Next morning R. and I strolled out of the city in the direction of Ceuta by way of the Báb-el-M`kabar (the Gate of the Tombs). Just beyond this gateway congregates in the road el doollah (the drove)—that is to say, the mules and donkeys belonging to any one in Tetuan who has no work for them on that particular day. They are all left by their owners at this spot in the care of a tall, tattered Moor, whose business in life is to look after them; and there they lie in the sandy road or lean up against the hot wall or each other, one of the saddest sights on God's earth, some of them infant two-year-olds, all of them overworked and starved. About midday the drover drives his charges off to the nearest grass—such as it is—and the ragged squad troops along the stony track without bridles and without spirit to abuse its freedom. They have none of them packs or saddles, unless their sore backs are too deeply aggravated to allow of exposure to the flies and dust; and in due time, one by one, the old or the dying drop tacitly out of the ranks; a couple of days—the scavenging dogs' work is done—and only a tangled knot of bones is kicked away from the roadside by the feet of the living generation, which have picked up the scantiest feed, and are straying back citywards again in the late afternoon, to be called for outside the Báb-el-M`kabar each by its owner.
El doollah had not started; and leaving them all in the road below us, we passed the little knots of countrywomen who sit by the Báb-el-M`kabar selling myrtle for laying upon the graves, and wound our way uphill through the old Mussulman cemetery, with its quaint domed tombs and toothed, arched doorways, cracked, decayed, and yellow with lichen, half hidden among the tangle of bushes and wild flowers on the rough slope.
The older of the tombs are probably those of the first Moors who fled from Spain in the days of that great trek back to Morocco: a much later and very conspicuous dome belongs to a brave lady, who, not a hundred years ago, did her best to defend Tetuan against the Spaniards, fighting side by side with the Moorish troops, and, in the course of the siege, accounting for half a dozen Spaniards, thereby earning for herself in due course a Joan of Arc reputation and a public sepulchre.
A Mohammedan Cemetery.
The cemetery was overgrown with ayerna root, one of the commonest weeds in Morocco, poisonous when it is eaten raw, though it is possible, after boiling the root for ten or twelve hours, spreading it out to dry in the sun, and grinding it in a mill, to make a sort of bitter bread out of the flour, and to subsist upon that. This the poor do to a great extent, whenever corn runs short and they have nothing but roots and grasses to fall back upon: their pale yellow faces and emaciated bodies tell a tale of the ayerna root. We grubbed some up with a little difficulty in the stiff clay soil with nothing but sticks to help. Fifteen inches down we found the root, a small whitish bulb, the size of a bluebell root.
There is much desolation about the old cemetery, with its crumbling ruins; but the sun struck a key-note of splendour, and turned the lichened stones into nuggets of gold.
A black raven sat on a grey rock above us and croaked; below lay the white city—white beyond all English ideas of whiteness. Two tall minarets, with simple straight lines, only a mosaic of green tiling let into their flat faces, cut the peaks of the mountains beyond. At a quarter past twelve a little white flag slowly mounted to the top of each mosque; an infinitesimally small black figure appeared against the sky; then leaning over the parapet and looking down upon the humming city, a cry broke from the figure, and was carried over to us upon the wind—a cry which rose and fell, most musical, most sonorous: "Allah Ho Akbar—Allah Ho Akbar." The black dot moved round the parapet, and east and west and north and south chanted the great summons to the Faithful to prayer. And then the little white flag was hauled down.
On the other side of the river the neutral-coloured villages could be picked out by their white saint-houses. Morocco is stuck as full of saints' tombs—fuller—than England of dissenting chapels. They stud the land. Moors rid themselves of much valuable energy in the erection, by countless thousands, of tombs to the memory of the eccentric or pious dead; and distances are measured, tracks marked, not from church to church as in Spain, nor from village to village as in England, but from saint-house to saint-house, each of which is village-green, club, or public-house rolled into one, where the men gossip, the pious read, travellers halt, offerings are brought the dead saint, and sick children arrive to be healed—all at a little whitewashed building with a dome like an oven outside, and a horse-shoe arch, an olive- or a fig- or a palm-tree, a flag-staff hung with morsels of rag, and often a spring of water. At four cross-tracks, instead of sign-posts, heaps of stones, cairns, are to be found, placed in such a way as to indicate the direction in which the next saint's tomb lies.
A saint-house or two spot the green plain below the cemetery, which merges into the seven miles of flats stretching from the city to the sea, the haunt of wild duck, plover, and snipe, among wastes of coarse grass, marsh, and red tangle. Coils of grey river lie upon the flats: the very flatness over which the stream snakes is at once most strong—serene.