One of the lorries was so constructed that a side could be raised in such fashion as to display a wide variety of tools, weapons, household utensils, and textiles. Ohs and ahs punctuated the air, women being the same in every land. Two of the smiths brought forth metal-working equipment of strange design and set up shop to one side. A broken bolt on an aged Lebel rifle was quickly repaired, a copper cooking pot brazed, some harness tinkered with.

Of a sudden, Moussa-ag-Amastan said, “But your women, your families, where are they?”

The one who had been introduced as Abrahim el Bakr, an open-faced man whose constant smiling seemed to take a full ten years off what must have been his age, explained. “On the big projects, one can find employment only if he allows his children to attend the new schools. So our wives and children remain near Tamanrasset while the children learn the lore of books.”

“Rouma schools!” one of the warriors sneered.

“Oh, no. There are few Roumas remaining in all the land now,” the smith said easily. “Those that are left serve us in positions our people as yet cannot hold, in construction of the dams, in the bringing of trees to the desert, but soon even they will be unneeded.”

“Our people?” Moussa-ag-Amastan rumbled ungraciously. “You are smiths. The smiths have no people. You are neither Kel Rela, Tegehe Mellet, Taitoq, nor even Teda, Chaamba, or Ouled Tidrarin.”

One of the smiths said easily, “In the great construction camps, in the new towns, with their many ways to work and become rich, the tribes are breaking up. Tuareg works next to Teda and a Moor next to a former Haratin serf.” He added, as though unthinkingly, even as he displayed an aluminum pan to a wide-eyed Tuareg matron, “Indeed, even the clans break up and often Tuareg marries Arab or Sudanese or Rifs down from the north … or even we Enaden.”