When I had finished, however, he sighed and said, “After all, what are all these things worth if we must all die?”
“Finally,” I concluded, “you would not change your condition for ours?”
He stood a moment thoughtful, and replied: “No, because you are no longer-lived than we are, nor are you more healthy, nor better, nor more religious, nor more contented. Leave us, then, in peace. Do not insist that everybody should live as you do, and be happy according to your ideas. Let us all stay in the circle where Allah has placed us. For some good purpose Allah stretched the sea between Europe and Africa. Let us respect His decree.”
“And do you believe,” I demanded, “that you will always remain as you are; that little by little we shall not make you change?”
“I do not know,” he answered. “You have the strength, you will do what you please. All that is to happen is already written. But whatever happens Allah will not abandon His faithful people.”
With this he took my hand, pressed it to his heart, and went majestically away.
This morning at sunrise I went to see the review which the Sultan holds three times a week in the square where he received the Embassy.
As I went out at the gate of the Nicchia del Burro, I had a first taste of the manœuvres of the artillery. A troop of soldiers, old, middle-aged, and boys, all dressed in red, were running behind a small cannon drawn by one mule. It was one of the twelve guns presented by the Spanish government to Sultan Sid-Mohammed after the war of 1860. Every now and then the mule slipped, or turned aside, or stopped, and the whole band began to yell and to strike at her, dancing and giggling, as if it was a carnival car they were conducting. In a distance of about a hundred paces they stopped ten times. Now the little bucket fell off, now the rammer, now something else; for every thing was hung on the carriage. The mule zig-zagged along at her own caprice, or rather wherever the cannon pushed her in coming down over the inequalities of the ground; everybody gave orders which no one obeyed; the big ones cuffed the small ones, the small ones cuffed the smaller ones, and they all cuffed each other; and the cannon remained pretty much in the same place. It was a scene to have thrown General La Marmora into a tertian fever.
On the left bank of the river there were about two thousand foot-soldiers, some lying on the ground, some standing about in groups. In the square enclosed between the walls and the river, the artillery; four guns were firing at a mark; behind the guns stood some soldiers, and a tall figure in white—the Sultan. From the place where I stood, however, I could scarcely distinguish his outline. He seemed from time to time to speak to the artillerymen, as if he were directing them. On the opposite side of the square, near the bridge, there was a crowd of Moors, Arabs, and blacks, men and women, people from the city and country-people, gentlemen and peasants, all assembled together, and waiting, I was told, to be called one by one before the Sultan, from whom they wished favor or justice; for the Sultan gives audience three times a week to whosoever wishes to speak with him. Some of these poor people had, perhaps, come from distant places to complain of the exactions of the governor, or to beg for pardon for their relatives in prison. There were ragged women and tottering old men; all the faces were weary and sad, and upon them could be read both impatient desire and dread to appear before the prince of true believers, the supreme judge, who in a few minutes, with few words, would perhaps decide the fate of their whole lives. I could not see that they had any thing at their feet or in their hands, and for this reason I believe that the reigning Sultan has discontinued the custom, which formerly existed, of accompanying every petition with a present, which was never refused, however small, and consisted sometimes of a pair of fowls or a dozen of eggs. I walked about among the soldiers. The boys were divided into companies of thirty or forty each, and were amusing themselves by running after one another and playing a sort of leap-frog. In some of these groups, however, the diversion consisted in a sort of pantomime, which, when I understood its meaning, made me shudder. They were representing the amputation of the hands, decapitation, and other kinds of punishment, which they had doubtless often witnessed. One boy represented the caid, another the victim, and a third the executioner; the victim, when his hand was cut off, made believe to plunge the stump into a vessel of pitch; another pretended to pick up the hand and throw it to the dogs; and the spectators all laughed.
The gallows-bird faces of the greater part of these youthful soldiers are not to be described. They were of all shades of color, from ebony black to orange yellow; and not one of them, even among the youngest, had preserved the ingenuous expression of childhood. All had something hard, impudent, cynical, in their eyes, that inspired pity rather than anger. No great perspicacity is necessary to understand that they could not be otherwise. Of the men, the greater part of them were dozing, stretched out on the ground; others were dancing negro dances in the midst of a circle of spectators, and making all sorts of jokes and grimaces; others, again, fencing with sabres, in the same way as at Tangiers, springing about with the action of rope-dancers. The officers, among them many renegades, who were to be recognized by their faces, their pipes, and a certain something of superior care in their dress, walked about apart, and when I met them, turned their eyes away. Beyond the bridge, in a place apart, about twenty men, muffled in white mantles, were lying on the ground, one beside the other, motionless as statues. I drew near, and saw that they all wore heavy chains on wrist and ankle. They were persons condemned for common offences, who were dragged about by the army, and thus pilloried in the sight of all. As I approached they all turned, and fixed upon me a look that made me retreat at once.