THE TROGLODYTE TOWN OF MEDENINE, SOUTHERN TUNISIA.
Perhaps the strangest city in the world. The dwellings, known as rhorfas, are built in the form of horseshoes to keep out thieves.
Photograph by Soler, Tunis.
CHAPTER II
THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL
AN unaccustomed silence hung over the labyrinth of court-yards, corridors, gardens, mosques, and kiosks which compose the imperial palace in Fez. The chatter of the harem women was hushed; the white-robed officials of the household slipped through the mosaic-paved passages like melancholy ghosts; even the slovenly sentries at the gates, their red tunics over their heads to protect them from the sun, seemed to tread more softly, as though some great one lay dying. Within the palace, in a room whose furnishings were a strange jumble of Oriental taste and European tawdriness, a group of men stood about a table. Certain of them were tall and sinewy and swarthy, their white burnooses, which enveloped them from their snowy turbans to their yellow slippers, marking them unmistakably as Moors. Of the others, whose clearer skins showed them to be Europeans, some wore the sky-blue tunics and scarlet breeches of the chasseurs d'Afrique, some the braided jackets and baggy trousers of the tirailleur regiments, some the simple white linen of the civil administration, while across the chest of one, a grizzled man with the épaulettes of a general of division, slanted a broad scarlet ribbon. At the table sat an old-young man, a man with an aquiline, high-bred nose, a wonderfully clear, olive skin, and a fringe of scraggy beard along the line of his chin, a man with a weak mouth and sensual lips and heavy-lidded, melancholy eyes. The man with the scarlet ribbon unrolled a parchment and, bowing, spread it upon the table. One of the native dignitaries, with a gesture of reverence which included heart and lips and head, dipped a quill pen into an ink-well and tendered it to the silent figure at the table. “Your Majesty will have the goodness to sign here?” said the soldier, half-questioningly, half-commandingly, as he indicated the place with his finger. The man at the table gravely inclined his head, reached for the pen, hesitated for a moment, then slowly began to trace, from right to left, the strange Arabic signature. “Inshallah! It is done!” he said, and throwing down the pen he sunk his face into his hands. “Vive la France!” said the general solemnly, and “Vive la France!” echoed the officers around him. Well might the one lament and the others rejoice, for, with the final flourish of the Sultan's pen, Morocco had ceased to exist as an independent nation and France had added an empire to her dominions.
“The world is a peacock,” says a Moorish proverb, “and Morocco is the tail of it.” Now, however, it has become the tail of the Gallic cock, for when, on March the thirtieth, 1912, Sultan Mulai-abd-el-Hafid signed the treaty establishing a French protectorate over his country, Morocco entered upon a new phase of its existence. With that act there ended, let us hope for all time, a situation which on more than one occasion has threatened the peace of the world. Not since the English landed in Egypt a third of a century ago has an event occurred which so vitally concerns the future welfare of Africa; not since the Treaty of Tilsit has France won so decisive a diplomatic victory or added so materially to her territorial possessions. By the signing of that treaty France laid the final stone in the mighty colonial structure which she has built up in Africa, and opened to Christianity, civilisation, and commerce the door of a region which has hitherto been a synonym for mystery, cruelty, intolerance, and fanaticism.
Though scarcely forty hours of travel by train and boat separate the departure platform at the Quai d'Orsay station in Paris from the landing-beach at Tangier, though its coast is skirted by the tens of thousands of American tourists who visit the Mediterranean each year, less is known of Morocco than of many regions in central Asia or inner Africa. Though a few daring travellers have made scattering crow's-feet upon its map, there are regions as large as all our New England States put together which are wholly unexplored. It is almost the last of the unknown countries. As its women draw their veils to hide their faces from the men, so the Moors have attempted to draw a veil of mystery and intolerance over the face of their country to hide it from the stranger. What strange tribes, what ruins of an earlier civilisation, what wealth in forests or minerals lie behind its ranges can only be conjectured. Its maps are still without the names of rivers and mountains and towns—though the rivers and mountains and towns are there; the sole means of travel are on camels, mules, or donkeys along the wild, worn paths, it being the only country of any size in the world which cannot boast so much as a mile of railway; its ports and the two highways leading from the coast to its capitals, Fez and Morocco City, were, until the coming of the French, alone open to the traveller—and none too safe at that; the foreigner who has the hardihood to stray from the frequented paths is taking his life in his hands. Few of the maps of Morocco are, so far as accuracy is concerned, worth the paper they are printed on, being largely based on unscientific material eked out by probabilities and conjectures, there being less accurate information, in fact, about a country larger than France, and only two days' journey from Trafalgar Square, than there is about Abyssinia or Borneo or Uganda. Even the names which we have given to the country and its inhabitants are purely European terms and are neither used nor recognised by the people themselves, who call their country El Moghreb el Aska, which means literally “Sunset Land,” the term Morocco being a European corruption of the name of one of its capitals, Marrakesh, or, as it is known to foreigners, Morocco City. A land almost as large as the State of Texas, with snow-capped mountain ranges, navigable rivers, vast forests, a fertile soil, an abundant water supply, and an ideal climate; a land of walled cities and white villages, of domed mosques and slender minarets, of veiled women and savage, turbaned men; a land of strange peoples and still stranger customs; a land of mystery and fatalism, of suspicion and fanaticism, of cruelty and corruption, of confusion and contradiction—that is Morocco, where, as an Arabic writer has put it, a wise man is surprised at nothing that he sees and believes nothing that he hears.