“Hard, proud, upright and noble are the wandering people, on the move for as long as the life in them flows too swiftly. They are probably looking for something or other. They don’t know what it is and even sense that they will never find it, so they say nothing and their progress is silent. The sky may be a single flame, the earth a furnace and their poor bodies as battered, parched and fissured as the stony plain of their reg (desert). Nothing, no nothing halts the steady advance of the wandering people. They are the drop of concentrated blood that still irrigates the burned earth. They embody the intelligence of the first people, who knew they had to be in motion in order to live. They will embody that of the last people, who will flee the horrors of immobility and attempt to recover if not purity at least serenity in their march through a terrain that is open to hastening thoughts. So they are people without chains ... Freedom, a certain freedom,” he said with a thoughtful expression.

from Malika Mokkedem | The Wandering People