Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20, September, 1877.Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20, September, 1877.
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
are to a less degree the women.
[Illustration: OIL-WORKS.]
In nothing, perhaps, is the line more strongly drawn between the two
races than in the treatment of their females. The Asiatic seclusion of
women is unknown among the Kabyles. There are no harems and no veils.
If, in return, the Kabyle women are subjected to more of such unfeminine
employments as harvesting and turning the wheels of olive-mills, that
does not lessen the assimilation to Western usage, but rather increases
the resemblance between the life of the fair Africans and that of their
sisters among the peasantry of Europe. Carrying water, so characteristic
a female office in the East, as the artists are constantly reminding us,
is none the less so among the Kabyles. But it becomes a more serious
matter when the wells or streams are three or four hundred feet lower
than the site of the dwelling to be supplied. In such cases donkeys come
to the aid of their mistresses, at some sacrifice of the picturesque,
but with great advantage to comfort.
A water-supply thus obtained must be, it is obvious, inadequate to the
demands of scrupulous cleanliness. Accordingly, the desert wanderer has
the advantage in this respect of the Kabyles, crowded into a village
perched on the summit of a rock and traversed only by pathways cut, as
it were, through solid blocks of houses. These abodes are of but one
story, and generally of one room. Bipeds and quadrupeds live together,
eating and sleeping on the same earthen floor. There are no chimneys and
no windows. Cutaneous and ophthalmic affections are of course common,
and typhus fever now and then redresses the balance in Malthusian
fashion by reducing the crowd. Death is the great sanitary regulator or
superintendent of hygiene. His functions in this regard are but
slightly, if at all, interfered with by the authorities of the village.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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