The Truants

by A. E. W. Mason

It was an awkward moment, but the men of Warrisden's party assumed, with what skill they could, an air of unconcern. Trouble was very near to them. It needed only that one of those wild tribesmen should reach out his hand and seize the bridle of a horse. But no hand was reached out. The Z'mur were caught in a moment of indecision. They sat upon their horses motionless. They let the Europeans pass.

Ibrahim, however, drew no comfort from their attitude.

"It is because they wish rifles and ammunition from the Government," he said. "Therefore they will avoid trouble until they have got them. But with the next party it will not be so."

There are three waterfalls in Morocco, and of those three one falls in a great cascade between red cliffs into a dark pool thirty feet below, close by the village of Medhuma. By this waterfall they lunched, the while Ibrahim bared his right arm to the shoulder, stretched himself full length upon the ground, and, to the infinite danger of the bystanders, practised shooting with his revolver. They lunched quickly and rode on. Towards evening, above a group of trees on a hill, they saw here and there a minaret.

"Mequinez," exclaimed Ibrahim. "Schoof! Mequinez!"

In a little while fragments of thick wall began to show, scattered here and there about the plain. Brown walls, high and crumbling to rain, walls that never had been walls of houses, but which began and ended for no reason. They were all that was left of the work of Mulai Ismail, who, in the seventeenth century, had built and planned buildings about this town until death put an end to all his architecture. There was to be a wall across the country, from Fez to Morocco city far away in the south, so that the blind, of which this kingdom still has many, and then was full, might pass from one town to another without a guide. Part of that wall was built, and fragments of it rise amongst the oleanders and the bushes to this day.

The travellers entered now upon a park. A green mossy turf spread out soft beneath the feet of their horses, dwarf oaks made everywhere a pleasant shade; Stretton had lost sight now of the minarets, and no sign of Mequinez was visible at all. The ground sloped downwards, the track curved round a hill, and suddenly, on the opposite side of a valley, they saw the royal city, with its high walls and gates, its white houses, and its green-tiled mosques, and its old grey massive palaces stretch along the hillside before their eyes.

One of the soldiers rode forward into the town to find the Basha and present his letters. A troop of men came out in a little time and led the travellers up the cobbled stones through a gateway into the wide space before the Renegade's Gate, that wonderful monument of Moorish art which neither the wear of the centuries nor the neglect of its possessors has availed to destroy. Its tiles are broken. The rains have discoloured it, stones have fallen from their places. Yet the gate rises, majestic yet most delicate, beautiful in colour, exquisite in shape, flanked with massive pillars, and surmounted by its soaring arch, a piece of embroidery in stone, fine as though the stone were lace. By the side of this arch the camp was pitched just about the time when the horses and mules are brought down to roll in the dust of the square and to drink at the two great fountains beyond the gate.

Later in that evening there came a messenger from the Basha with servants bearing bowls of kouss-kouss.

"Fourteen soldiers will ride with you to-morrow," he said, "for the country is not safe. It will be well if you start early, for you have a long way to go."