The softer element--thanks to the
Koran--has become non-existent, and you will look in vain for the
creative-feminine, for those intermediate types of ambiguous, submerged
sexuality, the constructive poets and dreamers, the men of imagination and
women of will, that give to good society in the north its sweetness and
_chatoyance_; for those "sports" and eccentrics who, among our lower
classes, are centrifugal--perpetually tending to diverge in this or that
direction. The native is pre-eminently centripetal. His life is reduced to
its simplest physiological expression; that capacity of reflection, of
forming suggestive and fruitful concepts, which lies at the bottom of
every kind of progress or culture, has been sucked out of him by the sun
and by Mahomet's teaching.
A land of violence, remorseless and relentless; the very beetles, so
placid elsewhere, seem to have acquired a nervously virile temperament;
they scurry about the sand at my feet with an air of rage and
determination.
So I mused, while the game went on boisterously in the mellow light of
sunset till, from some decaying minaret near by, there poured down a
familiar long-drawn wail--the call to prayer.
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