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Title: Mogreb-el-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco

Author: R. B. Cunninghame Graham

Release date: February 17, 2015 [eBook #48286]

Language: English



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This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.

                               WORKS BY
                       R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM
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LONDON: DUCKWORTH AND CO.
3, HENRIETTA ST., COVENT GARDEN

                                * * * * *





                             MOGREB-EL-ACKSA
                           A JOURNEY IN MOROCCO


BY R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

                                * * * * *

                "Show me Sohail and I will show you the moon"

                                * * * * *

                         LONDON: DUCKWORTH & CO.
                    3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN

                                * * * * *

                _Published by William Heinemann in_ 1898.
          _Revised Edition issued by Duckworth and Co. in_ 1921.

                          _All rights reserved_

                                * * * * *

                                   _TO_
                     _HAJ MOHAMMED ES SWANI EL BAHRI_
                          _I DEDICATE THIS BOOK_

_Not that he will ever read_, _or even_, _being informed of it_, _ever
comprehend its nature_, _except in so far as to think it some_
"_Shaitanieh_" _or another not to be understood_.

_But I do so because we have travelled much together_, _and far_, _and it
must have been at times a sore temptation to him_, _in lonely places_,
_to assure himself of Paradise by_ "_nobbling_"_ an unbeliever_.
_Still_, _I would trust myself with him even to go the pilgrimage to
Mecca_; _therefore_, _he must trust me when I swear not to have cast a
spell on him_ (_as Christians will upon occasion_) _by writing his name
here for unbelieving men to wonder at_.




PREFACE


_TO WAYFARING MEN_.

SIRS, the Holy Scriptures, which, as we know, were written for our
learning, seem to imply that some of us are fools.

This may be so, and when I moralise, wrapped in the frequent
contemplation of my travels, upon lost opportunities, lack of
discernment, and on the general folly incident to all mankind, but which
each man deems centred in himself, I think so too.  But still a traveller
in this travelling world, going perhaps to nowhere, or to some place that
he would rather never visit, cannot but find his most congenial public
amongst wayfaring men.  Therefore to you who, like myself, have crossed,
or even now are crossing, desert or pampa in the night; riding towards
Capella, if in the southern hemisphere (Sohail in Africa), keeping the
wind a little blowing on your right cheek, dismounting now and then to
smoke and slack the girths; then camping on some river, sleeping fitfully
and rising oft to view your horses feeding so quietly under the southern
stars; or you who in the liner, ocean tramp, or even "windjammer" are
going somewhere for no special reason, I now address myself.

Writers, I take it, firstly write to please themselves, if not, 'tis ten
to one their writing pleases nobody.  Following my postulate I have set
down that which pleased me upon my pilgrimage, hoping that it may please
at least some two or three who, like myself, have wandered.  Therefore in
this, my modest book of travels, I have tried to write after the fashion
that men speak over the fire at night, their pipes alight, hands on their
rifles, boots turned towards the blaze, ears strained to catch the rustle
of a leaf, and with the tin tea mug stopped on its journey to the mouth
when horses snort; I mean I strove to write down that which I saw without
periphrasis, sans flag-wagging, and with no megrim in my head of having
been possessed by some great moral purpose, without which few travellers
nowadays presume to leave their homes.

I fear I have no theory of empires, destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race,
spread of the Christian faith, of trade extension, or of hinterlands; no
nostrum, by means of which I hope to turn Arabs to Christians, reconcile
Allah and Jahve, remove the ancient lack of comprehension between East
and West, mix oil and vinegar, or fix the rainbow always in the sky so
that the colour-blind may scan it at their leisure through the medium of
a piece of neutral-tinted glass; and generally I fear I write of things
without a scrap of interest to right-thinking men: of humours, sayings,
proverbs, traits of character; little of eating, drinking, or night
alarms of vermin, as travellers will; but, on the contrary, of lonely
rides, desolate camping places, of ruined buildings seen in peculiar
lights, of simple folk who pray to Allah seven times a day, and act as if
they never prayed at all; in fact of things which to a traveller, his
travels o'er, still conjure up the best part of all travel--its
melancholy.  So I apologise for lack of analysis, neglect to dive into
the supposititious motives which influence but ill-attested acts, and
mostly for myself for having come before the public with the history of a
failure to accomplish what I tried; and having brought together a sack of
cobwebs, a pack of gossamers, a bale of thistle-down, dragon-flies'
wings, of Oriental gossip as to bygone facts, of old-world recollections,
of new-world practices half understood; lore about horses' colours, of
tales of men who never bother much to think, but chiefly act, carving
their lives out, where still space is left in which to carve, and acting
thus so inconsiderately whilst there still remain so many stones
unbroken, social problems to be solved, and the unpuncturable pneumatic
tyre not yet found out.

Touching my traveller's privilege I propose to use it sparingly, but at
the same time not to blurt out the brutal truth too trippingly, for
truth, I take it, suffers by too much comprehension, in the same manner
as the Mass has suffered even by its transmutation into Elizabethan
English.  Religion, once made understandable of all, loses its
authenticity, and soon degenerates into the arid dialectics of the
self-righteous Nonconformist.  What so consoling to a religious man, as
in a building (with the entry free) to join in singing praises to an
unknown God, in an uncomprehended tongue?  And so perhaps the truth, {x}
declare it quite unblushingly, and it may become as little interesting as
is an ill-concocted lie.

It may be that my poor unphilosophic recollections of a failure may
interest some who, like myself, have failed, but still may like to hear
that even in a failure you can see strange things, meet as strange types,
and be impressed as much with wild and simple folk, as any traveller who
thundered through the land, Bible and gun in hand, making himself no
spiced conscience, but putting into practice the best traditions of our
race, confident that the one way to win a "nigger's" heart "is to speak
English to him," and doing so even at the rifle's mouth.

But if they do not interest, then I fall back again upon my wanderers,
and hope that in my slight impressions they may find something they
recognise, something that they have felt before upon the journey that
they make across the Pampa of their lives, making it as they do in
general on horses hipshot, lean and saddle-galled, asking their way from
those they meet, who answer them as wise as they, "Ride on to the lone
tree on the horizon, then bear a little to the right, and if you keep the
line, you cannot miss the houses, for the barking of the dogs will guide
you, if it falls dark."

And then comes evening, and the travellers, still kicking at their
horses' sides, straining their eyes, keep pushing forward, stumbling and
objurgating on the trail.

                                                 R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.

GARTMORE, 1898.




CHAPTER I


SOUTH-SOUTH-WEST, a little westerly with a cloudy sky, and with long
rollers setting into the harbour of Tangier, and the date October 1st in
the last year of supposititious grace.  The old white town, built round
the bay with the Kasbah upon its hill, and the mosque tower just shining
darkly against the electric light, for Tangier passed from darkness to
electric light, no gas or oil lamps intervening, gave the effect as of a
gleaming horse-shoe in the dark.  Outside the harbour, moored twice as
far away as the French ironclad, swung the _Rabat_ at anchor, for the
captain, a Catalan of the true Reus breed, was bound to supplement his
lack of seamanship with extra caution.  Towards her we made our way late
in the evening in a boat manned by four strong-backed Jews, and seated
silently, for it was the first stage of a journey concerning which each
of our friends had added his wisest word of disencouragement.  Nothing so
spurs a man upon a journey as the cautions of his friends, "dangerous,"
"impossible," "when you get there nothing worth seeing," and the like,
all show you plainly that the thing is worth the venture, for you know
the world is ever proud to greet the conqueror with praise and flowers,
but he has to conquer first.  And if he fails, the cautious kindly friend
wags his wise head and shakes his moralising finger, thinks you a fool,
says so behind your back, but cannot moralise away experience, that
chiefest recompense of every traveller.  So in the boat besides myself
sat Hassan Suleiman Lutaif, a Syrian gentleman, who acted as interpreter,
and Haj Mohammed es Swani, a Moor of the Riff pirate breed, short,
strong, black-bearded, with a turned-up moustache, and speaking Spanish
after the Arab fashion, that is without the particles, and substitution
of the gerund for every portion of the verb.  El Haj and I were old
acquaintances, having made several journeys in Morocco, and being well
accustomed to each other's ways and idiosyncrasies upon the road.

Our bourne was Tarudant, a city in the province of the Sus, but rarely
visited by Europeans, and of which no definite account exists by any
traveller of repute.  Only some hundred and fifty miles from Mogador, it
yet continues almost untouched, the only Moorish city to which an air of
mystery clings, and it remains the only place beyond the Atlas to the
south in which the Sultan has a vestige of authority. {2}

Outside its walls the tribesmen live the old Arab life, all going armed,
constantly fighting, each man's hand against his neighbour, and,
therefore, in a measure, raised against himself.  And yet a land of
vines, of orange gardens, olive yards, plantations of pomegranates, Roman
remains, rich mines; but cursed "with too much powder," as the Arabs say,
and therefore doomed, up to the present day, to languish without
pauperism, prostitution, and the modern vices which, in more favoured
lands, have long replaced the old-world vices which man brought with him
into the old world.  Even my friends were all agreed that to reach
Tarudant in European clothes was quite impossible.  Thus a disguise
became imperative.  After a long discussion I determined to impersonate a
Turkish doctor travelling with his "taleb" {3a}--that is, scribe--to see
the world and write his travels in a book. {3b}  God, the great doctor,
but under Him His earthly vicegerents, practicants, practitioners, with
or without diploma, throughout the east, enjoy considerable respect; they
kill, they cure, and still God has the praise.  No one asks where they
studied, and if faith in his powers helps a doctor in his trade, the east
of all lands should be most congenial to all those who live by lancet,
purge, and human faith.  My stock of medicines was of the most homeric
type, quinine and mercury, some Seidlitz powders, eye wash for
ophthalmia, almost, in fact, as simple as that of the old Scotch doctor
who doctored with what he styled the two simples, that is, laudanum and
calomel.

The multitudinous dialects of Arabic, the constant travelling, either
upon the pilgrimage or for the love of travel, which seems inherent in
the Arab, render it possible for a European occasionally to pass
unrecognised, even although his stock of Arabic is as exiguous as was my
own.  Behold us, then, approaching the _Rabat_, a steamer of the Linea
Tras-Atlantica Espanola, bound for Mogador, some five days' journey below
Tangier, the point at which I intended to put on Moorish clothes, buy
mules and horses, engage a guide, and set out for Tarudant, the city
where La Caba, Count Julian's daughter (she whose beauty tempted Don
Rodrigo, and to avenge whose honour her father sold Spain to the Moors),
lies buried, though how she came to die there is to historians unknown.
On board the ship there was no light, no look-out, and the accommodation
ladder was triced up for the night, stewards were asleep, and the long
narrow vessel dipped her nose into the rollers, rolling and heaving in
the dark, whilst we in Spanish, English, Arabic, and Portuguese rang all
the changes upon ship ahoy.  At last a sulky, sleepy quartermaster
deigned to let down the ladder, and we scrambled upon deck.

Next morning found us off Arzila, the Julia Constantia Zilis of the
Romans, a small, walled town lost among orange gardens, and girt by walls
built by the Portuguese.  Over the gateway the half-obliterated arms of
Portugal can still be seen, but mouldering to decay, as is the country
that they represent.  Close to the walls rises the tomb of the Saint of
Arzila; the white dome springs from a dense thicket of palmetto, dwarf
rhododendron, berberis, and aromatic shrubs, a tiny stream bordered by
oleanders (bitter as is an oleander is a proverb in the land) runs past
it; above the dome and red-tiled roof two palms keep watch, and whisper
in the wind the secrets palm trees know, and tell each other of the East,
and of the various changes, Arab and Berber, Moor and Portuguese, they
have seen during the course of their slow growth and long extended days.
Columbus visited the place; the battle of Trafalgar was fought a few
leagues off, and an old shepherd, still living where he was born, above
the lighthouse on Cape Spartel, remembers to have seen it as a boy when
he lay out upon the hills tending his goats.

Inside the town decay and ruin, heaps of garbage, a palace falling here,
a hovel there.  A town almost entirely given up to Jews, who carry on
their business fleecing the Moors, and still complaining when at last the
cent. per cented victim turns and rends.  The best-known citizen is Mr.
Ben Chiton, an Israelite of the best type, old, and white bearded, and
with round, beady eyes, like an old rat, consul of seven nations, with
all the seven flag-staffs on his hospitable roof.  Dressed in the Jewish
gown girt round the waist, wearing his slippers over white cotton
stocking's, and the black cup badge of the servitude of all his race
throughout Morocco.  His house is neat and clean, almost beyond the power
of endurance, Rahel and Mordejai labouring incessantly with broom and
whitewash brush, and he himself talking incessantly in the Toledan {5}
dialect and thick Jewish accent, of politics, of kings, ambassadors, and
as to whether England and France will go to war over the question of the
Niger and the like, whilst all the time he presses brandy on you in a
lordly glass holding about a pint, which you must swallow no matter what
the hour, the while he calls upon the God of Isaac to bear him witness
that the house is yours, and shows you, with just pride, the chair on
which he says the Prince of Wales once sat, although historians do not
seem to chronicle his passage through the town.  An Israelite of
Israelites, a worthy Jew, come of the tribe of Judah as he says, one to
whose house all travellers are welcome; loved by his family with
veneration, as the heads of Jewish houses are.  Long may he prosper, and
may his roof grow broad as a phylactery, and become strong enough to bear
the flag-staffs of all the nations upon earth, and his house long remain
to show the curious what most probably a Jewish house in Spain was like
before the Catholic Kings, in their consuming thirst for unity, expelled
the Jews, sweeping at one fell blow commerce and usury out of their
sacred land, and setting up a faith so uniform that to be saved by it was
so easy that one wonders any one was lost.  A few hours' steaming brings
us to Larache (El Areish), once a great stronghold of the Moorish pirates
who infested the narrow straits, and who at times ran as far north as
Plymouth, westward to Naples, and made the coasts of France, Spain,
Italy, and Portugal their especial hunting grounds.

Three of their galleys still lie rotting in the Luccos, and at low tide
their ribs can still be seen projecting from the sand.  The city, painted
red, white, and blue, and the whole scale of tints from brown to Naples
yellow stands on a hill, and is to-day the haunt of consuls of all
nations, who have replaced the pirates of the times gone by.  Consuls of
France and Spain, of Portugal, of Montenegro, Muscat, Costa Rica, Brazil,
United States, their flag-staffs rear aloft from almost every house-top,
and their great flags, large in proportion to the smallness of the state
they represent, flap in the breeze; the caps of liberty, the rising suns,
and other trade-marks of the various states seeming to wink and to
encourage one another in the attempt to be the first to show the glories
of the commercial system to the benighted Moors.  All round the town the
walls and ramparts run, built by the Portuguese during the period when
they possessed the place.  At the west side a ditch remains, now turned
into a garden, and in it artichokes, egg-plants, and pimentos grow, and
the green stuffs of various kinds for which the Moors are famous, so much
so that in the times they lived in Spain, it was a current saying of a
good farmer "that he grows as many egg-plants in his garden as a Morisco
gardener." {6}  Just at the corner of the ditch the walls run into as
sharp an angle as the bows of a torpedo boat, and on the ramparts usually
is seen a colony of storks, who build their nests amongst the mouldering
gabions, ravelines, and counter-scarps, and sit and chatter on the brass
guns and carronades, with curling snakes around the touch-holes, and with
inscription setting forth their date, the place of casting, and the
legend "Viva Portugal!"  Their gunners are long dead, their carriages
long mouldered into dust, and the storks left to sit and mock the pomps
and circumstance of foolish war.

From the town sallied out (in 1578) the army under Don Sebastian, who met
his fate fighting the infidel at Alcazar el Kebir, near a long bridge
over a marshy stream known as Wad-el-Mhassen.  The battle still is called
amongst the Moors "The Three Kings' Fight," for besides Don Sebastian
fell two Moorish kings.  With Don Sebastian there fell the flower of the
nobility of Portugal, and by his death the crown passed quickly to
Phillip II. (the Prudent) of Spain, who knew far better than to embark in
expeditions into Africa.  The battle was memorable, for Abdel-Malik, King
of Fez, died of exhaustion on the field, and Don Sebastian, rather than
survive disgrace, plunged, as did Argentine at Bannockburn, into the
thickest of the fight, and fell or disappeared, for though his faithful
servant, Resende, claimed to have seen his body, so much doubt existed of
his death that the strange sect known as Sebastianists arose in Portugal.
Their tenet was that Don Sebastian was still alive, but kept in durance
by the Moors, and in remote and old-world villages believers linger even
to the present day.  I myself saw a sort of pterodactyle, years ago in
Portugal, a strange old man dressed in black clothes, and wrapped, in
heat and cold alike, in a thick cloak.  The people of the village called
him mad, but, looking at the thing impartially, madness and faith are the
same thing, the only difference being as to the mountain which the
believer wishes to remove.

Lala Mamouna, the female saint who guards Larache from pestilence and
famine, sudden death, and the few simple ailments which Arabs suffer
from, has her white crenelated sanctuary on a hill which overlooks the
sea, and to her tomb women who wish for children to carry on the misery
of life, repair, and pray or chatter with each other, and no doubt the
saint is just as tolerant of scandal as are the wise old men who sun
their stomachs at the windows of a club.

At this accursed port, Larache, of the Beni-Aros, after a signal had been
made by a man mounted on a mule, who held one end of a row of flags, the
other being made fast to a post, a great annoyance fell upon the
blameless captain of the good ship _Rabat_.  The bar at El Areish is
three times out of four impassable when steamers call, as here the river
Luccos {8} meets the tide, and such a surf gets up that as the people
have no surf boats, communication from a vessel to the shore is always
dangerous, and not frequently impossible.  This, to an ordinary steamer,
means either delay or loss of cargo, generally the latter, for when the
bar is bad it often takes three or four days to become passable, and as
the anchorage is most precarious a south-east gale causes great danger to
a vessel lying in the open roads.  On this occasion, though, the sea was
like a sheet of ice, smooth, shining, and the bar just marked by a thin
line of foam.  To the astonishment of the uninitiated passengers the fury
of the captain knew no bounds, the officers turned sulky, and the one man
on board who seemed unmoved was the unlucky priest, who shipped to please
the owners of the line, or to appease the folly of the nation, or for
"empeno," {9} or for some other reason at present not made known, passed
all his time in fishing when in port, or when at sea in studying
counterpoint, and playing on a piano which was tuned about the time Queen
Isabella was expelled from Spain.

A narrow, nine-knot crank and Clyde-built steamer was the _Rabat_, full
five-and-twenty years of age, boilers too small, but engines sound, and
the whole vessel kept as clean as holystone and paint could clean, brass
work all shining, and herself ever a-rolling like a swing-boat at a fair,
sailed out of Barcelona, owned by the Spanish Trans-Atlantic Company
(Chairman: the Marquis of Comillas), and subsidised by the Spanish
Government to carry mails down the Morocco coast in order that the
majesty of Spain might fill the eyes and strike the imagination of the
Moorish dogs, and show them that the Spaniards were on a level with the
other nations, such as the Inglis, Frances, el Bortokez (Portuguese), el
Brus (the Germans, that is, Prussians), and the Austrians, called by the
Moors el Nimperial.

Captain from Reus, taciturn, and shaved each Sunday when the priest said
mass, for it is decent for a man to stand before his God with a clean
chin, at other times a stubble on his face on which a man might strike a
match, so that the match had not been made in Spain.  Four officers: an
Andalusian, two Catalans, and a Basque; two engineers, and the
aforementioned priest, together with a crew of eighteen men and half a
dozen stewards, served to get the craft, whose utmost measurement could
not be above twelve hundred tons, across the sea.

The Pope had granted plenary indulgence in the following terms: "for
looking to the circumstances, the weather, etc., I deign to grant full
dispensation according to the ecclesiastic law, from fasting and from
abstinence (from meat) to all those who by reason, either of their
profession or as passengers, find themselves on board the vessels of this
Company, and that for three years' time, excepting (if it can be done
without too great an inconvenience) on Good Friday and on the Vigils of
the Apostles, Saint Peter and Saint Paul, also on Christmas Day and any
other day which may be opportune . . . on which three days I also
dispense from sin the passengers and crew if any difficulty unforeseen by
me makes their compliance an impossibility."  Given "en Vaticano" and
through the Bishop of Madrid and Alcala under whose aegis it appears that
Spanish ships all sail armed with this plenary indulgence; manned with
the priest and men and duly subsidised, it could not be expected that the
_Rabat_ cared much for passengers, still less for cargo; so when the
lumbering "barcazas" approached the ship, curses loud, guttural, and deep
were heard on every side.  The unwilling sailors, mostly Valencians and
Catalans, stood by to work the donkey engine; but their fears were vain,
for it appeared that all the cargo was but four bales of Zatar (Marjoram)
for the Habana, and a few thousand melons for the Sultan's camp.  The
bales of Zatar soon were dumped into the hold, but five long hours were
wasted passing the melons up from hand to hand; in counting them,
recounting them, in storming, and the whole time a noise like Babel going
on, shouting of Moors, cursing of Spaniards, and the confusion ten times
intensified because no man could speak a word the other understood.  The
_Rabat_ having been only five years upon the coast, no one on board could
speak a word of Arabic.  Why should they, did they not speak Christian,
and are Spaniards and sailors to be supposed to burrow in grammars as if
they were schoolboys or mere Englishmen.  A miserable Jew, fearfully
sea-sick, balancing up in the gunwale of a boat, in a mixed jargon of
Arabic and Portuguese kept tale after a fashion, of the melons, and at
last the vessel put to sea amid the curses of the passengers, and having
earned the name amongst the Arabs of Abu Batigh, the Father of the
Melons.  Amongst the Arabs almost every man is Father of something or
some quality, and lucky he who does not find himself styled, Father of
the "ginger beard," or of "bad breath," or any other personal or moral
failing, peculiarity, or notable defect.

Once more we urge our nine-knot course, and now find time to observe our
fellow-passengers.  In the cabin a German lady and her daughters are
enduring agonies of sea-sickness, on the way to join her husband at
Rabat. {11} The husband, known as the "mojandis," that is, engineer to
the Sultan, proves, when we meet him, to be a cheery polyglot blasphemer,
charged with the erection of some forts at the entrance to the harbour of
Rabat.  For a wonder the bar of the river Bu-Regeh proves passable, and
the German lady and her husband can land, which is, it seems, a piece of
luck, for the bar is known as the most dangerous of all the coast.
Rabat, perhaps the most picturesquely situated of any city in Morocco,
stands on a hill underneath which the river runs, and the spray from the
bar is drifted occasionally into the houses like a shower of snow.  Here
is the richest colony of the Spanish Jews, and here the best Morisco
{12a} families took refuge after the expulsion of the Moors from Spain.
The town is estimated to contain some 20,000 inhabitants, and it is one
of the four official capitals; {12b} the Sultan has a palace with
enormous gardens on the outskirts of the town.  Just opposite is built
Salee, called by the Moors "Sala," famous for having given its name to
the most enterprising of the pirates of the coast in days gone by.
To-day it is a little white, mouldering place, baked in the fierce sun,
or swept by south-west gales, according to the season and the time of
year.  The inhabitants are still renowned for their fanaticism, and the
traveller who passes through the place is seldom able to dismount, but
traverses the place trying to look as dignified as possible amid a shower
of curses, a sporadic curse or two, and some saliva if he ventures within
range of mouth.  Many a poor Christian has worked his life out in the
construction of the walls, and the superior whiteness of the inhabitants
would seem to show that some of the Christian dogs have left their blood
amongst the people of the place.  Men still alive can tell of what a
scourge the pirates were, and I myself once knew a venerable lady who in
her youth had the distinction of having been taken by a Salee rover; an
honour in itself to be compared alone to that enjoyed by ladies who are
styled peeresses in their own right.  Robinson Crusoe, I think, once
landed at the place, and the voyages of imaginary travellers make a place
more authentic than the visit of the unsubstantial personages of real
life.  A little up the river is the deserted city of Schellah, and on the
way to it, upon a promontory jutting into the stream, is built the
half-finished tower of Hassan, an enormous structure much like the
Giralda at Seville, and by tradition said to be built by the same
architect who built that tower, and also built the tower of the Kutubich,
which, at Morocco city, serves as a landmark in the great plain around.
The Giralda and the Kutubich spring from the level of the street, but the
Hassan tower excels them both in site, standing as it does upon a cliff,
and "looming lofty" {13} as one passes in a boat beneath.  Schellah
contains the tombs of the Sultans of the Beni Merini dynasty.  El Mansur
(the victorious) sleeps underneath a carved stone tomb, over which date
palms rustle, and by which a little stream sings a perpetual dirge.  The
tomb is held so sacred that till but lately neither Christians nor Jews
could visit it.  Even to-day the incursions of the fierce Zimouri, a
Berber tribe, render a visit at times precarious.  The walls of the town
enclose a space of about a mile circumference; sheep, goats, and camels
feed inside them, and a footpath leads from one deserted gate-house to
the other, a shepherd boy or two play on their reeds, and though the sun
beats fiercely on the open space, it looks forlorn and melancholy, and
even the green lizards peering from the walls look about timidly, as if
they feared to see a ghost.  On gates and walls, on ruined tombs and
palaces, the lichens grow red after the fashion of hot countries, and the
fine stonework, resembling the stucco work of the Alhambra, remains as
keen in edge and execution as when the last stroke of the chisel turned
it out.  Outside the town are olive yards and orange gardens, and one
comes upon the long-deserted place with the same feelings as a traveller
sees Palenque burst on him out of the forests of Yucatan, or as in
Paraguay after a weary following of dark forest trails, the spires of
some old Jesuit Mission suddenly appear in a green clearing, as at Jesus
or Trinidad, San Cosme Los Apostoles, or any other of the ruined
"capillas," where the bellbird calls amongst the trees, and the
inhabitants take off their hats at sunset and sink upon their knees,
bearing in their minds the teaching of the Jesuits, whom Charles III.
expelled from Spain and from the Indies, to show his liberalism.

Our most important passenger was Don Jose Miravent, the Spanish Consul at
Mogador, returning to his post after a holiday; a formal Spaniard of the
old school, pompous and kind, able to bombast out a platitude with the
air of a philosopher communicating what he supposes truth.  At dinner he
would square his elbows, and, throwing back his head, inform the world
"the Kings of Portugal are now at Caldas"; or if asked about the war in
Cuba, say: "War, sir, there is none; true some negroes in the Manigua
{14} are giving trouble to our troops, but General Blanco is about to go,
and all will soon be over; it is really nothing (no es na), peace will,
please God, soon reign upon that lovely land."  At night he would sit
talking to his cook, a Spanish woman (the widow of an English soldier),
whom he was taking back to Mogador; but though he talked, and she replied
for hours most volubly, not for a moment were good manners set aside, nor
did the cook presume in any way, and throughout the conversation talked
better than most ladies; but the "tertulia" over, straight became a cook
again, brought him his tea, calling him "Amo" (master), "Don Jose," and
he quite affably listened to her opinions and ideas of things, which
seemed at least as valuable as were his own.  A Jewish merchant dressed
in the height of Cadiz fashion, and known as Tagir {15a} Isaac, occupied
much the same sort of social state on board as does a Eurasian in
Calcutta or Bombay.  Tall, thin, and up-to-date, he had divested himself
almost entirely of the guttural Toledan accent, but the sign of his
"election" still remained about his hair, which tended to come off in
patches like an old hair trunk, and at the ends showed knotty, as if he
suffered from the disease to which so many of his compatriots in Morocco
are subject, and which makes each separate hair stand out as if it were
alive. {15b}

But, as is often seen even in more ambitious vessels than the _Rabat_,
the passengers of greatest interest were in the steerage.  Not that there
was a regular steerage as in ocean-going ships, but still, some thirty
people went as deck passengers, and amongst them was to be seen a perfect
microcosm of the eastern world.  Firstly a miserable, pale-faced
Frenchman, dressed in a dirty "duster" coat, bed-ticking "pants," black
velvet waistcoat, and blue velvet slippers, with foxes' heads embroidered
on them in yellow beads, his beard trimmed to a point, in what is termed
(I think) Elizabethan fashion, and thin white hands, more disagreeable in
appearance than if they had been soiled by all the meanest work on earth.
His "taifa" {15c} (that is band) consisted of one Spanish girl and two
half-French half-Spanish women, whom he referred to as his "company," and
whom he said were to enact "cuadros vivos," that is "living pictures," in
the various ports.  They, less polite than he, called him "el Alcahuete,"
which word I leave in Spanish, merely premising (as North Britons say)
that it is taken from the Arabic "el Cahueit," and that the celebrated
"Celestina" {16} was perhaps in modern times the finest specimen of the
profession in any literature.  So whilst our captain read "Jack el
Ripero" (it cost him two pesetas when new in Cadiz), I take a glance at
the inferior races, who were well represented in the steerage of the
ship.

Firstly, I came across a _confrere_ in the healing art who hailed from
Tunis, a fattish Arab dressed in Algerian trousers, short zouave jacket,
red fez, pink and white sash, and watch chain of two carat silver with an
imitation seal of glass, brown thread stockings and cheap sand shoes
after the pattern to be seen at Margate.  "Tabib numero Wahed," that is
an A1 doctor, so he says, has studied in Stamboul, where he remained nine
years studying and diligently noting down all that he learnt.  But,
curiously enough, all that he now remembers of the Turkish language is
the word "Mashallah," which he displayed to my bewilderment, until
Lutaif, who spoke good Turkish, turned on a flood of pertinent remarks,
to which the doctor answered in vile Tunisian Arabic, not having
understood a word.  Though not a linguist, still a competent
practitioner, trepanning people's heads with ease, and putting in pieces
of gourd instead of silver as being lighter, and if the patient died, or
by the force of constitution lived through his treatment, the praise was
God's, Allah the great Tabib (doctor), although he sends his delegates to
practice on mankind, just in the same way that in the east each man
commits his work to some one else to do.  At least he said so, and I
agree, but fail to see the use of substituting gourd for silver, seeing
the vast majority of heads are gourds from birth.  Quinine he had, and
blistering fluid, with calomel and other simples, and when the Christian
quinine ran out, he made more for himself out of the ashes of an oleander
stick mixed with burnt scales of fish and dead men's bones, and found his
preparation, which he styled "El quina beladia" (native-made quinine),
even more efficacious than the drug from over sea.  Also he used the
seven herbs, known as the "confirmed herbs," for tertian fevers, with
notable success.  A cheerful, not too superstitious son of AEsculapius,
taking himself as seriously as if he had had a large brass plate upon his
door in Harley Street, and welcomed by his surviving patients in Rabat on
our arrival with great enthusiasm. {17a}  His wife, a shrouded figure
lost in white veils and fleecy shawls, had the dejected air that doctors'
wives often appear to labour under, even in countries where they can rule
their husbands openly.

A group of high-class Arabs sat by themselves upon the decks, waited upon
by a tall tribesman faced like a camel, and with the handle of his pistol
and curved dagger outlined beneath his clothes.  This group was composed
of sherifs {17b} from Algeria, all high-caste men, dignified, slow, and
soft of speech, deliberate in movement, their clothes as white as snow,
nails dyed with henna, each with a heavy rosary in his hand, their
business somewhat mysterious, but bound to see the Sultan in his camp.
Throughout Algeria the sherifs are not allowed to levy contributions from
the people openly, but it is said in private, they receive them all the
same.  Of all the population they are the least contented with French
rule, as since the conquest naturally they have fallen somewhat from the
position they once occupied, and cannot go about receiving presents for
the pains they have taken to preserve their lineage, as they do in
Morocco, making themselves a travelling offertory.

All of them wished to know of the late war between the Sultan of Turkey
and the "Emperor of the Greeks."  They seemed to think the latter was a
descendant of the _Paleologi_, and asked if it were true the Sultan had
killed all the Greeks except fifteen, and if these latter had not fled to
"Windres" (London) to seek protection from the Great Queen and to advise
her to make preparations against the "Jehad" {18} to come.  With them
they carried sundry hide bags of gold with which they said they wished to
purchase permission from the Sultan of Morocco to export grain, as the
harvest in Algeria had not been good owing to locusts, and the lack of
rain.  Of course this may have been the object of their visit, but since
the Greco-Turkish war all the Mohammedan world is on the stir, and men
are travelling about from place to place disseminating news, and all the
talk is on the victories of the Turks, and on the rising of the tribes in
India; in fact, a feeling seems to be abroad that the Christian power is
on the wane, and that their own religion once again may triumph and
prevail.

At Casa Blanca--called by the Arabs Dar el Baida, that is, the White
House--the sherifs go ashore, and I last saw them seated on their bags,
outside the waterport, their backs against the ramparts of the town,
their eyes apparently fixed upon nothing though seeing everything,
telling their beads and waiting patiently, enduring sun and flies until
their servant should return and tell them of a lodging fit for persons of
their quality.  Of all the towns on the Morocco coast Dar el Baida has
the most business, the country at the back of it is fertile and grows
much wheat, the tribes are fairly prosperous, and the best horses of the
country come from the districts known as Abda and Dukala, a few leagues
from the place.

Consuls abound, of course, so do hyenas--that is, outside the town--but
both are harmless and furnish little sport, except the Consul of America,
my good friend Captain Cobb.  He, if my memory fails me not, piled up his
brig some thirty years ago upon the beach in the vicinity, liked the
climate, became a Consul, naturally, and to this day has never returned
to his sorrowing family in Portland, Maine.

In thirty years tradition says he has not learned a word of Arabic with
the exception of the word "Balak" (look out), which he pronounces
"Balaaker," and yet holds conversations by the hour in Arabic, and both
the patients seem contented with their lot.  All the attractions to be
met with in the town do not detain me; what takes my fancy most is to see
tribesmen from the country, armed to the teeth, and balancing a gun full
six feet long upon their saddles, sit on their horses bargaining at shops
in the same fashion I have seen the Gauchos at a camp-town in South
America, their horses nodding their heads and looking half asleep, their
owners seated with one leg passed round the pommel of the saddle, and
passing hours seated as comfortably as in a chair.

Back to the steamer in a boat, and at the waterport we pass a group of
Jews washing themselves, in preparation for a feast.  Lutaif ranks as a
wit for saying that the Jews will defile the sea, for any wit is small
enough to bait a Jew with; and the Arabs, though they will say the same
things of a Christian behind his back, all laugh consumedly when a
Christian takes their side against a Jew.

On board the uneasy ship, tossing like a buck-jumper in the Atlantic
swell, we find more Oriental items ready to hand.  The first a tall,
thin, cuckoldy-looking Arab knave, dressed in a suit of slop-made
European clothes, his trousers half-a-foot too short, his boots
unblacked, and himself closely watched by two Franciscan Friars. {20a}
It appeared he was a convert.  Now, in Morocco a convert is a most rare
and curious animal, and he is usually not a great credit to his
capturers.  On this occasion, it appears, the convert had been dallying
with the Protestants, had given them hopes, had led them on, and at the
last, perhaps because he found the North-British water {20b} of their
baptism too cold for him, or perchance because the Friars gave a dollar
more, had fallen away to Rome.  However, there he was, a veritable
"brand," a sheep, who had come into one of the folds, leaving the other
seven million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand and ninety-nine still
straying about Morocco, steeped in the errors of Mohammedanism.  His
captors were a gentlemanlike, extremely handsome, quiet Castilian, who to
speak silver (hablar en plata) seemed a little diffident about his prize,
and went about after the fashion of a boy in Texas who has caught a
skunk.  The other guardian had no doubts.  He was a sturdy Catalonian
lay-brother, who pointed to the "brand" with pride, and told us, with a
phrase verging upon an oath, that he was glad the Protestants had had
their noses well put out of joint.  The victim was a merry sort of knave,
who chewed tobacco, spoke almost every language in the world, had
travelled, and informed me, when I asked him where he was going, that the
"Frayliehs" (Friars) were taking him to Cadiz "to have the water put upon
his head."  He seemed an old hand at the business, and recognised my
follower, Swani, as a friend, and they retired to talk things over, with
the result that, e'er night fell, the "convert" was in a most unseemly
state and singing Spanish songs in which Dolores, Mercedillas, and other
"Chicas" figured largely, and were addressed in terms sufficient to upset
a convent of Franciscan Friars.  Peace to his baptism, and may the
Protestants, when their turn comes to mark a sheep, secure as fine a
specimen as the one I saw going to Cadiz to have "the water put upon his
head."  This missionary question and the decoying of God-fearing men out
of the ranks of the religion they were born in, is most thorny in every
country like Morocco, where the religion of the land is one to which the
people are attached.  An earnest missionary, a pious publican, a minister
of the crown who never told a lie, are men to praise God for,
continually.  Honour to all of them, labouring in their vocations and
striving after truth as it appears to them.  I, for my part, have found
honest and earnest men both in the Scottish missions in Morocco and in
the ranks of the Franciscan Friars from Spain.  Amongst both classes, and
in the missions sent by other churches, good men abound; and in so far as
these good men confine themselves to giving medicines, healing the sick,
and showing by the example of their lives that even Christians (whom
Arabs all believe are influenced in all they do by money) can live pure,
self-denying lives for an idea, the good they do is great; but that by
living, as they do, amongst the Moors, they do more good than they could
do at home by living the same lives, that I deny.  Amongst Mohammedans
plenty of people lead good lives, as good appears to them--that is, they
follow out the precepts of their faith, give to the poor, do not lend
money upon usury; and, to be brief, practice morality, {22} and believe
by doing so that they are sacrificing to some fetish, invented by
mankind, to make men miserable.  When, though, it comes to marking
sheep--the object, after all, for which a missionary is sent--I never saw
a statement of accounts which brought the balance out upon the credit
side.  The excuse is, generally, "Oh, give us time; these things work
slowly;"--as indeed they do; and if the missions think it worth their
while to send men out to doctor syphilis, cure gonorrhoea, and to attend
to every form of the venereal disease, their field is wide; but if they
wish to convert Mohammedans let them produce a balance-sheet, and show
how many of the infidel they have converted in the last twenty years.
Not that I blame them for endeavouring to perform what seems impossible,
or try to detract an atom from the praise due to them for their efforts,
but when so many savages still exist in Central Africa and in East
London--not to speak of Glasgow and the like--it seems a pity to expend
upon a people, civilised according to their needs, so much good faith,
which might be used with good effect upon less stony ground.

Prophets, reformers, missionaries, "illuminated" folk, and those who
leave their homes to preach a faith, no matter what it is, are people set
apart from the flat-footed ordinary race of human kind; of such are
missionaries and the dream world they live in.  How many an honest,
hard-working young man, who gets his education how he can, by pinching,
screwing, reading at bookstalls, paying for instruction to those who live
perhaps almost as poorly as he himself, thinks when he reads of
Livingstone, Francisco Xavier, the Jesuits of Paraguay, and Father
Damien, that he, too, would like to take his cross upon his back and
follow them.  It seems so fine (and is so splendid in reality) a
self-denying life, lived far away from comforts, without books; Bible and
gun in hand, to show the heathen all the glories of our faith.

Then comes reality, mocker of all best impulses, and the enthusiastic
spirit finds itself bound in a surgery (say in Morocco city), finds work
increasing, and his dreams of preaching to a crowd of dusky catechumens
dressed in white, with flowers in their hair, and innocence in every
heart, turned to Dead Sea Fruit, as with motives misunderstood, with
caustic, mercury, sulphate of copper and the rest, he burns the fetid
ulcer, or washes sores, and for reward can say after a term of years that
he has made the people of the place look upon European clothes with less
aversion than when first he came.

If the mere fact of getting accustomed to the sight of Europeans were a
thing worthy of self-congratulation, then indeed missionaries in Morocco
have achieved much.  But as I see the matter Europeans are a curse
throughout the East.  What do they bring worth bringing, as a general
rule?

Guns, gin, powder, and shoddy cloths, dishonest dealing only too
frequently, and flimsy manufactures which displace the fabrics woven by
the women; new wants, new ways, and discontent with what they know, and
no attempt to teach a proper comprehension of what they introduce; these
are the blessings Europeans take to Eastern lands.  Example certainly
they do set, for ask a native what he thinks of us, and if he has the
chance to answer without fear, 'tis ten to one he says, Christian and
cheat are terms synonymous.  Who that has lived in Arab countries, and
does not know that fear, and fear alone, makes the position of the
Christian tolerable.  Christ and Mohammed never will be friends; their
teaching, lives, and the conditions of the different peoples amongst whom
they preached make it impossible; even the truce they keep is from the
teeth outwards, and their respective followers misunderstand each other
quite as thoroughly as when a thousand years ago they came across each
other's path for the first time.  But if the Arabs constitute a stony
vineyard, the Jews are worse, and years ago when first the missionaries
appeared in the coast towns of southern Barbary, they fleshed their
maiden weapons on the Jews.  It struck the chosen people that the best
weapon to employ against their new tormentors was that of irony, and so
they cast about to find a nickname calculated at the same time to
ridicule and wound, and found it, made it stick and rankle, so that
to-day every new missionary on landing has to accommodate his shoulders
to the burden of a peculiarly comic cross.

Almost all Europeans in Morocco must of necessity be merchants, if not
they must be consuls, for there is hardly any other industry open to them
to choose.  The missionaries bought and sold nothing, they were not
consuls; still they ate and drank, lived in good houses, and though not
rich, yet passed their lives in what the Jews called luxury.  So they
agreed to call them followers of Epicurus, for, as they said, "this
Epicurus was a devil who did naught but eat and drink."  The nickname
stuck, and changed into "Bikouros" by the Moors, who thought it was a
title of respect, became the name throughout Morocco for a missionary.
One asks as naturally for the house of Epicurus on coming to a town as
one asks for the "Chequers" or the "Bells" in rural England.  Are you
"Bikouros"? says a Moor, and thinks he does you honour by the inquiry;
but the recipients of the name are fit to burst when they reflect on
their laborious days spent in the surgery, their sowing seed upon the
marble quarries of the people's hearts, and that the Jews in their
malignity should charge upon them by this cursed name, that they live in
Morocco to escape hard work, and pass their time in eating and in
quaffing healths a thousand fathoms deep.

Often at night, awake and looking at the stars and trying to remember
which was which, I have broken into laughter when I thought upon the
name, and laughed until the Arabs all sat up alarmed, for he who laughs
at night laughs at his hidden wickedness, or else because a devil has
possessed his soul.

Cargo, of course, was not expected in the _Rabat_, and as by four o'clock
in the afternoon the last few passengers had come aboard, it might have
been expected that the ship would put to sea.  Not so, the captain gave
it as his opinion that it was best to wait till midnight so as to arrive
in Mazagan by breakfast time; so for eight hours we waited in sight of
Casa Blanca, swinging up and down, giddy and miserable, and in the
intervals of misery tried to fish.

Next morning we were off Djedida (New Town), as the Arabs call Mazagan.
A yellowish town, peopled by Jews, Moors, and innumerable yellow dogs.
Camels blocked all the streets, and above the consul's flag-staffs a
single palm-tree reared its head, fluttering its feathers over the
sandstone walls built by the Portuguese in the days when they were
navigators, adventurers, and over-ran the world, after the fashion of the
modern Englishman.  The batteries built by the Moors or by the Portuguese
are most ingeniously constructed to expose the gunners, and to batter
down the town they are supposed to guard.  Outside a street of
beehive-looking huts of reeds, each with its little garden, its ten or
twelve dogs, thirteen or fourteen children, three or four donkeys, and a
score of mangy fowls, and with a bush or two of castor oil plants
sticking up in the sand at every corner of the street, gives quite an air
of equatorial Africa or Paraguay.

Right in the middle of the Plaza a squadron of some fifty Arab irregular
soldiers guard about two hundred prisoners.  These latter, heavily ironed
and half-starved, were of the tribe of the Rahamna, who for the past
twelve months had been in open rebellion against their liege lord the
Sultan, Abdul Aziz, whom may God defend.  The system in Morocco when a
Sultan dies is for the tribes who think they may be strong enough, to
refuse to pay all taxes, and then the Sultan is obliged to come in person
with an army to discuss the matter, to fight, and if he wins send baskets
full of heads to be stuck up on the chief cities' gates, and squads of
prisoners like the band I saw in Mazagan to rot in prison till death
relieves them of their miserable lives.  Every one of the prisoners in
the Plaza must have known that any chance of his release was small,
indeed, they knew they were going to be half-starved, either in a dark
cellar-like prison, or in an open courtyard exposed to sun and cold, for
the Morocco Government allows no rations to its prisoners, and those who
have no friends soon die of hunger. {26}  Still they were not apparently
much put about.  People stood talking to them, flies settled on their
eyelids, dogs licked their sores, horses and camels jostled against them,
the sun poured on their heads, and still they did not suffer in the way
our prisoners suffer, for they were not cut off in sentiment from those,
their brothers in Mohammed, who stood round and talked to them to pass
the time.  Pious old ladies, young philanthropists and novelists in
search of "copy" who visit Tangier go into "visibilio," as the Italians
say, over the prisoners in the prison, with its flat horseshoe arches at
the door, so similar in style to those at Toledo in the old synagogue,
now turned into a church. {27}

All those good people and each journalist, all have their word about the
darkness, chains, and the want of air; the misery, the crowding at the
door to take the chocolate (which should have been tobacco) which the
pious lady brings.  Each tourist sends home his badly written paragraph
to his favourite paper, and goes away lamenting over the barbarism of
Mohammedans; and, if he is a "glorious empire" man, thinks of the time
when, under the Union Jack, the Moorish prisoner shall have a number and
a cell, tin pan to wash in, Bible to read, and all shall be apparelled in
Queen Victoria's livery, until they purge themselves of their contempt
and promise to amend their naughty lives.

One thing they all forget when writing of a Moorish prison, that, in
spite of dirt, of chains, of want of air, of herding all together in a
den, they are happier than prisoners with us, for they can speak, exhale
their misery in conversation; they still are men, and leave the prison
men, instead of devils, hating all mankind like those who, under our
inhuman silent plan, eat out their miserable "terms" cursing the fools
who in their foolish kindness hit on a device to turn men into stone.
{28}  And so I leave the prisoners in the square, thinking as an old Arab
says: "It looks as if the Sultan wished to finish with all the
Mussulmen."  At any rate, since the last Sultan's death, three years ago,
thousands must have been killed in war, died by starvation, or rotted
miserably to death in prisons underneath the ground.

It being a feast day of the Jews all stores were closed in Mazagan, for
in Morocco all the retail business is in Jews' hands, and no religion
that I know of seems to have so many days on which men may not work; and
therefore it is strange that men have not yet flocked to join their
faith.

At last the steamer shakes itself free from the allurements of Mazagan
and steers almost due west to clear the reef, which, jutting out about
six miles, makes Mazagan the least exposed of all the open harbours on
the coast.  As Mazagan is distant only three days from the city of
Morocco it may be destined some day to a glorious commercial future, with
railways, docks, smoke, pauperism, prostitution in the streets,
twenty-five faiths instead of one, drunkards, cabs, bicycles and all our
vices, so different in their nature from those the Arabs brought from
Arabia and have clung to in the same way they cling to their religion,
dress, speech, their alphabet, and their peculiar mode of life.

As we steamed out, the town of Azimur was seen under our lee, about
twelve miles from Mazagan, situated on a hill close to the river Um er
R'bieh, once an important harbour but long silted up by sand.  The
harbour, once the resort of pirates, is now silted up, and the
remembrance of the pirates' deeds is still kept fresh in people's
memories by a great store of old Delft plates, either taken by pirates in
the merry days gone by, or sent from Holland {29a} in the times when
vessels from the Dutch ports traded along the coast.  To-day the foreign
merchants buy them or exchange them for modern china, and their
inglorious end is to hang on a wall beside the so-called artistic
plenishings of ladies' over-gimcracked drawing-rooms.

As we turn southwards, after clearing the long reef, it seems as if we
had already entered another zone.  The hills along the beach become more
arid, the plains all stony or covered with low, thorny scrub.  Saffi, the
hottest place on all the coast, melts past, merely a film of white
against the reddish background, and in the distance the foot-hills rising
to the Atlas now appear.  The largest of them Jebel Hadid, the Mount of
Iron standing out like an enormous box {29b} above the coast.

A Yemeni Jew has come on board, bound for Mogador, the city of the Jews.
Short, black-eyed, greasy-locked, and with a red fez bound round with a
woman's shawl, he, like St. Paul, is of a mean appearance.  Still he has
much to tell about Arabia, and the province from which he comes.  It
appears that near Sannaar, in South Arabia, there is a land called
Beni-Mousa.  In this favoured spot the inhabitants are all Jews, and none
of them are known to speak untruths, at least so says their
representative on board the ship.  This tribe, he says, is that of
Shebatat.  A river, which bounds their country, has so fierce a current
that rocks and stones are moved along by it, and no mere Gentile can
cross the stream.  Upon its banks grow two tall trees (Sandaracs, he
thinks), which bend across to one another and salute by saying, "Shabat
Sholom."  On Saturday they do not bend over to one another, and keep no
watch; therefore, on Saturday alone can Gentiles cross the wondrous
river, as on that day only does the stream abate its force.  All this is
true, and I myself am much confirmed in my opinion of its truth, because
at night this same veracious Jew produced out of a bag a bottle of spirit
(majia) made from dates, and, drinking it, got most uproarious, shouting
and singing, falling repeatedly upon the winch to the great delight of
all the Moors, and towards midnight avowing his intention of swimming
back to the Yemen so that my henchman Haj Mohammed es Swani, who had been
a sailor, had to make him fast to a ringbolt in the deck.  And as in
Arabic without a particle after the fashion of a child or negro, I tried
to express my astonishment at such a line of conduct in so grave a man,
to a young Arab who stood near me, without a smile he answered, in most
perfect English, "I am not certain if I understand all that you say, sir,
but I speak English pretty well."  In outward visible appearance he was
an Arab of the usual kind, bare legs and yellow slippers, shaved head and
fez with rather grimy turban, dirty white drawers, and brown djellaba
{30a} with the hood of it over his head after the fashion of a friar.  It
seemed he was an acrobat from the province of the Sus, from the
celebrated Zowia {30b} of Si Hamed O'Musa, the patron saint of all the
acrobats throughout Morocco.  Not far from the Wad {30c} Nun is situate
the district called Taseruelt, and in that district the famous patron
saint of acrobats is buried at the above named Zowia.  From thence a
large proportion of the Arab troops of acrobats, who perform at our
music-halls, set forth to tumble round the world.

My English speaking acrobat had terminated an engagement at the South
London Music Hall, and was returning to resteep himself in the true faith
at home, and also, it is possible, to rest.  He told me that his ambition
was to marry a European girl, and that his choice would be a German, for
he said, "German girls mind the house and sew; English are prettier, but
will not sew, and, besides that, they are always drinking plenty."  Out
of the mouths of babes and heathens I think a reflection on our national
femininity comes with some force.  As we stand talking of the "Empire,"
"Pavilion," "Oxford" and other "halls," both in the provinces and the
metropolis, the island which half shelters the roadstead of Mogador came
into view.

Kissed by the north-east trade which just envelops Mogador and about half
a league of country outside the town, the city, dazzlingly white, lies in
the sun, well meriting the name of Sueira, that is, the picture, given by
the Moors.  Founded in 1760, by order of the Sultan Sidi Mohammed, the
plan made by an engineer from France, whose name, according to the Arabs,
was Cornut, the city (supposed by some to be the ancient Erythraea) is
the most regularly built and most commercial of all the empire.  A little
desert, varying in breadth from three to thirteen miles, cuts off the
city from the fertile lands.  Sand, and more sand, fine, white, and
almost always altering in position, gives an idea of the Sahara made in
miniature.  The little river Wad el Ghoreb runs near the town, and in the
middle of the water a former Sultan has built a palace founded on the
sand; but though the north-east trade blows almost all the year, and when
it rains the rain comes down in torrents, the palace has not fallen, and,
as it never was inhabited, it remains a monument of human folly,
surmounting all the powers of providence.  Jews, Jews, and still more
Jews possess the place; they make their Kidush, keep their Purim,
Cabanas, and New Year; eat adafina, broaden their business and
phylacteries, are hospitable, domestic in their habits, each man revered
in his own house as if he were a prophet, and all the business of the
place is in their hands.

Grave, reserved Jews in gabardines, smart up-to-date young Jews in white
straw hats and European clothes, daughters of Israel with handkerchiefs
bound round their heads and hanging down their backs, others in Paris
fashions, but all with hair like horses' tails, are everywhere.  Donah
and Zorah, Renia, Estrella, Rahel, and Zulica, with Azar, Slimo, Baruch,
and Mordejai are seen in every street; they sit in shops, lean out of
windows, lounge upon the beach, walk about slowly as if they stepped on
eggs, are kind in private life, cruel in business; they keep up much
communication with Houndsditch, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, and other
centres of the "community," speaking an Arabic garnished with English,
seasoned with Spanish, peppered with Shillah {32} words, and rendered as
intelligible as Chinook by the thick utterance with which they speak.  An
amiable race, business once over, and charitable amongst themselves; what
is called moral, that is, their customs do not tolerate prostitution, and
husbands love their wives, children their parents, and their home life
resembles that which writers say is to be seen in England, but which
experience generally shows is oftener found in France, where families go
out together and men are not ashamed to play with children, and to sit
drinking coffee out of doors beside their grandmothers.

So to this New Jerusalem, after a five days' voyage, the _Rabat_ arrived,
and anchored inside the island where the Sultan has a great open prison;
there his rebels are confined, and daily die, both those who live and
those whom death releases.  An iron steamboat, much like a tramp, in
shape, but armed with four small guns, and commanded by a German officer,
displays the red flag of Morocco, identical in colour with the well-known
flag which in Hyde Park has braved a thousand meetings, and around which
the "comrades" flock to listen when Quelch holds forth on social wrongs,
or Mr. Hyndman speaks on India, and outside the crowd the bourgeois feels
a shrinking in the stomach as he smooths his hat to give him countenance.
We bid the microcosmic craft good-bye, and go ashore stuffed in a boat
with Moors and Jews, some Spaniards, two Franciscan friars, eight or ten
bird-cages, and land to find the Jewish feast proceeding, the hotels all
full, the shops all shut, and the whole town delivered over to the
mercies of Jehovah, who, caring little for a mere Christian, left us to
walk the baking street four mortal hours, till just when we were going to
buy a tent to sleep in, Lutaif remembered that he had a dear and valued
friend who lived in Mogador.  Comment upon his memory seemed injudicious.
His friend, Mr. Zerbib, a missionary, received us into his hospitable
house.  We straight forgot our troubles and the Jews' unseasonable feast,
and fell discussing with our host whether or not the thing in Europe
known as progress had proved a blessing or a curse, sporadically
introduced into Morocco by the waifs and strays, the tourists, traders,
runaway sailors, and the rest who, on the coast, act as the vanguard of
the army of the light.




CHAPTER II.


ALL Mogador we found much exercised about the province of the Sus, the
very province in which the inaccessible Tarudant, the city of our dreams,
was situated.  It seemed that about eighteen months ago, one Abdul Kerim
Bey, an Austrian subject, had arrived and hoisted his flag as Patagonian
consul.  Brazil and Portugal, Andorra, San Marino, Guatemala, Hayti, and
San Domingo, Siam, the Sandwich Islands, Kotei, Acheen, the Transvaal,
Orange Free State, and almost every place where there was revenue
sufficient to buy a flag and issue postage stamps for philatelists, had
long ago sent consuls to Mogador.  Their flag-staffs reared aloft looked
like a mighty canebrake, from the sea; their banners shaded the streets
after the fashion of the covering which the Romans drew over their
amphitheatres, and half the population were consuls of some semi-bankrupt
state.  Yet Patagonia, even in Mogador, excited some surprise.  Jews who
had been in Buenos Ayres (and a considerable quantity emigrate thence
from Mogador) argued that Patagonia was under the authority of the
Argentine Republic.  Those who had been in Valparaiso said it belonged to
Chile.  Few knew where Patagonia really was.  The Arabs, whose geography
is fragmentary, thought "Batagonia" was situated somewhere in
Franguestan, and that contented them.  What struck their fancy most was
certainly the colour and design of the new oriflamme.  Barred white and
blue, a rising sun grinning across three mountain tops, a cap of liberty,
and a huanaco ruminant; an Araucanian Indian in his war paint in one
corner, and here and there stars, daggers, scales, and other democratic
trade-marks, made up a banner the like of which had seldom been observed
in all the much be-bannered town of Mogador.  The owner of this standard
and the defender in Morocco of the lives and liberties of Patagonian
subjects, dressed like a Turk (long single-breasted black frock coat and
fez), and spoke a little Turkish, but no Arabic.  His age was that of all
the world, that is, somewhere between twenty-eight and fifty, and his
appearance insignificant, all but his eyes, which some declared to have
the power of seeing through a brick, and others that of piercing through
cloth and leather, and discerning gold from silver in the recesses of a
purse.  Be all that as it may, a travelled man, a doctor; that is,
"tabib," for the two words, though given in dictionaries as the Arabic
and English for the equivalents of the same thing in either tongue, in
point of fact, are different.  "Tabib," in Oriental lands, is a
convenient travelling designation, as "Colonel" in the Southern States,
and as "Captain" was in Georgian times; it rather indicates a status than
a profession, and, in addition, is not out of place upon a traveller's
card.

Dr. el Haj Abdul Kerim apparently enjoyed his designation and his
"tabibship" by the grace of God.  His consulate he held by virtue of a
mandate of an extraordinary potentate.

Some two-and-twenty years ago, a Frenchman, one Aureille de Tounens, a
man of family and an advocate of Bordeaux, succeeded in persuading the
Indians of Arauco that he was their king.  This soon aroused the anxiety
both of the Chilians and the Argentines; for from the time when first
Ercilla wrote his "Araucana," the Indians of Araucania had been free, and
if they had had a king perhaps they would have taught the neighbouring
Republics what liberty really meant.  For a brief space De Tounens
flourished under the style and title of "Aurelio Primero, rey de los
Araucanos," and then diplomacy or treachery, or both, ousted him, and he
died "i' the spital" in his own town of Bordeaux.  During his
efflorescence he coined money, designed a flag, gave titles of nobility,
and appointed consuls; and it appears that one of them was this Kerim
Bey, the Turco-Austrian, who swooped upon Mogador, out-consuling all
consuls hitherto known by the size and pattern of his flag.  It is not
likely that Aurelio Primero ever heard of Mogador, still less that from
Arauco he sent a special envoy to such a place.  Most probably he sent
out consuls generally, after the fashion of bishops _in partibus_, with a
roving consulship, and with instructions to set up their flags wherever
they found three or four dozen fools assembled and a sufficient roof to
bear the pole.

One of these roving consular commissions no doubt was given to Dr. Abdul
Kerim Bey, in days gone by, in South America.  Indeed, I fancy I remember
at Bahia Blanca a forlorn Austrian who was said to have held some
illusory employment about the person of the Araucanian King, such as head
bottle-washer, holder of the royal stirrup, or guardian of the royal
purse, the last, of course, a sinecure which, in all courts that have no
money, should be abolished in the interest of economy.  Our Mr. Abdul,
{36} during his residence in Mogador, having heard that the province of
the Sus was rich in mines, and that no port open for European trade
existed south of Mogador, the grandfather of the present Sultan having
closed Agadhir (formerly known as Santa Cruz when in possession of the
Spaniards), bethought himself that it would be a master stroke to make a
treaty with the semi-independent chieftains of the Sus, open either
Agadhir, Asaka, or some other port, and trade direct with Europe.  Sus
being mainly peopled by Berber tribes, who, it is said, are the
descendants of the Numidians, who certainly were in possession of the
country at the epoch of the invasion of the Arabs, has always been but
ill-affected to the central government.  The town of Tarudant and the
Zowia of Si Hamed O'Musa have hitherto been the two chief centres of the
Shereefian {37} authority, but recently, from some fancied slight or from
ambitious motives, the representative of Si Hamed O'Musa, one Sidi
Hascham, has wavered in his allegiance to his lord.

That which is most desired by every Arab intriguer is the possession of
good rifles, and it appears that Kerim Bey, Esq., promised to help the
chiefs to unlimited supplies of Winchesters.  But be this as it may,
Kerim appeared in London with a treaty, real or supposititious, a fez,
some twenty words of Arabic, several tons of assurance, and the
experience of five-and-forty years.  With these commodities he got a
syndicate together to engage in trade with the province of the Sus, open
a harbour, divert the caravans which now come from the interior and the
south to Mogador, supply the ingenuous natives with rifles, bibles,
Manchester "sized" cottons, work the real or hypothetic mines, introduce
progress--that is electric light, whisky, and all that--and give the
acrobats of Taseruelt a reasonable music-hall which might spare them the
long voyage to London to seek a fitting place in which to show their
powers.

The necessary gentlemen (tribe of Manasseh) with money being found, it
was incumbent to get a man de pelo en pecho, {38} as the Spaniards say,
to visit Morocco, see the Sultan, go to the Sus, and arrange matters with
the various chieftains personally.  Like all the world, Abdul Kerim had
many faults, but amongst them the fault of rashness was not numbered.  In
his wildest moments he had never asserted that he personally had
penetrated in the little visited Sus; it was thought if the treaty (which
he exhibited, but could not read) was genuine, that it had been
negotiated by a third person who knew the country well.

Brave men are not so far to seek in London, and one, Major Spilsbury,
soon volunteered.  He was the kind of man able and willing to walk up to
a cannon's mouth; the sort of man who risks his life ten times a day for
forty years to gain his livelihood, and dies--either by an Indian arrow,
Malay parang, or Arab bullet--"one of our pioneers of empire" or else a
"foolish filibuster," according as he succeeds or fails.  Quiet and
courteous, a linguist, and brave to rashness, he was the very antithesis
of Abdul; but such as they were they started out together on their quest.

Sus being the most southern province of Morocco, Abdul Kerim quite
naturally went to the north, and dragged his wondering companion all
round the empire till at last they found the Sultan, who was in Morocco
city, when it turned out that all the boasted influence Abdul Kerim had
set forth he possessed was nothing, and the Sultan refused permission to
trade direct with Sus.  At Mogador the inevitable quarrel took place, and
Abdul started for Montenegro, Muscat or elsewhere, and left poor Major
Spilsbury alone.

He being determined to see the adventure through, engaged a Jewish
interpreter, went to the Canaries, chartered a schooner and landed at
Asaka after having entered into negotiations from Mogador as to his
reception with the chiefs.

Eight or ten days he fought with contrary winds aboard his little
unseaworthy schooner, reached Asaka, landed, was well received, made
treaties with the chiefs, and all went well until an inferior chief,
either being bribed by the Sultan or because he did not think himself
sufficiently regarded, or because of the old antipathy to Christians,
ever so strong amongst Mohammedans, rode up at the head of fifty horsemen
and spread confusion amongst the assembled natives, declaring that he
would permit no Christian to traffic in the land.  Shots were exchanged,
and Spilsbury, bearing his treaty, as Camoens bore his poems, had to
escape on board his schooner and for the present leave the enterprise;
though, whilst I write, I should not be surprised to learn that he was
near Asaka with a fresh expedition. {39a}  Quite naturally the advent of
such a consul from a new country such as "Batagonia," {39b} his flag, his
fez, his name, and all the subsequent proceedings created some excitement
in such a quiet place as Mogador.  Consuls assembled, took counsel, wrote
dispatches, charged for stamps, and generally fulfilled the functions of
their office.  Long-bearded Jews, whose talk up to that time had never
strayed from money, now discussed questions of diplomacy, of
international law, discoursed on piracy, of filibustering, wondered if
business would have been improved if Spilsbury had got a footing, but
thought no affair sublunary could be quite rotten if Daniel Sassoon {40}
had had a finger in the pie.

The Arabs generally were puzzled, but pleased to think there seemed a
chance of good repeating rifles being in the market; but all the European
residents saw clearly the hand of all-encroaching England, and in
especial the French were certain that Mr. Curzon had given his sanction
to a plot to extend the dominion of the empire over Sus.

All things considered, it was a most inauspicious time to attempt a
journey to such a place as Tarudant, guarded most jealously itself from
Europeans both by the fanaticism of the inhabitants and by the special
prohibition of the Moorish Government to any European to pass south of
the Atlas Mountains to the plains.  Hardly had we well landed in the
town, when a report was spread that we were agents of the British
Government, or advance couriers in the interest of the syndicate.  Our
sojourn at the house of so well-known a missionary as Mr. Zerbib in some
way allayed the public fear, for no one credited him with any but purely
spiritual views of conquest.  The fact that we had no arms, suggested our
great cunning, for no one doubted that we could lay our hand on stacks of
rifles if we chose, though how we could have done so was a mystery, as
all the influence of our minister at Tangier proved insufficient to
procure me even a pass for a common double-barrelled gun, so much alarmed
were the authorities after the recent landing on the coast.  No one,
except the Turks, more clearly comprehend that only the jealousy of the
European nations saves their independence than do the ruling classes of
Morocco.  They understand entirely the protestations about better
government, progress, morality and all the usual "boniment" which
Christian powers address to weaker nations when they contemplate the
annexation of their territory.  On the one hand they see the missionary
striving to undermine their faith, and on the other they behold the
whisky seller actually sapping their Mohammedan morality; behind them
both they see the ironclad arriving in their harbours under frivolous
pretences to exact enormous compensation often for fancied injuries, and
they well know the official Christian's God is money, or as they say
themselves, "amongst the Nazarenes all is money, nothing but money." {41}
The Moors have vices, plenty of them, some of them well-known in London
and in Paris, but in their country a poor Mohammedan, unless in case of
famine, is seldom left to starve.  Even a begging Christian renegade, of
whom there are a few still left, always receives some food where'er he
goes, and is not much more miserable than the poor Eastern whom one sees
shivering about the docks in London and imploring charity for "Native
Klistian" with an adopted whine, and muttered national imprecation on the
unsuspecting almsgiver.

The Moors all know when once a European gets a footing in their land,
even although that should be brought about by filibustering syndicates
financed by London capitalists, that the nation to whom the filibusters
belong steps in to guard its subjects, and having once stepped in,
remains for ever.  They see Ceuta, Alhucemas, el Penon de la Gomera and
Chafarinas all in foreign hands, and like the fact as much as we should
like the Russians in the Isle of Wight.  Therefore, their irritation
about the Sus was most intense, and the jealousy of foreign travellers
never keener.

Much has been said about the badness of the Government of Morocco.  Most
Governments are bad, the best a disagreeable institution which men submit
to only because they fear to plunge into the unknown, and therefore bear
taxation, armies, navies, gold-laced caps, and all the tawdry rubbish
which takes from themselves, to furnish living and employment for their
neighbours, under the style and title of national defences, home
administration, and the like.

In countries like Morocco, where men still live under the tribal system,
all government must be despotic; witness Algeria, Afghanistan, and
Russian Tartary.  The unit is the tribe and not the individual, and what
we understand by freedom and democracy would seem to them the grossest
form of tyranny on earth.  No doubt no man in all Morocco is secure in
the enjoyment of his property; but then in order to be amenable to
tyranny one must be rich, and as most tribesmen own but a horse or two, a
camel, perhaps a slave, some little patch of cultivated ground or olive
garden, it is not generally on them the extortion of the Government
descends, but on the chief Sheikh, Kaid, or Governor, who, if he happens
to be rich, can never sleep secure a single day, for he knows well some
time he will be brought to Fez or to Morocco, thrust in a dungeon
underground, and made to give up all he has on earth.  True, whilst this
very man enjoys his wealth and place he oppresses all the tribe to the
utmost of his power; but still I fancy that hardly a Moor alive would
change the desultory Eastern tyranny, which he has suffered under all his
life, and under which his fathers groaned since the beginning of the
world, for the six-monthly visit of the tax collector as in Algeria.
When people in Morocco speak of Algeria they admit the safety of the
roads, the gathered harvests, no hostile intervention coming between the
sickle and the wheat; they admire the railroads, laugh at the figure
which the French soldiers cut on their horses, but generally finish by
saying, "the Arab pays for all, and in that land they tax your dog, your
horses, and you yourself, and all are slaves."

Most Europeans point with pride to the curious system known as
"protection," and called by the Arabs "Mohalata," which for at least a
hundred years has existed in Morocco, as something to be proud of.  The
system needs a few words, as generally writers on Morocco, without a word
of explanation, talk of the custom and state it is a good one, in the
same way that free and fair traders each assume their nostrum is the
best, or as professors of the Christian or Mohammedan religions look on
their dogmas as being alone fitted for honest men to hold.  Briefly, the
system of the "Mohalata" was invented to obviate the difficulties of
trading in a country so badly governed as is Morocco.  The word in Arabic
means partnership, but the system has been complicated by the habit of
protection by means of which the European partner generally contrives to
get his Moorish partner made a citizen of the country to which he himself
belongs.  Thus, "Mohalata" and "Protection" have come to be so mixed
together, that it is rare to find a Moor in partnership with any European
and not protected by a European Consul.  Once protected, the Moor ranks
as a Montenegrin, Paraguayan, Englishman, Frenchman, or Portuguese, or
what not, and is removed from the exactions of his own Kaid (governor),
and even is placed outside the jurisdiction of his own Sultan.

So far, so good, for no one can pretend the Sultan's government is good,
and under shadow of the protection system many individual Moors have
become rich.  But in their efforts to escape from their own rule, the
wretched Moors often fly from the claws of Moorish tribal feudalism, and
fall into the mouth of European commercialism, unrestrained by public
opinion, the press, or any of the preventive checks which keep the "cash
nexus" system within some sort of bounds in England.  The following
anecdote may serve to illustrate how the protection system occasionally
works out.  Mohammed -- {44} ten years ago was partner of a European
merchant in Mogador.  The European (a God-fearing man) purchased three
camels on condition that Mohammed -- should act as camel-driver, and take
the beasts about the country wherever it was profitable to take goods.  A
camel in Mogador may be worth some thirty dollars.  For this business
Mohammed was to receive a certain portion of the profits made.  For
several years all went well; Mohammed made his journeys, took his
merchandise about, and got his portion of the gains, feeding the camels
at his own expense.

One day the Christian (in Morocco all Europeans pass colloquially as
Christians) said to Mohammed, "I intend to leave the place and to return
to Europe.  My intention is to sell the camels, and we can then divide
the profits of the sale according to our deed."  The Arab answered he was
willing, and began to cypher up the sum the beasts should bring when
sold.

The Christian then informed him that he had a scheme by which he thought
that they might each gain much, and if it prospered, that Mohammed could
keep the camels for his pains.  Mohammed, nothing loath, sat all
attention to hear the expected plan by means of which he was to keep his
beasts.  "You shall take the camels," said the Christian, "and load them
for a journey to the Sus.  At some point of the journey thieves shall
attack you, and you shall then throw all the merchandise upon the ground,
then return home at once, and swear before the Cadi that I entrusted you
with two thousand dollars and it is stolen, and I will force the
Government to compel the Sheikh of the tribe where the robbery was done,
to make all good, and we will share the money, and you can keep the
camels for your own."  A scheme of this kind always attracts an Arab; it
is just the sort of thing he would invent himself.  And when his own
ideas are returned to him, passed through the medium of a Christian mind,
he is certain that the thing must be all right.  Curiously enough,
although the Moors are never tired of cursing at the Christian sons of
dogs, yet they are well aware of their superior business capabilities,
and never seem to doubt their word in matters of the sort.  "But," said
Mohammed, "if I tell the Cadi that I had your money and that thieves took
it, he will throw me into prison, and there is little chance I shall ever
come out alive."  "Have no fear," said the merchant, "the imprisonment
will be a mere formality.  I will feed you when you are in prison, and in
a few days you will be free."

The camels were duly loaded, and Mohammed set out upon his journey to the
Sus.  In a few days he returned, having torn his clothes, rolled himself
in the sand, and with some self-inflicted bruises, informed his friend
the merchant, who took him to the Cadi to testify on oath.

Most unluckily for the miserable man the place he chose to pitch upon for
the scene of his adventure was a few miles outside the town, in a
district called Taquaydirt.  The Cadi sent for the headman, who came and
swore that he had never seen Mohammed, and he himself failed to identify
any of the natives of the place, who were presented to him.  Seeing the
thing looked grave, he went and took sanctuary in the tomb of Sidi
M'Doul, {46a} the patron saint of Mogador, about a mile outside the town.
Inside the sanctuary the man was safe, and every day his European friend
sent him his food, his "Tajin," {46b} "Couscousou," {46c} flat Moorish
bread, and green tea (called Windrisi from Windres, that is London, from
whence it comes), seasoned with mint and sweetened with enormous lumps of
sugar broken with a hammer from the loaf.  A week passed by, and every
day his wife and children came and talked to him, standing outside the
shrine, and much elated at the kindness of their European friend, and of
the affluence which, in a day or two, was to burst on them through his
influence.

But all their feasting did not suit the European's book, and he contrived
to get Mohammed out of the sanctuary, upon the pretext that it was
necessary to swear again to the affair before the judge.  The swearing
and examination over, the Cadi (at the Christian's instigation) threw the
poor devil into prison, and then for a few days the Christian sent him
his food, as he had done before when in the sanctuary.  After a day or
two he feigned to think Mohammed had deceived him as to the robbery, and
had really taken the two thousand dollars for himself.  The supply of
food then ceased, and the Christian raised a plea against the Arab for
restitution of his money, or, failing that, the seizure of his goods.

The wretched man, seeing himself deceived, confessed the plot, but as he
(this time) spoke the truth, no one believed him.  The lawsuit ran its
course, and the Arab's wife sold off his horse and gun (the most
cherished property an Arab has), sold off his camels, their cows, their
goats, and sheep, and raised six hundred dollars after selling everything
she had.  His children begged, the wife worked as she could, the husband,
heavily chained in prison, starved.

Five long years passed away, the wife feeding her husband as she could,
the children running about like pariah dogs, maintained by charity.  Then
the good Christian merchant died, and his heirs, of course, still pressed
for payment of the debt.

Four more long years went by, and then a thing occurred which makes one
think of the proverb that "to jump behind a bush is better than the
prayers of good men." {47}  Within the prison were five hundred men,
Mohammed one of them; a mutiny broke out, the guard was overpowered, and
a few dozen men got out.  Then came Mohammed's turn, and he, thinking
that his good deed might win his freedom, seized the key and locked the
door, keeping the rest within.  News went unto our lord the Sultan in his
camp, and people hoped that he might exercise his clemency.  Back came a
letter praising Mohammed's deed, and saying he deserved his liberty, but
that the Sultan could not grant it till the debt was paid.

Ten years have passed away, the merchant is long dead, six hundred
dollars paid for nothing, a family reduced to misery, and still the
victim of the plot remains in prison, heavily chained and prematurely
old; Allah looks down, the call to prayers rises to heaven five times a
day, and poor Mohammed, a grey-headed man, resigned and uncomplaining,
talks to the casual stranger at the prison gate and says the Christian
was no doubt a knave, but that the thing was written (mektub), and that
therefore no one was to blame, Allah Ackbar, no God but God, and Lord
Mohammed is his messenger.

The protection system may benefit the Jews, who, once despised and spit
upon by every Moor, have of late years become the tyrants of the land.
Scarcely a Jew of any property in any Mellah, {48} in Morocco, who is not
a citizen of some foreign state.  Perhaps America has made the most use
of its protective powers.  Both the United States and the Brazils have
frequently named consuls who were quite unworthy of representing either
state.  These men, in several instances, have sold protection right and
left, and nothing is more common than to meet a Moor or a Jew in one or
other of the seaport towns, who tells you that he is a Brazilian or an
American.  To-day the United States seem to have seen the error of their
ways, and several of their consuls are of high character, and fitted to
do honour to the post they occupy.

Until quite recently, at times a consul would "sell a Moor," that is
would tell his luckless "citizen" that, unless by such a time a sum of
money was forthcoming his protection would be withdrawn.  The effect of
this would be as a sentence of death to the unlucky man.  Generally the
protected citizens amass some money, and if the protection is withdrawn,
their Kaid or Governor falls down upon them, puts them in prison, where
they either die or else remain till, as the prisoner in the Gospel, they
have paid the uttermost farthing they possess.  As to reclamations, how
can a Moor, speaking no foreign language, go to Andorra, Montenegro, or
San Marino, to appeal.  Pay and appeal, {49a} the proverb says; but fancy
an Arabic-speaking man, without a cent, appealing in New York, or in
Brazil, in neither of which countries men of dark races are viewed with
favour, and justice is a costly pastime even for the rich.

No doubt some few have become rich under protection.  Witness the case of
Si Bu Bekr, who for so long a time was British agent, and who, when a few
months ago he showed me all his treasures in his palace in Morocco city,
tapped on his iron chest, and said, "This one is gold, that is all
jewels; this, again, is full of bonds;" and is assumed to have a hundred
thousand pounds all safely tied up in Consols.

But, on the other hand, sometimes the partnership and protection is as a
shirt of Nessus, and I have heard an Arab say, "Can I not get away from
his cursed 'Mohalata'?" rather the exactions of my Kaid than the
insidious bleeding by my Christian partner.  Still it must be confessed
that both protection and "Mohalata" are much sought after by the natives,
and nothing is commoner than to be asked, whilst on a journey, either to
protect or enter into "Mohalata" with a Moor.  As in the case of the
kindred system which prevails in Turkey, of "capitulation," much abuse
creeps in, and as the country is not ripe for mixed tribunals I suppose
the chicken will have to live and bear its pip. {49b}

Peacemakers and reformers pass a thankless life, and it appears as almost
every ill we see is irremediable, and as the world goes on quite
cheerfully (no matter what we do), crushing the weak, and opening wide
upon the passage of the strong, that curses are no use; the only course
the wise man can adopt is to stand well away and keep his own opinions to
himself, unless, indeed, after the fashion of the man in Joseph Conrad's
story, {50} he prefers to hang himself, and then put out his tongue at
the world's managing directors.

Finding myself the observed of all observers in Mogador, I transferred my
residence to Mr. Pepe Ratto's International Sanatorium, about three miles
outside the town, which passes generally under the designation of the
Palm-Tree House.  There I essayed to live my filibustering character
down, and for a day or two went sedulously out shooting in the hottest
time of day, to show I was a European traveller; collected "specimens,"
as butterflies and useless stones; took photographs, all of which turned
out badly; classified flowers according to a system of my own; took
lessons in Arabic, and learned to ride upon the Moorish saddle.  A few
days of this exhilarating life made all things quiet, and the good
citizens of Mogador were certain that I was a _bona-fide_ traveller and
had no design to attack the province of the Sus.

The Sanatori Internacional de la Palmera was a sort of hotel of the next
century.  Everything in it was "_en construction_."  The managers, two
little Marseillais, of the bull-dog type, spent almost all their time
either in practising _la boxe Marseillaise_, in playing on the
concertina, an instrument which, when I am in Europe (dans les pays
polices), I fancy obsolete, but which, in days gone by, set my teeth
often aching in the River Plate and in Brazil.  After so many years when
first again I heard its wheezy tones, upon a moonlight night in the
Palmera, with camels resting under the great palm tree, and Arabs lying
asleep, their faces covered in their haiks, horses and mules champing
their corn, hyenas growling in the distance, jackals yelping, and the
frogs croaking like silver cymbals, as they never croak to the north of
latitude forty, it set me wondering why men must go about on a calm,
clear night grinding an instrument to make their unoffending fellows'
stomachs ache.  Besides the concertina and "la boxe" (Marseillaise), the
brothers, curly-headed and pleasant little sons of La Joliette or La
Cannebiere, devoutly entered everything into a ledger, large enough for
Lombard Street, by double entry; and besides that had an infinity of
talents _de societe_, kept chameleons, understood botany, were cooks and
linguists, speaking most languages including "petit negre" quite
fluently; were civil, educated, ignorant, and thoroughly good fellows to
the full length of their respective five feet four and five feet seven
inches.

The hotel was on a hill and had a view over a sand hill, on which grew
oceans of white broom, dwarf rhododendrons, gum cistus, thyme (which in
Morocco is a bush), and mignonette, and in whose thickets wild boars
harboured and from which sand grouse flew whirring out.  The owner of the
place, a mighty sportsman, having slain more boars, and had more
adventures in the slaying than any one, since Sir John Drummond Hay laid
down his spear.  Born in Mogador, of English or Gibraltarian parents, and
speaking Spanish, English, Arabic, and Shillah quite without prejudice of
one another, Mr. Ratto, known to his friends as "Pepe," fills, in South
Morocco, the place that Bibi Carleton fills in the north.  No book upon
Morocco is complete without a reference to both of them.  How the thing
comes about I do not know, but not unfrequently the sons of Europeans
born in hot countries turn out failures, either in person or in mind, or
both, but when the contrary occurs and the transplanting turns out well,
the type is finer than is common in the mother country.  Both of my types
would, walking in a crowd in any town of Europe, attract attention.
Tall, dark, brown-eyed, erect and lithe, clear brown complexions,
open-handed and quick of apprehension, good horsemen, linguists, and yet
perhaps not fitted to excel in England or in France, or any country where
continuous work is necessary, they have had the sense to stay at home,
and become as it were "Gauchos," that is a sort of intermediate link
between the Arab and the European, and at the same time to incorporate
most of the virtues of the two races.  Put them in Western Texas, Buenos
Ayres, or South Africa, and they must have made fortunes; as it is both
are as rich as kings when mounted on a good horse, a rifle in their
hands, and a long road to travel for no special cause.

Not far away begins, sporadically, the district of the Argan Tree, {52}
in fact, outside the door of the Palmera stands a small specimen, the
roots almost uncovered and bent towards the east by the prevailing wind.

Not far away, still lives a patriarch of this restricted family, flat
topped and gnarled and like a Baobab, its branches taking root all round
the stem, and running on the ground for fully fifty feet, goats climbing
on its limbs, snails clinging to the leaves, pieces of rag tied to the
boughs by passing Arabs, reminding one of the Gualichu {53} tree in the
South Pampa of Buenos Ayres.  After long years of life it seems to rest,
putting forth leaves and shoots, and bearing fruit, as if it were by
habit, and as a protest against the decay which has overtaken all its
fellows.  The passing Arab, though he may break a branch to light his
fire, still reverences it in a vague way, never forgetting as he passes
to praise God for it, as if Allah had set it there to tell him of his
power.

The choice of guides became a difficulty.  Few men in Mogador cared to
attempt a journey to Tarudant in company with a European, even though
disguised.  Arabs who knew the way were terrified at venturing alone into
the territory of Berbers, and Arabs feared to be found out upon the road
and put in prison by the Sultan's governors.

All were agreed the journey was hazardous, although to what extent they
were not sure.  Sometimes in travelling in Arab countries it is possible
to take a guide into a certain part, and then to get some tribesmen to
accompany you.  In our case this was impossible, as I could not speak
Arabic sufficiently to pass off as a native of the place.  Even to say I
was a Georgian, a Circassian, or Bosnian, for any of which I might have
passed as far as type goes, would have aroused suspicion, for why should
an inhabitant of such a country journey to Tarudant?

Although the place I wished to visit is tabooed for Europeans, still
Arabs, like other men, delight in doing what they know they should not
do, with the full consciousness of doing wrong.

To the illiterate Moor or Arab nothing seems so wrong as to eat bacon,
pork, or touch a pig, and yet at times they say "I ate some pork the
other day, it was magnificent," after the fashion that boys smoke at
schools, pretend to like it, and are sick behind a hedge.  An Arab says
no wonder Christians are so red in the face and look so well, do they not
feed on pork and drink strong wine?  It seems to be implanted in the
human mind that anything a man is bidden not to do, must, of necessity,
be the one thing that if he did it, would make him happy all his life.
If this be so, and clergymen (all of the highest moral standing) have
assured me that is the case, surely the general consensus of the opinion
of mankind is towards doing everything they like, and if that is the case
it must be right, for anything which can secure a majority of votes is
sent from heaven, for God himself is quite uncertain of the justice of
his acts till men have voted on them.

Still, guides for such a journey did not abound.  One was too old, a
second too religious to go with Christians, or a third too big a rogue
even to go with Christians; till at the last a man, Mohammed el Hosein,
came forward of his own accord.

Report averred he was a slave-dealer, but the best muleteer in the
country.  In person he was thin and muscular, age thirty-eight, just
married, a first-rate horseman, cunning and greedy, but to be depended on
if once he gave his word.  All his delight, as he himself informed me,
was to drink green tea and smoke tobacco, and, therefore, like the old
Scotch lady, who, when a cook was recommended to her for her good moral
character, exclaimed, "Oh, damn her morals, can she mak guid broth?"  I
did not boggle at his slave-dealing, but took him on the spot.  Strangely
enough he had been employed by missionaries, who spoke well of his
capacity touching his muleteership, but lamented over the hardness of his
heart.  By nationality he was a Berber, with the thin face, small eyes,
and high cheekbones of all his race.  He sang in Shillah, in a falsetto
voice, a quavering air, both in and out of season, and seated on a mule,
a packing needle in his hand to act as spur, got over more mortal leagues
of country in a day than any other mule driver whom I remember this side
of Mexico.

After the muleteer, came choice of roads, for three were open to us; the
first along the coast passing the town of Agadhir. {55}  This road is
flat and sandy, and follows close to the coast right down to Agadhir, and
by it Tarudant can easily be reached within five days from Mogador.  The
disadvantages of following this road were three; firstly, we had to pass
the town of Agadhir, in which the Sultan had a governor; and secondly,
Agadhir once passed, we had to traverse the country of the Howara tribe,
which bears an evil name for turbulence.  Journeying, as I proposed to
do, in Moorish dress, two difficulties lay in my path.  Firstly, I might
be recognised, and if so recognised by an official of the central
government I should have been turned back at once, as has already
happened to other travellers in South Morocco.  Again, dressed as a Moor
and not discovered, I had to run all the risks a Moor must run in
travelling, from robbers and from violence.  These risks do not beset a
European travelling in European dress to the same degree, as Moors in
general are chary of meddling with Europeans.  It may be asked, why then
did I adopt the Moorish dress, and not go boldly as a European after
having got a permit from the Sultan, and taken a guard of Moorish
soldiers.

These were my reasons: the Sultan of Morocco, when he gives a European a
permit to travel in his territory always writes on it, after the usual
salutations to his various governors, "we recommend this Christian {56a}
to you, see that he runs no danger."  The Moor, reading between the
lines, sees that the Sultan wishes him to stop the Christian visiting any
unfrequented place, and naturally he puts a lion in the path.  Thus, had
I gone to Agadhir furnished with guard and Sultan's letter, the governor
would have received the letter, kissed it, duly placed it on his
forehead, called to his scribe to read it, made me welcome, and informed
me that it was quite impossible for me to go farther, as certain
bastards, {56b} who feared neither God nor Sultan, would be sure to kill
me on the road.  I should have told him: "well, my death be on my own
head," and he would straight have answered, "be it so in God's name, if
it were only yours, but who will shelter me from the anger of our Lord
the Sultan if you are killed?"  Persuasion, bribes, and everything would
have been in vain, and had I then insisted, I should have found myself
politely escorted back by a guard of cavalry, as all the Sultan's
governors are well aware that their liege lord admits of no mistakes, but
punishes mistakes and faults alike.

Just as I had determined to risk the journey by the way of Agadhir, news
came that the Howara tribe was in rebellion, and that the road was shut.
There still remained two mountain passes through the Atlas, one starting
from a place called Imintanout, and going by Bibouan to Tarudant, and
still another from Amsmiz, a town close to Morocco city, which crossed
the Atlas at its greatest breadth and led to Tarudant, across the River
Sus at a place called Ras el Wad, a whole day's journey from Tarudant.
Needless to say both roads were longer and much more difficult than the
coast route, and by either of them I should have employed at least eight
days to reach my destination.

Choosing the shortest road I then determined to go by Imintanout, and set
about at once to make my preparations for a start.

Mohammed el Hosein brought his own mule and with it another belonging to
one Ali of the Ha-Ha {57} tribe, that is to say Mohammed hired a mule
from Ali who accompanied us (as I learned upon the road) to see his
animal was not ill-treated.  Ali I suspect received no pay, but was a
sort of general _homme de peine_, and quite contented so that he received
his food and that his mule was fed, and even thought himself quite
fortunate when he received a pair of cast-off shoes.  He had no idea
where we were going to, and when we told him, wished to return, and would
have done so had we not laid hands upon his mule, which seeing, he
resolved to brave all dangers rather than trust it to the tender mercies
of Mohammed el Hosein.  For the rest Ali was a muleteer, which race of
men, whether Spaniards, Mexicans, Turks, or Brazilians is all alike,
singing all day while sitting sideways on their beasts, smoking
continually, eating when there is food, and sleeping quite contentedly
(as the unjust all sleep), their heads resting upon a pack saddle, feet
to the fire, and with a tattered blanket covering their faces from the
dew at night.  Lutaif, following his character of a man of letters, rode
on a mule, perched on a high red pack saddle, which, loosely girthed,
after the Moorish fashion, swayed about and made it quite impossible for
him to mount or to dismount without assistance.  By this time we had
bought our Moorish clothes, in which Lutaif, being a Syrian, looked
exactly like one of the figures on the outside of a missionary journal,
which assume to represent biblical characters, and really are a libel on
the Syrian race.  Having arranged to represent a Turkish doctor, I put on
the clothes with some misgivings, and left my room in the Palmera with
the air of one who has assumed a fancy dress.  On my appearance all
declared that I need never say I was a Turkish doctor, for I looked so
like a man from Fez, in type and colouring, that it was better to say
nothing as to who I was, and that the passers-by would take me for a
travelling Sherif.  A Sherif being a holy character generally rides upon
a horse, and so I purchased one through the good offices of Mohammed el
Hosein, who happened to know of "the best horse in all the province which
his owner wanted to dispose of--with saddle and bridle all complete--for
a mere nothing, being short of cash."  I purchased the whole "outfit" at
nine-and-twenty dollars, a third more than a native would have paid.  The
saddle was rotten, and felt like riding on a bag of stones, but the
horse, though lean in condition, was full of quite unsuspected spirit,
sure-footed, and excellent upon the road.  Equipped with horse, high
Moorish saddle covered with red cloth, dressed in white, but with a blue
cloth cloak to cover all, a fez and turban, head duly shaved, and yellow
slippers, with, of course, a pair of horseman's boots (called temag by
the Arabs) buttoned up the back with green silk buttons, embroidered down
the sides with silk and silver thread, a leather bag to sling across the
shoulders and act as pocket, I was ready for the start.

Tents and the general camp equipment of a European journeying in Morocco,
did not trouble me.  We had a little tent packed on a mule, just large
enough to serve as sleeping quarters for myself and for Lutaif.  The men
had to sleep by their mules after the Moorish fashion, and if it rained
to come for shelter under the lea side of our tent.  Cooking utensils
were but a kettle and an iron pot; we had no forks or spoons, as being
dressed as Moors we had to eat after the Moorish fashion with our hands,
our only luxuries being a rather gim-crack brass tea tray, a pewter
German teapot, and six small glasses to drink green tea flavoured with
mint, and made as sweet as syrup.  In my anxiety to be quite the native,
I even left my camera, an omission which I regret, as had I taken it I
might have published a book of views of the Atlas, and saved much trouble
to the public and myself.

A European who came to see us off looked at our modest equipage with some
disgust, and said that he had never seen a Christian start like a Susi
trader, and that we should soon repent the want of European comforts.
Your European comfort when in Europe is in place; but on the march in a
wild country everything additional you take is as the grasshopper in the
adage, which I think soon made its presence felt.  It is customary for
fools and serious men, when setting out on any journey (say to Margate),
finishing books, entering into the more or less holy state of matrimony,
becoming bankrupt, or entering holy orders, going to sea, meeting their
first love, burying their most disagreeable relation, or being jilted,
thrown from a bicycle, being kicked or knighted, in fact in any of the
disagreeables, which like rain fall on the just and the unjust, but
always show a preference for the poor honest man, to sit down and record
exactly how they felt, what thoughts occurred to them, and generally to
disport themselves as if another mortal in the world cared they were even
born, except their mothers and themselves.

Time-honoured institution, from which no scribbling traveller should
depart.  If you have naught to say, why write it down, extend it, examine
into it, and write and write till after writing you persuade yourself you
have written something; and if upon the other hand you happen to have
aught worth writing, keep it to yourself, and go to bed remembering that
to-morrow is another day, that thoughts will keep and mules are ever
better saddled about an hour before the sky on the horizon begins to
lighten, and the first faint flush of dawn spreads slowly like a diurnal
Aurora Borealis and drives the morning star back to its night; for then,
as mules are cold and empty, they cannot swell their stomachs out so much
and stop the muleteers from drawing home the girths.




CHAPTER III.


LEAVING the International Sanatorium of the Palmera at the hour that
Allah willed it, which happened to be about eight in the morning of the
12th October, dressed in Moorish clothes, our faces far too white, and
our ample robes like driven snow, the low thick scrub of Argan, dwarf
rhododendrons, and thorny sandarac, and "suddra" {61a} bushes after five
minutes' riding swallowed us up, quite as effectually as might have done
a forest of tall trees.  Mohammed el Hosein, fully aware of the
importance of getting accustomed to the Moorish clothes before at once
emerging on the beaten track which leads from Mogador to Morocco city,
engaged us in a labyrinth of cattle tracks, winding in and out for full
two hours through stones and bushes, following the beds of water courses
dry with the twelve months' drought, which had caused almost a state of
famine, and calling to us to hold ourselves more seemly, not to let our
"selhams" {61b} hang too low, not to talk English, and when dismounted to
walk as befits Arab gentlemen, to whom time is a drug.

After much threading through the tortuous paths, getting well torn and
sunburned by the fierce sun, we emerged at the crossing of the river El
Ghoreb, which runs into the sea at Mogador.

Here we encountered the usual stream of travellers always to be met with
at the crossing of a river in countries like Morocco; grave men on mules
going to do nothing gravely, as if the business of the world depended on
their doing it with due precision.  Long trains of mules laden with
cotton goods going up to the capital; a travelling Arab family, the
father on his horse, his gun cased in a red cloth case, balanced across
the pommel of his saddle; his wife, either on foot or seated on a donkey
following him, the children trotting behind, a ragged boy or two drawing
a few brown goats, a scraggy camel packed with the household goods on one
side, and on the other with a pannier from which a foal stuck out its
head; and, lastly, two or three grown-up girls, who, as we came upon them
crossing the stream, lift up their single garment and veil their mouths
according to the laws of Arab decency.  We sit and eat under a tree as
far away as possible from all the passers-by, and our clean clothes and
look of most intense respectability, secure us from all danger of
intrusion on our privacy.

No sooner seated than Swani seized my legs and pulled them violently, and
rubbed the knee-joints after the fashion of a shampooer in a Turkish
bath.  On my enquiry he assured me he knew I must be suffering agony from
the short Moorish stirrups and cramped seat.  I had indeed felt for the
past half-hour as if upon the rack; but a horseman's pride and
acquaintanceship with many forms of saddles had kept me silent.  The
rubbing and pulling afforded intense relief, and I acknowledged what I
had endured, on his assurance that no one escapes the pain, and that the
most experienced riders in the land are sometimes kept awake all night,
after a long day's march, owing to the stiffness of their legs.

In mediaeval Spain, good riders were often designated as "Ginete en ambas
sillas," {63} that is accustomed to either saddle, _i.e._ the Moorish and
the Christian, and I now understood why chroniclers have taken the
trouble to record the fact.  Strangely enough the high-peaked and
short-stirruped saddle does not cross the Nile, the Arabs of Arabia
riding rather flat saddles with an ordinary length of leg.  The Arab
saddle of Morocco, in itself, is perhaps the worst that man has yet
designed, but curiously enough from it was made the Mexican saddle,
perhaps the most useful for all kinds of horses and of countries that the
world has seen.

The Moors girth loosely and keep their saddle in its place by a broad
breast plate; so that it becomes extremely difficult to mount, and to do
so gracefully, you have to seize the cantle and the pommel at the same
time, and get as gingerly into your seat as possible.  Like all natural
horsemen, the Moors mount in one motion, and bend their knees in
mounting; thus, in their loose clothes, they appear to sink into the
saddle without an effort.  Once in the saddle a man of any pretension to
respectability has his clothes arranged for him by a retainer, as being
so voluminous, it is quite an art to make them sit.

Swathed in the various cloaks and wrappings which constitute the Arab
dress, the feet driven well home into the stirrups, and gripping your
horse's sides with all the leg, the seat is firm, though most
uncomfortable at first.  After a little it becomes more tolerable, but
few men can walk a step without enduring agony when they dismount after
three or four hours on horseback, especially as it is a superstition
amongst the Moors to mount and dismount as seldom as they can, for they
imagine the act of getting on and off fatigues the horse far more than
the mere carrying the burden on his back.  Of course, both getting on and
off are done in the name of God, that is after the repetition of the
sacramental word Bismillah, used on eating, drinking, riding or
performing any action for which a true believer should give thanks to Him
who giveth benefits to man.  It is the fashion amongst Europeans to sneer
at Arab riding, and no doubt an Arab in the hunting field would not look
well; and it is possible that a hunting man might also find himself
embarrassed to ride a Moorish horse in Moorish saddle fast downhill over
a country strewn with boulders, or at the "powder play," to stand upon
his saddle and perform the feats the Moors perform.

Horsemen and theologians are both intolerant.  Believe my faith, and ride
my horse after my fashion, for no Nonconformist, Cossack, Anglican,
Gaucho, Roman Catholic, or Mexican can see the least redeeming point
about his fellows' creed, his saddle, horse, ox, ass, or any other thing
belonging to him.

Lunch despatched, green tea drunk, and cigarette carefully smoked behind
a bush, for men in our position must not give offence by "drinking the
shameful" {64} in the face of true believers, we mount again, and plunge
into an angle of the Argan forest, which extends from Mogador to Saffi.

Goats climb upon the trees, and camels here and there browse on the
shoots; under the trees grow a few Aras (_Callitris Quadrivalvis_), and
in the sandy soil some liliaceous plants gleam like stars in the expanse
of heaven.  After an hour the trees grow sparser and we emerge into a
rolling country, and pass a granary, which marks the boundary between the
provinces of Ha-Ha and Shiadma, and take our last look of the sea.

The Argan trees become more scarce as we cross into the fertile and
well-cultivated province of Shiadma.  Sand now gives place to rich red
earth, and Swani, pricking his mule with his new dagger, which he had
wheedled me to buy him under pretence that it did not befit my follower
to go unarmed, comes up and asks if, even in England, there is a better
cultivated land.  I answer, diplomatically, that there is none, although
perhaps the soil of England in certain parts is just as rich.  Being an
Arab he does not believe me for a moment, but ejaculates, with perfect
manners, "God is Great, to him the praise for fertile lands, whether in
England or Morocco."

The Kaid's house on a hill stands as the outward visible sign of law and
order, and Mohammed el Hosein imparts the information that the prison is
always full.  'Tis pleasant to go back, not in imagination, but reality,
to the piping times when prisons were always full, {65} maidens sat
spinning (I think) in bowers, and the gallows-tree was never long without
its "knot."  This leads me to consider whether, if all the world were
regulated by a duly elected county council, all chosen from a properly
qualified and democratic, well-educated, pious electorate, and all men
went about minding each other's business--with fornication, covetousness,
evil concupiscence, adultery, and murder quite unknown, and only slander
and a little cheating left to give a zest to life--they would be happier
upon the whole than are the unregenerate Moors, who lie and steal, fight,
fornicate, and generally behave themselves as if blood circulated in
their veins and not sour whey?  Despite the Sultan's tyranny, with every
form of evil government thrown in, with murder rampant, vices that we
call hideous (but which some practice on the sly) common to everyone, the
faces of the poor heathen Moors, whom we bombard with missionaries, are
never so degraded as the types which haunt the streets of manufacturing
towns.  And if the face is the best index to the mind, it may be that the
degraded heathen Moor is at the heart not greatly worse than his baptised
and educated rag-clad English brother in the Lord.

As evening falls we pass a shepherd close to the high road, sitting down
to pray, beside him are his shoes and crook, and not far off his dog
looks on half cynically, and up above, Allah preserves his attitude of
"non mi ricordo," which is excusable where men worry him five or six
times a day.  Still the shepherd must have been genuine, and could not
have known that infidels would pass his way.

The country here is chiefly composed of red argillaceous earth, the rock
limestone, and the general configuration round-topped hills rising
towards the Atlas.  The Argan trees become more rare, and within sight of
our destination we see the last of them.

The Argan, like the Cacti of the Rio Gila, in Arizona, seems to be able
to resist any drought.  Strange that all-wise Providence failed to endow
Africa with either the Cactus or the Aloe, both plants so eminently
suited to its climate.  It was, however, left to poor, weak, erring human
reason to supply the want.

It is pleasing to reflect that for once the powers {66} generally opposed
to one another should have united in endowing a country with two
non-indigenous plants, which have taken to the soil as if they had been
originally found there.  Is it reason after all that is infallible?

Meskala reminded me curiously enough of an "hacienda" in Mexico, with an
almost similar name Amascala, the same white walls, the same two towers
of unequal height over the gateway, almost the same corrals for animals
outside, formed in both cases of the branches of a prickly shrub, goats
feeding by the same turbid stream flowing through a muddy channel, and
the gate once opened, which in our case took at least a quarter of an
hour's entreaty mixed with objurgations, the self-same twisting passage
of about twenty yards in length, through which the stranger enters before
arriving at the great interior court.

The court, about two hundred feet across, was full of animals, belonging
some to the Sheikh himself, and others to the various travellers who had
sought shelter for the night within his walls.

We had a letter from the consul in Mogador setting forth that we are
friends of his, but not descending to particulars, so that we were
ushered into an airy upper room, and bread and butter, in a tolerably
lordly dish, was set before us.  We were uncertain whether Sheikh el
Abbas penetrated my disguise, but if he did he made no sign; nor did it
matter much, as I intended to be taken for a Christian travelling in
Moorish dress to escape observation (as is often done), till near the
place where we break off into the wilds, and leave the main road to
Morocco city.  Had all gone well, I hoped this would confuse the
hypothetic persons, and jumble up their substance to such an Athanasian
extent as to make recognition quite impossible.

Lutaif discourses much of eastern lands and reads el Faredi, an Arab
poet, to the admiration of the assembled elders.

Swani makes tea and Sheikh el Abbas drinks the three cups prescribed by
usage, lapping them like a dog, and drawing in his breath like a tired
horse at water, to show his great content.  The upper room looked out
upon the court; and in the moonlight I saw a shepherd, assisted by a
little ragged boy, engaged in separating the goats from amongst the
sheep, and ranging them in two little flocks, after the fashion that the
good are to be divided from amongst the wicked, when this foolish affair
of life is finished with; though with this difference, that whereas in
this case the two flocks were nearly equal, who can suppose but that
after the last count, the goats will not exceed the sheep by at least ten
to one.  In a corral hard by the horses eat, some camel drivers crouch
round a fire, and as I look at the unchanging Eastern life the call to
prayers reminds me that Allah has blessed it by continuity for a thousand
years.

The Sheikh sat long, talking of things and others, of the decline of
British prestige, the advance of Russia, the new birth of Turkey, and of
the glory of the Moorish kingdoms in the Andalos (Spain); and then of
business, and how the Brus (Germans), a nation which he says seemed to
have come into the world but recently, from some high mountains, are
bidding fair to be the first of Franguestan.  The German Emperor strikes
him as being a great king.  He is a Sultan, says the Sheikh, after the
fashion that the Spaniards used to say when Ferdinand VII. had
perpetrated some atrocity, "es mucho rey," that is, he is indeed a king.
{68}

I fancy that he knows I am a Nazarene, although my conversation is quite
evangelical, that is, yea and nay, and now and then a pious sentence
muttered very low to hide the accent.  Lutaif and Swani answer for me, as
if I were an idiot, and step in, so to speak, between me and the Sheikh,
as when he asks, for instance, if I have seen the war ships of the
Christians, when they at once respond I have, and give particulars
invented at the moment, and I learn that ships steam more than fifty
miles an hour, guns carry twenty miles, to all of which I nod a grave
assent, and the Sheikh sips his tea and praises God for all his mighty
works.

Lutaif tells of a vessel at Beirout, a Turkish war ship, sent by the
German Emperor to the Sultan (he of Brus), so large that two young
Syrians of his acquaintance, who had shipped as sailors and got
separated, vainly sought each other for seven years, at night climbing to
the masthead, by day descending to the hold, but all in vain, because the
vessel was so huge; the Sultan could step aboard of her out of his palace
on the Bosphorus and after walking all day land in whatever country he
desired.  This meets with great approval, and I have to confirm it to the
letter, and do so with a nod.

The night is hot and the mosquito hums in his thousand; but the Sheikh as
he goes warns us to bar the door, because, he says, "Sleep is Death's
brother," meaning that when one sleeps death may be near and yet the
sleeper be unconscious of it.

The muleteers retire to sleep beside their mules.  Swani wraps up my feet
in the hood of one "djellaba," and draws another up to my head ready to
cover it when I feel sleepy, and as we lie upon the floor, on sheepskins,
watching the moon shine through the glassless window, Lutaif puts out the
flickering wick, burning sustained by argan oil in a brass bowl,
exclaiming, as he did so, "Oh, Allah! extinguish not thy blessing as I
put out this light."  How much there is in names; fancy a deity,
accustomed to be prayed to as Allah by Arabs, suddenly addressed by an
Armenian as Es Stuatz, it would be almost pitiable enough to make him
turn an Atheist upon himself.  I feel convinced a rose by any other name
would not smell sweet; and the word Allah is responsible for much of the
reverence and the faith of those who worship him.

We left Meskala early and in rain, which soon was over, and entering on a
little bit of desert country, the Atlas range appeared like a great wall
of limestone capped with white in the far distance.

For three hot hours we passed through a miniature Sahara, rocky and
desolate, stones, stones, and still more stones and sand, a colocynth or
two lying amongst the rocks, some orange-headed thistles, Ziziphus Lotus
here and there, some sandarac bushes now and then; the horses stumbling
on the stones, mules groaning in the sand, and no great rock in all the
thirsty land to shelter under from the sun.  Three hours that seemed like
six, until a line of green appears, a fringe of oleanders on the margin
of a muddy stream in which swim tortoises, and by which we lie and lap
like dogs, and understand wherefore the Psalmist so insisted on his green
pastures wherein his Allah made him lie.

In England your green pastures have no significance, and call to mind but
recollections of fat cattle and sheep with backs as square as boxes, in
the lush grass between the hedges, as the express whirls past and the
stertorous first-class passengers hold up their wine glasses against the
light and praise the landscape as they eat their lunch. {70}

But in Morocco and Arabia green grass means life, relief from thirst, and
still to-day their poets stuff their verses full of allusions to the
pastures rare to them, but which with us make one at times long for a bit
of brown to break the sea of dull metallic green.  Fig trees and olives,
oleanders {71a} with pomegranates, and a few palms make an oasis in the
little desert, and on a sheepskin spread on some cobble stones close by a
rock, exactly like the one that Moses is depicted striking in
old-fashioned Sunday books, the water rushing out in a clear stream, we
lie and smoke and fall a-talking of our chances of reaching Tarudant.

Mohammed el Hosein gave it as his opinion that if he could conduct a Rumi
{71b} there, he would make his name in Mogador as the best muleteer in
all the south, and all his previous fears seemed to vanish as he
descanted on the line of conduct to pursue when once inside.  He seemed
to think the risk, if known to be a Christian, was considerable, and
counselled that we should encamp outside the gates and reach the town a
little after dawn when people were arriving to sell provisions, and then
go instantly to the Governor's house which was close to the gates, and
claim protection from him.  Swani, who, as a native of Tangiers, though
he had seen the world and twice performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, yet
was a little uneasy in South Morocco, and thought it best that we should
go to some caravansarai (called in Morocco fondak) and try our best to
escape detection, I shamming ill, and Lutaif giving out he was a Syrian
doctor.

Ali the muleteer, who learned for the first time our destination, was in
an agony of fear, and said he must return at once; but when we pointed
out to him that he would then not only lose his wages but perhaps his
mule, he made his mind up, on condition I procured him a letter of
protection from the English consul in Mogador.  Mohammed el Hosein,
before he left the town, had made me sign a paper stating I had engaged
him for all his life, and, fortified with this protection, I understand
he now bids all his governors and masters absolute defiance, wrapped, so
to speak, within a tatter of the British flag.  Lutaif, who knew the
Governor of Tarudant, one Basha Hamou, who had been Governor of
Mequinez--a negro, and a member of the famous Boukhari {72} Pretorian
bodyguard--gave his opinion that Mohammed el Hosein was right, and that
though Basha Hamou might not be pleased, he would be obliged to give us
protection, and that he, probably after the first excitement of the
natives had subsided, would send us back under escort to Mogador.  I held
my tongue, resolving that if we got there I would not return without a
good look at the place.

About a mile from where we sat was situated the castle of the local Kaid,
a castle set upon a rock, and strong enough apparently to set tribal
artillery at defiance; but our Lord the Sultan being "unfavourable" to
him, the castle was deserted, cattle stolen, crops all destroyed, and an
air about the place reminding one of some of the Jesuit Missions
(destroyed to show the Liberalism of Charles III.) which I have seen in
Paraguay.  In fact the Kaid is only Kaid _in partibus_, and it is
understood a Sheikh in Fez has offered the Sultan 100,000 dollars to be
made governor, providing he (the offerer) might have a "free hand" with
the tribe; this means to oppress them, and in a year or two to take the
100,000 dollars out of them to pay the Sultan, and as much more for
himself.  Strange that the Arabs, though so warlike, should in all ages
have endured so much oppression.  It may be that the tribal system
renders them specially liable to this, for inter-tribal jealousies make
them an easy prey to any Sultan who can command money enough to set them
at one another's throats.

Ibn Jaldun (in the introduction to his history) says: "The Arabs are the
least fitted men to rule other nations, for they demolish the
civilisation of every land they conquer.  They might be good rulers, but
they must first change their nature."  This no doubt arises from their
incapacity to govern themselves.  Still with all their faults they are a
fine race, and if they have demolished the civilisation of several
countries, they have in return left their own type wherever they have
conquered, and what type in the world is finer.  I say nothing of the
more doubtful of their legacies, their system of numeration, and the
thoroughbred horse.

The grateful spring, fruit trees, and shady little oasis where we rested
rejoice in the name of Aguaydirt el Ma, a compound of Arabic and Shillah,
Ma in Arabic meaning the water, and Aguaydirt, no doubt having some
meaning of its own in the wild tongue it comes from.

As we ride through a bushy country with some straggling farms, we pass a
Sheikh on a good horse, long gun across the saddle, and a tail of ragged
followers on foot.  It seems he is a tax collector, gathering the taxes
in person, and no doubt quite as effectually as the Receivers General
used to do in France, including even him who sleeps (his bubble burst)
under a flagstone in the door of San Moise, {74} in Venice, with a brief
dog-Latin epitaph, setting forth the usual lack of virtues of a man who
fails.

Curious to observe (again per usual) the fatness and good clothes of the
collector, and the mean estate of the poor "taxables," their downcast
looks, and all the apparent shifts and wiles they are putting forth to
escape the worst outrage that a free man can bear, that is to have his
money taken from him under the pretext of the public good.

Pleasant to gather taxes well armed on a good horse; a horse I mean that
could do his ninety miles a day for several days and carry something
heavy in the saddle bags.

I had a friend who, being for a short time governor of a province in a
Central American Republic, and finding things became too hot for him,
collected all the public money he could find, and silently one night
abdicated in a canoe down to the coast, and taking ship came to Lutetia;
and then, his money spent, lectured upon the fauna and the flora of the
country he had robbed; and, touching on the people, always used to say
that it was very sad their moral tone was low; the reflection seeming to
reinstate himself in his own eyes, for he forgot apparently that in his
abdication he but followed out the course which law had pointed out to
him in his official days.

Night catches us close to el Mouerid, a dullish pile of sun-dried bricks,
the lord of which, one Si Bel Arid, is an _esprit fort_, and knowing me
for a Christian, ostentatiously walks up and down talking on things and
others to show his strength of mind.  Though disapproving of them, most
Moors like to be seen with Christians, in the same way some pious men are
fond of listening to wicked women's talk, not that their conversation
interests, but to show the asbestos quality of their own purity, and to
set forth that, as in Rahab's case no imputation can attach itself to men
of virtuous life.  Therefore, as maiden ladies are said to love the
conversation of rakes, and clergymen, that of fallen women, so do Moors
love to talk with and be seen in public with the enemies of God.

El Mouerid looks miserable in the storm of rain and wind, in which we
leave it as the day is breaking.  The Arab dress in windy weather teaches
one what women undergo in petticoats upon a boisterous day; but still
their pains are mitigated by the fact that generally men are near at hand
to look at them, whereas we could not expect to find admiring ladies on
the bleak limestone plain.  Curious striations on the hills, as if the
limestone "came to grass" in stripes, give an effect as of a building, to
the rising foot-hills, into which we enter by the gorge of Bosargun, a
rocky defile which gradually becomes a staircase like the road from Ronda
to Gaucin, or that to heaven, almost untrodden of late years.  We pass a
clump of almond trees, by which a light chestnut {75} mare is feeding;
she looks quite Japanese amongst the trees, buried up to the belly in
aromatic shrubs; a little bird sits on her shoulder, no one is near her,
though, no doubt, some sharp-eyed boy is hiding somewhere watching her,
for in this district no animal is safe alone.  From the top we get our
first view of the Atlas in its entirety; snow, and more snow marking the
highest peaks, the Glawi, Gurgourah, and the tall peaks behind Amsmiz.
No mountain range I ever saw looks so steep and wall-like as the Atlas;
but this wall-like configuration, though most effective for the whole
range, yet robs the individual peaks of dignity.

To the east the stony plain of Morocco, cut into channels here and there
by the diverted water of the Wad el N'fis (a river I was destined to
follow to its very source), under the highest peaks of Ouichidan, upon
the very confines of the Sus.  Here, for the first time, we see, though
far below us, the curious subterraneous aqueducts, looking like lines of
tan pits, with which the plain of Morocco is intersected everywhere.

These aqueducts, called Mitfias, are a succession of deep pits, dug at
varying distances from one another; the water runs from pit to pit in a
mud channel, and the whole chain of pits often extends for miles.  Men
who undertake such herculean labour in order to irrigate their fields
cannot well be called lazy, after the fashion of most travellers who
speak, after a fortnight's residence in Morocco, of the "lazy Moors."
The truth is that the country-people of Morocco are industrious enough,
as almost every people who live by agriculture are bound to be.  Only the
Arabs of the desert, and the Gauchos of the southern plains, and people
who live a pastoral life, can be called lazy, though they, too, at
certain seasons of the year, work hard enough.  The Arabs and Berbers of
Morocco work hard, and would work harder had they not got the
ever-present fear of their bad government before them.  When one man
quarrels with another, after exhausting all the usual curses on his
opponent's mother, sister, wife, and female generation generally, he
usually concludes by saying: "May God, in his great mercy, send the
Sultan to you"--for he knows that even Providence is not so merciless as
our Liege Lord.

About three miles below us are two curious flat-topped hills, looking
like castles.  Mohammed el Hosein pronounces them to have been the site
of two strong castles of the Christians.  What Christians, then?--Roman,
or Vandal, or Portuguese?  Perhaps not Christian at all, but
Carthaginian; for in Morocco, any old building, the builders of which are
now forgotten, is set down to the all-constructing Christians, in the
same manner as in Spain, the Moors built all the castles and the Roman
bridges, and generally made everything which is a little older than the
grandfather of the man with whom you speak.  Not but at times the person
questioned puts in practice, to your cost, the pawky Spanish saying: "Let
him who asks be fed with lies."  What Christians could have been so
foolish as to build two castles in a barren plain, far off from water,
does not appear.  At any rate, after a careful search, we can discover no
trace of building, and put the castles down with the enchanted cities
Fata Morgana, Flying Dutchman, and the like phenomena, which seem more
real than the material cities, ships, and optical illusions, which, by
their very realness, appear to lose their authenticity, and to become
like life, a dream.

Passing the castles, we emerged again upon a desert tract, which took
almost two hours to pass, and, at the furthest edge of it a zowia of a
saint, Sidi Abd-el Mummen, with a mosque tower, flanked by palms, rising
out of a sea of olives twisted and gnarled with age, and growing so
thickly overhead that underneath them is like entering a southern church,
out of the fierce glare of the sun.

History has not preserved the pious actions which caused Si Abd-el Mummen
to be canonised.  In fact, Mohammed, if he came to life again, would have
a fine iconoclastic career throughout the world of the Believers; for
though they have not quite erected idols, graven or otherwise, yet all
their countries are stuck as full of saints' tombs, zowias of descendants
of saints, and adoration of the pious dead prevails as much as in the
Greek or Latin churches.  True, the custom has its uses, as it serves to
indicate the distance on roads, and men as naturally enquire their way
from Saint (Sidi) to Saint, as from church to church in Spain, or
public-house to public-house in rural England.  In other countries
Saints, before becoming free of the fellowship, have to show their
fitness for the post; but in Morocco no probation of any kind--that is,
according to our ideas--seems to be necessary.

I knew an aged man, who used to sit before the Franciscan Convent, in the
chief street of Tangier--a veritable saint, if saint exists.  He sat
there, dressed in a tall red fez, {78} given by some pious soldier, a
long green caftan, clean white drawers, and a djellab of fine blue cloth.
Long hair descended on both sides of his face in locks like bunches of
chrysanthemums; his eyes were piercing, and yet wavering; for the poor
Saint was nearer to Allah than the common herd by the want of some small
tissue, fibre, or supply of blood to the vessels of the brain.  Thus
clothed and mentally accoutred for his trade, a basket by his side, and
in his hand a long pole shod with iron, for he belonged to the sect
called the Derkowi, he sat and told his beads, and took his alms, with an
air of doing you a favour: for who gives to the poor does them no favour,
but, on the contrary, insures his own eternal happiness, and but gives
out again that which Allah entrusted to him for the behoof of man.

I happened one day, with European curiosity, to enquire what made the
venerable man so venerated, and was told that, having suddenly gone mad,
he killed his wife, threw off his clothes, and then marched naked through
the land--justice not interfering--for the mad are wise; and then, the
violence of his madness over, had quietly sat down and made himself a
sort of "octroi" upon passers by, after the fashion of blind Bartimaeus,
who sat begging at the gate.  The explanation pleased me, and in future
when I passed I laid up treasure in that mothless territory, where no
thieves annoy, by giving copper coins; and was rewarded even here on
earth, for once I heard an Arab say: "This Kaffir, here" (speaking of me)
"fears neither God nor devil, yet I have seen him give to the old Saint;
it may be, God, the merciful, may save him yet, if but to show His
might."

And so it is that Saints' tombs stud the land with oven-shaped buildings
with a horse-shoe arch, a palm tree growing by, either a date or a
chamcerops humilis, in which latter case pieces of rag are hung to every
leaf-stalk, perhaps as an advertisement of the tree's sanctity or from
some other cause.  The place serves as a re-union for pious folk, for
women who pray for children, for gossipers, and generally holds a midway
place betwixt a church and club.  In order that the faithful wayfarers,
even though idiots, shall not err, in mountain passes, as in the gorge of
Bosargun, at four cross roads, passes of rivers, and sometimes in the
midst of desert tracts the traveller finds a number of small cairns, in
shape like bottles, which show--according to the way they point--where
the next Saint's tomb lies; for it is good that man should pray and think
about himself, especially upon a journey--prayer acts upon the purse;
alms save the soul; and Saints, though dead, need money to perpetuate
their fame.

After nine hours of alternating wind and heat we reached Imintanout, the
eastern entrance of the pass which, crossing a valley of the Atlas, leads
to Sus.  So to speak Tarudant is within hail, three (some say two) days
and we are there, if . . . but the if was destined to be mortal, as it
proved.  The straggling village almost fills the gorge through which the
road enters the hill.  Above it towers the Atlas; a little stream (then
dry) ran through the place, which had an air between a village in Savoy,
and a Mexican mining town lost in the Sierra Madre.  Brown houses built
of mud, stretches of Tabieh {80a} walls, the tops of which crowned with
dead prickly bushes, steely and bluish looking in the setting sun, the
houses generally castellated, the gardens hedged in with aloes, wherein
grow blackberries, palms and pomegranates, flowers, fig-trees, and
olives.  Water in little channels of cement, ran through the gardens,
making of them an Arab paradise.  Further up the gorge the Mellah
(Jewry), in which we catch a glimpse for the first time of the Atlas
Jews, servile and industrious, wonderfully European-looking as to type,
superior to the Arabs and Berbers in business capacity, and thus at once
their masters and their slaves.

The Kaid's house, perched upon a rock, I avoided like a plague spot,
fearing to be recognised and sent back to Mogador, and made, instead, for
the house of one Haj Addee, a Sheikh, {80b} which being interpreted may
stand in his case for country gentleman.

The Sheikh has been in Mecca, Masar el Kahira (Cairo), carries a rosary,
has some knowledge of the world (Mohammedan), and is not quite unlike
those old world Hidalgos of La Mancha, they of the "Rocin flaco y galgo
corredor," whom Cervantes has immortalised in the person of Don Quixote.

Friends interested in my journey in Mogador had recommended the Sheikh to
me as a safe man in whom to trust, before engaging myself in the recesses
of the Atlas.  So, riding to his house, I sent in Swani with a letter
from an influential man in Mogador, and Haj Addee soon appeared, and,
after asking me to dismount, led me by the hand to his guest house.  This
was an apartment composed of three small rooms, one serving as a bedroom,
the second as a place in which to store our saddles, tent, and camping
requisites, and the third, which had no roof, as sitting-room.  All round
the sitting-room ran a clay divan, a fire burned in one corner, and
overhead the stars shone down upon us, especially the three last stars in
the Great Bear's tail, so that, take it for all in all, it was as
pleasantly illuminated a drawing-room as any I have seen.  Hard by the
door stood an immense clay structure, shaped like a water barrel, which
served for storing corn {81a} in during the winter, and in the spring
broken to pieces when the corn was used.

Seated on the divan, I watched an enormous copper kettle try to boil upon
a brass tripod {81b} in which a little charcoal glowed, whilst in a small
brass dish a wick fed with raw mutton fat made darkness manifest.  As I
look round the room it strikes me that there seems to be a sort of
dominant type of Mohammedan formed by religion, in the same way that in
the north of Ireland you can distinguish a Catholic from a Protestant,
across the street.  Mohammed el Hosein, though of a different race, and
from thousands of miles away, presents the perfect type of an Afridi, as
depicted in the columns of the illustrated papers.  Ali, our muleteer,
with his thin legs, beard brushed into a fan, and coppery skin, might sit
for the picture of a Pathan; it may be that an Oriental would discern a
great resemblance between a Dutchman and a Portuguese which had lain
dormant to our faculties, and if this was the case my theory would be as
well confirmed as many other theories which have revolutionised the
scientific world.

We talk of Mecca and Medina, of travelling from Jeddah, stretched in
"shegedefs" {82} upon a camel's back, of Gibel Arafat, the Caaba, and of
the multitude of different classes of Mohammedans who swarm like bees,
Hindoos and Bosnians, Georgians, Circassians, the dwellers in the
Straits, and the Chinese believers, whom my host serves up all in a lump
as Jawi, and says that they are little, yellow, all have one face, and
that their mother in the beginning was a Djin.  It appears that at the
sacred places, the town of tents is of such vast dimensions that it is
possible to lose yourself and wander for miles if you forget to take the
bearings of your tent.  It must be a curious sight to see the various
nationalities, the greater part of whom have no means of communication
other than a few pious sentences, and a verse or two from the Koran.

Swani, who is a double pilgrim, having twice been in Mecca, comes out
most learnedly as to nice points in Mohammedan theology.  Though he can
neither read nor write, and is, I fear, not all too strict in the mere
practice of his religion, yet he can talk for hours upon the attributes
of God, and as judiciously as if he had been a graduate of St. Bees, so
well he knows the essence, qualities, power, majesty, might, glory, and
every proper adjective to be applied.  The object of his hopes is to
induce me to perform the pilgrimage.  He assures me that it is quite
feasible, has even arranged for my disguise, and tells me that in Mecca
he can take me to a friend's house, who is as big a Kaffir as myself.
His idea is that I shall go as a Circassian, which people I resemble as
to type, and when I say, "What, if I fall upon a real Circassian?" he
only answers, "That is impossible," in the same manner as when asked what
they would do if they discovered me; he answers, "they would not discover
you, you look so like a man from Fez."  What annoys him is that I make no
apparent progress in the language, and I fear that I shall have to take a
longer pilgrimage before I am fit, even with such a guide, to throw the
stones on Gibel Arafat.  Sometimes our talk ran on the wonders of the
West; the steamships in which the pilgrims sail from Tangier to Jeddah,
and on board of one of which, our host informs us, once when he was
praying, the Kaffir Captain touched him on the arm, and, pointing to the
compass, informed him he was not head on to the proper point.  This
conduct seems to have impressed Haj Addee, and he remarks, "God, in his
mercy, may yet release that captain from the fire."  As we were talking,
neighbours dropped in, in the familiar Eastern way, and sat quiet and
self-contained, occasionally drinking from one of the two long-necked and
porous water-jars, known as "Baradas," or the "coolers," which stand,
their wooden stoppers tied to them with a palmetto cord, on each side the
divan.  Swani concocts the tea, using the aforesaid weighty copper
kettle, a pewter cone-shaped tea-pot, made in Germany, a tin tea-caddy,
painted the colour of orange marmalade, with crude blue flowers, which
kind of merchandise Birmingham sends to Morocco, to be sold at
one-and-sixpence, to show how much superior are our wares to those of all
the world.  The host knocks off great pieces from a loaf of cheap {84}
French sugar with the key of the house, drawing it from his belt, and
hammering lustily, as the key weighs about four ounces, and is eight or
nine inches long.

Imintanout being, as it were, the gate of Sus, and the end of the first
stage of our journey, we ask most anxiously as to the condition of the
road.  The way we learn is easy, so easy that trains of laden camels pass
every day, and the whole distance across the mountains is a short two
days.  So far so good, but when we intimate our intention of starting
early next morning, then bad news comes out.

It appears the tribe called Beni Sira, sons of burnt fathers, as our host
refers to them, have stopped the pass, not that they are bad men, at
least our host is sure of this, or lives too near them to venture on a
criticism, but because they are dissatisfied with the new governor
recently appointed, and wish to get him into bad odour with the Sultan by
causing trouble.  It appears those mis-begotten folk have fired upon a
party only the day before, and wounded a Jewish merchant, who is laid up
in a house not far from where we sit.  A caravan of twenty mules was set
upon last week, two men were wounded and the goods all carried off.  A
most ingenious system of proving that the governor is incompetent to
preserve order, and therefore must be changed.

Suspecting that the story was untrue, and only got up to prevent my
entering the Sus, I sent two messengers, one to see the Jewish merchant,
and tell me if he is really wounded, and another to a Sheikh, asking if a
traveller, going to pray in Tarudant, and skilled in medicine, can pass
that way.  The report of fighting seriously alarms our muleteers, and
even Swani, though brave enough, looks grave at having to fight so far
away from home.  Haj Addee--to show goodwill, or to impress us with his
power--offers, should the local Sheikh of the Beni Sira return an
unfavourable reply, to get his men together and fight his way right
through the pass.  I thank him with effusion, but resolve not to place
myself alone in the middle of a tribal battle without a rifle, on a
half-tired horse, and deprived even of a Kodak with which to affright the
nimble adversary.

And so I lose a day, or perhaps gain it, talking to the curious people,
and prescribing wisely for ophthalmia; dividing Seidlitz powders into
small portions to be taken at stated times to serve as aphrodisiacs, and
watching an incantation which seems to cure our host of rheumatism.

Haj Addee was a sort of "Infeliz," as the Spaniards call a man of his
peculiar temperament.  I am certain that in whatever business he entered
into he must have failed, he had so honest a disposition, and his lies
were so unwisely gone about, they would not have deceived a Christian
child.  His rosary, each bead as big as a large pea, was ever in his
hand; he said it was made from the horn of that rare beast, the unicorn,
and he had brought it with a price at Mecca, from a "Sherif so holy that
he could not lie."  It looked to me like rhinoceros horn, and so,
perhaps, the Sherif had lied less than he had intended when he sold the
beads.  In the middle of the string were four blue beads, and between
these four beads a piece of ivory standing up like a cone, and called "el
Madhna," {86a} that is the "erect one."  Besides the "Madhna" there was a
little comb, shaped like a stable mane comb, and made of horn, which
dangled from the rosary, and which Moors use to comb their beards after
performing their ablutions, and which they seldom carry in Morocco,
except they have performed the pilgrimage.

Haj Addee suffered from rheumatism in the left shoulder.  This he called
simply "el burd," "the cold," and complained that he had exhausted all
lawful medicine and was about to try an incantation. {86b}  So to us
entered a "fakir"--that is, a holy man--fat and white-bearded, and with
the half-foolish, half-cunning look, so often to be found in "holy men"
who are professors of some faith either inferior to, or differing from,
our own.  The man of God gave me a scowl, and, I fancy, saw I was a
misbeliever, then sat down, after the fashion of his class, in the best
seat, and, mumbling something, drew out a dagger and wrote upon it, with
the juice of a plant he carried in his hand, some mystic characters.  The
master of the house, together with a friend, stood up and held two pieces
of split cane about a yard in length.  Both had the air the Italians call
"compunto," that is, they looked like people walking down the aisle of a
crowded church (as if they trod on eggs) after partaking of the Holy
Communion, and conscious that it is not impossible they may have eaten
and drunk their own damnation, and that before a crowd of witnesses.

The Levite, sitting in a corner, kept on muttering, and underneath the
cane rapidly passed the cabalistic dagger to and fro, just in the middle
of the reeds, touching them lightly, as the dagger moved almost like a
shuttle in his hands.  The look of concentration and air of being
accomplices after the fact was kept up for almost five minutes, and quite
insensibly I find I joined in it, and, looking at Lutaif (a Christian, if
such a man there be) at Swani and Mohammed el Hosein, I found that they
too were fascinated, much like a rabbit in a snake-house moves towards
the snake.

It seems, of all the forces which move mankind, humbug is the strongest,
for humbugs are always taken in by humbug, and the very men who practice
on the folly of mankind fall easy victims to the manoeuvres of their
brothers in the art.  Gradually the movement of the dagger grew slower,
then stopped, and then the mystery man struck the patient gently with the
blade upon the arm, broke the two canes across, tied them together in a
bundle, and put them on a ledge just where the thatch is fastened to the
mud walls of the house.

Admirable to observe the look of faith of all the standers-by.  If ever I
witnessed a religious action, that is, taking religio and superstitio (as
I think the Romans did) to be synonymous, I did so then.  Even the
Salvation Army, at its most unreasonable, never succeeded in bringing
such a look of ovine faith upon the faces of its legionaries.  The
patient says that he is greatly benefited, and for the first time in my
life I see a religious ceremony begun, continued, and concluded (with the
result successful), and without apparent sign of a collection being taken
up.

Faith should not be divorced from its true spouse, the offertory.  What
man has brought together, even the act of God should not disjoin, for
faith is so ethereal that, left alone, it pines and languishes in a hard
world, unless sustained by pennies in a plate, in the same manner as the
soul, which, as we all know (nowadays), is eternal, takes its departure
when the body dies, and lies unquickened if the head receives a knock.

The function over, we sit and talk, look at one another's arms, lie as to
our shooting powers, and, after careful examination of my pistol, to my
astonishment, our host produces a large-sized Smith and Wesson revolver,
which it appears he bought in Kahira (Cairo), and seems to think the most
important result of all his pilgrimage.  Hours pass, and still no
messenger, and a fat Saint {88} rolls in, and salutes Swani as an
acquaintance of the pilgrimage.  They kiss and embrace, hugging one
another and alternately placing their beards over one another's right and
left shoulders.  As Burton observes, the Arabs are by far the most
emotional of the Oriental races.  Poetry, or a well-told lamentable tale,
moves them to tears, and friends who meet often weep for joy.

Swani privately imparts to me, in Pigeon Spanish, which he tells the
Saint is Turkish, that the Saint is a humbug, and that when they last met
he would hardly speak to him, for he (Swani) was working as a sailor on
board an English pilgrim steamer, and dressed "a la inglesa, saber del
trousers, catchy sea boots y todo."

Still waiting for the messenger, I fall to observing the difference
between the Arabs and the Berber race.  It is the fashion amongst
travellers in Morocco and Algeria to exalt the Berbers, and run down the
Arabs.  "The noble Shillah race" has become quite a catch-word with every
one who sees a Berber and writes down his impressions.  Curious that no
one talks of the noble "Tuareg race," yet the Tuareg's are Berber of the
Berbers, and their language, known as Tamashek, merely a dialect of the
Berber language, which spreads over the vast area of territory from
Tripoli to the Atlantic Ocean, and from the Mediterranean to Timbuctoo.
Undoubtedly the oldest known inhabitants of the countries which now are
called the Barbary States, they seem to have kept their type and customs
unchanged since first we hear of them in history.  The Arabs found them
in possession of all Morocco, and drove them into the mountains and the
desert beyond, and though they forced Islam upon them, still the two
peoples are anti-pathetic to one another, have blended little, and you
can tell them from one another at a glance.

The Arab, one of the finest types of all the races of mankind, tall,
thin, fine eyes, aquiline noses, spare frames; walking with dignity; a
horseman, poet; treacherous and hospitable; a gentleman, and yet
inquisitive; destroying, as Ibn Jaldun assures us, the civilisation of
every land they conquer, and yet capable of great things, witness Granada
and Damascus; a metaphysician and historian; sensual and yet abstemious;
a people loveable, and yet not good to "lippen to," as Scotchmen say; and
yet perhaps of all the Orientals those who have most impressed themselves
upon the world.

The Berbers, short, squat figures, high cheekbones, small eyes, square
frames, great walkers, only becoming horsemen by necessity, as when the
Arabs have forced them to the desert; as fond of mountains as the Arabs
are of plains; in general agriculturists, whereas the Arab in his true
sphere prefers a pastoral life; the Berbers, little known outside their
mountains, look rather Scottish in appearance, that is, Scotch as
ordinary mortals see that race, and not as seen through "kailyard"
spectacles.  It may be that the Berbers are a noble race, but personally
I should apply the adjective "noble" to the Arabs, and to the Berbers
give some such qualifying phrases as "relatively honest," "tenacious," or
perhaps, best of all, "bourgeois," which, to my way of thinking, best
expresses the characteristics of those Berber tribes who, in the north
side of the Atlas, are dominated by the Sultan's power.  Where they touch
one another to the south upon the confines of the desert, it would be
hard to give the palm for savagery; and the great Berber tribes, Ait
Morghed and Ait {90a} Hannu, have become practically Arabs in their
customs and their use of horses.  The Tuaregs, {90b} on the other hand,
have remained absolutely Berber, and indiscriminately attack Arabs and
Christians, and all who cross their way.

As to the name of Berber, ethnologists, after the fashion of all
scientists, have disagreed, taken one another by the beards, and freely
interchanged (and I suppose as faithfully received) the opprobrious names
which render the disputes of men of science and of theologians so amusing
to those who stand aside and put their tongues out at both sorts of men.

Breber, Baraba, Berber, all three phases of the word are found.  Some
learned men derive the word from the Greek, and make it simply stand for
Barbarian.  Others, again, as stoutly make it Arab, and say it means
"People of the Land of Ber." {90c}

Ibn Jaldun (always an innovator) has his theory, which seems just as good
as any other man's.  He makes the Berbers to descend not from Shem, but
Ham (Cam as the Arabs call him), and relates that Ham had a son called
Ber, whose son was called Mazirg, and that from Ber came the Beranis,
who, in time, and by corruption of the word, turned into Berberes.  If
not convincing, the theory shows invention, and smacks (to me) of the
derivations I have heard hacked out, so to speak, with a scalping knife
round the camp-fire; for, uncivilised and semi-civilised men waste as
much time in seeking to find out how the form of words got crystallised
as if they had diplomas from their universities.

Strangely enough, the people we call Berbers do not know the name, and
call themselves Tamazirght, that is, the noble.  Their language is called
Amzirght, and resembles closely the Tamashek spoken by the Tuaregs, the
dialect of the tribes of the Riff Mountains, and that of the Kabyles of
Algeria. {91a}  The Arabs neither use the word Tamazirght nor the word
Berber, but call the Berber tribes "Shluoch," that is, the outcasts; the
verb is "Shallaha," and the term used for the speech Shillah, {91b} a
sort of Shibboleth in Europeans' mouths, for very few even of those (who,
like the Germans and the Spaniards can pronounce the guttural) ever
attain to the pronunciation of the Arabic and Berber semi-guttural,
semi-pectoral aspiration of this word.

Till the last twenty years the greater portion of the Berber tribes,
although Mohammedans, owned but a nominal allegiance to the Sultan of
Morocco, and lived almost independently under their Omzarghi (lords),
Amacrani (great one), and Amrgari (elders), but nowadays, even in Sus and
in the desert, the Sultan's authority is much more felt.  In fact, until
quite lately they lived as their forefathers--the Getulians,
Melano-getulians, and Numidians--lived before them, with the exception
that being driven to the mountains they had greatly lost the horsemanship
which made them famous to the ancient world.  Even to-day it is not rare
to see them ride, just as the Roman writers said the ancient Numidian
cavalry rode, without a saddle or a bridle, and guiding their horses with
a short stick, which they alternately change from hand to hand to make
them turn.

The words Mazyes, Maziriciae and Mazyces occur in many Greek and Roman
writers, and seem not impossibly to be derived from Amazirght, or from
Mazig, the most ancient form known of their appellation.  Leo Africanus,
himself a Moor, {92} calls them Amarigh, and says of them "they are
strong, terrible, and robust men, who fear neither cold nor snow; their
dress is a tunic of wool over the bare flesh, and above the tunic they
wear a mantle.  Round their legs they have twisted thongs, and this
serves them also for shoes.  They never wear anything on the head at any
season; they rear sheep, mules and asses, and their mountains have few
woods.  They are the greatest thieves, and traitors, and assassins in the
world--" {93}

Even to-day this picture of them holds good in most particulars.  The
Berbers of the mountains seldom wear turbans or anything but a string
tied round their foreheads.  Generally they have a linen shirt to-day,
but often wear the tunic as Leo Africanus says, and now and then one sees
them with the twisted leg bandages like Pifferari.  As to their moral
character, after some small experience, I rather hold to the view of Leo
Africanus, than that of Mr. Walter Harris.  One thing is certain, that
they cannot lie more than the Arabs do, but then the Arabs lie so
prettily, with so much circumstance, and such nice choice of words, that
it all comes to be a matter of individual taste, for there are those who
had rather be deceived with civil manners by an Italian, than be cheated
brutally by a North Briton, for the love of God.

The first of all the tribes we hear of in history as living in Morocco
are the Autoloti of Ptolemy, who seem to be the Holots, who now live in
El Gharb, that is, the country between Tangier and the Sebu.  In Hanno's
Periplus, the same word occurs, and the description of their country
seems to tally with the territory where they live.

Luis de Marmol, who was long prisoner with the Moors in the sixteenth
century, places a people called Holots, near to Cape Azar.  Now it is
certain that the Holots are Berbers, and the testimony of the writers
referred to goes to prove the long continuance of the Berbers in the
land, and also seems to prove that in ancient times, as now, the Berbers
were not nomads, as the Arabs were, but stationary, as they are to-day.
Graberg di Hemso, in his curious "Speechio Geographico di Marocco," says,
"Questi Mazighi della Tingitana fabbricarono, ne quella costa in
vincenanza del capo Bianco la citta di Mazighan, che porta ad oggi il
loro nome di nazione."  He quotes no authority for his statement, and it
is certainly at variance with fact, for Mazagan was founded by the
Portuguese in 1506, and it is called Djedida, _i.e._, New Town, by the
Arabs; still the name of Mazagan may yet commemorate an older town under
the style of Mazighan.

Be all that as it may, the Berbers inhabited Morocco ages before the
Arabs conquered the land, and gave them the religion of the sword.
Tradition says they were once Christians, and certainly in their
embroideries and decorations the cross is used.  Yet, looking at the
matter from an artistic point of view, discounting (for the nonce)
morality, the cross, and honesty, it seems to me that noble is not a term
to use in speaking of the Berber, and I submit it better fits a race such
as the Arabs, who, in the persons of their horses and themselves, have
done so much to refine the type of all those peoples, equine and biped,
whom they have come across.

As night was falling, and a whistling wind springing up from the
mountains, the messenger appeared bringing the news that the Sheikh
refused to let anyone cross the pass, and that there had been a pretty
hot exchange of shots that afternoon between the men of the Beni Sira,
and a troop of cavalry crossing from Sus.  This was a stopper over all,
for it was evident we could not force our way through a road winding by
precipices, held by a mountain tribe.  Remembering the Arab proverb which
runs, "Always ask counsel from your wife, but never act on what she
says," I held a long palaver with Haj Addee, Lutaif and my men, on what
was best to do.  Two courses were now open to me, either to wheel about
and follow the shore road by Agadhir, or else to try the upper and more
difficult pass to Sus, which starts above Amsmiz.  This place was
situated about two days' journey further on, the pass, according to all
reports, took three good days to cross, and having crossed it, we should
still be a long day from Tarudant.

Lutaif had no opinion, and as the rest all counselled Agadhir, except Haj
Swani, who gave it his opinion that he would go wherever I did, I "opted"
for Amsmiz, arguing that to turn back would certainly dishearten my
companions, and if the Howara had been fighting a week ago, they would be
fighting still, and thinking that even if taking the upper road I failed,
I should see more of the interior of the Atlas, than I was likely to do
by any other route.  After having cursed the Beni Sira thoroughly in all
the languages we knew, drank gallons of green tea, sat for an hour or two
listening to stories of the Djinoun, smoked cigarettes and Kiff, and
generally tried to imagine we were not disappointed, we retired to bed,
so as before first light to be upon the road.  Our bedroom had no window,
and gave on the _al fresco_ drawing room I have referred to; all round
the walls were little recesses in which to put things, made in the
thickness of the wall, pouches and powder horns hung from goats' horns
forced underneath the thatch, three long "jezails," all hooped with
silver, one with a Spanish two-real piece, depending from the
trigger-guard, stood in the corner, a lantern made of tin with coloured
glass, gave a red light, upon the floor of mud a Rabat carpet in pattern
like a kaleidoscope or Joseph's coat, was spread; nothing of European
manufacture was there except a large-sized (navy pattern) Smith and
Wesson pistol, which, hanging by a red worsted cord upon the wall, seemed
to project the shadow of the cross upon the room.




CHAPTER IV.


MY journey all next day lay through low hills of reddish argillaceous
earth, cut into gullies here and there by the winter rains, and clothed
with sandaracs, Suddra (Zizyphus lotus) and a few mimosas.  The hills
sloped upwards to the wall-like Atlas, and on the left the desert-looking
plain of Morocco, broken but by the flat-topped hill known as the Camel's
Neck (Hank el Gimel), and bounded by the mountains above Demnat, and the
curve the Atlas range makes to the north-east so as to almost circle
round Morocco city.  We search our hearts, that is, I search my own and
the others' hearts and try to persuade myself that we have acted
prudently in not attempting the Imintanout road.  But when did prudence
console anybody?  Rashness at times may do so, but the prudent generally
(I think) are more or less ashamed of the virtue they profess.  The
Moors, of course, were glad we had risked nothing, for though no cowards
when the danger actually presents itself, indeed, in many cases (as at
the battles with the Spaniards in 1861) showing more desperate courage
than anyone except the Soudanese, still they are so imaginative, or what
you please, that if men talk of danger they will take a five days'
journey to avoid the places where hypothetic peril lurks.  Mohammed el
Hosein, being in his character of ex-slave dealer, what the French call a
"lapin," talked of his adventures in the past, told how he had smuggled
slaves into the coast towns almost before the Christian consul's eyes,
sung Shillah songs in a high, quavering falsetto, and boasted of his
prowess in the saddle, occasionally bursting into a suppressed chuckle at
the idea of taking a Christian into Tarudant.

Almost before we were aware of it, on going down a slope between some
bushes, we found ourselves right in the middle of a crowded market.
These country markets are a feature of Morocco, and, I think, of almost
every Arab country.  Often they are held miles away from any house, but
generally on an upland open space with water near.  When not in use they
reminded me of the "rodeos," on to which the Gauchos, in La Plata, used
to drive their cattle to count, to mark, part out, or to perform any of
the various duties of an "estanciero's" {97} life.  The markets usually
are known by the day of the week on which they are held, as Sok el Arba,
Sok el Thelatta, el Jamiz, and so forth; the Arabs using Arba, Tnain,
Thelatta, "one, two, three" etc., to designate their days.  This market,
in particular, I knew to be the Sok es Sebt, but thought we had been some
distance from it, and all my assurance was required to make my way
amongst at least two thousand people with the dignity which befits a
Moorish gentleman upon a journey.  Arabs and Berbers, Jews and Haratin
(men of the Draa province, of mixed race) were there, all talking at the
fullest pitch of strident voices, all armed to the teeth.  Ovens with
carcases of sheep roasting entire inside them, cows, camels, lines of
small brown tents made to be packed upon a mule and called "Kituns,"
dust, dust, and more dust, produced the smell, as of wild beasts, which
emanates from Eastern crowds.  Moors from Morocco city in white fleecy
haiks I carefully avoided, as being my equals in supposititious rank,
and, therefore, likely to address me.  Berbers in striped brown rags, and
wrapped in the curious mantle, called an "achnif" in Shillah, made of
black wool with fringes and an orange-coloured eye, about two feet in
length, woven into the back, abounded; through them I shoved my horse,
not even looking down when the poor fellows lifted my cloak and kissed
the hem, and, passing through majestically, I heard some mutter, "That
Sherif is very proud for one so thin," fat being amongst Moors a sign of
wealth, as it was evidently amongst the Jews, if we are to take the
testimony of the Old Testament as worthy of belief.

To ride right through a market and pass on would have looked suspicious,
as markets in Morocco form a sort of medium for exchange of news, in the
same manner that in old times the churchyard was a kind of club; witness
the story of the elder who was heard to say--"he would not give all the
sermons in the world for five good minutes of the churchyard clash."  So,
after having gone about a quarter of a mile, we got under some olive
trees (zeitun, from whence the Spanish aceituna, an olive), and, sitting
in the shade, sent Swani to the market to buy some "Schwah," that is,
some of the carcase of a sheep roasted whole "en barbecue."  Various poor
brothers in Mohammed came to assure themselves of my complete good
health; but Mohammed el Hosein informed them the Sherif was ill, and,
giving them some copper coins, they testified to the existence of the one
God, and hoped that He might in His mercy soon make me well.  Being
schooled as to the form to be observed, I looked up slowly, and, raising
one hand, muttered as indistinctly as I could that God was great, and
that we all were in His hands.  This pleased Mohammed el Hosein so much
that when we were alone he assured me I must have been born a Sherif, and
could I but speak Arabic a little less barbarously that our journey would
have been productive, as Sherifs make it a practice, whilst giving small
copper to the poor, to cadge upon their own account from the better
classes, of course for Allah and His Holy Prophet's sake.  Lutaif, who in
his character of Syrian, talked almost incessantly to anyone we met,
elicited that this particular market called "Sok es Sebt," the "Sixth Day
Market," is one of four held in Morocco on a Saturday, thus showing that
the Jews have got most of the trade into their hands, and do not care
that markets should be held upon their holy day.  We tore the "Schwah"
between our fingers, in the "name of God"; it tasted much like leather
cooked in suet; we passed the ablutionary water over our hands, moving
them to and fro to dry, drank our green tea, and were preparing for a
siesta when it was rumoured that an English Jew was soon expected to
arrive.  Having still less acquaintance with Yiddish than with Arabic,
and being certain that the English Israelite would soon detect me, and
fall on one shoulder exclaiming "S'help me, who would have thought of
meeting a fellow-countryman out 'ere!" I saddled up and started as
majestically as I felt I could upon my way.  The start was most
magnificent, Swani and Mohammed helping to arrange my clothes when I had
clambered to my seat, and all went well with the exception that no one
happening to hold Lutaif's off stirrup, and the huge Moorish mule saddle,
called a "Sirijah," being so slackly girthed, that it is almost
impossible to scale it all alone, he fell into the dust, and Ali coming
up to help with a broad grin received a hearty "Jejerud Din!" ("Curse
your religion!"), which caused a coolness during the remainder of the
journey.  Lutaif, though a good Christian and as pious as are most
dwellers on the Lebanon, yet came from the country where, as Arabs say,
"the people all curse God," referring to the imprecation on their
respective creeds, which is most faithfully taken and received between
Maronite and Druse, Christian and Moslem, and all the members of the
various jarring sects who dwell under the shadow of the cedars on those
most theologic hills.  Nestling into the gorges of the hills, and
crowning eminences, were scattered villages of the true Atlas type, built
all of mud, flat roofed, the houses rising one over the other like a
succession of terraces or little castles, and being of so exactly the
same shade as the denuded hills on which they stand as to be almost
impossible to make out till you are right upon them.  At times so like is
village to hill, and hill to village, that I have taken an outstanding
mound of earth to be a house, and many times have almost passed the
village, not seeing it was there.

Riding along and dangling my feet out of the stirrups to make the agony
of the short stirrup leather, hung behind the girths, endurable, it
struck me what peaceful folks the Arabs really were.  Here was a
traveller almost totally unarmed, for the Barcelona and Marseilles
"snap-haunces" we had borrowed at the Palm-Tree House were hardly to be
called offensive weapons; without a passport, travelling in direct
defiance of the Treaty of Madrid, in Arab clothes, asserting that he was
an Arab or a Turk (as seemed convenient).  So, unattended, for defensive
purposes, I rode along quite safely, or relatively safely, except from
all the risks that wait upon the travellers in any country of the world,
such as arise from stumbling horses and the like, fools, and the act of
God.

What was it that stopped a band of Arabs on the lookout for plunder?
What stood between us and a party of the "Noble Shillah race"?  Either or
both could easily have plundered us and thrown our bodies into some silo
and no one would have known.  The truth is, in Morocco, when one reflects
upon the inconveniences of the country, the lonely roads, the places
apparently designed by Providence to make men brigands, and the fact that
almost every Arab owns a horse and is armed at least with a stout knife,
that the inhabitants are either cowardly to a degree, are law-abiding to
a fault, or else deprived by nature of initiative to such extent as to be
quite Arcadian in the foolish way in which they set about to rob.  When I
remembered Mexico not twenty years ago, before Porfirio Diaz turned the
brigands, who used to swarm on every road, into paid servants of the
Government, men on a journey from the Rio Grande to San Luis Potosi all
made their wills and started weighted down with Winchesters, pistols and
bowie-knives, besides a stout machete stuck through their saddle-girths.
So Morocco seemed to me a perfect paradise.

In the republic of the Eagle and the Cactus, the tramways running to the
bullfights at Tacubaya frequently were held up by armed horsemen and the
passengers plundered of everything they had about them.  Stage coaches
often were attacked by "road agents" and everyone inside of them stripped
naked, although the robbers, being caballeros, generally distributed some
newspapers amongst them to cover up their nakedness.  In the old
monarchy, murder was pretty frequent, but it was chiefly the result of
private vengeance, and though the tribes fought bloody battles now and
then, a travelling stranger seldom was molested by them, except he got in
the way.

Real highway robbery seemed not to flourish in Morocco, perhaps because
the atmosphere of monarchy was less congenial to it than the free air of
a republic, though that could surely not have been the case, as virtue is
a plant that grows from the top downwards, and both the President and
Sultan, at the time I write about, are robbers to the core.

Occasionally in the Shereefian Empire, a Jew returning from a fair was
set upon and spoiled, and now and then in lowered voices, as you jogged
along the road, were pointed out to you the place where Haramin {102a}
had slain a man thirty or forty years ago.

This is the case in all those portions of Morocco where Christians
travel; that is to Fez, to Tetuan, from Mazagan to the city of Morocco,
and generally about Tangier, the coast towns and the Gharb. {102b}
Outside those spheres the case is different; and in the Riff, the Sus,
Wad Nun, or even a few miles outside of Mequinez, a Christian's life, or
even that of a Mohammedan from India, Persia or the East, would not be
worth a "flus." {102c}  We rested for our mid-day halt upon the open
plain under the shadow of a great rock, the heat too great to eat, and
passed the time smoking and drinking from our porous water-jars, until
the "enemy," as the Arabs call the Sun, sank down a little; then in the
cool we went on through a wilderness of cactus and oleanders, almond and
fig trees, with palms and apricots, till sandy paths zigzagging between
aloe hedges with a few tapia walls backed by a ruined castle, betokened
we were near Asif-el-Mal.  Asif means river in Shillah, and at the foot
of the crumbling walls a river ran, making things green and most
refreshing to the eyes after ten hours of fighting with the enemy,
enduring dust, and kicking at our animals after the fashion which all men
adopt upon a journey; not that it helps the animals along, but seems to
be a vent for the impatience of the traveller.  Norias {103a} creak, a
camel with a donkey and a woman harnessed to one of them, water pours
slowly out of the revolving "Alcuzas," {103b} and at the trough the
maidens of the village stand waiting to fill their water-jars, shaped
like an amphora, which they carry on the shoulders with a strap braced
round their hands.  Asif-el-Mal boasts a Mellah, and Jews at once came
out to offer to trade with us, to talk, and hear the news.  Intelligent
young Jews, Moises, Slimo, and Mordejai with Baruch, and all the other
names, familiar to the readers of the Old Testament, flock round us.  All
can read and write, can keep accounts, as well as if they had been born
in Hamburg; most have ophthalmia, some are good-looking, pale with great
black eyes, and every one of them seems to be fashioned with an extra
joint about the back.  Yet hospitable, civil and a link with Europe,
which they have never seen; but about which they read, and whose affairs
they follow with the keenest interest, all knowing Gladstone's name and
that of Salisbury; all longing for the day when they can put on European
clothes and blossom out arrayed after the gorgeous fashion of the tribe
in Mogador.  Each of them wears a love-lock hanging upon his shoulder,
and, without doubt, if they were but a little bit more manly-looking,
they would be as fine young men as you could wish to see.

Their race almost controls the town, Berbers are few and hardly any Arabs
but the Sheikh and his immediate following live in the place.  A proof
the land is good, the soil productive, and the water permanent; for when
did Jews set up their tabernacles on an unproductive soil, in a poor
town, or follow the fortunes of any one who was not rich?  Their chief,
Hassan Messoud, a venerable man, dressed in a long blue gown, a spotted
belcher pocket-handkerchief over his head and hanging down behind in a
most unbecoming style, advanced to greet us.  Perhaps he was the finest
Eastern Jew I ever saw; a very Moses in appearance, as he might have been
on Sinai a little past his prime, and yet before the ingratitude of those
he served had broken him.  Beside him walks his daughter, a Rebecca, or
Zohara, bearing fresh butter in a lordly tin dish, and bread baked upon
pebbles, with the impression of the stones upon the underside.  Such
bread the chosen people have left in Spain, and still in Old Castille
amongst the "Cristianos Rancios," who hate the very name of Jew, and
think that the last vestige of their customs has long left Spain, the
self-same bread is eaten at Easter, if I remember rightly; and so,
perhaps, the true believer (Christian this time) unwittingly bakes bread
which yet may damn him black to all eternity.

Hassan comes quickly into the tent, and bids us welcome in Jewish Arabic;
and waiting cautiously till even our own Moors have left the tent, breaks
into Spanish and asks me of what nationality I am.  I tell him from
"God's country," and he says, "Ingliz," to which I answer, "Yes, or
Franciz, for both are one."  He grins, squatting close to the door of the
tent, servile, but dignified, full six feet high, his black beard turning
grey, and hands large, fat, and whitish, and which have never done hard
work.  We talk, and then Hassan takes up his parable.  Glory to Allah he
is rich, and all the Governors are his dear friends, that is they owe him
money; and as he talks the old-time Spanish rhyme comes to my memory,
which, talking of some Jews who came to see a certain king, speaks of
their honeyed words, and how they praised their people and boasted of
their might.

    "Despues vinieron Don Salomon y Don Ezequiel,
    Con sus dulces palabras parecen la miel,
    Hacen gran puja, de los de Israel."

And yet Hassan was but easy of dispense, wearing the clothes of an
ordinary Morocco Jew, with nothing to indicate his wealth.

As we sat talking to him of the exchange in Europe; about the
Rothschilds, Sassoons, Oppenheims, and others of the "chosen" who bulk
largely in the money columns of the daily press of Europe (all of whom he
knew by name), and interchanging views about the late Lord Beaconsfield,
whom Hassan knew as Benjamin ben Israel, the daughters of God's folk came
out upon the house-tops, dressed in red and yellow, with kerchiefs on
their heads, eyes like the largest almonds, lips like full-blown
pomegranates, and looked with pride upon their headman talking to the
Sherif or Christian Caballer, whichever he might be, on equal terms.
Strange race, so intellectual, so quick of wit, so subtle, and yet
without the slightest dignity of personal bearing; handsome, and yet
without the least attraction, conquering the Arabs as they conquer
Saxons, Latins, or all those with whom they come in contact upon that
modern theatre of war--the Stock Exchange.  Hassan Messoud having
protested that by the God of Abraham we were all welcome, retired and
left us to pitch our tent upon a dust-heap in a courtyard, between some
ruined houses and the village wall.

Under the moonlight, the distant plain looked like a vast, steely-blue
sea, the deep, red roads all blotted out, the palms and olives standing
up exactly as dead stalks of corn stand up in an October wheat-field.
The omnipresent donkeys and camels of the East hobbled or straying in the
foreground beneath the walls, and the mysterious, silent, white-robed
figures wandering about like ghosts, the town appeared to me to look as
some Morisco village must have looked in Spain when the Mohammedans
possessed the land, and villages brown, ruinous, and hedged about with
cactus like Asif-el-Mal, clung to the crags, and nestled in the valleys
of the Sierra de Segura, or the Alpujarra.

At daybreak, Hassan Messoud appeared with breakfast at our tent, olives
and meat in a sauce of oil and pepper, not appetising upon an empty
stomach, but not to be refused without offence.  Then, throwing milk upon
the ground from a small gourd, he blessed us, and invoked the God of
Israel to shield us on our way.  A worthy, kindly, perhaps usurious, but
most hospitable Israelite, not without guile (or property), a type of
those Jews of the Middle Ages from whom Shakespeare took Shylock, and in
whose hands the lords, knights, squires, and men-at-arms were as a
Christian stockbroker, cheat he as wisely as he can, is to-day in the
hands of any Jew who, a few months ago, retailed his wares in
Houndsditch; but who, the Exchange attained to, walks its precincts as
firmly as it were Kodesh, and he a priest after the order of Melchizedec.
Riding along the trail which runs skirting the foothills of the Atlas,
and forces us to dive occasionally into the deep dry "nullah," for there
are only six or seven bridges in all Morocco, and none near the Atlas,
the vegetation changes, and again we pass dwarf rhododendrons, arbutus,
and kermes-oak, and enter into a zone of plants like that of southern
Spain, with the exception that here the mignonette becomes a bush, and
common golden rod grows four feet high, with a thick woody stem.  White
poplars, walnuts, elms, and a variety of ash are planted round the
houses.  From the eaves hang strings of maize cobs; bee-hives like those
the Moors left in Spain, merely a hollow log of wood, or roll of cork,
lie in the gardens; grape vines climb upon the trees, producing grapes,
long, rather hard, claret-coloured, and aromatic, the best, I think, in
all the world, and which have fixed themselves upon the memory of my
palate, as have the oranges of Paraguay.

About mid-day, upon a little eminence, we sight the tower of the
Kutubieh, the glory of Morocco; but the city is, so to speak, hull down,
and the white tower seems to hang suspended in the air without
foundations; indeed, it looks so thin at the great distance from which we
see it, as to be but a mere white line standing up in the plain and
pointing heavenwards, that is, if towers built by false prophets do not
point to hell.  All day my horse, really the best I ever rode in all
Morocco, had been uneasy, wanting to lie down; so disregarding the advice
of Mohammed el Hosein to prick him with my knife and pray to God,
somewhat prosaically I got off, and, unsaddling him, found his shoulder
fearfully swollen, and understood how I came possessed of a horse the
like of which few Christians, even for money, get hold of from a Moor.  I
saw at once he had a fistulous sore right through the withers; incurable
without an operation and a long rest.  Then I believed what Mohammed el
Hosein had told me, that the horse was from the other side of the Atlas
and had been used in ostrich-hunting, for a better and more fiery beast I
never rode, and though thin, rough, and in the worst condition, had he
been sound-backed, quite fit to carry me to Timbuctoo.

The Arabs have an idea upon a journey that a man should dismount as
seldom as he can.  They say dismounting and remounting tires the horse
more than a league of road, they therefore sit the livelong day without
dismounting from their seat.  The Gauchos, on the contrary, say it helps
a horse to get off now and then and lift the saddle for a moment,
loosening the girth so that the air may get between the saddle and the
back.  This the Moors hold to be anathema, and Spaniards, Mexicans, and
most horsemen of the south agree that the saddle should not be shifted
till the horse is cool, on pain of getting a sore back.  Who shall decide
when horsemen disagree?  However, the Gauchos all girth very tightly, and
the Arabs scarcely draw the girth at all, their saddles repose on seven
(the number is canonical) thick saddle cloths, and are kept in their
place more by the breastplate than the girth.  It may be therefore that,
given the loose girth, short stirrup leathers, and their own flowing
clothes, personal convenience has more to do with the custom of not
getting off and on than regard for the welfare of their beast.  The Arabs
in Morocco, though fond of horses, treat them roughly and foolishly; at
times they cram them with unnecessary food, at times neglect them; their
feet they almost always let grow too long, their legs they spoil by too
tight hobbling, and if upon a journey their horse tires they ride him
till he drops.

Across the mountains and amongst the wilder desert tribes, this is not
so, and travellers all agree that the wild Arab really loves his horse;
but he has need of him to live, whereas inside Morocco horses are used
either for war or luxury, or because the man who rides them cannot afford
a mule.  The pacing mule, throughout North Africa, is as much valued as
he was in Europe in the Middle Ages, and commands a higher price than any
horse; yet whilst allowing that he is dogged as a Nonconformist, on the
road, sober and comfortable, to my eye, a man wrapped in a white
burnouse, perched on a saddle almost as large as the great bed of Ware,
looks fitter to be employed to guard a harem than to enjoy the company of
the houris inside.  Necessity (in days gone by) has often forced me to
ride horses with a "flower" {108} on their backs or with a sore which
rendered every step they made as miserable to me as it was hell to them;
but as on these occasions I rode either before an Indian Malon, {109a} or
for the dinner of a whole camp, so I at once determined that,
notwithstanding any risk, I would purvey me a new horse at the next
stopping place.  As it turned out, the changing horses and the talk which
ensued, as the owner of the horse and I tried to deceive each other about
our beasts, was the occasion of my never reaching Tarudant.  At least I
think so, and if it was, some better traveller will do that which I
failed in doing, write a much better book than any I could write, and if
he be a practical and pushful man spare neither horses on the road, nor
stint the public of one iota of his "facts," for to the pushful is the
kingdom of the earth.  As to what sort of kingdom they have made of it,
it is beyond the scope of this poor diary to enquire.

We crossed the Wad el Kehra, and early in the afternoon tied up our
animals under a fig-tree, with a river running hard by, a stubble field
in front, and Amsmiz itself crowning a hill upon our right.  Amongst the
"algarobas," {109b} fig-trees and poplars, swallows flit, having come
south, or perhaps migrated north from some more southern land.

At the entrance of the town stood the palace of the Kaid, an enormous
structure made of mud and painted light rose-pink, but all in ruins, the
crenellated walls a heap of rubbish, the machicolated towers blown up
with gunpowder.  The Kaid, it seems, oppressed the people of the town and
district beyond the powers of even Arabs and Berbers to endure; so they
rebelled, and to the number of twelve thousand besieged the place, took
it by storm, and tore it all to pieces to search for money in the walls.

Most people in Morocco if they have money, hide it in the walls of their
abode, but the Kaid of Amsmiz was wiser, and had sent all his to Mogador.
He fought to the last, then cutting all his women's throats, mounted his
favourite horse and almost unattended "maugre all his enemies, through
the thickest of them he rode," leaving his stores well-dressed with
arsenic, so that, like Samson in his fall, he killed more of his enemies
than in his life.  To-day he is said to live in Fez, greatly respected, a
quiet old Arab with a fine white beard, whose greatest pleasure is to
tell his rosary.

Curious how little the Oriental face is altered by the storms of life.  I
knew one, Haj Mohammed el --, --a scoundrel of the deepest dye--who in
his youth had poisoned many people, had tortured others, assassinated
several with his own hand, and yet was a kindly, courteous, venerable
gentleman, whose hobby was to buy any eligible young girl he heard of, to
stock his harem.  One day I ventured to remark that he was getting rather
well on in years to think of such commodities.  He answered; "Yes, but
then I buy them as you Christians buy pictures--to adorn my house; by
Allah, my heirs will be the gainers by my mania."  Yet the man's face was
quiet and serene, his eyes bright as a sailor's, his countenance as
little marred by wrinkles as those one sees upon the Bishops' benches in
the House of Lords; and as he stroked his beard, and told his beads, he
seemed to me a patriarch after the type of those depicted in the Old
Testament.  Perhaps it is the lack of railways, with their clatter,
smoke, and levelling of all mankind to the most common multiple; but
still it is the case--an Eastern scoundrel's face is finer far than that
a Nonconformist Cabinet Minister displays, all spoiled with lines, with
puckers round the mouth, a face in which you see all natural passion
stultified, and greed and piety--the two most potent factors in his
life--writ large and manifest.

An orange grove, backed by a cane-brake, with the canes fluttering like
flags, was near to us; cows, goats, and camels roamed about the outskirts
of the town, as in Arcadia--that is, of course, the Arcadia of our
dreams--or of Theocritus.

Jews went and came, saluting every one, and being answered: "May Allah
let you finish out your miserable life"; but yet as pleased as if they
had been blessed.  Their daughters came, like Rebecca, to the well--all
carrying jars--unveiled, and yet secure, for in this land few Moors cast
eyes upon the daughter of a Jew.

Upon the ramparts, shadowy white-robed figures, with long guns, go to and
fro, guarding the town from hypothetic enemies.  Through an arch, between
two palm-trees, the Kutabieh rises, distant and slender, and the white
haze around its base shows where Marakesh lies.  On every hedge are
blackberries and travellers' joy; whilst a large honeysuckle, in full
flower, smells better than all Bucklersbury in simple time; a jay's harsh
cry sounds like the howl of a coyote, and Europe seems a million miles
away.  In the evening light, the footpaths, which cut every hill, shine
out as they had all been painted by some clever artist, who had diluted
violet with gold.

Nothing reminds one that within half a mile a town, in which three
thousand people live, is near, except the footpaths which zigzag in and
out, crossing the fields, emerging out of woods, and intersecting one
another, as the rails seem to do at Clapham Junction.  A fusillade tells
that a Sherif from the Sus has just arrived; all Amsmiz sally forth to
meet him mounted upon their best, charging right up to the Sherif, and
firing close to his horse--wheeling and yelling like Comanches--making a
picture shadowy, fantastic, and unbelievable to one who but three weeks
ago had left a land of greys.  The Sherif's people open fire, and when
the smoke clears off the Sherif himself, mounted upon a fine white horse,
rides slowly forward, holding a green flag.  The people fall into a long
line behind him, which, by degrees, is swallowed up under the horse-shoe
gateway of the town.  Mohammed el Hosein, whom I had sent to look out for
a horse, appears with a little, undersized, and brachycephalic Shillah,
leading a young, black horse, unshod, with feet as long as coops, in good
condition and sound in wind and limb, and with an eye the blackest I have
seen in mortal horse--a sign of perfect temper; incontinently I determine
in my mind to buy him at all cost.  We praise our horses--that is, the
Shillah praises his--but I, as a Sherif, am far too grand to do so at
first hand; so Swani lies like a plumber about mine--which stands and
kicks at flies, and looks--like horses do when one is just about to part
with them--much more attractive than one ever thought before.

The Shillah leads up his horse, which I pretend hardly to notice; and,
luckily for me, he speaks no Arabic.  Then he looks at my horse, and, I
imagine, grabs him, for Swani springs upon the horse's back, and runs him
_ventre a terre_ over the rough stubble, and, stopping with a jerk--the
horse's feet cutting the ground like skates--gets off, and says that,
help him, Allah, the horse is fit for Lord Mohammed, and that I only sell
him because I am so tender-hearted about the sore upon his back.

This makes the Shillah think there is a "cat shut up inside," {112} for
no one sells a horse for a sore back amongst his tribe.  We try his
horse--that is, Mohammed el Hosein makes him career about the field
without a bridle; and then I mount him, and display what I consider
horsemanship.  Nine dollars and the horse?  By Allah, seven; but the
Shillah, who has not tried my horse, looks at his colt, and says: "I
brought him up, fed him with camel's milk, rode him to war, and he is six
years old; nine dollars and the horse."  We shake our heads; and he,
mounting his horse, yells like a Pampa Indian, and charging through the
cane-brake bare-backed, and with nothing but a string on one side of his
horse's neck, rushes up a steep bank and disappears, riding like a
Numidian.  I say it was a pity I did not give the nine, but am assured
all is not over, and that the man has probably gone to bring back "a
bargain-striker" to complete the sale.  Throughout Morocco, when animals
change hands, the bargaining lasts sometimes for a week; and at the last
a man appears, sometimes a passer-by, who is pressed into the
undertaking, who, seizing on the bargainers' right hands, drags them
together, and completes the deal.

In about half-an-hour our man comes back, bringing the local "Maalem,"
that is Smith, who talks and talks, and as he talks surveys me from the
corner of his eye.  At last the Shillah yields, takes the seven dollars,
counts them with great attention, tapping each one of them upon a stone
to see if "it speaks true," and then mounting my horse essays its paces.
As it fell out the horse, which galloped like a roe, with Swani, set off
with a plunge which almost sent the Shillah over one side, and turning
flew to the mules and stopping by them refused to move a step.  The
Shillah thought, of course, he had been done, and I had most reluctantly
to mount the horse and make him go.  We give our word the horse is not a
jibber, and swear by Allah if he is, and the Shillah will send him back
to Mogador, he shall receive his money and his own horse on our return.

He takes our word at once and grasps my hand, puts his own bridle on my
horse, and bending down kisses his own horse underneath the neck, and
says, in Shillah, that he hopes I shall never ill-treat it, I promise
(and perform) and bid my own horse farewell after my fashion, and the
Shillah mounts and rides out of my life towards the town.  A little dour
and fish-eyed, turbanless and ragged man, legs bowed from early riding,
face marked with scars, a long, curved knife stuck through a greasy belt,
hands on a horse as if they came from heaven; his farewell to his horse
was much more real than is the leavetaking of most men from their wives,
and moved me to the point of being about to call him back and break the
bargain, had I not reflected that the pang once over, the poor Shillah
would never in his life be at the head of so much capital. {114}

In less than half-an-hour the Maalem had shod the horse, shortening its
feet with an iron instrument shaped like a trowel, and nailing on the
shoes, which almost cover the whole foot, with home-made nails; he stays
to guard our animals (and spy upon us), and we prepare for our first al
fresco night.

Unlike America, where travellers sleep out of doors from Winnipeg to
Patagonia, in the East, except in crossing deserts, to sleep out of doors
without a tent is quite exceptional, and yet one never sleeps so soundly
as on a fine night beside a fire, one's head upon a saddle, feet to the
fire, and the stars to serve as clock.  Even the wandering Arabs
generally carry tents, and thus, in my opinion, all through the East much
of the charm of camping out is lost.  All that we do is a convention, and
Arabs are not savages, but on the contrary even the Bedouins are highly
civilised after their fashion, and the civilised man must always have a
roof, even of canvas, over his head to shut out nature.  Not but that
your common Moors, like to "your Kerne of Ireland" in ancient days, do
not sleep out, for nothing is more common than on a rainy night, in
camping at a village, for the Sheikh to send a guard to watch a
traveller's horses, and for the guard to "liggen in their hoods" all the
night long.  So at Amsmiz, under a fig tree, I made my camp, despite the
protests of Lutaif, the Maalem, {115} and Mohammed el Hosein, who joined
in saying that it was not decent for a man of my (Moorish) position to
camp outside the town.  Swani himself was rather nervous, and, as it
turned out, there may have been some risk, for a strong "war-party," as
they would say upon the frontiers in America, drove almost every head of
cattle belonging to the town that very night.  We slept as sound as
door-mice, and the Maalem, who kept watch with an old muzzle-loading
rifle stamped with the Tower mark, slept like a top, knowing the duty of
a most ancient guard, for during the night I thought I heard a noise of
people passing, and waking saw him fast asleep with the old rifle by his
side full cocked, and with a bunch of rushes in its muzzle either for
safety or for some other reason not made plain.  Darwin relates the
peculiar and ineffaceable impression a night he slept under the stars,
upon the Rio Colorado, in Patagonia, made on him.  He says the cold
blue-looking sky, the stars, the silence, the dogs keeping watch, the
horses feeding tied to their picket pins, and the sense of being cut off
from all mankind, appealed to him more than the beauty of the tropics,
the grandeur of the Andes, or anything that he remembered in his travels.
And he was right.  Nothing appeals to civilised and to uncivilised alike
so much as a fine night when one sleeps near one's horse, and wakes
occasionally to listen to the noises of the night.  Men from the counter,
from the university, riff-raff of towns cast out like dross into a
frontier territory, all feel the spell.  The Indians and the Arabs feel
it, but do not know exactly what they feel; still, in a house, under a
roof, they pine for something which I am certain is the open air at
night.

'Tis said some ancient wise philosopher once took an Indian from the
southern Pampa and showed him all the delights, the pomps and vanities,
of Buenos Ayres: showed him the theatre with Christian girls dancing half
naked, took him to Mass at the cathedral, led him along the docks, let
him fare sumptuously, and then accompanied him to gaze upon the
multifarious faces of strange women, who used to lean from almost every
balcony and beckon to the stranger in that town; and then the Indian,
fed, instructed, with his mind enlarged by all the pomp and circumstance
of a Christian town, was asked to say if he liked Buenos Ayres or the
Pampa best.  The story goes that, after pondering a while, the Indian
answered: "Buenos Ayres very large, beautiful things, very wonderful,
Christian women kind to poor Indian, but the Pampa best."  A brutish
answer of a brute mind.  'Tis patent that the man was quite incapable of
understanding all he saw; no doubt our gospel truths were all unknown to
him, the philosopher who took him round to haunts of low debauchery
either a fool or knave; but on the other hand, riddle me this: how many
men of cultivation, education, and the rest have seen the Pampa, prairie,
desert, or the steppes, and putting off the shackles of their
bringing-up, stayed there for life, and become Indians, Arabs, Cossacks,
or Gauchos; but who ever saw an Indian, Arab, or wild man of any race
come of his own accord and put his neck into the noose of a sedentary
life, and end his days a clerk?

And so of faiths.  The missionary for all his preaching would never mark
a sheep, had he but gospel truths alone to draw upon.  What brings the
savage to the fold is interest, guns, cotton cloth, rum, tea, sugar,
coffee, and the thousand things for which a commentator might search the
Scriptures through from end to end and not find mentioned.  In Central
Africa the Christian and the Moslem missionary are both at work marking
their sheep as fast as may be, and each one as much convinced as is the
other of the justice of his cause.  With a fair field, without the
adventitious aids of Christian goods, the Moslem wins hands down.

The Christian comes and says "My negro friends, believe in Christ," and
the poor negro, always eager to believe in anything, assents, and then
the Christian sets him to black his boots, and all that negro's life he
never rises to an equality with his converter.  Then comes the Mussulman
and cries "Only one God."  The fetish worshipper who has had a dozen all
his life, thinks it a little hard to give them up, but does so, becomes a
Moslem, and is eligible to be Sultan, Basha, Vizier, Kaid, Sheikh, or
what not; so that, put rum and rifles on one side, let preaching be the
test, in fifty years from the Lake Chad to Cape Town there would not be a
single negro, except a few who stuck to their old gods, outside Islam.

I slept but fitfully, knowing if I could leave Amsmiz without suspicion
that I was sure to reach my journey's end.  The night wore on, the
sapphire sky changing to steely-blue; as the muezzin called at the Feyer,
{117} great drops of dew hung from the leaves; up from the river rose the
metallic croaking of the frogs; Canopus was just setting; across the sky,
the mirage of the dawn stole stealthily, the mules stood hanging down
their heads upon the picket rope, a jackal howled somewhere far out upon
the plain; Allah perhaps looked down, and not far off from me baited
quite peacefully my (new) destrere on "herbes fine and good."




CHAPTER V.


PLEASING to wake up under the fig trees with all our cloaks and blankets
wet with dew, to find our guard, the Maalem, still sound asleep, and be
accosted by a tracker who informed us that many of the cattle of the town
had been driven off the night before, and who would hardly believe that
all our animals were safe.  Soon parties from the town, armed and muffled
up in cloaks against the morning air, rode out from underneath the
horseshoe gateway, and spread in all directions, trying to strike the
trail of the "mad herdsmen," as they were called along the Highland
Border in the days before prosperity had rendered Scotland the home of
commonplace.

Though sharp of eye, it did not strike me that the Arabs and Shillah were
experienced trackers.  They rode about too much, and must have crossed
the trail of the lost cattle a hundred times, and I kept thinking that an
"Arribeno" {119} from the River Plate would have done better work than
the whole tribe.  Still, as they scattered on the hills, their white
clothes just appearing now and then behind the clumps of trees, as they
quartered all the ground, they fell effectively into the middle distance,
and no doubt if they never found their cattle, on the first fine night
they would recoup themselves from some neighbouring village in the hills.
Cattle and horse-stealing, with an occasional higher flight into the
regions of abduction of young girls, seem to be staple industries in all
pastoral countries, and nowhere but in western Texas are taken very
seriously; but there the horse-thief hangs.  Camped once outside a
village called Bel-arosis, on the road from Tangier to Rabat, a raiding
party attacked the place upon a rainy night, fought quite a lively
action, the bullets coming through my tent, drove off some horses and
several yoke of oxen, and in the morning the Kaid rode up on horseback,
his followers behind him, in just the spirit that a gentleman at home
starts out to hunt.  He praised his God for his good luck, and said he
reckoned (by Allah's help) to retake all the "Creagh," and drive above a
thousand dollars' worth of sheep, of cattle, and horses, from the weakest
neighbours of the nearest hostile tribe he met.

In all the actions that take place consequent upon these cattle raids,
but few are slain, for though both the Arabs and the Berbers all have
guns, their style of fighting is a survival from the time they carried
bows.  They rarely charge, and never engage hand-to-hand, but gallop to
and fro and fire their guns with both eyes shut, or, turning on their
horses, fire over the tail; so few are killed, except the prisoners, who
generally are butchered in cold blood, if they are not of such account as
to be worth a ransom.  A merry, pleasant life enough for able-bodied men,
and not unhealthy, and one that makes them singularly bad subjects for
missionary work.  So stony is the ground in the vineyard of the tribes,
that up to now I never heard of any missionary so bold or foolish as to
attempt to dig.  A day will come, no doubt, when their hearts will prove
more malleable; but I fear before that time their bodies will have to be
much wrought upon by rifles, revolvers, and the other civilising agents
which commonly precede the introduction of our faith.

Leaving Amsmiz, the road to Sus leads over foothills all of red
argillaceous earth and fissured deeply here and there by winter rains.
Now and then strange effects of coloured earth, blue, yellow, green, and
mauve, diversify the scene.  The road leads through a straggling oak wood
and emerges at a village, where, in the middle, the county council is
assembled in a thatched mosque.  Mosques serve for council chambers,
meeting places, and in villages for travellers to sleep in, for
throughout Morocco the sanctuary is never closed, and thus the people
feel their God is always there, and not laid up in lavender for six days
in the week.

The Maalem who had accompanied us as guide, and as a guarantee that we
were creditable folk--for in the wilder districts of Morocco travellers
take a man in every district to convoy them to the next--had reached his
limit, and, laying down his gun, entered the mosque to get another man.
What he said there I do not know; if he had doubts perhaps he uttered
them, at any rate, after a most unseasonable wait, which kept us all on
pins and needles, he emerged, bringing a most ill-favoured tribesman, who
came up to me and, kissing my clothes, asked for my blessing.  I gave it
him as well as I was able, but fancied he was not satisfied, as he
retired muttering in Shillah, of which I did not understand a word.  The
Maalem bade us good-bye, and asked for cartridges, which, of course, we
gave, but how they benefited him is a moot point, for they were intended
for a small-sized Winchester; he drew his charge and crammed the four or
five cartridges we gave him into his old Tower gun, but as I did not pass
by Amsmiz on my return, I have no information how he fared when he
touched off the piece.

Little by little the road got worse until we entered a tremendous gorge,
just like a staircase, which made the worst roads in the Sierra Morena
look like Piccadilly by comparison.  Only a mule, an Iceland pony, or a
horse bred in the mountain districts of Morocco could have coped with
such a road, and, as it was, the efforts of the poor brutes were pitiable
to see.  Under our feet, at a great depth below, the Wad el N'fiss boiled
furiously amongst the stones, winding and rewinding like a watch spring,
and forcing us to cross it many times, when its swift current proved so
formidable that, although not more than three feet deep, we had to enter
altogether in a group to keep our feet.  As we were toiling up a steep
incline, a shouting brought our hearts into our mouths, and, looking
back, we saw two mountaineers rushing to intercept us, from a
neighbouring hill.  No time for any consultation, or to do more than cock
our miserable guns and sit quite meekly waiting for the worst.  On came
the mountaineers, bounding from stone to stone till they appeared upon
the road and blocked our way.  Long guns, curved daggers, and almost
naked save for their long woollen shirts, their side locks flying in the
wind, they looked most formidable, and poured out at once a volume of
guttural Shillah which sounded menacing.  Mohammed-el-Hosein, who with
Ali the muleteer spoke Shillah, interpreted to Swani, who, half in Arabic
and half in Spanish (which he called Turkish) informed me what they said.







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