After the spectacle of great cities in decadence, a moribund people, and a lovely but melancholy landscape; after such sleep, such old age, and such ruin, here is the work of the eternal hand, and here is immortal youth; here is the air that revives the blood, the beauty that refreshes the heart, the immensity in which the soul expands! Here is the ocean! With what a thrill of delight we salute it! The unexpected apparition of a friend or a brother could not have been dearer to our hearts than the sight of that distant shining curve that gleamed before us like an immense sickle, mowing down Islamism, slavery, barbarism, and bearing our thoughts direct and free to Italy.
“Bahr-el-Kibir!” exclaimed some soldiers. (The great sea.) Others said, “Bahr-ed-Dholma!” (The sea of darkness.) All involuntarily hastened their steps; conversation, which had begun to languish, was re-animated; the servants set up sacred songs; the whole caravan, in a few minutes, assumed an air of cheer and festivity.
On the evening of June 19th we encamped at three hours’ distance from Laracce, and the following morning entered the city, received at the gate by the son of the governor; by twenty soldiers, without muskets or breeches, drawn up along the road; by almost a hundred ragged boys, and by a band composed of a tambourine and a trumpet, who came afterward to ask for money—giving us an excruciating concert in the court of the Italian Consular-Agent.
Upon that coast, sprinkled with dead cities—such as Salè, Azamor, Safi, Santa Cruz—Laracce still preserves a little commercial life, which is sufficient to cause her to be considered as one of the principal ports of Morocco. Founded by a Berber tribe in the fifteenth century, fortified at the end of the same century by Muley-ben-Nassar, abandoned to Spain in 1610, retaken by Muley-Ismael in 1689, still flourishing at the beginning of this century, with a population of about four thousand, between Moors and Hebrews, it rises upon the incline of a hill to the left of the mouth of the Kus, the Lixus of the ancients, which forms for it an ample and secure port, closed, however, by a sand-bank against the entrance of large vessels. In the port lie rotting the carcases of two small gun-boats, the last miserable remnant of the fleet that once carried the victorious army into Spain and alarmed European commerce. Behind the hill there is a large grove of gigantic trees. The town has nothing notable in it except a market-place, surrounded by a portico sustained by small stone columns; but seen from the port, all white upon the dark-green background of its hills, surrounded by a circle of high battlemented walls of a dark calcareous tint, reflected in the azure waters of the river, under that limpid sky, it presents a dignified aspect, and despite the vividness of its colors, almost a melancholy one, as if one felt compassion at the sight of the picturesque city silent and alone upon that barbarous coast, by that deserted port, in the face of that immense sea.
The camp was pitched that evening on the right bank of the Kus, and raised early the following morning. We were to go to Arzilla, four hours distant from Laracce. The baggage was sent on in the morning; the Embassy left toward evening. I left with the baggage convoy, in order to see the caravan under a new aspect; and I was glad I did, for it was a journey full of adventure.
The laden mules, accompanied by muleteers and servants, went in groups, at a great distance one from the other. I went on alone and rode for nearly an hour over the hills, where I saw only one mule, driven by an Arab servant, and carrying two sacks of straw, of which one supported the head and the other the feet of a groom of the Ambassador’s, who had been seized by a violent fever, and who groaned enough to move the very stones with pity. The poor fellow lay thus across the mule, with his head hanging down, his body bent, the sun in his eyes, and in this way had he come all the way from Karia-el-Abbassi, and was to go to Tangiers! And in this way are all the sick transported in Morocco who have no money to hire a litter and two mules, and fortunate is he who can have a bag of straw!
On the shore I was joined by the cook, Ranni, and Luigi, who did not leave me again until we reached Arzilla.
We trotted for an hour over the sands, turning out here and there from the direct road to avoid a marsh.
At this time the cook, who for the first time in all the journey was able to speak freely, opened his heart to me.
Poor fellow! all the adventures we had had, all the great things we had seen, had not freed him from a painful thought which had destroyed his peace from the first week of his sojourn at Tangiers. And this thought was an unsuccessful jelly made by him one day when we were dining with the French Minister—a jelly which had given the first blow to his reputation in the mind of the Ambassador, and whose ill success was due, not to him, but to the bad Marsala wine. Fez, the court, Mechinez, the Sebù, the ocean, he had seen and still saw them all through this medium of jelly. Or rather, he had seen and saw nothing, because although his body was in Morocco, his spirit was in Turin. I asked him to tell me his impressions, and they were these, as nearly as I can set them down. He could not comprehend who the beast could have been who had stamped that country. He related his fatigues, his quarrels with his two Arab scullions, the difficulties of preparing food in the desert, and his immense desire to see Turin again; but he always fell back upon that deplorable jelly at the French Minister’s. “I do not know how to cook? Do me the favor when you are at Turin,” he said, touching my arm to withdraw me from my contemplation of the ocean, “go and ask Count so-and-so, Countess such a one, etc., whom I served for years and years! Go to General Ricotti, Minister of War, who has been five years Minister, and who can do just what he pleases; go and ask him whether or no I can make a jelly! Do go; give me that satisfaction; it will not take a moment when you are back in our country!” And he insisted so, that in order to contemplate the ocean in peace, I was obliged to promise.