Morocco, Its People and Places

by Edmondo De Amicis

The guide awoke me from my reverie and re-conducted me to my inn, where my discomfiture at finding myself among strangers was much mitigated when I discovered that they were all Europeans and Christians, dressed like myself. There were about twenty persons at table, men and women, of different nationalities, presenting a fine picture of that crossing of races and interlacing of interests which go on in that country. Here was a Frenchman born in Algiers married to an Englishwoman from Gibraltar; there, a Spaniard of Gibraltar married to the sister of the Portuguese Consul; here again, an old Englishman with a daughter born in Tangiers and a niece native of Algiers; families wandering from one continent to the other, or sprinkled along the coast, speaking five languages, and living partly like Arabs, partly like Europeans. All through dinner a lively conversation went on, now in French, now in Spanish, studded with Arabic words, upon subjects quite strange to the ordinary talk of Europeans: such as the price of a camel; the salary of a pasha; whether the sultan were white or mulatto; if it were true that there had been brought to Fez twenty heads from the revolted province of Garet; when those religious fanatics who eat a live sheep were likely to come to Tangiers; and other things of the same kind that aroused within my soul the greatest curiosity. Then the talk ran upon European politics, with that odd disconnectedness that is always perceptible in the discussions of people of different nations—those big, empty phrases which they use in talking of the politics of distant countries, imagining absurd alliances and impossible wars. And then came the inevitable subject of Gibraltar—the great Gibraltar, the centre of attraction for all the Europeans along the coast, where their sons are sent to study, where they go to buy clothes, to order a piece of furniture, to hear an opera, to breathe a mouthful of the air of Europe. Finally came up the subject of the departure of the Italian embassy for Fez, and I had the pleasure of hearing that the event was of far greater importance than I had supposed; that it was discussed at Gibraltar, at Algeziras, Cadiz, and Malaga, and that the caravan would be a mile long; that there were several Italian painters with the embassy, and that perhaps there might even be a representative of the press—at which intelligence I rose modestly from the table, and walked away with majestic steps.

I wandered about Tangiers at a late hour that night. There was not a single light in street or window, nor did the faintest radiance stream through any loop-hole; the city seemed uninhabited, the white houses lay under the starlight like tombs, and the tops of the minarets and palm-trees stood out clear against the cloudless sky. The gates of the city were closed, and every thing was mute and lifeless. Two or three times my feet entangled themselves in something like a bundle of rags, which proved to be a sleeping Arab. I trod with disgust upon bones that cracked under my feet, and knew them for the carcase of a dog or cat; a hooded figure glided like a spectre close to the wall; another gleamed white for one instant at the bottom of an alley; and at a turning I heard a sudden rush and scamper, as if I had unwittingly disturbed some consultation. My own footstep when I moved, my own breathing when I stood still, were the only sounds that broke the stillness. It seemed as if all the life in Tangiers were concentrated in myself, and that if I were to give a sudden cry it would resound from one end of the city to the other like the blast of a trumpet. Meantime the moon rose, and shone upon the white walls with the splendor of an electric light. In a dark alley I met a man with a lantern, who stood aside to let me pass, murmuring some words that I did not understand. Suddenly a loud laugh made my blood run cold for an instant, and two young men in European dress went by in conversation; probably two attachés to the Legations. In a corner of the great square, behind the looped-up curtain of a dark little shop, a dim light betrayed a heap of whitish rags, from which issued the faint tinkle of a guitar, and a thin, tremulous, lamentable voice, that seemed brought by the wind from a great distance. I went back to my inn, feeling like a man who finds himself transported into some other planet.

The next morning I went to present myself to our chargé d’affaires, Commendatore Stefano Scovasso. He could not accuse me of not being punctual. On the 8th of April, at Turin, I received the invitation, with the announcement that the caravan would leave Tangiers on the 19th. On the morning of the 18th I was at the Legation. I did not know Signor Scovasso personally, but I knew something about him which inspired me with a great desire to make his acquaintance. From one of his friends whom I had seen before leaving Turin, I had heard that he was a man capable of riding from Tangiers to Timbuctoo without any other companions than a pair of pistols. Another friend had blamed his inveterate habit of risking his life to save the lives of others. When I arrived at the Legation I found him standing at the gate in the midst of a crowd of Arabs, all motionless, in attitudes of profound respect, seemingly awaiting his orders. Presenting myself, and being at once made a guest at head-quarters, I learned that our departure was deferred till the 1st of May, because there was an English embassy at Fez, and our horses, camels, mules, and a cavalry escort for the journey, were all to be sent from there. A transport-ship of our military marine, the Dora, then anchored at Gibraltar, had already carried to Larrace, on the Atlantic coast, the presents which King Victor Emanuel had sent to the Emperor of Morocco. The principal scope of our journey for the chargé d’affaires was to present credentials to the young Sultan, Muley el Hassen, who had ascended the throne in September, 1873. No Italian embassy had ever been at Fez, and the banner of United Italy had never before been carried into the interior of Morocco. Consequently, the embassy was to be received with extraordinary solemnities.

My first occupation when I found myself alone was to take observations of the house where I was to be a guest; and truly it was well worthy of notice. Not that the building itself was at all remarkable. White and bare without, it had a garden in front, and an interior court, with four columns supporting a covered gallery that ran all around the first floor. It was like a gentleman’s house at Cadiz or Seville. But the people and their manner of life in this house were all new to me. Housekeeper and cook were Piedmontese; there was a Moorish woman-servant of Tangiers, and a Negress from the Soudan with bare feet; there were Arab waiters and grooms dressed in white shirts; consular guards in fez, red caftan, and poignard; and all these people were in perpetual motion all day long. At certain hours there was a coming and going of black porters, interpreters, soldiers of the pasha, and Moors in the service of the Legation. The court was full of boxes, camp-beds, carpets, lanterns. Hammers and saws were in full cry, and the strange names of Fatima, Racma, Selam, Mohammed, Abd-er-Rhaman flew from mouth to mouth. And what a hash of languages! A Moor would bring a message in Arabic to another Moor, who transmitted it in Spanish to the housekeeper, who repeated it in Piedmontese to the cook, and so on. There was a constant succession of translations, comments, mistakes, doubts, mingled with Italian, Spanish, and Arabic exclamations. In the street, a procession of horses and mules; before the door, a permanent group of curious lookers-on, or poor wretches, Arabs and Jews, patient aspirants for the protection of the Legation. From time to time came a minister or a consul, before whom all the turbans and fezes bowed themselves. Every moment some mysterious messenger, some unknown and strange costume, some remarkable face, appeared. It seemed like a theatrical representation, with the scene laid in the East.

My next thought was to take possession of some book of my host’s that should teach me something of the country I was in, before beginning to study costume. This country, shut in by the Mediterranean, Algeria, the desert of Sahara, and the ocean, crossed by the great chain of the Atlas, bathed by wide rivers, opening into immense plains, with every variety of climate, endowed with inestimable riches in all the three kingdoms of nature, destined by its position to be the great commercial high-road between Europe and Central Africa, is now occupied by about 8,000,000 of inhabitants—Berbers, Moors, Arabs, Jews, Negroes, and Europeans—sprinkled over a vaster extent of country than that of France. The Berbers, who form the basis of the indigenous population—a savage, turbulent, and indomitable race—live on the inaccessible mountains of the Atlas, in almost complete independence of the imperial authority. The Arabs, the conquering race, occupy the plains—a nomadic and pastoral people, not entirely degenerated from their ancient haughty character. The Moors, corrupted and crossed by Arab blood, are in great part descended from the Moors of Spain, and, inhabiting the cities, hold in their hands the wealth, trade, and commerce of the country. The blacks, about 500,000, originally from the Soudan, are generally servants, laborers, and soldiers. The Jews, almost equal in number to the blacks, descend, for the most part, from those who were exiled from Europe in the Middle Ages, and are oppressed, hated, degraded, and persecuted here more than in any other country in the world. They exercise various arts and trades, and in a thousand ways display the ingenuity, pliability, and tenacity of their race, finding in the possession of money torn from their oppressors a recompense for all their woes. The Europeans whom Mussulman intolerance has, little by little, driven from the interior of the empire toward the coast, number less than 2,000 in all Morocco, the greater part inhabiting Tangiers, and living under the protection of the consular flags. This heterogeneous, dispersed, and irreconcilable population is oppressed rather than protected by a military government that, like a monstrous leech, sucks out all the vital juices from the State. The tribes and boroughs, or suburbs, obey their sheiks; the cities and provinces the cadi; the greater provinces the pasha; and the pasha obeys the Sultan—grand schereef, high priest, supreme judge, executor of the laws emanating from himself, free to change at his caprice money, taxes, weights and measures; master of the possessions and lives of his subjects. Under the weight of this government, and within the inflexible circle of the Mussulman religion, unmoved by European influences, and full of a savage fanaticism, everything that in other countries moves and progresses, here remains motionless or falls into ruin.

Commerce is choked by monopolies, by prohibitions upon exports and imports, and by the capricious mutability of the laws. Manufactures, restricted by the bonds laid upon commerce, have remained as they were at the time of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, with the same primitive tools and methods. Agriculture, loaded heavily with taxes, hampered in exportation of produce, and only exercised from sheer necessity, has fallen so low as no longer to merit the name. Science, suffocated by the Koran, and contaminated by superstition, is reduced to a few elements in the higher schools, such as were taught in the Middle Ages. There are no printing-presses, no books, no journals, no geographical maps; the language itself, a corruption of the Arabic, and represented only by an imperfect and variable written character, is becoming yearly more debased; in the general decadence the national character is corrupted; all the ancient Mussulman civilization is disappearing. Morocco, the last western bulwark of Islamism, once the seat of a monarchy that ruled from the Ebro to the Soudan, and from the Niger to the Balearic Isles, glorious with flourishing universities, with immense libraries, with men famous for their learning, with formidable fleets and armies, is now nothing but a small and almost unknown state, full of wretchedness and ruin, resisting with its last remaining strength the advance of European civilization, seated upon its foundations still, but confronted by the reciprocal jealousies of civilized states.

As for Tangiers, the ancient Tingis, which gave its name to Tingistanian Mauritania, it passed successively from the hands of the Romans into those of the Vandals, Greeks, Visigoths, Arabs, Portugese, and English, and is now a city of about 15,000 inhabitants, considered by its sister cities as having been “prostituted to the Christians,” although there are no traces of the churches and monasteries founded by the Portugese, and the Christian religion boasts there but one small chapel, hidden away among the legations.

I made in the streets of Tangiers a few notes, in preparation for my journey, and they are given here, because, having been written down under the impression of the moment, they are perhaps more effective than a more elaborate description.

I am ashamed when I pass a handsome Moor in gala dress. I compare my ugly hat with his large muslin turban, my short jacket with his ample white or rose-colored caftan—the meanness, in short, of my black and gray garments with the whiteness, the amplitude, the graceful dignified simplicity of his—and it seems to me that I look like a black beetle beside a butterfly. I stand sometimes at my window in contemplation before a portion of a pair of crimson drawers and a gold-colored slipper, appearing from behind a column in the square below, and find so much pleasure in it that I cannot cease from gazing. More than any thing else I admire and envy the caic, that long piece of snow-white wool or silk with transparent stripes which is twisted round the turban, falls down between the shoulders, is passed round the waist, and thrown up over one shoulder, whence it descends to the feet, softly veiling the rich colors of the dress beneath, and at every breath of wind swelling, quivering, floating, seeming to glow in the sun’s rays, and giving to the whole person a vaporous and visionary aspect.

No one who has not seen it can imagine to what a point the Arab carries the art of lying down. In corners where we should be embarrassed to place a bag of rags or a bundle of straw, he disposes of himself as upon a bed of down. He adapts himself to the protuberances, fills up the cavities, spreads himself upon the wall like a bas-relief, and flattens himself out upon the ground until he looks like a sheet spread out to dry. He will assume the form of a ball, a cube, or a monster without arms, legs, or head; so that the streets and squares look like battle-fields strewn with corpses and mutilated trunks of men.