The Nomadic Alternative – Page 77

their wide antlers shovel the snow aside to uncover cushions of reindeer moss, their staple food. In the summer the landscape bursts into leaf and there is food for all; then the Tungus retreat to higher ground to escape the plagues of mosquitoes that make the short arctic summer so uncomfortable, lighting fires to keep them at bay.

In the Southern Sahara the rains of summer enliven the tawny wastes with their annual sprinkling of green. Black acacia trees and bleached thorns spring to life. At this time the people of the rivers drive their longhorn cattle northwards from the insects; the herders of sheep and goats make way for them a little, and the camel nomads displace themselves to return for a brief sojourn under their own roofs in desert oases to participate in the date harvest. The hoofprints of herds mark even the bleakest of deserts. "There is not any place of the immense waste", Doughty wrote, "which is not at some time visited in the Arab's wanderings, yet while we pass, no other life, it may be, is in the compass of a hundred miles."

Clockwork predictability, however, is the victim of many variables. Rain may come late. Sometimes it may not come at all. For the nomads of Mauretania, 1969 was the year of the great drought. The herdsmen looked with increasing alarm at the cloudless sky which should have filled with puffy rain-clouds. The wells ran dry, and about two thirds of the livestock died. A year later their carcasses lay among the crackling vegetation, their dessicated hides flapping in the wind against white rib cages. The nomads retreated from the bush into the bidonvilles that have sprung up on the fringes of mining settlements and towns, just as the brothers of Joseph went down to Egypt when "famine was sore in the land".

The axis of any tribal migration is The Way, not a way, but The One Way - the path which substitutes for a fixed home base. Persian nomads call it the Il-Rah. The Way of one tribe intersects with the ways of others and ill-timing leads to conflicts of interest. Forking paths and easy short cuts offer tempting alternatives, but these may lead to disaster. A cycle of vegetation drags the nomad over