Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/316

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THE FIRE OF DESERT FOLK

into the country and putting it into this earth that is so burned and baked by the sun. Among the six million of Berbers, Arabs, Jews, Negroes and other mixed peoples within this area of approximately one hundred seventy thousand square miles[1] the white population does not count more than two hundred thousand souls. However, this oasis, as it were, in the greater desert of people has worked a miracle, having performed it through its training in the great school of energy, wherein climate, soil and man, in fact everything, is strange and hostile; where the newcomer must first conquer innumerable difficulties, calm the stormy waves of the surging people and then only begin the work of constructive creation.

It is quite patent that representatives of the white race who are in Morocco are giving ample evidence of organizing instinct and are guiding this work well, in proof of which one need cite no further fact than that the ports of Knitra, Rabat, Fedalah, Casablanca, Safi and Mogador have not only insufficient produce to meet their export demands but are also constantly enlarging the machinery of their commerce and their technical equipment. Back of these gates to the outer world the strategic railways bring out produce and wares from as far east as the Algerian frontier and south to the High Atlas, while over shorter hauls new motor routes are driven into the producing regions to supplement with their lumbering trucks the soft-footed camel. In the opposite direction the roads bear back to the Berber villages and hitherto untouched regions the primary elements of Western civil-

  1. There Is great diversity in the reported area of the country, even in official figures. Some of these give as high as 320,000 square miles.