The pillars of Hercules

by David Urquhart

The Government of Algiers recently projected sending steamers to touch regularly at the Spanish Presidios to gain intelligence of what was going on in the interior. They were then to present themselves in the Bay of Tangier, communicate with the French Consul, visit Gibraltar, and return to Algiers—a nicely-devised scheme to convince the Moor that a conspiracy against them was on foot, common to France, England, and Spain. But the French Government not having altogether resigned itself into the hands of its “Algerines,” thought proper to appoint a superior officer of another service to go this round and report upon it. The first place he called at was Melilla; he inquired, “What news from Morocco?” The governor told him that he would be able to satisfy his curiosity on the day following, as they expected the Madrid papers. The French Admiral dined with the governor, took a siesta, Spanish fashion, and had, on awaking, an opportunity of judging of the intercourse with the interior. Two or three Moors got into an out-post unobserved, and had escaped in like manner, leaving behind the bodies of six Spaniards, but carrying off the heads.

The next morning I started early to visit the works on the lines, accompanied by a merchant of the place whom the governor sent to me, as the person best qualified to act as cicerone. Issuing from the first gate, we came on a drawbridge: below ran the sea over yellow sand, there being a clear passage by the ditch from one side to the other. Fishing-boats were splashing round the sharp angles. The old lofty Portuguese battlements rose above us; these masses of building are enormous, though the space of ground covered is small. The body of the place from which we had emerged, consists of a curtain and two bastions, three hundred yards in length, ninety feet in height; the bastion to the south carrying a second, is twenty feet higher. As we proceeded, ditch succeeded to ditch, and battery to battery. There are three lines and three ditches, with corresponding demi-lunes; in all six tiers of guns. The basis from sea to sea does not exceed four hundred yards, and the radius may be equal: I give the dimensions from memory. There are few guns mounted; I counted about one hundred and fifty embrasures for guns, and twenty beds for mortars. The inner curtain is completely pitted with shot and grape. The upper works and merlons are refaced.

Emerging from the fortification, we began to ascend the hill: the face of it was cut into by level spaces, the earth banked up by stone walls, lining which, infantry could level their pieces up the hill. The whole ground is mined and traversed by passages, the roofs of which project above the soil with loop-holes. The vidette on the hill pointed out to us on a brow opposite, at a short distance—but divided by a chasm—the Moorish post, a low shed of reeds: we saw no one. Some fig-trees in the gulley between, we were forbidden to pass; and he warned us to keep always in his sight. I came suddenly on a mass of ruins clustering round eminences, or running in long straight lines, castellated and turreted: the angles were fresh and sharp. The holes left in the walls by the fastenings of the planks, into which the compost is beaten, gave them the appearance of enormous pigeon-houses. There were no Roman blocks; yet the style was Roman. There was none of the massiveness of the Moorish, but their materials. There was more of the palm-like lightness of Fars than of the troglodyte of ancient or modern Africa. I hoped that these might belong to some remnants of the earlier and untraced races; but a nearer inspection soon decided that question. A gate on the western face is still almost perfect, and is Moorish; yet who can find the date of that style which may have belonged to the days of Juba, as well as to those of Almanzor and Abderahman.

My companion was excessively alarmed when I proposed to visit the ruins, as they are beyond the neutral ground. I endeavoured to relieve him, by making a forward cast through the brushwood. He followed, detailing how those savages would lie for hours in wait for a shot, and how a few days before a man had been wounded at the same place. Presently he exclaimed, “A Moor! a Moor!” I had, however, for some time seen the figure in a clear space on the opposite brow, wrapped in its haik, and motionless.

How pleasing would it not be to find the original of some dubiously-figured chimera! What then to discover a living representative of a race that has left behind it an undying name and immortal ruins? Such was to me that solitary figure. The Assyrian bowed his back to the burthen and his neck to the yoke, and the first of conquerors became the meanest of slaves. The Mede served in his turn, and so the Persian. The Egyptian, the first and greatest, became the outcast of nations. The Macedonian and Attic conquerors of the East were bondsmen at Rome. The Roman was a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, at the door of the Gothic hut and the Vandal tent. In all times, in all climes, the conquered have dwelt as Helot bondsman or slave with the conqueror. This wild man, this Moor, alone has followed no conqueror’s car, and served no master’s bidding. Vanquished, he has departed—disappearing from the land which ceased to own him lord. He has not by familiarity worn out the terrors of his name, nor the indignation of his heart; and there he stands to-day, not yielding to facts his reason, nor to fortune his fate.

But to compare the old Moor of Spain with the African Moor of to-day, might appear like comparing the British of to-day with their (assumed) naked ancestors. It, however, seems to me doubtful whether the old light be all extinct. Look at the Moor! Is there not dignity in his deportment—grandeur in his costume? The produce of the looms of Morocco to-day equals in beauty and taste, if it does not surpass, that of any country. At Tetuan the Mosaics are now made which adorn the Alhambra. Science has departed, but is that an essential of greatness? When a nation sinks to the barbarism that follows light, it is indifferent to honour: it hates itself more than its foe or conqueror. The Moor is not such.

The Moors at home are more wedded than any Mussulman people to their usages; more fanatic, more abhorrent of all intercourse with strangers. When they come to Europe they make themselves at home. They are seen at Gibraltar, in the streets, on the battlements, sauntering in the public walks, as if they entirely belonged to us. The civil magistrate represents them as orderly and peaceable: the police-court may be said to ignore their existence: legal practitioners declare that the cases of litigation chiefly arise from their being overreached. They are an example of sobriety, industry, and integrity. Their community at Gibraltar is neither small nor select, nor composed solely of those in easy circumstances: they come and go, and many are flying destitute from war and persecution. No one has heard of a Moor being a drunkard, or a swindler: no one doubts a Moor’s word: no one fears either his vengeance or his ferocity.

But may it not be that these men are here influenced by European manners? May they not, like the civilized and instructed classes of the Spaniards, be assimilated to Europe? There precisely is the difference. A Moor, after spending twenty years in Europe, goes back and demeans himself as if he had never left home. They carry their habits with them, and at Gibraltar live much in the same way as to the south of the Straits. As a people, they avoid us more than any other, excepting, perhaps, the Japanese: yet, individually they have greater intercourse with us, and in a more familiar manner; because from the distance and the difficulties of the land journey, the pilgrims almost always go and return from Egypt in European vessels.

As we returned into town, a stone nearly the size of a man’s head was shown to us, by which the skull of the Portuguese commander who first entered the place was, like that of Pyrrhus, broken by a woman from a tower. A Moorish sovereign, who was so wounded, despatched himself like Abimelech, with his own sword, to cover the disgrace.

The Romans at one time substituted this place for Tangier, as a provincial capital; yet it has neither a harbour nor road, being at the extreme point of the land, and shut out by a range of mountains from a fertile and peopled country, while Tangier is at the bottom of a bay, surrounded with rich lands, and is on the highway from Spain to Mauritania, from the ocean to the interior.