic Pyramid. I replied I did not have one, but picked up random information as I went along. "The man's a vagrant", she must have thought, as she returned to exorcise her weeds.

If a man identifies his welfare and that of his family with a field, a threat to the boundary of the field will anger him. He erects walls to protect his patch from stray animals and the encroachments of outsiders - barriers to reinforce his uncertain sense of security. Similarly when internal chaos threatens the stability of the Pyramid, the High Command builds its Maginot Lines against the outsider. If a threat does not exist, the Pyramid is obliged to invent one.

The lunatic defence systems of civilized governments cloud the very future of human existence. Yet they have not been built simply to keep the enemy out, but keep the people in. They are for home consumption, to buttress internal authority. A Chinese Imperial Secretary of the Han Dynasty was appalled at the prospect of abandoning the Great Wall in times of peace and appraised its true function correctly. "The frontier posts of China are as much needed for keeping Chinese traitors out of Tartar lands as for keeping the Tartars out of China."*

*E.H. Parker, One Thousand Years of the Tartars, 1923, p. 49; the speech of Yin-Shen.