“I hope that within a little time, O Joanna, you will be persuaded that I am the strongest man in Tangier, and that I am sprung from the blood of the Moors of Garnata, as then you will no longer refuse to take me for a husband, you and your maid Johár, and to become Moors. What a glory to you, after having been married to a Genoui, and given birth to Genouillos, to receive for husband a Moor like me, and to bear him children of the blood of Garnata! What a glory, too, for Johár!—how much better than to marry a vile Jew, even like Hayim Ben Attar, or your cook Sabia, both of whom I could strangle with two fingers, for am I not Hammin Widdir, Moro de Garnata, el hombre mas valido de Tanger?” He then shouldered his barrel and departed.
“Is that Mulatto really what he pretends to be?” said I to Joanna; “is he a descendant of the Moors of Granada?”
“He always talks about the Moors of Granada, when he is mad with majoon or aguardiente,” interrupted, in bad French, the old man whom I have before described, and in the same croaking voice which I had heard chanting in the morning. “Nevertheless it may be true, and if he had not heard something of the kind from his parents, he would never have imagined such a thing, for he is too stupid. As I said before, it is by no means impossible: many of the families of Granada settled down here when their town was taken by the Christians, but the greater part went to Tunis. When I was there, I lodged in the house of a Moor who called himself Zegri, [378] and was always talking of Granada and the things which his forefathers had done there. He would moreover sit for hours singing romances of which I understood not one word, praised be the Mother of God, but which he said all related to his family: there were hundreds of that name in Tunis, therefore why should not this Hammin, this drunken water-carrier, be a Moor of Granada also? He is ugly enough to be emperor of all the Moors. Oh, the accursed canaille! I have lived amongst them for my sins these eight years, at Oran and here. Monsieur, do you not consider it to be a hard case for an old man like myself, who am a Christian, to live amongst a race who know not God, nor Christ, nor anything holy?”
“What do you mean?” said I, “by asserting that the Moors know not God? There is no people in the world who entertain sublimer notions of the uncreated eternal God than the Moors, and no people have ever shown themselves more zealous for His honour and glory: their very zeal for the glory of God has been and is the chief obstacle to their becoming Christians. They are afraid of compromising His dignity by supposing that He ever condescended to become man. And with respect to Christ, their ideas even of Him are much more just than those of the Papists; they say He is a mighty prophet, whilst, according to the others, He is either a piece of bread, or a helpless infant. In many points of religion the Moors are wrong, dreadfully wrong; but are the Papists less so? And one of their practices sets them immeasurably below the Moors in the eyes of any unprejudiced person: they bow down to idols, Christian idols if you like, but idols still, things graven of wood, and stone, and brass; and from these things, which can neither hear, nor speak, nor feel, they ask and expect to obtain favours.”
“Vive la France, Vive la Guadeloupe!” said the black, with a good French accent. “In France and in Guadeloupe there is no superstition, and they pay as much regard to the Bible as to the Koran; I am now learning to read, in order that I may understand the writings of Voltaire, who, as I am told, has proved that both the one and the other were written with the sole intention of deceiving mankind. O, vive la France! where will you find such an enlightened country as France; and where will you find such a plentiful country as France? Only one in the world, and that is Guadeloupe. Is it not so, Monsieur Pascual? Were you ever at Marseilles? Ah quel bon pays est celui-là pour les vivres, pour les petits poulets, pour les poulardes, pour les perdrix, pour les perdreaux, pour les alouettes, pour les bécasses, pour les bécassines, enfin, pour tout.”
“Pray, sir, are you a cook?” demanded I.
“Monsieur, je le suis pour vous rendre service, mon nom c’est Gérard, et j’ai l’honneur d’être chef de cuisine chez monsieur le consul Hollandois. A present je prie permission de vous saluer; il faut que j’aille à la maison pour faire le diner de mon maître.”
At four I went to dine with the British consul. Two other English gentlemen were present, who had arrived at Tangier from Gibraltar about ten days previously for a short excursion, and were now detained longer than they wished by the Levant wind. They had already visited the principal towns in Spain, and proposed spending the winter either at Cadiz or Seville. One of them, Mr. ---, struck me as being one of the most remarkable men I had ever conversed with: he travelled not for diversion nor instigated by curiosity, but merely with the hope of doing spiritual good, chiefly by conversation. The consul soon asked me what I thought of the Moors and their country. I told him that what I had hitherto seen of both highly pleased me. He said that were I to live amongst them ten years, as he had done, he believed I should entertain a very different opinion; that no people in the world were more false and cruel; that their government was one of the vilest description, with which it was next to an impossibility for any foreign power to hold amicable relations, as it invariably acted with bad faith, and set at nought the most solemn treaties. That British property and interests were every day subjected to ruin and spoliation, and British subjects exposed to unheard-of vexations, without the slightest hope of redress being offered, save recourse was had to force, the only argument to which the Moors were accessible. He added, that towards the end of the preceding year an atrocious murder had been perpetrated in Tangier: a Genoese family of three individuals had perished, all of whom were British subjects, and entitled to the protection of the British flag. The murderers were known, and the principal one was even now in prison for the fact; yet all attempts to bring him to condign punishment had hitherto proved abortive, as he was a Moor, and his victims Christians. Finally, he cautioned me not to take walks beyond the wall unaccompanied by a soldier, whom he offered to provide for me should I desire it, as otherwise I incurred great risk of being ill-treated by the Moors of the interior, whom I might meet, or perhaps murdered; and he instanced the case of a British officer who not long since had been murdered on the beach for no other reason than being a Nazarene, and appearing in a Nazarene dress. He at length introduced the subject of the Gospel, and I was pleased to learn that, during his residence in Tangier, he had distributed a considerable quantity of Bibles amongst the natives in the Arabic language, and that many of the learned men, or talibs, had read the holy volume with great interest, and that by this distribution, which, it is true, was effected with much caution, no angry or unpleasant feeling had been excited. He finally asked whether I had come with the intention of circulating the Scripture amongst the Moors.
I replied that I had no opportunity of doing so, as I had not one single copy either in the Arabic language or character. That the few Testaments which were in my possession were in the Spanish language, and were intended for circulation amongst the Christians of Tangier, to whom they might be serviceable, as they all understood the language.
It was night, and I was seated in the wustuddur of Joanna Correa, in company with Pascual Fava, the Genoese. The old man’s favourite subject of discourse appeared to be religion, and he professed unbounded love for the Saviour, and the deepest sense of gratitude for his miraculous atonement for the sins of mankind. I should have listened to him with pleasure had he not smelt very strongly of liquor, and by certain incoherences of language and wildness of manner given indications of being in some degree the worse for it. Suddenly two figures appeared beneath the doorway; one was that of a bareheaded and bare-legged Moorish boy of about ten years of age, dressed in a gelaba. He guided by the hand an old man, whom I at once recognized as one of the Algerines, the good Moslems of whom the old mahasni had spoken in terms of praise in the morning whilst we ascended the street of the Siarrin. He was very short of stature and dirty in his dress; the lower part of his face was covered with a stubbly white beard; before his eyes he wore a large pair of spectacles, from which he evidently received but little benefit, as he required the assistance of the guide at every step. The two advanced a little way into the wustuddur, and there stopped. Pascual Fava no sooner beheld them, than assuming a jovial air he started nimbly up, and leaning on his stick, for he had a bent leg, limped to a cupboard, out of which he took a bottle and poured out a glass of wine, singing in the broken kind of Spanish used by the Moors of the coast—