On the fragility of civilization
more than to have to lay out all he possessed in the way of
food for our entertainment. He had a pleasant brown face
with eyes well apart, and quick, neat manners. He had been
for a good many years in Baghdad and Basra, and knew the
ways of civilized life. When I had been accommodated on
a carpet, and water was brought me to wash my hands, he
knelt beside me, and out of bis voluminous sash produced a
small piece of soap. He offered it with an air of modest
triumph. He evidently felt about it as an Englishman may
feel when he dresses for dinner in some outpost of the jungle.
It was the symbol of a different order of things, a little treasure
kept among the difficulties of nomad life as a reminder of
something better which might otherwise be forgotten. Even
so, perhaps, in the decline of Rome, some relic of imperial
opulence might be preserved amid the northern forests,
embodying in its dim way ideas long since shipwrecked and
submerged.
What a delicate plant is our civilization, I thought, as I sat
in the shade with the circle of the tribesmen around me, in
that short silence which is good manners in the East. You
would imagine that these people, who know the life of cities
and its comforts, would reproduce it in some measure when
they return to their own hills. Far from it. They return
and live just as they lived two thousand years ago or more.
The force of primitive circumstance is too great for diem.
And these amenities are not, like freedom, or religion, authority
or leisure, among the indispensable necessities of mankind.
The father of our host was an old patriarch very nearly
blind and dressed in strips of rags so multitudinous that only
a principle of mutual attraction could, you would imagine,
induce them to remain all together on his person. He carried
them with a serene dignity, having reached an age when the
mere fact of being still alive at all entitles one to indulgence