Morocco, Its People and Places

by Edmondo De Amicis

At that moment our chargé d’affaires appeared in the Soc. The Vice-Governor beheld him from the hill, ran to meet him, and conducted him under the tent, where all the members of the future caravan, myself included, speedily assembled. Then came soldiers and musicians, and an immense semi-circle of Arabs formed itself in front of the tent, the men in front, the gentle sex in groups behind; and then began a wild concert of songs, dances, yells, and gunshots, which lasted for more than an hour, in the midst of dense clouds of smoke, the sounds of barbaric music, the enthusiastic shouts of the women and children, the paternal satisfaction of the Vice-Governor, and our great amusement. Before it was over, the chargé d’affaires put some coins into the hand of an Arab soldier, to be given to the director of the spectacle, and the soldier presently returning, delivered the following odd form of thanks, translated into Spanish:—“The Italian Ambassador has done a good action; may Allah bless every hair of his beard!”

The strange festival lasted until sunset. Three water-sellers were sufficient to satisfy the needs of all that crowd, exposed all day to the rays of the sun of Africa. One marengo was perhaps the utmost of the sum that circulated in that concourse of people. Their only pleasures were to see and hear. There was no love-making, no drunkenness, no knife-play,—nothing in common with the holidays of civilization.

Moorish Husbandman.

The country about Tangiers is not less curious to see than the city. Around the walls extends a girdle of gardens, belonging for the most part to the ministers and consuls, and rather neglected, but rich in luxuriant vegetation. There may be seen long files of aloes, like gigantic lances bound up in sheaves of enormous curved dagger blades, for such is the shape of their leaves. The points, with the fibre attached, are used by the Arabs to sew up wounds. There is the Indian fig—in the Moorish tongue, kermus del Inde—very tall, with leaves an inch in thickness, and growing so thickly as to obstruct the paths; the common fig, under whose shadow ten tents could be erected; oaks, acacias, oleanders, and shrubs of every sort, that interlace their branches with those of the highest trees, and with the ivy, the vine, the cane, and the thorn, form a tangled mass of verdure under which ditch and footpath are entirely concealed. In some places one has to grope one’s way, and pass from one enclosure to another through thick, thorny hedges, over prostrate fences, in the midst of grass and flowers as high as one’s waist, and no living creature to be seen. A small white house, and a well, with a wheel by means of which the water is sent flowing through little trenches dug for the purpose, are the only objects which indicate the presence of poverty and labor. Sometimes, if the captain of the staff, who was a clever guide, had not been with me, I should have lost my way in the midst of that wild vegetation; and we often had to call out, as in a labyrinth, to prevent our losing each other. It was a pleasure to me to swim amid the greenery, opening the way with hands and feet, with the joyous excitement of a savage returned from slavery to his native forest.

Beyond this girdle of gardens there are no trees, or houses, or hedges, or any indication of boundaries; there are only hills, green valleys, and undulating plains, with an occasional herd of cattle pasturing and without any visible herdsman, or a horse turned loose. Once only did I see any tilling of the ground. An Arab was driving an ass and a goat, harnessed to a very small plough, of a strange shape, such as might have been in use four thousand years ago, and which turned up a scarcely visible furrow in the stony, weedy earth. I have been assured that it is not unusual to see a donkey and a woman ploughing in company, and this will give an idea of the state of agriculture in Morocco. The only attempt at manuring is to burn the straw left after the grain is gathered; and the only care taken not to exhaust the earth, is to leave it every third year to grow grass for pasture, after having grown grain, and buckwheat or maize, in the two preceding years. In spite of this, however, the ground becomes impoverished after a few years, and then the husbandman leaves it, and seeks another field, returning, after a time, to the old one; and so but a very small part of the arable land is under cultivation at one time, whereas if it were even badly cultivated, it would return a hundred-fold the seed thrown in it.

The prettiest excursion we made was that to Cape Spartel, the Ampelusium of the ancients, which forms the north-western extremity of the African continent, a mountain of gray stone, about three hundred mètres in height, rising abruptly from the sea, and opening underneath into vast caverns, the larger of which were consecrated to Hercules: Specus Herculi sacer. Upon the summit of this mountain stands the famous lighthouse erected a few years ago, and maintained by contributions from most of the European States. We climbed to the top of the tower, where the great lantern sends its beneficent rays to a distance of five-and-twenty miles. From thence the eye embraces two seas and two continents. There can be seen the last waters of the Mediterranean and the horizon of the Atlantic—the sea of darkness, Bar-el-Dolma, as the Arabs call it—beating at the foot of the rock; the Spanish coast, from Cape Trafalgar to Cape Algesiras; the African coast, from the Mediterranean to the mountains of Ceuta, the septem fratres of the Romans; and far in the distance, faintly outlined, the enormous rock of Gibraltar—eternal sentinel of that port of the old continent, mysterious terminus of the antique world, become the “Favola vila ai naviganti industri.”

In this expedition we encountered but few persons, for the most part Arabs on foot, who passed almost without looking at us, and sometimes a Moor on horseback, some personage important either for his wealth or his office, accompanied by a troop of armed followers, who looked contemptuously at us as they passed. The women muffled their faces even more carefully than in the city, some muttering, and others turning their backs abruptly upon us. Here and there an Arab would stop before us, look fixedly at us, murmur a few words that sounded as if he were asking a favor, and then go on his way without looking back. At first we did not understand, but it was explained that they were asking us to pray to God for some favor for them. It seems that there is a superstition much in vogue among the Arabs, that the prayers of a Mussulman being very grateful to God, He generally delays granting what they ask for, in order that He may prolong the pleasure of hearing the prayer; whilst the prayer of an infidel dog, like a Hebrew or a Christian, is so hateful to Him, that He grants it at once, ipso facto, in order to be rid of it. The only friendly faces we saw were those of some Jewish boys who were scampering about on donkeys, and who threw us a cheerful “Buenos dias, Caballeros!” as they galloped by.

In spite, however, of the new and varied character of our life at Tangiers, we were all impatience to leave it, in order to get back in the month of June, before the great heats began. The chargé d’affaires had sent a messenger to Fez to announce that the embassy was ready; but ten days at least must pass before he could return. Private notices informed us that the escort was on its way, others that it had not yet started. Uncertain and contradictory rumors prevailed, as if the longed-for Fez were distant two thousand miles from the coast, instead of about one hundred and forty miles; and this, from one point of view, was rather agreeable, because our fifteen days’ journey thus assumed in our fancy the proportions of a long and adventurous voyage, and Fez seemed mysteriously attractive. The strange things, too, which were related by those who had been there with former embassies, about the city, its people, and the dangers of the expedition, all combined to excite our expectations. They told how they had been surrounded by thousands of horsemen, who saluted them with a tempest of shots, so near as almost to scorch their skins and blind them, and that they could hear the balls whistle by their ears; that in all probability some of us Italians would be shot in the head by mistake by some ball directed against the white cross in our flag, which would no doubt seem an insult to Mahomet in Arab eyes. They talked of scorpions, serpents, tarantulas, of clouds of grasshoppers and locusts, of spiders and toads of gigantic size that were found on the road and under the tents. They described in dismal colors the entrance of the embassy into Fez, in the midst of a hostile crowd, through tortuous, dark streets, encumbered with ruins and the carcases of animals; they prophesied a mountain of trouble for us during our stay at Fez—mortal languors, furious dysenteries and rheumatisms, musquitoes of monstrous size and ferocity compared with which those of our country were agreeable companions, and, finally, homesickness; apropos of which, they told us of a young Belgian painter who had gone to Fez with the embassy from Brussels, and who, after a week’s stay, was seized with such a desperate melancholy, that the ambassador was obliged to send him back to Tangiers by forced marches, that he might not see him die under his eyes; and it was true. But all this only increased our impatience to be off, and our delight can easily be imagined when Signor Soloman Affalo, the second dragoman of the Legation, one day presented himself at the door of the dining-room, and announced, in a sonorous voice—“The escort from Fez has arrived.”

With it came horses, mules, camels, grooms, tents, the route laid down for us by the Sultan, and his permission to start at once. Some days, however, had to be allowed for men and beasts to take a little rest.