For some distance we passed between the lines of stacked guns, attracting the curious gaze of everybody, especially the women, who rose and came nearer the soldiers. One youth, a mulatto, got up and took a gun from a stack, and pretending to shove a cartridge into it, aimed directly at my head. The incident was, as one of the Englishmen suggested, somewhat boring.
Within a hundred yards of the palace we got behind the line and took up our stand. We had not long to wait. Shortly after the sun began to decline a twanging blast from a brassy cornet brought the field to its feet.
There was no hurry or scurry—there seldom is in Mohammedan countries. The soldiers took their guns, not with any order but without clashing; the women and children came up close; tribesmen, mounted, drew up behind. The Sultan’s band, in white, belted dresses, with knee skirts, bare legs, yellow slippers, and red fezzes, began to play a slow, impressive march—‘God save the King!’ with strange Oriental variations. It would not have been well if the Moors had known, and our soldier, for one, was amazed when we told him, that the band played the Christian Sultan’s hymn.
The mongrel soldiers, black and brown and white, slaves and freemen, presented arms uncertainly, as best they knew how; the white-robed women ‘coo-eed’ loud and shrill. A line of spear-bearers, all old men, passed at a short jog-trot; following them came six Arab horses, not very fine, but exceedingly fat, and richly caparisoned, led by skirted grooms; then the Sultan, immediately preceded and followed by private servants, likewise in white, except for their chief, a coal-black negro dressed in richest red. Beside the Sultan, who was robed in white and rode a white horse, walked on one side the bearer of the red parasol, and on the other a tall dark Arab who flicked a long scarf to keep flies off his Imperial Majesty. In and out of the ranks, disturbing whom he chose, ran a mad man, bellowing hideously, foaming at the mouth. This, on the part of Abdul Aziz, was indeed humouring the prejudices of the people.
CHAPTER XV
MANY SULTANS
It is generally put down to the weakness of Abdul Aziz that Morocco has come to its present pass, and there is no doubt that had the youthful Sultan possessed a little more of firmness he would not have come now to be a mere dependent of the French. But Morocco has long been doomed. Even in the days of the former Sultan, who ruled the Moors as they understood and gave them a government the likes of which they say they wish they had to-day, the tribes were constantly at war with one another and with him. Continual rebellions in Morocco proper left Mulai Hassan no time to subdue the Berber tribes to the south, nominally his subjects; and when in his age he set upon a long-projected pilgrimage to the birthplace of his dynasty, Tafilet, he could venture across the Atlas mountains only after emissaries had begged or bought from the Berbers the right of way.
The tragic death of Mulai Hassan while on the march, and the manner in which the throne was saved to Abdul Aziz, his favourite son, made graphic reading in the summer of 1894; and they will serve to-day to illustrate the sad, chaotic state of the whole poor Moorish empire. The old Sultan was not well when he returned from Tafilet, but serious disorders throughout the country allowed him to rest at Marakesh, his southern capital, only a few months. Proposing to move on to Rabat, thence to Fez, punishing lawless and rebellious tribes that had risen while he was away, he set out from Marakesh with an army composed of many hostile elements, conscripts kept together largely by their awe of him and hope of loot. They came to but the first rebellious district, that of the Tedla tribes, when Mulai Hassan fell seriously ill and was unable to go on. But after several days the news was spread one morning that he had sufficiently recovered and would proceed. Only the viziers and a few slaves—who held their tongues to save their heads—knew that Mulai Hassan was dead.
For a day the body, seated within the royal palanquin, was borne along in state, preceded as usual by many banners, the line of spear-bearers, and the six led horses, and flanked by the bearer of the parasol and the black who flicks the silken scarf. Though speed was imperative the usual halts were made that no suspicion should arise. In the morning at ten o’clock, the Sultan’s usual breakfast time, the army stopped, a tent was pitched, and into it the palanquin was carried. Food was cooked and green tea brewed and taken in, to be brought out again as if they had been tasted. At night the royal band played before the Sultan’s vast enclosure. But the secret was not to be kept long in a climate like that of Morocco in summer; and lest the corpse should tell its own tale, at the end of a long day’s march, as the army pitched its camp in the evening, the news went out, spreading like a wave through the company, that the Sultan was dead, and that Abdul Aziz was the Sultan, having been the choice of his father.
In an hour the camp split up into a hundred parties, each distrustful of some other. There was not a tribe but had some blood feud with another, and now the reason for the truce that had held hitherto was gone. Men of the same tribe banded together for defence and marched together at some distance from the others; conscripts from the neighbouring districts, or districts to the south, took their leave; private interests actuated now where awe and fear had held before. Soon the news got to the country, and the tribes through which the m’halla passed began to cut off stragglers, to plunder where they could and drive off animals that strayed.
By forced marches the army at last arrived at Rabat, and those of the tribesmen who cared to halt pitched their camp on the hills outside the walls. Promptly that night the Sultan’s body, accompanied by a single shereef and surrounded by a small contingent of foot-soldiers, was passed into the town through a hole in the wall—a dead man, it is said, never going in through the gates—and was entombed, as is the custom with Sultans, in a mosque. In the morning, when the people bestirred themselves to see the entry of the dead Hassan, they saw instead the new Sultan, then sixteen years of age, led forth on his father’s great white horse, and, shading him, the crimson parasol marking his authority.