“But you enjoyed it, Mama?”
“I have loved every moment of being with your father,” her mother answered, “and actually I have become as interested as he is in the tribes and their strange evolution from their contacts with other peoples.”
As her mother spoke, Atayla knew that she was speaking of how the Berbers, with whom her father was particularly concerned, had mingled with their successive conquerors – the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Vandals and the Arabs.
When her father had taken his family to the Rif mountains, where the majority of the Berbers lived, being known there as the ‘Rifft’, she had begun to understand why he found them so interesting.
Then year after year as she grew older she began to learn the history of the people of North Africa, who seemed more complex and at the
