Dirt Symbol Analysis

When you walk through a town like this—two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in—when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact.

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more
important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white
skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a
labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a
hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances
are that you don't even see him…He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.

It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa
are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap
trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown
skins their poverty is simply not noticed.

Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare
can live on it. Huge areas which were once covered with forest have
turned into a treeless waste where the soil is exactly like broken-up
brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with frightful
labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women, bent double
like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields,
tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands, and the peasant gathering
lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk instead of reaping it,
thus saving an inch or two on each stalk.