The Nomadic Alternative – Page 90

"Horror?" asked the Companions, and the Prophet replied, "SLAUGHTER! SLAUGHTER!" Political commentators who pronounce on the coming confrontation between Russia and China should remember one complicating factor. The Turks and Mongols lie in between.

"No one ever ploughs a field in their country", the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus complained of the Huns, "or touches a plough handle. They are ignorant of home, law and settled existence, and they keep roaming from place to place like fugitives in their waggons. If you ask one of their children where he comes from, he was conceived in one place, born far away, and brought up still farther off." (This might be a North American sociologist talking.)

"In truce they are faithless and unreliable. They sacrifice every- thing to the impulse of the moment, and trim their sails to each new shift of the wind ..." An Imperial Secretary of China said of the same people, "... in their breasts beat the heart of beasts ... from the most ancient times they have never been regarded as a part of humanity." In the year 1 B.C. the Hunnish ruler paid a state visit to the Imperial capital and his Imperial host lodged him in the Imperial Zoo.

But the nomad and the citizen are more attracted to each other than either would be the first to admit. One glance at the glitter of the metropolis - or a taste of its fleshpots - and the nomad begins to doubt. He doubts the point of those endless journeys. The very idea of sheep exhausts him and he develops inferiority complexes about his lack of table manners.

One whiff of nomadic freedom and the decadent citizen positively wants to be invaded. A revival of the nomadic sensibility invariably accompanies the return of neo-barbarism. Once the impetus to earn a settled living evaporates, people latch onto flamboyant costumes and portable possessions, pillaging the wardrobes of nomad peoples - past and present - for fashionable ideas - leather jackets and tight trousers (a nomad invention for horse-riding), fur coats, bristly boots, patchwork-shirts (in imitation of bird plumage), gipsy frills, bedouin bangles, pseudo-shamanic dance costumes,