The Nomadic Alternative – Page 78

the horizon, but he has no fixed destination, no point beyond which he need not go. The next pasture is both the destination and the point of departure. Nomads see life as a sequence of linked horizontal planes. The end of the road is the end of joy and sorrow and lies within the traveller himself; for the annual migration enacts the human life cycle in miniature - a youth bursting with vernal energy, the height of powers in summer, an autumnal descent, followed by a winter death. There is no going without a return and the going is the return.

The migration paths of some Mongolian tribes run in tight ellipses of a hundred and fifty kilometers; Persian nomads will follow a long straight track from the coastal plain to the mountains and back, while Saharan camel owners negotiate the desert wells in loops and figures of eight. Place and time are synonymous. A stretch of the way is a stretch of time and vice versa; the path pivots about the celestial time-piece. April in Afghanistan is the time when the nomads and Tajik cultivators scowl and hiss curses at each other, as the caravans of animals skirt the mud-brick villages. The nomad enviously eyes the planted greenery and the planter jealously guards his patches of corn, flax and melons from the mouths of goats. But August is a time for friendly exchanges. The nomads are winging back to winter pastures. The peasant has harvested his crops and stored them in granaries. Black tents hover over golden stubble, and the farmers allow animals to browse over their fields.

The animals are fat. Their feet cut up the baked surface of the soil and this assists autumn ploughing. Their manure revives its fertility. Nomads bring hides, wool and dairy produce to the villagers and barter them for the grain they need to see them through the winter. Nomadic economy is not self-contained. A nomad independent of settled agriculture has probably never existed.

But the ethos of the nomad diametrically opposes that of the settler. Nomad and planter may depend on each other, yet they never understand each other. The nomad shifts from pasture to pasture because the health of his animals demands movement. He rejoices in