Here a long dark tunnel opens into sunlight and shops on each side, with great vines trailed on trellis-work—like a pergola—overhead, and sunlight in blotches on the cobbled paving below: there, just beyond, the Slipper Quarter, and we find ourselves in the thick of the tap-tap of the mallets on the hard-hammered leather—dozens of busy little shops on each side, lined with yellow matting, and hung from top to floor with rows of lemon-yellow slippers for the men, rose-red slippers for women, embroidered slippers for the wealthy, crimson slippers for slaves, slippers with heel-pieces and slippers without. In each shop a man and boys at work: the white turbans and dark faces bending over the leather, the coloured jellabs which they wear, the busy hard-white-wood mallets in the deft brown hands, even the waxed thread, the red jelly which glues the soles together, the gimlets, the sharp scissors, have a passing fascination for the wandering Moor himself, who sits down lazily in front and talks to the workers. Still more for ourselves. Leather bags are being sewn next door and ornamented with work in coloured leather and silks. Within hearing of the "tap-tap" lies the skin-yard, and the skins are scraped and tanned and dyed and turned into slippers all in the same square acre or two, whence they depart many of them for Egypt and supply the Cairo bazaars.
A few steps farther, and there is a steady clanking of hammers on anvils, beating out hot iron—the Blacksmiths' Quarter. Not the old turbaned blacksmiths nor boys with shaved heads, in tunics grimed with age, and leather aprons sewn with red leather, nor the primitive bellows and quaint iron points, all being beaten out for the ploughs, are the features of the Blacksmiths' Quarter; but the sheep. Every forge has its sheep, every shop its pen like a rabbit-hutch, made out of the side of a box, where the sheep lives when it is not lying just at the threshold of the shop in the sun, beside a half-finished meal of bran in a box. Sheep after sheep, tame and fat, take up half the room in the street: there are sometimes a few hens, often a tortoiseshell cat curled up on a sack, but to every shop there is always a sheep fattening, as no other animal in Morocco fattens, against the Aid-el-Kebeer (the Great Feast), when every family kills and eats its own mutton.
The little shops in Tetuan group themselves together more or less. There is another quarter where sieves are made, a corner where baskets and the countrywomen's huge straw hats are plaited, another where carpenters congregate, and an open square where rugs, carpets, and curios cram the shops, and so on.
We left the warm heat from the glowing cinders and the cascade of sparks, and walked on into the feddan (market-place), which was teeming with women from the hills and villages round, come in to sell provisions.
The Jews' Quarter lies on one side of the feddan, shut in by a gate at night and locked—a squalid, noisy, over-populated spot, where the worst-kept donkeys and most filth are to be met with. Tetuan is a clean city: on every animal killed the "butchers" have to pay a tax; the tax goes towards the sweeping of the streets once a week, and towards their paving—that is, if the basha is conscientious: the last basha ate and drank the tax.
A gutter runs down the middle of the streets, where chickens are killed, and the heads and uneatable parts of flesh, fish, and fowl thrown. Mules and donkeys walk along the gutter, while foot-people flatten themselves against the walls. A well-laden mule fairly absorbs the width of the little streets.
The condition of these wretched transport animals is not due so much to wanton cruelty as to neglect, and to a callousness bred of long familiarity. A Moor will not trouble to prevent his beasts having sore backs and fistulated withers and raw hindquarters, any more than he sees that his children are warmly clad and suitably fed. Fond of both, he is foolish and apathetic, treating his mules roughly, cramming them with unnecessary food or neglecting them, and invariably working them till they drop.
One or two little cafés we passed round the feddan, and banished any connection between them and lunch for ever and a day.
A little room in the shade hung with yellow matting, no chairs, but a wide divan at the far end, where a few Moors sat cross-legged or reclined, smoking long pipes of soothing kif, and eating the pernicious haschisch—this constitutes a café. A few of the Moors are playing cards; the rest look on. A dome-shaped pewter teapot, filled with a brew of steaming tea, stands on a low table, with a painted glass beside it half full of mint, which a freckled boy in a coarse jellab fills up from the teapot to the brim and puts to his lips; then he lights a cheap cigarette. A great urn, with an oil lamp under it, stands in one corner.
No self-respecting Moor patronizes these cafés: he is the most fanatical of Mohammedans in a land reputed to be more strictly religious than any Eastern country. In public he observes his Prophet's laws, only indulging sub rosa in smoking—"eating the shameful," as it is called.
