It was entered, as usual, by a wide yellow door, studded with giant nails and a resounding knocker: a courtyard house—a most quaint and original construction in which to spend two or three months. From the ochre-coloured door we walked into a tiny tiled patio open to the sky, too small and insignificant for a fountain or an orange-tree: the kitchen and one other room where servants could sleep opened out of it, lighted only by their wide doors, which were never shut. So much for the ground floor.
A tiny tiled staircase led to the first floor. Four narrow rooms, windowless, flanked the four sides of the square, and looked down into the little court below. Each room had double doors standing open for light and air. From the house-top above the first floor, on to which we went last, there was at least a view of a thousand flat white roofs, of pencil-shaped minarets, of turtle-backed mosques; but at the same time the sun itself could not be more dazzling to look at than was the impossible whitewash which besmeared all the roofs, and we soon left for our first floor, in whose four little dark rooms we proposed to live. Standing on the gallery which ran outside them, and leaning on the balustrade looking down into the minute patio, it was a case of the view below into that, and the view above up at the sky, and no more—a limited, and on wet days gloomy, prospect. Added to that, the orgies worked in the kitchen by a Moorish cook could not do other than proclaim themselves all over the first floor. True, the little patio embodied the Moorish conception of al-fresco seclusion, and a depth of shadow lay in the inner rooms within the thin shell of the white walls. And yet—and yet—the lines of old-fashioned Eliza Cook returned insistently, and refused to be silenced:—
Double the labour of my task,
Lessen my poor and scanty fare,
But give, oh! give me what I ask—
The sunlight and the mountain air.
And in the end the vote was given against the little windowless dwelling in the Moorish Quarter. No doubt a courtyard house is bizarre, but it has its imperfections.
A Scotch proverb has it that "Where twa are seeking, they are sure to find." In time we found. A certain Moor of Tetuan, named Ali Slowee, a Spanish protected subject, was guardian, uncle, and stepfather to a boy named Dolero. Dolero owned a garden-house outside the city, called Jinan Dolero (The Garden of Dolero). Ali Slowee heard of our wants and offered us his nephew's house, provided we undertook to give it up at the end of March. Than the unexpected, when it does come, nothing is so good. After a little difference over the rent (our landlord began by asking two pounds five a month, and came down to thirty shillings) all was settled, and New Year's Day, 1902, found us living in a whitewashed garden-house in Morocco, out in the country.
Moors have extravagant ideas of the sums English people will pay. Mr. Bewicke was offered a house and garden for seven pounds ten a month: some time after the landlord asked three pounds; eventually he came down to thirty-nine shillings.
