rt
marauder.

"I knew nothing exactly about her real life. She related it to me in
incoherent fragments, that seemed to rise up at random from a disordered
memory, and she mixed up deliciously childish observations with them;
a whole vision of a Nomad world, born of a squirrel's brain that had
leapt from tent to tent, from encampment to encampment, from tribe to
tribe. And all this was done with the severe looks that this reserved
people always preserve, with the appearance of a brass idol, and rather
comic gravity.

"When she had finished, I perceived that I had not remembered anything of
that long story, full of insignificant events, that she had stored up in
her flighty brain, and I asked myself whether she had not simply been
making fun of me by her empty and would-be serious chatter, which told me
nothing about her, nor about any real facts connected with her life.

"And I thought of that conquered race, among whom we have encamped, or,
rather, who are encamping among us, whose language we are beginning to
speak, whom we see every day, living under the transparent linen of their
tents, on whom we have imposed our laws, our regulations, and our
customs, and about whom we know nothing, nothing more whatever, I assure
you, than if we were not here, and solely occupied in looking at them,
for nearly sixty years. We know no more about what is going on in those
huts made of branches, and under those small canvas cones that are
fastened to the ground by stakes, which are within twenty yards of our
doors, than we know what the so-called civilized Arabs of the Moorish
houses in Algiers do, think, and are. Behind the white-washed walls of
their town houses, behind the partition of their _gourbi_, which is made
of branches, or behind that thin, brown, camel-haired curtain which the
wind moves, they live close to us, unknown, mysterious, cunning,
submissive, smiling, impenetrable. What if I were to tell you, that when
I look at the neighboring encampment through my field glasses, I guess
that there are superstitions, customs, ceremonies, a thousand practices
of which we know nothing, and which we do not even suspect! Never
previously, in all probability, did a conquered race know so well how
to escape so completely from the real domination, the moral influence
and the inveterate, but useless, investigations of the conquerors.

"Now I suddenly felt the insurmountable, secret barrier which
incomprehensible nature had set up