The stables were a great point, and the bobbery pack, which hunt pig for five months all through the winter, accounted in one season for something like nineteen full-grown boar, ten tuskers, and nine sows.
Palm-tree House belonged for more than twenty years to a British merchant, who simply provided accommodation for any sportsman liking to come out and put up for a week or so outside Mogador: it has still the air of a shooting-box. The host, in breeches and gaiters and a great felt wideawake, rode up while we were there, and offered us every hospitality—a tall wiry man, with good hands and seat.
Had time been of no object, we should have moved on into Palm-tree House. It would be a spot to visit at any season, for the climate scarcely varies all the year round: the difference between summer and winter is not more than five degrees.
Back again in the city and strolling round it that same afternoon, the conviction was borne in upon us that of all saddening spots Mogador was possibly the saddest—that is, to the traveller, from an outside point of view: residents may have another tale to tell. But without vegetation or cultivation within sight, suggestive of life and change and labour, with the monotonous roar of the grey breakers beating its seaward walls, and wastes of blown white sand to landward, Mogador is the picture of a city which has lost all heart, and settled down into grim apathy, without a vestige of joy or activity outside its walls. The overcrowding of the Jews in the Mellah is a shocking evil, already stamping the rising generation with disease.
Earlier by three-quarters of an hour than Tetuan at the same time of year, the city gates at Mogador were shut at six o'clock, and picnic parties of Moorish or European traders were hurried back in broad daylight. We met the basha gravely pacing the sands on a white mule with scarlet trappings—of all stout officials, in a country where it is a sin and a shame on the part of one in office to be thin, the stoutest. His broad body overshadowed the big mule, and his two little legs might have been a pair of ninepins below a vast cask draped in white.
To the south of Mogador lies first the Sus country and then Wadnoon, dividing the Morocco which is partly known to Europeans, from the Sahara, which nobody knows. The Sus may be said to be practically unknown, and it is distinctly "forbidden" land, through which only two or three travellers have ever passed—Oskar Lenz, Gatell, Gerhard Rohlfs, and possibly a missionary; but they were all disguised and went in terror of their lives; nor have they left satisfactory records of their experiences.
After Rain in Mogador.
And yet the Sus is comparatively close to Mogador, with which it trades; mules from the Sus were always in the Mogador market; camels were coming in every week with wool, camels' hair, goat-skins, hides, beeswax, a little gold dust, ostrich feathers, gum-arabic, cattle, and all the produce of the Sahara; while the Berbers from the Sus were interesting above any Riffis or tribesmen with whom we had hitherto met.
Their country is supposed to contain rich mines: it is said to be fertile and thickly populated; it is not loyal—on the contrary, it is ill-affected to its liege lord, the Sultan; it is fanatical to a degree, and largely swayed by a form of government best expressed by its title—Council of Forty. In return for their own goods the Berbers from the Sus carry back into their country all sorts of Manchester goods, powder, tea, sugar, cheap German cutlery, and the like.