Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

200 THINKING BLACK
the identical idea when you misspell " pray " as " prey "
these devout Arabs do nothing but prey. Theirs it is, at
any rate, to explain why Kuomba Muungu doubly denotes
prayer and plunder, worship and war—only another proof
this, that we are the poles asunder.
When the thermometer goes up the barometer gener-
ally goes down. Even so Mr. Arab and Mr. Missionary :
your A is his Z ; your beginning, his end—literally so,
I mean, for the whole ABC of this Arab problem is
only a mere matter of his own actual Arabic ABC.
There, in that Semitic alphabet of his, beginning like
Hebrew at the right and working across to the left side
of the paper, there, I say, you have the whole typical
story of Arab and Englishman. Always missing each
other and never meeting, we work the page of life from
left to right, and he glories in doing the diametric
opposite. Muruturutu laughed at me in disdainful Board
School fashion for reading out the Bible from left to
right : it obviously offended his academical susceptibilities
as much as seeing a native pretending to read a book
upside down. "The blind man has bought a looking-
glass ! " is their high-flown hint that all such pretence of
reading is of no value. Can you eat your dinner standing
on your head ? The which is a parable, I repeat, for the
difference between us is one of standpoint, but stand-
points so mutually antagonistic that blood would flow in
rivers, as in the old days of the Saracen conquest, but for
the English preponderance in quick-firers. The Arab
himself sees worlds of meaning in this sharp contrast of