About twenty-seven years ago the kaid who built the kasbah—chiefly by forced labour on the part of all the country people for miles round, though skilled workmen came from Mogador and were paid—was attacked by the Arab tribes from end to end of his province of Shedma, and after a six-months' siege was forced to fly to Marrakesh, where he died in prison, the tribesmen demolishing the castle for hidden treasure, till every wall had yielded its secret. Probably he oppressed his province like every other kaid, and was well hated. We went inside, and it was a foregone conclusion that we should camp there upon the grass. The governor's own halls were in a block in the centre, room after room, most intricate. Our tents were pitched in the vast sunny courtyard. We wandered about, exploring the odd corners, all the afternoon: not a vestige of timber or decoration remained. Handsome little red-brown kestrels with grey heads hovered over us and sat on the old walls, uttering their querulous cry: a beautiful blue jay, with cinnamon back and black-tipped wings and tail, was nesting in a hole among the bricks, and let us come close to him. A sib-sib scampered along an old window-ledge, a little animal like a squirrel, grey with striped back, the stripes running from head to tail: it ruffled out its tail at will.
The camel turned up at five, having been nine hours on the road. Later on a mona (a present) was brought us, consisting of butter, in a lordly dish set round with pink roses. So in the deserted walls of the kasbah we passed the night. Ghosts ought to have haunted those horrible death-traps, the matamors, of which there are said to be a hundred. The ground seemed riddled with these "wells," intended for the storage of grain, but used by sheikhs and kaids as their private prisons, whence at their will they draft on luckless captives to the public gaols: an old enemy is quite harmless in a matamor, with a square stone over the top, for the rest of his life.
The wonderful cisterns were another feature of the kasbah, immense tanks underground, concreted and still water-tight—at the end of every dry season cleaned out and whitewashed, now half full of stinking rain-water and decay.
We got off at seven the next morning, struck the main road from Mogador, left it, and found ourselves in quite an agricultural country, green barley-fields, planted all over at intervals with figs and pomegranates, even hedges of a sort. Then again we were in the argan forest—the last of it, and the best: beautiful trees, with their knarled, twisted branches. I thought of yews on the Surrey hills. Here coarse grass grew between, something like a park at home: goats clambered up into the forks, feasting on the green fruit. But all too soon the argans came to an end, and we saw this phenomenon of Morocco no more.
Nor was the exchange of the argan forest for the everlasting r`tam (white broom) and a sun-baked, arid wilderness, a welcome one. It always meant stones and sand and a general grilling, the r`tam, as it waved like pampas-grass to the far horizon. By-and-by palmetto cropped up, the fan-shaped dwarf palm, which makes ropes and twine, baskets, mats, dish-covers, leggings, hats, and girths. Here it grew in the middle of wretched little attempts at corn-fields—a drawback to farming, though from want of water farming might well have been let alone. Topping a rise, the whole undulating country was r`tam and palmetto: occasionally a flock of goats moved on its face, tended by thin mahogany-coloured Arab boys in dirty woollen tunics.
When a single olive-tree appeared, we hailed its shade for lunch. The mules, hobbled together, grazed: Omar and Saïd lay at a short distance, drinking green tea and smoking near the little fire they had lit. Botanical specimens had to be dried.
That night we camped outside the kasbah belonging to the most powerful kaid in the whole district: an immense reddish-yellow pile it was, built of tapia—that is, of mud, gravel, and water principally, poured into bottomless cases on the wall itself, and left to set. The kasbah had lived through a siege or two, and looked as if it would "ruin" quickly. From the arched gateway a crowd of squalid retainers emerged to stare at sun-helmets and Englishwomen: living like mediæval times within the castle's protecting walls, the "feudal system" practically obtains in Morocco in the present day.
Alas! the governor, Kaid Mohammed, was at Fez: his khaylifa (lieutenant) received us inside the filthy and squalid kasbah, seated on a doorstep—a better-dressed man than his retainers, curtailed perhaps in intellectual allowance, who gave us leave to camp outside.
A Blindfolded Camel Working a Water-Wheel.