“I see. Thank you, Baumann.”
Gerard de Montignac was swimming in deep waters. He was not imaginative but he had imagination. He comprehended, though he did not feel, the call and glamour of the East; and nowhere in the world is there a land more vividly Eastern in its spirit, its walled cities, its nomad tribes, and its wide spaces, than this northwestern corner of Africa. Gerard had lived long enough in it to see men yield to it, as to a drug, forsake for it all that is lovely and of good repute. Was this what had happened to his friend? He wondered sorrowfully. Paul was friendly, cheerful, gay, but none the less really and truly a man of terrific loneliness. Walled about always. Gerard tried to think of an intimate confidence which Paul had ever made him. He could not remember one. He was the very man to whom the strange roads might call with the voices of the Sirens. It might be . . . it might be. Gerard de Montignac never sought again for traces of his lost friend. He left the search to the Administration and the Administration had other work to do.
CHAPTER XIX
In the Sacred City
The sharp lesson, then the goodwill; and always even during the infliction of the lesson, fair dealing between man and man, and nothing taken without payment on the spot. This, the traditional policy of the great French Governors, was carried out in Fez. Only the lesson was not so sharp as many thought it should have been. But the policy achieved its end, and it was not long before many a Fasi, like his kinsmen of the Chaiouïa, would proudly assure you that he was a Frenchman. The work of settlement and order could be transferred to other regions, and Gerard de Montignac went with it. He served in the mountains about Taza during the autumn of that year, and then went upon long leave. He was in Paris for Christmas, and there, amidst its almost forgotten lights and brilliancies, took his pleasures like a boy. He hunted in the Landes, returned to Morocco, and a year later, after a campaign in the country south of Marrakesch, got his step and the command of his battalion.
For three months afterwards he was stationed at Meknes and drew his breath. He had the routine of his work to occupy his mornings, and in this city of wide spaces and orchards to engross his afternoons. Meknes with the ruined magnificence of its palaces of dead kings, its huge crumbling stables, the great gate of mosaic built through so many years by so many captives of the Sallee pirates, and so many English prisoners from Tangier; that other gate hardly less beautiful to the north of the town; its groves of olives; its long crumbling crenellated walls reaching out for miles into the country with no reason, and with no reason abruptly ending—Meknes satisfied the æsthetic side of him as no other city in that enchanted country. He delighted in it as a woman in her jewels.
But in the autumn the Zarhoun threatened trouble for the hundredth time—the Zarhoun, that savage mountain mass with its sacred cities which frowns above the track from Meknes to Rabat and through which the narrow path from Tangier to Fez is cleft. It was decided that the sacred cities must at last throw open their gates and the Zarhoun be brought into line. The work was entrusted to Gerard de Montignac.
“You will have a mixed battalion of infantry, a squadron of Chasseurs, a section of mitrailleuses, and a couple of mountain guns,” said the Commander-in-Chief. “But I think you will not need to use them. It will be a demonstration, a reconnaissance in force, rather than an attack.”
Thus one morning of June, Gerard led his force northwards over the rolling plain, onto the higher ground, and marching along the flank of Djebel Zarhoun, camped that night close to the tall columns and broken arches of Volubilis. In front of the camp, a mile away, dark woods of olive trees mounted the lower slopes, and above them the sacred city of Mulai Idris clung to the mountain sides, dazzlingly white against the sombre hill and narrowing as it rose to an apex of one solitary house. In the failing light it had the appearance of a gigantic torrent, which, forcing itself through a tiny cleft, spread fanwise as it fell, in a cascade of foam.
There was no fighting, as the Commander-in-Chief had predicted. At nine o’clock the next morning the Basha, followed by three of his notable men, rode down on their mules through the olive groves, and, being led to the little tent over which floated the little red flag of the commander, made his obeisance.