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Updated: May 1, 2025
The need of pasturage from time immemorial has urged the pastoral tribes of the desert towards the fertile land of the Nile. When want of rain has brought drought upon Canaan, parching the grass and destroying the corn, the nomad has invariably set his face toward the country which is dependent for its fertility, not upon the rains of heaven, but upon the annual overflow of its river.
I have now to instance two whose development can be traced to the other fact that he is a nomad. I refer to his skill with the bark canoe and his ability to carry. I was once introduced to a man at a little way station of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the following words: "Shake hands with Munson; he's as good a canoeman as an Indian." A little later one of the bystanders remarked to me:
The sharp passion which moved her now as she stood before Jethro Fawe would not have been so acute yesterday; but to-day she had lain in a Gorgio's arms to-day; and though he was nothing to her, he was still a Gorgio of Gorgios; and this man before her her husband was at best but a man of the hedges and the byre and the clay-pit, the quarry and the wood; a nomad with no home, nothing that belonged to what she was now a part of organized, collective existence, the life of the house-dweller, not the life of the 'tan', the 'koppa', and the 'vellgouris' the tent, the blanket, and the fair.
No Roman army had yet dared to penetrate even into Western Numidia, and such a venture would be more hopeless than ever, if the nomad tribes of the desert frontier and Bocchus of Mauretania enclosed that district with myriads of mounted men that might sweep it at any time from point to point, and destroy in a moment the laborious efforts at occupation that might be made by Rome.
For, from the day when they left the chill table-lands of Tibet and journeyed, a nomad people, to AEgean shores, the characteristic of their nature has been the search for light, and the spirit of historical criticism is part of that wonderful Aufklarung or illumination of the intellect which seems to have burst on the Greek race like a great flood of light about the sixth century B.C.
Even Mohammedanism, that Puritanism of the East, has not been able to eradicate the belief in the divine nature of such trees from the mind of the nomad; we may still see them decorated with offerings of rags torn from the garments of the passer-by or shading the tomb of some reputed saint.
Nomad men follow along their banks, making a living by fishing and doing odd jobs on the stations they pass. They are called "whalers," and follow the life, mainly, I think, because of a gipsy instinct for roving, since it is not either a comfortable or profitable existence. On the rivers, too, are all sorts of curious little colonies, living in barges, and floating down from town to town.
The plateau of eastern Asia has been the natural abode of nomad tribes, Tartars and Mongols, whose invading hosts have poured through the passes of the mountains into the inviting territories below. The plateau of western Asia, stretching westward from the Indus, is not so high as that of the east.
There is a particular system of inner impressions and operations which fashions the artist, the believer, the musician, the painter, the nomad, the social man; for each of these, the filiation, intensity, and interdependence of ideas and of emotions are different; each has his own moral history, and his own special organization, along with some master tendency and with some dominant trait.
The Irish had hardly emerged from the nomad pastoral stage, when the first of that series of invasions, which had all the ferocity, without the finality of conquest, made settled life impossible over the greater part of the island. An old chronicle throws some vivid light upon the way in which the idea of home life presented itself to the mind of the clan chiefs as late as the days of the Tudors.
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