An hour more and we arrive at Mehedia, formerly a city of the Portuguese, to-day a vast ruin in the midst of which a miserable Arab hamlet is concealed. We camp near the decaying walls, where storks and men, gifted with equal intelligence, observe us with a silent curiosity. This Mehedia was once a flourishing port, and the fortifications left by the Portuguese are very stately and must have been at one time thoroughly impregnable. To-day, however, everything is dilapidated and forsaken.
THE BASHA PROVES HIS PROWESS
A PART OF THE IMPERIAL HAREM
THE GREAT WALL OF SALLI
We descend to the beach and enjoy a dip in the salty waters where the River Sebu meets the sea. Above us loom the imposing walls and bastions of Mehedia, silent and abandoned, yet eloquent of the vanished glory of Portugal. In the thought of this empty fortress, so formidable in aspect, so monumentally defenseless in its desolation, there is something almost awe-inspiring. Its few miserable human denizens seem like dejected ghosts gliding through the crumbling portals, haunting the roofless palaces. The stork population on the wall-tops and the battlements seems more real. The Moors declare, "Storks are men who have come from islands far away to the west upon the great ocean to see Morocco. Like all the world they know there is no other land to compare with it; they abandon their outward form of men, and come hither to behold it. Therefore we give them hospitality and do not harm them." Nay, the Moors do more than this for the long-legged dwellers on their house-tops—they maintain in Fez a hospital for invalid storks, founded, so runs the legend, in this wise: Several hundred years ago a stork came to the Kadi of Fez bringing a pearl necklace that it had stolen. As the owner could not be found, with the proceeds from the sale of the necklace, the Kadi bought a house that is still in existence, called the Stork House, an institution where storks are received and treated as human beings.[a]
BEFORE ENTERING SALLI