CHAPTER XII
The Thursday Market—We Might have gone to Glaouia—Leave Marrakesh and set out on Our Last March for the Coast—Flowers in Morocco—On the Wrong Trail—Arab Tents—Good-Bye to El Moghreb.
CHAPTER XII
The best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
The great Thursday Market is one of those things in Marrakesh which, once seen, is stamped deeper than a hundred other memories upon the mind. It is held in a sun-baked open space outside the Gate of the Thursday Market, just beyond the city walls, within view of the plains and a distant low range of mountains. Thousands and thousands of tall palms, groves of them, wave in the wind all over the surrounding country: a few great watercourses, worn and eaten out of the red soil, burrow between the forests on their way down to the great river.
To reach the market we rode out along a road thronged with people selling all sorts of goods, from splendid old flintlock guns from the Sus chased with silver and gold and going at three pounds, to striped carpets strong and violent in colouring at seven-and-sixpence each, and second-hand clothes of the most varied description. At last, topping a little hill, we rode down into the market: it is, more correctly speaking, a horse fair,—mules were also for sale. The horses down in the south are without doubt very different from the poor little ponies bred up in the north; but even these, in comparison, for instance, with a thoroughbred hunter at home, fell far short of what my defective imagination had led me to expect of Arab stallions in Morocco. For the most part there was nothing for sale except great heavy brutes with small heads and proud arched necks. Every one of them fell away in the hindquarters.
