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And what could be more puerile than the fanciful connection of the Supreme Being with a pastoral simplicity of life? This simplicity was gone, irrecoverably gone, with the passage from nomad times to the complexities of a modern society.
I remonstrated. "We take more time than that to fit ourselves for a journey or some transient pleasure. I hardly realize my engagement yet." "You have not been thinking of it for these last two months as I have." "No," I replied demurely, forgetting everything else in my delight at this admission. "Nor are you a nomad among clubs and restaurants." "No, I have a home."
Many a century has passed since the plough first sped a conqueror east and west, clearing forest and draining fen; policing the valleys with barbed-wires and Sunday schools, with the chains that are forged of peace, the irking fetters of plenty: driving also the whole lot of us, these to sweat at its tail, those to plod with the patient team, but all to march in a great chain-gang, the convicts of peace and order and law: while the happy nomad, with his woodlands, his wild cattle, his pleasing nuptialities, has long since disappeared, dropping only in his flight some store of flint-heads, a legacy of confusion.
The "factory people," many of whom had been nomad tenant farmers seldom living long in the same place, had never thought of attempting to beautify their surroundings, and the immediate neighborhood of the mill to which they moved was often bare and unlovely and afforded little encouragement to beauty.
The first stage in pioneer-life is nomadic: a half-score of men, women, and children faring on day after day, living in the open air, encamping at night beside a spring or brook, under the canopy of the forest, it is only when they reach their place of destination, that the germ of a community fixes itself to the soil, and rises obedient to those laws of social and civil order which distinguish the European colonist from the Asiatic nomad.
Then the nomads eat anything and drink the brackish water from the bottom of a mud pool with relish. In no country in the world is water so costly as in Arabia; nowhere is it so carefully used; an Arab never wastes a drop of water and looks surprised and pained when an European traveller rinses out a cup before drinking! The nomad Arabs eat locusts and wild honey as did John the Baptist.
The Tibetan is a born nomad, and shifts his dwelling with the seasons, wherever he can find grazing for his yaks and sheep. He knows how to make himself comfortable. For instance, in the centre of his tent he makes himself a goling, or fireplace of mud and stone, some three feet high, four or five feet long by one and a half wide, with two, three, or more side ventilators and draught-holes.
These quiet, rolling stretches of thinly peopled land contented him, and gave pasture for his flocks, as well as fields for his cultivation. Like many of the tribes of that district still, he had passed from the purely nomad and pastoral life, such as Abraham led, and had begun to 'sow in that land. That marks a stage in progress.
The nomad tribes began to show growing hostility on the frontier, and the peoples of the Tigris and Euphrates were already pushing their vanguards into Central Syria.
"He hardly corresponds to my aimless nomad wandering hither and yon, with neither ambition nor destination! By the way," he added abruptly, "what do you think of Jack? I am not asking this, mind you, just to make conversation, but because I am interested in him as a national type.
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