Meanwhile, we were leaving the millet-fields behind us—stubbles, an occasional stalk three feet high, no lying for birds—and were in a country of wild lavender and stunted bushes: these consisted chiefly of cistus or else palmetto, a little dwarf palm, the fruit of which is eaten by goats, and the root by natives as a vegetable, while its fibrous leaves make rope and baskets and a hundred things. A bleak undulating country, which ran up into rocky blue gorges and grey peaks on the right hand. The path was almost blocked at one point by an immense cairn on the top of a ridge—a holy pile, upon which the devout Moor in passing casts a stone, because from this spot the mountain can be made out on which the venerated shrine of Mulai Abdesalam lies, in Beni Anos, the goal of thousands of pilgrims each year. Though it is within a day's ride of Tangier, the country for miles around is forbidden to any European, and two Englishmen only have penetrated into the sacred city of Shesháwan, which lies in the same district. Mr. Walter B. Harris and Mr. Somers, at different times, got inside, but only at sunset, and after lying in hiding all night had to flee for their lives at dawn.
Gradually we reached wilder and more rocky country, recalling Scotland as far as the open moorland went. If fir-trees were planted on the sheltered slopes, the fir-pins should, in conjunction with the natural soil, form land capable of growing vines—an idle dream in the Morocco of to-day.
Between two hills in front of us towered a cliff of rocky red limestone, which might once have formed the bed of some vast stream. Semsar lay where the waters should have struck the rock beneath as they fell: a more sheltered village could not be, facing south-east. The cliff above is still riddled with the remains of an old silver-mine, worked years ago by the Portuguese: the ladders and scaffolding inside have fallen to pieces, and after penetrating along dark tunnels on hands and knees for a certain distance an open shaft intervenes, and further exploration is impossible.
Semsar, nestled into its crevice, takes more or less the local brown; but among the thatched huts, rising one above the other like an uneven pile of mud terraces, a few walls were whitewashed, and of course a white village mosque stood guard over all on the top of a hillock. There is something a trifle "animal" in these villages, rough clusters of bee's-comb or ant-heaps or beavers' lodgings as they might be, assuming exactly the shade of their surroundings, as nests the colour of their hiding-places, or as the khāki-coloured sand-lizard, desert-lark, and sand-grouse of the great Sahara take on the yellow-ochre tone of that desert.
A friend belonging to Mr. Bewicke's soldier had ridden out behind us. He owned a garden at hand, and asked if we would go in and look at it. We stooped low under a white stone doorway, an imposing structure, invariably the entrance to every garden: the door generally painted Reckitt's blue, and kept locked with a key eight inches long, while on each side of the gateway the cane fence is tumbling to pieces and offering useful gaps to marauders—a curious inversion of the rule in Spain, where to this day they bar the window heavily and leave the door open.
Though to all appearance the owner was a hard-working Moor, the garden at any rate bore no great signs of expenditure of labour. We found ourselves in an overgrown wilderness of orange-trees, peaches, pears, figs, plums, damsons, cherries, white mulberries, quinces, jasmine, all overgrown and stabbed by the interloping prickly pear—a good fruit, too, in its way, and a "useful beast" as a hedge.
Half of his oranges were always stolen, the owner said; the remaining half brought him in from sixty to ninety shillings a year, selling perhaps at a shilling or two the thousand. He had evidently not the capital to get the half of what such fruitful soil could give with Gibraltar at hand for export, nor the means of securing to himself any money he made; and it is poor work putting money into the hands of the nearest extortionate sheikh. Yet his garden was, and is to every Moor, a source of great satisfaction and content: truly a field of the slothful, a garden where the mystic finds rest and heart's ease, and the two things which appeal most to sun-baked men—shade and water. It is enough in such a spot to drowse away the sunny hours amidst the hum of bees, the rattle of the tree-beetle; to muse upon some book of whose drift only a faint idea is intelligible, content to leave its problems in the limbo of the insoluble, where most of life's questions seethe harmlessly enough; then, turning, give thanks to Allah, who has made gardens for mankind, and doze again.
Farther on the path led us across streams banked with maiden-hair fern like rank grass. Water had worn the rock into grotesque shapes, a cavernous arch in one place, the banks, like a tunnel, almost meeting over our heads in another. Immense blocks of stone barred the way; it was not easy riding, but the mules climbed up and down rocky staircases with much tact, while we sat holding our breath.
Over one of these obstructions the breastplate of my saddle, which had only been fastened to begin with by three stitches of string, burst, and I found myself almost over the grey's tail: such a common occurrence that no Moor goes out without string and packing-needle handy; but this was past mending on the road, and I changed on to the soldier's mule, whose top-heavy saddle was no fit at all, and, shifting all over its back, required careful balance on the rider's part.
The road was only a few feet wide, and so overgrown that, as we jogged one after the other, trying to dodge grey arms of fig-trees, lying on the mules' necks under dark masses of foliage which shut out half the light, hatless, the stiffest bullfinch at home would have been ears of corn compared with what we went through.