The Moorish tent is quite different from the Arab. It is of white cotton, and of the ordinary form of the officers’ tent in all European armies. The curtain is more upright, and the roof slants up. The mechanism is different. The cover and the curtain are in separate parts. The roof spreads out with a fringe hanging round it; if shade only is required the curtains are not added. It stands as a large umbrella; the stem nine or ten feet high, and the top thirty feet in circumference. Against high winds they have guys or stays, which, like our cables of a ship, they lay out to windward. The operation of pitching commences with securing those stays, which are three in number; then the cords of the umbrella are spread, and then the curtain is fitted round. It is between five and six feet deep, of double cloth, strengthened by thin rods like the bones of ladies’ stays, and one to each cord of the roof. This curtain is in one piece—is carried in a roll, and when fitted, the roll is set upright, and the right side of the place left for the door, and so unwound and laced all round till it is brought to the door on the other side; it is then fastened below by small pegs. There is a strong binding round the top, and this, with the rods, gives solidity to the edifice, without in any perceptible degree increasing the weight or cumbersomeness for carriage. It is much more easily managed from being in two parts, and the superior and moveable stays are of the greatest advantage. Having cut out tents, and having more than once had to repair the loss of them by the work of my own servants, I am, perhaps, qualified beyond most dwellers in houses to speak on the subject. Putting aside magnificence or grandeur, and having in view use and adaptation, I may say I never knew what a tent was until I had seen those of Morocco.[307] It is ornamented with a golden ball; the flaming sword on the cloths of the roof and the valance imitates the crenulated top of a battlement. The colour of these devices is blue.
In the description of the Jewish Tabernacle we have exactly the Moorish manner of pitching. Blue is the first colour mentioned; purple and red follow. But these may have been added as distinctive to the sacred tent, as they were to the priestly garments; and as blue distinguished the common clothing of the Israelites, so might it be expected to be the mark of his tent. The manner of lacing the curtain to the roof is precisely that described in Exodus, xxv. 45: “Thou shalt make loops of blue upon the edge of the one curtain from the selvage in the coupling, and also on the other curtain. Fifty loops shalt thou make in the one curtain, and fifty loops shalt thou make in the other, so that the loops shall take hold of one another.” These fifty loops were to be of the length of twenty-eight cubits, so that they would be ten inches apart. This is precisely the manner in which the curtain of the Moorish tent is fitted to the roof, loop through loop all the way round, and the loops are not far from the above distance; and, probably, in the larger fittings of the Sultan’s establishment, they coincide with the dimensions laid down by Moses.
While at Rabat I had failed in every endeavour to see the Shereffean encampment. I at last was gratified, as on quitting the city we passed through it. I, however, neglected to take note of it in these nightly memoranda, having been too absorbed by the new life that was presented to me.
Ten thousand cavalry—the horses picketed close down, or rather packed, in front and rear of the line of tents—were encamped in one enormous and unbroken figure. It was an oblong, lengthways stretching east and west. The centre was kept clear and unencumbered, and there stood the Sultan’s tents, though untenanted by him: the appearance presented was that of a miniature fortress, in the centre of a clear esplanade—the wall or curtain about nine feet, the turrets at the corners a little more; the cornices pointed to represent the crenulated battlements. Over this the tops of seven or eight turrets appeared, their golden balls glittering in the sun.
After the description I have given of the curtains or wall of my own tent, stiffened with lath and pointed to imitate a battlement, this enclosure of the Sultan’s will be easily understood, and it corresponds, even to the dimensions, with that which surrounded the tabernacle of the Jews in the wilderness, which was an hundred cubits long, fifty broad, and five high; the length was also from east to west.
FOOTNOTES:
[304] The Jews, even after their sojourn of centuries in the Holy Land, did not lose the habit of dwelling in tents, and probably, as here, there was a city and a nomade population; as, for instance, “The dwellers in tents,” Psa. lxxxiii. 6. “The tents of Israel,” Zech. xii. 7. “The tents of Kedar,” Song i. 5.
[305] “Tihama, the abode of the sons of Maad. There they came for the winter.”—Song on the death of Koulayb. Tihama is derived from تهم Taham. See Edressi, Georg.; Drummond’s Origines, vol. iii. p. 260. Ham’am—bath—is derived from the same word.
[306] An equally near approach is caldo, cold. In the Greek, Phrygia, “burnt up”—the Latin, frigus.
[307] I find that this is much the plan used in India, even to the ornaments.