Mohammed knew very well that Eastern peoples drink to get drunk, and smoke and eat opium for the purpose of intoxicating their senses. Kif, a herb something like hemp, produces this effect on the brain. He therefore forbade both.
When a Moorish "swell" wants to amuse himself, instead of passing the time at a café he goes out for the day into the country. There is generally an expression of perfect satisfaction with life as he finds it, on his lineless biscuit-coloured face and in his brown agate eyes—a content seldom expressed under the top-hats in the Park. Time is to him no "race": he drifts easily down the years; knows no other home than, it may be, Tetuan; nor is conscious that Tetuan sleeps, as it has slept for ages, curled up, underneath the towering hills, white, petrified, like Lot's wife.
Still down more streets, and on towards the Belgravia of the city we walked, leaving steaming little hot-fritter shops, where sfins are fried in oil and eaten with honey, where cream tarts may possibly be made and honeyed cakes, and crisp pastry prepared with attar of roses, and candied musk lemons, and dates mixed with almond paste. We left the fried-fish shops and fried spitted-meat shops behind, whence emerge kabobs—second only to coos-coosoo—and a smell indescribable; and we wound down tortuous alleys, past quiet windowless houses, whose great painted doors, yellow and brown, studded with enormous nails and knockers, spoke respectability.
Never a straight street for six yards. Here an angle with a door; turn down under an archway: there a tiny branching alley, which we follow: here another door; plunge down the opposite way. A woman passes us with a friend, walking as only women in Morocco walk—figures in creamy haiks of the finest wool, which swathe them entirely from top to toe like a sheet, a pair of eyes barely showing between the folds. At the bottom of the haiks a flash of colour obtrudes, tomato in one, beetle-green in the other, and filmy muslin over both, which in their turn allow a glimpse of ankles wrapped round in snowy linen folds—rose-pink, gold-embroidered slippers completing the whole, suggestive of a tea party.
A yard farther and we pass El-Jama-el-Kebeer (the Big Mosque), which, unlike that at Tangier, stands with its doors wide open, but in front of which no infidel may linger. There was a vision of a cool tiled courtyard and splashing fountains of white marble and clean yellow matting, of endless tiled pillars vanishing into shade. There are saint-houses in the city where women are allowed to pray, but only upon one night in the whole year in El-Jama-el-Kebeer—a field-day among the wives and concubines, who flit like white moths through the darkness in flocks to worship, carrying red-and-blue lanterns.
At last we reached the house of the Moor upon whom Mr. Bewicke intended us to call—a specimen of the best Moorish houses.
Alarbi Abresha has been nicknamed "the Duke of Westminster"—the wealthiest man in Tetuan. A slave responded to the hammer of the great knocker, demanded who knocked, and then opened the door. Alarbi Abresha was out; but his son, a youth badly marked with small-pox, received us, dressed in a jellab of pale blue, tasselled, and worked in white. Mr. Bewicke asked after the house. No one in Morocco inquires after the wife or family distinctively.
Alarbi Abresha's House.
Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier.