Morocco, Its People and Places

by Edmondo De Amicis

I will try to give a distant idea of our torments. Let the gentle reader prepare his or her heart to feel profound compassion. I wipe my dripping brows, and begin.

At ten o’clock in the morning, when my two companions and I withdrew to our tents, the thermometer marked forty-two degrees centigrade in the shade (about 107-1/2° Fahrenheit). For about an hour the conversation continued animated. After that we began to find a certain difficulty in terminating our periods, and were reduced to simple propositions. Then, as it cost too much fatigue to put subject, verb, and attribute together, we stopped talking and tried to sleep. It was useless. The hot beds, the flies, thirst, and restlessness, would not let us close an eye. After much fretting and fuming, we resigned ourselves to stay awake, and tried to cheat the weary time in some occupation. But it could not be done. Cigars, pipes, books, maps, all dropped from our nerveless hands. I tried to write: at the third line the page was bathed in the perspiration that streamed from my forehead like water from a squeezed sponge. I felt my whole body traversed by innumerable springs, which intersected, followed, joined each other, forming confluents and streams, running down my arms and hands, and watering the ink in the point of my pen. In a few minutes, handkerchiefs, towels, veils, every thing that could serve the purpose, were as wet as if they had been dipped in a bucket. We had a barrel full of water; we tried to drink, it was boiling. We poured it out; it had hardly touched the earth when no trace of it could be seen. At noon the thermometer marked forty-four and a half degrees. The tent was an oven. Every thing we touched scorched us. I put my hand on my head, and it felt like a stove. The beds heated us so that we could not lie down. I tried to put my foot outside the tent, and the ground was scorching. No one spoke any more. Only now and then was heard a languid exclamation: “It is death.” “I cannot bear this.” “I shall go mad.” Ussi put his head out of the tent for an instant, his eyes starting out of his head, murmured in a suffocated voice, “I shall die,” and disappeared. Diana, the poor dog, lying down near the commandant’s bed, panted as if she were at her last gasp. Outside of the tent no human voice was heard, no human being was visible, the camp seemed deserted. The horses neighed in a lamentable manner. The doctor’s litter, standing near our tent, cracked as if it were splitting in pieces. Suddenly we heard the voice of Selam running by, and calling out, “One of the dogs is dead.”

“One!” answered the faint voice of the commandant, facetious to the last.

At one o’clock the thermometer marked forty-six and a half degrees. Then even complaints ceased. The commandant, the vice-consul, and I lay stretched on the ground motionless, like dead bodies. In the whole camp the Ambassador and the captain were perhaps the only Christians who still gave signs of life. I do not remember how long this condition lasted. I was steeped in a sort of stupor, dreaming with my eyes open, and a thousand confused images of cool spots and frozen objects chased each other through my brain: I was springing from a rock into a lake, I was putting the back of my neck against the spout of a pump, I was building a house of ice, I was devouring all the ices in Naples, and the more I sprinkled myself with water and drank cool drinks, the hotter, the thirstier, the wilder I became. At last the captain exclaimed in a sepulchral voice: “Forty-seven!”[^[7]] It was the last voice I remember to have heard.

Toward evening the son of the governor of the Beni-Hassen, the boy whom we had seen in the morning, came to visit the Ambassador in the name of his father, who was ill. He entered the camp on horseback, accompanied by an officer and two soldiers, who took him in their arms when he dismounted, and advanced with solemn step toward the Ambassador, trailing his long blue mantle like a robe, with his left hand upon the hilt of a sabre longer than himself, and his right extended in salutation.

In the morning, seen on horseback, he had seemed a handsome boy; and he had indeed beautiful pensive eyes and a small pallid oval face; but on foot, we saw that he was ricketty and deformed. From this no doubt came his melancholy looks. In all the time he remained with us, no smile moved his lip, his face never brightened for a moment. He looked at us all with a profound attention, and answered the Ambassador’s questions with short sentences, spoken in low tones. Once only a gleam of pleasure came into his eyes; it was when the Ambassador told him that he had admired, in the morning, his bold and graceful riding; but it was only a gleam.

Although all our eyes were upon him, and this was probably the first time that he had appeared in an official capacity before a European embassy, he showed no shadow of embarrassment. He slowly drunk his tea, ate some sweetmeats, whispered in the ear of his officer, settled two or three times his little turban on his head, looked attentively at our boots, and showed that he was a little bored; then, in taking leave, he pressed the Ambassador’s hand to his breast, and returned to his horse with the same royal gravity with which he had approached the tent.

Lifted into the saddle by his attendants, he said once more, “Peace be with you!” and galloped off, followed by his small and hooded staff.

That same evening several sick people came to consult the doctor, who, with the dragoman Solomon and a company of soldiers, had started a little earlier for Tangiers, by the way of Alkazar. Among the rest came a poor half-naked boy, lean, and with his eyes in such a state that he could see with difficulty, while he seemed exhausted with fatigue. “What do you want?” asked Morteo. “I seek the Christian physician,” he answered in a trembling voice. When he heard that he was gone, he stood a moment as if stunned, and then cried out in despair: “Am I to lose my sight then! I have come eight miles to be cured by the Christian physician! I must see him!” and he broke out into sobs and tears. Morteo put some money into his hand, which he received with indifference, and pointing out the way which the doctor had taken, told him that if he walked quickly he might perhaps overtake him. The boy stood a moment uncertain, looking with eyes full of tears, and then slowly limped away.

The sun went down that evening under an immense pavilion of gold and flame color, and striking across the plains his last blood-colored beams, set behind the straight line of the horizon like a monstrous glowing disk that was sinking into the bowels of the earth.