The Nomadic Alternative – Page 82

deployed his removal from the black tents. "My tabernacle is spoiled, and all my cords are broken; my children are gone forth from me, and they are not; there is none to stretch forth my tent any more and to set up my curtains." Jeremiah 10.20. Such was the Lord's opinion of settlement.

IV

Nomad children develop a prodigious sense of direction. Athr, the art of reading footprints, is the skill the Bedouin prize above all others. A boy can recognize the footprints of all his family and relations, the tracks of wild and tame animals. Nomads scrutinize sand or rough stones disturbed by a caravan and inform themselves on the number of animals passing by, whither headed, whether burdened, how long before and how fast they were moving. A nomad can deduce how to arrive at an unknown destination in almost featureless desert, to march in a straight line for days on end and to navigate by the stars at night. "He orientates", writes Jean Chapelle of the black Toubou or Teda nomads of Tchad, "to the sun, the moon and the stars, to all aspects of the terrain, the appearance of the ground and its vegetation. If all that is lacking - say a dark night with low cloud, thick mist and characterless ground, or little heaps of sand blown by the wind. He can navigate by the wind alone for a little way ... The nomad lives in a state of orientation governed by his senses, where reason does not interpose every second, but this orientation is not innate. The faculty, however developed, owes nothing to the supernatural." "The Teda who loses his way in the night, in difficult conditions, closes his eyes, whirls himself round several times, then lies down and lets his dizziness pass. Then he rises and looks attentively at the stars and the landscape as though he were seeing them for the first time. Reoriented he gains his direction."

* she barefooted. pack up and hurrid found. If he combines these must be some other clues, the alignment of sand dunes ripples in the ground,