In the morning the little city appeared unlike other Moorish towns; where they are mostly grey or white, with here and there a green-tiled mosque, Laraiche affects all manner of colour. Among the white and blue houses there may be green or orange, yellow or brown or red, and likewise the inhabitants, curiously, go in for gaily coloured cloaks. On one side of the river this brilliant city rose from the ancient walls; on the other a cluster of sand dunes sloped back to the hills a mile or more away, and behind them, far in the distance, towered the Red Mountain, which Raisuli has made famous. Great lighters, things like Noah’s arks, rowed by fifteen, sometimes twenty, turbaned men, pushed off from the little quay to bring our cargo, and smaller craft began to cross the river to ferry over country people and their animals, along with one or two poor, fagged-out letter carriers, who had come afoot from Tangier, forty miles, overnight. By one of the smaller boats which came alongside we went ashore, to remain three days awaiting a further belated shipment of grain that came by camel train from the interior. We went to the only hotel, kept of course by a Spaniard, though designed specially to attract the British tourists of the Forwood line. The walls of the tiny, wood-partitioned rooms (spacious Moorish halls cut to cubicles) are papered like children’s playrooms, with pictures from old Graphics and other London weeklies, planned no doubt to amuse the visitor when it rains, for on such occasions the streets of Laraiche are veritable rapids. The room which I occupied hung over the city walls and looked down on the banks of the river, dry at low tide. Being waked early one morning by some hideous sounds and muffled voices, we peered cautiously out of the window and in the dim light discerned a crowd of black-gowned Jews not twenty feet below, killing a cow. This bank at low tide is the slaughterhouse, where a dead beast of some kind lay continually. Fortunately the rising waters carried off the few remains that Jews and Moslems left; and fortunately, too, the place was not used also as the boneyard, where animals that have died of natural causes are dragged and heaped uncovered. Such a spot there is outside the walls of every Moorish town.
Laraiche is off the great trade routes, and the district round about is unproductive. For these reasons its poor inhabitants, unable to own guns and riding horses, are peaceable and submissive. The town as well as the surrounding country is safe for any Christian, and even insults for him are few. We went with our ragged old guide, who bore the fitting name of Sidi Mohammed, up through the Kasbah, as fine a ruin of Moorish architecture as I have seen, and out through a long tunnel to the quaint old market-place, broad and white, flanked on each side by long, low rows of colonnades, the ends, through which the trains of camels come, sustained by several arches, none the same, opening in various directions. Certainly the Moors who built this town were architects and artists too. But the poverty and the degradation of the place! The houses, dark and wretched; the tea-shops foul and small and crowded much like opium dens; the people lean and miserable and cramped with hungry stomachs, dirty and diseased. Though clad in rags of brightest colours, the average human being is marked over with pox or something worse, and his head is scaly, the hair growing only in blotches. Children follow you, with paper patches, the prayers of some mad saint, tied about their running, bloodshot eyes; old men hobble by, one lean leg covered with sores, the other swollen huge with elephantiasis, both bare and horrible. Laraiche is beautiful and awful.
We saw a funeral here, and I thought we Christians could learn something from these Moors. In this sad country a man is hardly dead before they bury him. As soon as the grave can be dug the corpse is taken on the shoulders of friends, and quickly, to the music of a weird chant, borne to the grave. Without a flood of agony and an aftermath of long-extended mourning, the body is consigned to earth, and the soul that has departed, to the tender mercy of almighty God. An unmarked sandstone is erected; and if a relative wore a cloak of green or red before the parting, green or red is his colour still.
The day we left Laraiche a heavy breeze blew from the sea, white-capped rollers broke upon the shore, and we knew that Rabat was not to be reached. We passed on to Casablanca, where, the harbour being better, we were able to land. Now after all these disappointments we were resolved to get to Rabat at any cost. If it were necessary, we would go by land and run the gauntlet of the Shawia tribes, professing to be Germans deserting from the Foreign Legion; but the French consul saved us this. From him we obtained permission to go back by torpedo-boat and to be transhipped, so to speak, to the cruiser Gueydon, where we might stay as long as was necessary, as the ship was permanently anchored off Rabat. In two days after boarding the Gueydon the Atlantic calmed, and we left, bidding adieu to our French hosts, to cross the bar of the Bu Regreg in a twenty-oared Moorish boat.
CHAPTER XI
AT RABAT
At the time that the Krupp Company were mounting heavy-calibre guns at Rabat other German contractors proposed to cut the bar of the Bu Regreg and open the port to foreign trade. But the people of both Rabat and Sali protested, saying that this would let in more Nasrani and that the half-dozen already there, who bought their rugs and sold them goods from Manchester and Hamburg, were quite enough. Up to the time the French gunboats appeared—preceded by the news of their effective work at Casablanca—the arrival of twenty Europeans at Rabat would have given rise to much murmuring and no doubt to a good many threats. Now, however, more than double that number of Frenchmen alone had come to the town. From Tangier had come the Minister of France and all his staff, accompanied by a score of soldiers and marines; and from Casablanca had followed a troop of correspondents, French and English. Yet the hapless Moors, stirred as they had never been before, were required to give them right of way.
‘Balak! Balak!’ went the cry of the Maghzen soldier, leading the Christians through the crowded, narrow streets, and meekly, usually without a protest, the natives stood aside. Most of the people did not understand. Had not the Prophet said that they should hate the Christians? Yet now their lord, Mulai Abdul Aziz, Slave of the Beloved, sat upon his terrace—so rumour vowed—sat with some Frenchmen and listened towards Ziada to the cannon of some other Frenchmen as they slaughtered faithful Moslems! At Rabat, besides the townsfolk, there were refugees from Casablanca; there were tribesmen still in arms; there were saints who had followed the Sultan from Fez; there were madmen who are sacred, and impostors who pretended to be mad; there were soldiers trained to every crime; in short, there were men from every corner of the variegated empire, any one of whom would gladly have laid down his life to slay a Christian had the Sultan so commanded. Yet months have passed and they have kept the peace, though Frenchmen still slay Moors within the sound of Rabat’s walls.
A Shawia tribesman who spoke a little English, a tall young man with dark skin, and an ear torn by an earring at the lobe, met us at the landing and extended his hand. He took upon himself to help us with our luggage, and we let him show us the way to the French hotel lately opened. Of course this man was anxious to serve us as guide and interpreter, and we were glad to have him. Driss Wult el Kaid was his name, Driss, son of the Kaid. He had worked for Englishmen at Casablanca, and from his accent we could tell they had been ‘gentlemen.’ No ‘h’s’ did he shift from place to place, while his pronunciation of such words as ‘here’ and ‘there’ were always drawled out ‘hyar’ and ‘thar.’ ‘Now, now,’ he would say with a twisting inflection, for all the world like an Oxford man wishing to express the ordinary negative ‘no.’ It was humorous. English of this sort, to the mind of a mere American, associates itself with aristocracy, while the face of a mulatto goes only with the under-race of the States. It was difficult, in consequence, to reconcile the two. But Driss soon demonstrated that he was worthy to speak the language of the upper man. The manners and the dignity of a ruling race were his heritage; and proud he was, though his bearing towards the poorest beggar never appeared condescending. A gentleman was Driss. ‘Me fader,’ he told us in fantastic Moro-English, ‘me fader he was one-time gov’nor Ziada.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Now, now; he in prison.’