The Settled Tribe
faced, black-bearded figure dressed in white, whose fierce
appearance would have made the Members of Parliament
faint away altogether.
Crouching on the footboard, he guided us, with a sense
denied to the town-bred driver, in and out of irrigation
ditches to the mud village where the Shaikh and his people
are leaving their nomad habits and settling on the land:
they are in the early stages of the process and still look
upon houses as scarcely more permanent than tents, things
to be left and built up again somewhere else if for any
reason, such as a dispute with the tax collector or difficulty
over grazing or irrigation, the site becomes distasteful.
Shaikh Habib was thinking of doing this soon, he explained,
because of some business with rents. Followed by a
little group of tribesmen, he took us round the village,
on a mound whose gentle regular rise showed that it had
probably been inhabited off and on since Babylonian days.
All here was a mixture of new things and very old.
The Shaikh himself was such. Dressed in a yellow and
black striped gown, or zibun, with a knife in his sash, and
sleeves which ruffled over his hands, long and delicate as
Van Dyck might have painted—a trait, by the way, often
noticeable among the Beduin chiefs—he talked to us about
the League of Nations, about his new school with French
educational posters on its mud walls, and about raids in
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