READY FOR THE BATTLE WITH THE BREAKERS
Embarkation at Rabat is easier to plan than to accomplish. No ship can cross the bar; if the wind blows from the west, the huge native lighters cannot climb over the inrolling breakers, and the ship, after a courteous delay, steams off, leaving the drenched, discomfited passengers to return shoreward and possess their souls in patience until there comes the happy conjunction of a passing steamer and a calmer day.
FAREWELL!
Fortune, however, favored us in this as it did in all other things during our wanderings in Morocco. True, the breakers are rolling mountain-high across the bar, the forty-foot lighter is tossed like an egg-shell on their crests, or dropped with awful suddenness into abysses formed between cliffs of green transparent water. But our sturdy crew of twenty Salli men, descendants of the famous Rovers, attack the billows with that dogged perseverance that made their fathers the masters of the sea and all that sailed upon it. Wave after wave sweeps past—green-robed, with draperies foaming white, as if the cohorts of the sea were striving to surpass the Moorish squadrons in a glorious lab-el-baroud—a powder play where foam and spray and the roar of waters supplant the flowing burnooses, rolling smoke, and din of volley firing.
This is our last impression of Morocco, this overwhelming "fantasia" of the billows. And as we look back through clouds of flying spray at the grim Kasbah of Rabat, at the white city, and the smiling hillsides roundabout, we say with Pierre Loti, "Farewell, dark Moghreb, Empire of the Moors, mayst thou remain, many years yet, immured, impenetrable to the things that are new! Turn thy back upon Europe! Let thy sleep be the sleep of centuries, and so continue thine ancient dream. And may Allah preserve to the Sultan his unsubdued territories and his waste places carpeted with flowers, there to do battle as in old times the Paladins, and gather in his harvest of rebel heads! May Allah preserve to the Arab race its mystic dreams, its immutability scornful of all things, and its gray rags; may he preserve to the Moorish ruins their shrouds of whitewash, and to the mosques their inviolable mystery!"
FOOTNOTE
[a] Budgett Meakin—"The Land of the Moors" Mr. Meakin's three volumes, "The Moorish Empire," "The Land of the Moors," and "The Moors" are recommended to readers who desire fuller information concerning Morocco and its people.