There was another hotel in Tangier, a more pretentious establishment, owned by one Martin—surname unknown. Martin was a character. He was an unmitigated coloured gentleman, blubber-lipped and black as the ace of spades, with saffron-red streaks at the corners of his optics. He was a native of one of the West India Islands, I believe, but I will not be positive. Mahomet Lamarty pressed me to tell him in what English county Englishmen were born black, and when I said in none, he gravely ejaculated that in that case Martin was a liar, and habitually ate dirt. To avert possible complications into which I might have been drawn, I had to hasten to explain that Martin might possibly have been born in a part of England known as the Black Country. He had served in the steward's department on the ship of war where the Duke of Edinburgh, then Prince Alfred and a middy, was picking up seamanship. Hence his Jove-like hauteur. He had rubbed-skirts with Royalty, and to his fetter-shadowed soul some of the divinity which hedges kings and their relatives had adhered to him. I never met a darkey who could put on such fearful and wonderful airs. Where he did not order he condescended. He showed me an Irish constabulary revolver which he had received from "his old friend, Lord Francis Conyngham—'pon honour, he was delighted to meet him. It was good for sore eyes—who'd a-thought of his turning up there!" Splendidly inflated Martin was when he spoke of "his servants." This thing was entertaining until he grew presumptuous. If you are polite to some people they are familiar, and want to take an ell for every inch you have conceded. And then you have to tell them to keep their place. But Martin, with the instincts of his race, saw in time when it was coming to that. What a misery it must be for a coloured gentleman of ambition that the tell-tale odor stirpis cannot be eliminated! Martin spent extraordinary amounts of money on the purchase of essences, but to no effect; he could not escape from himself; the scent of the nigger, che puzzo! would hang round him still. He was a great coward with all his magniloquence, and when cholera attacked Tangier, left it in craven terror, and sequestered himself in a country house a few miles off.
The two captains and I "did" Tangier conscientiously, with the zest of Bismarck over a yellow-covered novel, and the thoroughness of a Cook's tourist on his first invasion of Paris. We crawled into a stifling crib of a dark coffee-house, and sucked thick brown sediment out of liliputian cups; we smoked hemp from small-bowled pipes until we fell off into a state of visionary stupor known as "kiff;" we paid our respects to the Kadi, exchanged our boots for slippers, and settled down cross-legged on mats as if we were the three tailors of Tooley Street; we almost consented to have ourselves bled by a Moorish barber—Mahomet Lamarty's particular, who lanced him in the nape of the neck every spring—for the Moorish barber still practises the art of Sangrado, and also extracts teeth. But in my note-taking I was sorely handicapped by my ignorance of the language. Arabic is spoken in the stretch extending from Tetuan to Mogador by the coast, and for some distance in the interior; Chleuh is the dialect of the inhabitants of the Atlas range, and Guinea of the negroes. Spanish is slightly understood in Tangier and its vicinity, and is well understood by the Jews. The houses are generally built of chalk and flint (tabia) on the ground-floor, and of bricks on the upper story. Moorish bricks are good, but rough and crooked in make. The houses inhabited by Jews are obliged to be coated with a yellow wash, those of natives are white, those of Christians may be of any colour. The Jews are made to feel that they are a despised stock, and yet with Jewish subtlety and perseverance they have managed to get and keep the trade of the place in their hands. That fact may be plainly gathered from the absence of business movement in the bazaars and public resorts of Tangier on the Jewish Sabbath. Your Hebrew does not poignantly feel or bitterly resent being reviled and spat upon, provided he hears the broad gold pieces rattling in the courier-bag slung over his shoulder. He nurses his vengeance, but he has the common sense to perceive that the readiest and fullest manner of exacting it is by cozening his neighbour. At this semi-European edge of Africa he enjoys comparative license, although he is forced to appear in skull-cap and a long narrow robe of a dark colour something like a priest's soutane. But the son of Israel when he has a taste for finery (and which of them has not?) compensates for the gloom of his outer garment by wearing an embroidered vest, a girdle of some bright hue, and white drawers.
The daughters of Israel—but my conscience charges me with want of gallantry towards them in a previous chapter, and now I can honestly relieve it and win back their favour. They are the only beautiful women who mollify the horizon of Tangier: the Mahometan ladies are not visible, those of Spanish descent are coarse, and of English are washed-out; while their lips are against the negresses. I have a batch of photographs of females in an album—aye, of believers in the Prophet amongst them, for it is a folly to imagine you cannot obtain that which is forbidden. Hercules, I fancy, must have overcome with a golden sword the dragon that watched the gardens of the Hesperides—which, by the way, were in the neighbourhood of Tangier, if Apollodorus is to be credited. On looking over that album, the majority of the faces are distinctly those of Aaronites, and most favourable specimens of the family, too There are melting black orbs curtained with pensive lashes, luxuriant black hair, regular features, and straight, delicately chiselled noses. These Jewesses generally wear handkerchiefs disposed in curving folds over their heads, and are as fond of loudly-tinted raiment and the gauds of trinketry as their sisters who parade the sands at Ramsgate during the season. There is a photograph before me, as I write, of a Jewish matron, fat, dull, double-chinned, and sleepy-eyed, who must have been a belle before she fell into flesh. She wears massy filigree ear-rings, two strings of precious stones as necklaces, ponderous bracelets, edgings of pearls on her bodice, and rings on all her fingers. Her shoulders are covered with costly lace, and the front of her skirt is like an altar-cloth heavy with embroidery. I dare say, if one might peep under it, she has gold bangles on her ankles. It would surprise me if she had an idea in her head beyond the decoration of her person. As we turn the leaf, there is a full-blooded negress with a striped napkin twisted gracefully turban-wise round her hair, and coils of beads, large and small, sinuously dangling on her breast, like the chains over the Debtor's Door at Newgate. A very fine animal indeed, this negress, with power in her strong shiny features; a nose of courage, thin in the nostrils, and cheek-bones high, but not so high as those of a Red Indian. If she were white, she might pass for a Caucasian, but for that gibbous under-lip. She lacks the wide mouth and the hinted intelligent archness of the Two-Headed Nightingale, and has not the moody expression and semi-sensuous, semi-ferocious development of the muscular widows of Cetewayo; but for a negress she is handsome and well-built, and would fetch a very good price in the market. The slave-trade still flourishes in Morocco. On the next page we meet two types of young Moorish females: one a peasant, taken surreptitiously as she stood in a horse-shoe archway; the other a lady of the harem, taken—no matter by what artifice. The peasant, swathed from tip to heel in white like a ghost in a penny booth, and shading her face with a cart-wheel of a palm-leaf hat looped from brim to crown, and with one extremity of its great margins curled, is a prematurely worn, weather-stained, common-looking wench, with a small nose and screwed-up mouth. She is a free woman, but I would not exchange the dusky bondswoman for five of her class. Centuries of bad food, much baby-nursing, and field-labour sink their imprint into a race. The harem lady, whose likeness was filched as she leaned an elbow against a low table, is in a state of repose. She squats tailor-fashion, her fingers are twined one in another in her lap, her eyes are closed, and her expression is one of drowsy, listless voluptuousness. She is fair, and her dress (for she is not arrayed for the reception of visitors) is simple—a peignoir, and a sash, and a fold of silk binding her long rich tresses. A soft die-away face, with no sentiment more strongly defined than the abandonment to pleasure and its consequent weariness. By no means an attractive piece of flesh and blood, and yet a good sample of the class that go to upholster a seraglio.
I have never had the slightest anxiety to penetrate the secrets of the Moslem household, and I consider the man who would wish to poke his nose into its seclusion no better than Peeping Tom of Coventry—an insolent, lecherous cad. I would not traverse the street to-morrow to inspect the champion wives of the Sultan of Turkey and Shah of Persia amalgamated; and I deserve no credit for it, for I know that they are puppets, and that more engaging women are to be seen any afternoon shopping in Regent Street or pirouetting in the ballets of half-a-dozen theatres.
Your lady of the harem is an insipid, pasty-complexioned doll, nine times out of ten, and would be vastly improved in looks and temperament if she were subjected to a course of shower-baths, and compelled to take horse-exercise regularly and earn her bread before she ate it.
How do I know this? it may be asked. Who dares to deny it? is my answer.
But here is a digression from our theme of the condition of the Jews at Tangier, and all on account of a few poor photographs! In one sentence, that condition is shameful. It is a reproach to the so-called civilized Powers that they do not interfere to influence the Emir-al-Mumenin to behave with more of the spirit of justice towards his Jewish subjects. In Fez and other cities they have to dwell in a quarter to themselves—"El Melah" (the dirty spot) it is called in Morocco city; and when they leave the Melah they have to go bare-footed. They are not permitted to ride on mules, nor yet to walk on the same side of the street as Arabs.
The late Sir Moses Montefiore, a very exemplary old man in some respects, visited Morocco in his eightieth year to intercede on behalf of his co-religionists, and promises of better treatment were made; but promises are not always kept.
CHAPTER VI.
A Pattern Despotism—Some Moorish Peculiarities—A Hell upon Earth—Fighting for Bread—An Air-Bath—Surprises of Tangier—On Slavery—The Writer's Idea of a Moorish Squire—The Ladder of Knowledge—Gulping Forbidden Liquor—Division of Time—Singular Customs—The Shereef of Wazan—The Christian who Captivated the Moor—The Interview—Moslem Patronage of Spain—A Slap for England—A Vision of Beauty—An English Desdemona: Her Plaint—One for the Newspaper Men—The Ladies' Battle—Farewell—The English Lady's Maid—Albert is Indisposed—The Writer Sums up on Morocco.