MarrakechGeorge OrwellAs the corpse went past the flies left the resta urant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but t hey came back a few minutes later.The little crowd of mourners -- all men and boy s, no women--threaded their way across the market p lace between the piles of pomegranates and the taxi s and the camels, walling a short chant over an d over again. What really appeals to the flies i s that the corpses here are never put into coffin s, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag an d carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulder s of four friends. When the friends get to the bu rying-ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or tw o deep, dump the body in it and fling over i t a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which i s like broken brick. No gravestone, no name, no id entifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is m erely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month or two no one ca n even be certain where his own relatives are buri ed.When you walk through a town like this -- tw o hundred thousand inhabitants of whom at least twe nty thousand own literally nothing except the rag s they stand up in-- when you see how the peopl e live, and still more how easily they die, it i s always difficult to believe that you are walkin g among human beings. All colonial empires are i n reality founded upon this fact. The people hav e brown faces--besides, there are so many of the m! Are they really the same flesh as your self D o they even have names Or are they merely a kin d of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individu al as bees or coral insects They rise out of th e earth，they sweat and starve for a few years, an d then they sink back into the nameless mounds o f the graveyard and nobody notices that they are g one. And even the graves themselves soon fade bac k into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk as yo u break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and onl y a certain regularity in the bumps tells you tha t you are walking over skeletons.I was feeding one of the gazelles in the publi c gardens.Gazelles are almost the only animals that look go od to eat when they are still alive, in fact, on e can hardly look at their hindquarters without thi nking of a mint sauce. The gazelle I was feedin g seemed to know that this thought was in my min d, for though it took the piece of bread I was h olding out it obviously did not like me. It nibble d nibbled rapidly at the bread, then lowered its h ead and tried to butt me, then took another nibbl e and then butted again. Probably its idea was tha t if it could drive me away the bread would someh ow remain hanging in mid-air.An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered h is heavy hoe and sidled slowly towards us. He look ed from the gazelle to the bread and from the bre ad to the gazelle, with a sort of quiet amazement, as though he had never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he said shyly in French: "1 could eat some of that bread."I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefull y in some secret place under his rags. This man i s an employee of the municipality.When you go through the Jewish Quarters you gathe r some idea of what the medieval ghettoes were pro bably like. Under their Moorish Moorishrulers the Je ws were only allowed to own land in certain restri cted areas, and after centuries of this kind of tr eatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowdin g. Many of the streets are a good deal less tha n six feet wide, the houses are completely windowle ss, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unb elievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the c entre of the street there is generally running a l ittle river of urine.In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed i n the long black robe and little black skull-ca p, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits crosslegged at a pr ehistoric lathe, turning chairlegs at lightning spee d. He works the lathe with a bow in his right ha nd and guides the chisel with his left foot, an d thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this positio n his left leg is warped out of shape. At his si de his grandson, aged six, is already starting o n the simpler parts of the job.I was just passing the coppersmiths' booths whe n somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarett e. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, ther e was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them ol d grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamour ing for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere a t the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in th e air with his hand. In about a minute I had use d up the whole packet. None of these people, I su ppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and eve ry one of them looks on a cigarette as a more o r less impossible luxury.As the Jews live in self-contained communities the y follow the same trades as the Arabs, except fo r agriculture. Fruitsellers, potters, silversmiths, bl acksmiths, butchers, leather-workers, tailors, water-ca rriers, beggars, porters -- whichever way you loo k you see nothing but Jews. As a matter of fac t there are thirteen thousand of them, all livin g in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitle t wasn't here. Perhaps he was on his way, howeve r. You hear the usual dark rumours about Jews, no t only from the Arabs but from the poorer European s."Yes vieux mon vieux, they took my job away fro m me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They' re t he real rulers of this country, you know. They‘v e got all the money. They control the banks, finan ce -- everything.""But", I said, "isn't it a fact that the averag e Jew is a labourer working for about a penny a n hour""Ah, that's only for show! They' re all money lenders really. They' re cunning, the Jews."In just the same way, a couple of hundred year s ago, poor old women used to be burned for witch craft when they could not even work enough magic t o get themselves a square meal. square mealAll people who work with their hands are partl y invisible, and the more important the work the y do, the less visible they are. Still, a white s kin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europ e, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, yo u probably give him a second glance. In a hot cou ntry, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Sue z, the chances are that you don't even see hi m. I have noticed this again and again. In a trop ical landscape one's eye takes in everything excep t the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soi l, the prickly pear, the palm tree and the distan t mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoein g at his patch. He is the same colour as the ear th, and a great deal less interesting to look a t.It is only because of this that the starved coun tries of Asia and Africa are accepted as tourist r esorts. No one would think of running cheap trip s to the Distressed Areas. But where the human bei ngs have brown skins their poverty is simply not n oticed. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman An o range grove or a job in Government service. Or t o an Englishman Camels, castles, palm trees, Foreig n Legionnaires, brass trays, and bandits. One coul d probably live there for years without noticing th at for nine-tenths of the people the reality of li fe is an endless back-breaking struggle to wrin g a little food out of an eroded soil.Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild an imal bigger than a hare can live on it. Huge area s which were once covered with forest have turne d into a treeless waste where the soil is exactl y like broken-up brick.Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, wit h frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Lon g lines of women, bent double like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields, tea ring up the prickly weeds with their hands, and th e peasant gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it u p stalk by stalk instead of reaping it, thus savin g an inch or two on each stalk. The plough i s a wretched wooden thing, so frail that one ca n easily carry it on one's shoulder, and fitted un derneath with a rough iron spike which stirs the s oil to a depth of about four inches. This is a s much as the strength of the animals is equal t o. It is usual to plough with a cow and a donke y yoked together. Two donkeys would not be quite s trong enough, but on the other hand two cows woul d cost a little more to feed. The peasants posses s no narrows, they merely plough the soil severa l times over in different directions, finally leavin g it in rough furrows, after which the whole fiel d has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong pa tches to conserve water. Except for a day or tw o after the rare rainstorms there is never enoug h water. A long the edges of the fields channel s are hacked out to a depth of thirty or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run throug h the subsoil.Every afternoon a file of very old women passe s down the road outside my house, each carryin g a load of firewood. All of them are mummified w ith age and the sun, and all of them are tiny. I t seems to be generally the case in primitive comm unities that the women, when they get beyond a cer tain age, shrink to the size of children. One da y poor creature who could not have been more tha n four feet tall crept past me under a vast loa d of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou so u piece ( a little more than a farthing into he r hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almos t a scream, which was partly gratitude but mainl y surprise. I suppose that from her point of vie w, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost t o be violating a law of nature. She accept- ed he r status as an old woman, that is to say as a b east of burden. When a family is travelling it i s quite usual to see a father and a grown-up so n riding ahead on donkeys, and an old woman following on foot, carrying the baggage.But what is strange about these people is thei r invisibility. For several weeks, always at abou t the same time of day, the file of old women ha d hobbled past the house with their firewood, an d though they had registered themselves on my eyeba lls I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Fire wood was passing -- that was how I saw it. It wa s only that one day I happened to be walking behi nd them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a l oad of wood drew my attention to the human bein g beneath it. Then for the first time I noticed t he poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced t o bones and leathery skin, bent double under the c rushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been fiv e minutes on Moroccan soil before I noticed the ov erloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by i t. There is no question that the donkeys are damna bly treated. The Moroccan donkey is hardly bigger t han a St. Bernard dog, it carries a load which i n the British Army would be considered too much fo r a fifteen-hands mule, and very often its packsaddle is not taken off its back for weeks togethe r. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is t he most willing creature on earth, it follows it s master like a dog and does not need either brid le or halter . After a dozen years of devoted wor k it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tip s it into the ditch and the village dogs have tor n its guts out before it is cold.This kind of thing makes one's blood boil, wherea s-- on the whole -- the plight of the human being s does not. I am not commenting, merely pointing t o a fact. People with brown skins are next door t o invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey wi th its galled back, but it is generally owing t o some kind of accident if one even notices the o ld woman under her load of sticks.As the storks flew northward the Negroes were mar ching southward -- a long, dusty column, infantr y , screw-gun batteries, and then more infantry, fo ur or five thousand men in all, winding up the ro ad with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Afri ca, so black that sometimes it is difficult to see whereabouts on their necks the hair begins. Thei r splendid bodies were hidden in reach-me-down khak i uniforms, their feet squashed into boots that loo ked like blocks of wood, and every tin hat seeme d to be a couple of sizes too small. It was ver y hot and the men had marched a long way. They s lumped under the weight of their packs and the cur iously sensitive black faces were glistening with sw eat.As they went past, a tall, very young Negro turn ed and caught my eye. But the look he gave me wa s not in the least the kind of look you might ex pect. Not hostile, not contemptuous, not sullen, no t even inquisitive. It was the shy, wide-eyed Negr o look, which actually is a look of profound respe ct. I saw how it was. This wretched boy, who i s a French citizen and has therefore been dragge d from the forest to scrub floors and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reve rence before a white skin. He has been taught tha t the white race are his masters, and he still be lieves it. But there is one thought which every wh ite man (and in this connection it doesn't matte r twopence if he calls himself a socialist) think s when he sees a black army marching past. "How m uch longer can we go on kidding these people Ho w long before they turn their guns in the other d irection"It was curious really. Every white man there ha d this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mi nd. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white N. C. Os marching in the ranks. It wa s a kind of secret which we all knew and were to o clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know i t. And really it was like watching a flock of cat tle to see the long column, a mile or two mile s of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, wh ile the great white birds drifted over them in th e opposite direction, glittering like scraps of Paper.(from Reading for Rhetoric, by Caroline Shrodes, Clifford A. Josephson, and James R. Wilson)。