Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence (2)

This is a lovely account about the status of slaves in Arabia. Lawrence says:
"When we awoke we found a meal of bread and dates prepared for us by the people of the house. The dates were new, melting sweet and good, like non I had ever tasted. They told us that the locusts had made of them a small crop this year. The owner of the property, a Harbi, was away like his neighbours serving with Feisal, and his women and children were out in the hills in his goat-hair tents, pasturing his camels. At the most the tribal Arabs of Wadi Safra lived in their village houses four months in the year. For the other seasons the gardens were entrusted to their slaves, negroes like the grown labs who brought in the tray to us, and whose thick limbs and plump shinning bodies looked curiously out of place among the bird-like Arabs. Khallaf told me the blacks were all originally from the Sudan, brought over as children by their nominal Takruri fathers, and sold in Mecca during the pilgrimage. When grown strong they were worth from fifty to eighty pounds apiece, and were looked after carefully as befitted their price. Some were kept as house or body servants with theirs masters, but the majority were sent out to the palm villages of the feverish valleys with running water, whose climate was too bad for an Arab to labour in, but where they flourished, and built themselves houses, and mated with women slaves, and did all the manula work of the holding.

They were very numerous - for instance there were thirteen villages of them in forty miles of this Wadi Safra - so they formed a society of their own, and had power to live much at their pleasure. Their work was hard, but the supervision loose, and escape easy. Their legal status was bad, for they had no appeal to tribal justice, or even to the Sherif's courts, but public opinion and self- in terest deprecated any cruelty towards them, and te tenet od the faith that to enlarge a slave was a good deed meant in practice that nearly all gained their freedom in the end. They made pocket money of their own during their serviece, if they were ingenious. Those I saw were in pissession of property, and declared themselves contented. Wadi Safra had become their country, and they had no thought of leaving it. They gre melons, marrowsm cucumbers, tobacco and grapes, for their own account, in addition to the dates they owed to their masters. These masters were all Beni Salem...(ch14)

"Yet the craving for solitude seemed part of the delusion of self-sufficiency, a fictitious making rare of the person to enhance his own strangeness in his own eyes." (ch27)