A Typical Moorish Street.
Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier.
From the west coast at Saffi terrible reports arrived of the havoc the weather had made of the city. The lowest barometer ever seen had preceded sheets of rain, and a solid hamla (flood) had entered the gates from the valley above, filling the narrow streets in a few moments to a depth of seven and eight feet, and carrying everything before it: men, women, children, and cattle were swept in a torrent through the water-gate out to sea, sometimes a hand stretched out above the eddies. Then the gate became blocked with floating debris and bodies, and the flood rose to ten feet in the principal street. The townspeople who survived took refuge on their roofs. The vice-governor was drowned. Houses, shops, mills, and mosques were gutted as if by fire; furniture and household goods were ruined; the Saffi shopkeepers were beggared. For many weeks after the survivors starved upon roots, in spite of a subscription raised in Tangier to relieve them.
The rain apparently was something like a waterspout. Happily Tetuan was exempt from waterspouts, and on days when the rain gave over for a time we rode, or, picking our way along the muddy streets, drank tea with some Moor.
One dull afternoon we sampled the state of the roads outside, R. on a donkey, and Mr. Bewicke and myself on foot. Walking out by the Gate of the Tombs, we bore to the left, and dived into the narrowest of narrow lanes, shut in with tall cane fences and high mud-banks crowned with prickly pear, the shape of whose fat, fleshy leaves recalls moles' paws.
The donkey was an unusually large one, and its pack rolled more than packs in general: before we saw the last of Tetuan its rider had many a fall off her unsteady perch; and if there is truth in the Moorish saying that "one does not become a horseman till one is broken," R. may claim to have qualified. It shied and bucked and came on its nose over rocks; but this time Mr. Bewicke's boy, Mohr, directed its ways, and thoroughly enjoyed cudgelling it along with a stick, helped by its rider's switch, cut from a quince-tree, which often as not hit Mohr instead of the ass.
By-and-by we met a countryman, his wife, and a donkey. The woman, who wore little except two striped towels, and a handkerchief round her head, staggered along under a great load of faggots. She was stunted and wrinkled, removed mentally but few degrees from the three-year-old weather-beaten donkey which minced along in front of her, also loaded with faggots. The woman had strips of rough leather bandaged round her legs to protect them from thorns. Her feet were bare. Her husband sauntered last of all, presumably looking after the donkey: he had no load. Another time the donkey also might be exempt, while the woman was still burdened; and the man, when asked why, if he would not carry the load himself, he did not at least put it upon the donkey, would reply, "Because it is too heavy for the ass."
A little farther on and a magnificent Riffi passed us, walking along at a smart pace into the city, his face "old oak" colour, framed in a turban of dark red-brown strings of wool. He wore a chocolate-coloured jellab, embroidered at the edge with white, and sewn with tufts of red, violet, yellow, and green-coloured silks: a tall, wiry fellow, with a back like a ram-rod, a thin face, and keen, defiant eyes. The light glittered on his long, brass-plated Riffi gun: a red leather pouch full of bullets hung at his side. He was a great contrast to the labourer who passed us afterwards, also bound for the city—an old and grizzled monkey-faced man, with his head tied round with a ragged red cloth gun-case. His jellab hung in tatters, but he also carried a gun, and by a string a brace of partridges and a wild duck, which "bag," after some bargaining, became ours for the sum of one-and-sixpence.
Among the brown jellabs and varied turbans European clothes were forcibly out of their place: a people like the Moors, childlike, patriarchal, whose lives embody one of the oldest and perhaps best ideas of a simple existence, may well hate the sight, on the face of their select country, of prosaic tailoring and hideous head-gear. The traveller in his boots, where boots are things unknown, passes the muffled women with their silent gait, the picturesque ruffians with their swinging stride, and is unable to help feeling not at home and something of a blot on the landscape.