art beautiful,’ he sings, ’thy limbs are plump, if thou wouldst drink camel’s milk thou wert more beautiful still.’  The girl, on her part, gives expression to her longing for the absent lover in this melancholy song:  ’The camel needs good grazing, and dislikes to leave it.  My beloved has left the country.  On account of the children of Sahal (the lover’s family), my heart is always so heavy.  Others throw themselves into the ocean, but I perish from grief.  Could I but find the beloved.’”

What evidence of “idealized” love is there in these poems?  The girl expresses longing for an absent man, and longing, as we have seen, characterizes all kinds of love from the highest to the lowest.  It is one of the selfish ingredients of love, and is therefore evidence of self-love, not of other-love.  As for the lover’s poem, what is it but the grossest sensualism, the usual African apotheosis of fat?  Imagine an American lover saying to a girl, “You are beautiful for you are plump, but you would be more beautiful still if you ate more pork and beans”—­would she regard this as evidence of refined love, or would she turn her back and never speak to him again?  Anthropologists are sometimes strangely naive.  We have just seen what kind of “attachments” are formed by African youths and girls while tending cattle; Burton adds to the evidence (F.F., 120) by telling us that among the Somali “the bride, as usual in the East, is rarely consulted, but frequent tete-a-tetes at the well and in the bush when tending cattle effectually obviate this inconvenience.”  “At the wells,” says Donaldson Smith (15), “you will see both sexes bathing together, with little regard for decency.”  They are indeed lower than brutes in their impulses, for the only way parents can save their infant girls from being maltreated is by the practice of infibulation, to which, as Paulitschke himself tells us, the girls are subjected at the early age of four, or even three; yet, even this, he likewise informs us, is not always effectual.

As for the father’s great pride in his daughter, and his guarding her like a treasure, that is, by the concurrent testimony of the authorities, not a token of affection or a regard for virtue, but a purely commercial matter.  Paulitschke himself says (30) that while the mother is devoted to her child, “the father pays no attention to it.”  On the following page he adds: 

“The more well-to-do the father is, and the more beautiful his daughter, the longer he seeks to keep her under the paternal roof, for the purpose of securing a bigger price for her through the competition of suitors.”

Of the Western Somali tribes at Zayla, Captain J.S.  King says[148] that when a man has fixed his choice on a girl he pays her father $100 to $800.  After that