“All right,” whispered Abraham, “you see I understand these people. Did you ever pass through a customhouse so easily?”
None of us had guessed that it was a customhouse!
The whole life of Tangier seems to be lived in the streets. The market is a perfect babel of strange tongues. Veiled women seated on the ground sell queer flat loaves of bread and great bunches of violets. The stalls are piled with golden tangerines, tiny limes, mammoth lemons, scarlet peppers, purple eggplant—every fruit or vegetable you ever saw and many you never heard of!
The children are very handsome with enormous eyes and skins of bronze velvet! The Moorish is the best Oriental dress I have seen, save that of the Bedouins of the Pyramids, which it resembles. Abraham piloted us through a maze of narrow twisted streets crowded with strange figures; Moors in white bournouses, Jews in black gaberdines, negro slaves with gashed cheeks and wild-looking Berbers with blue eyes, the descendants of white men settled centuries ago in the hills and fiercer looking even than the Moors....
In the late afternoon Dr. Baltzell (a fellow traveler) and I went for a ride in the outlying country. It might better be called desert, for it was all sand with an occasional fig tree. The sand from the beach seems to have been driven inland and rises up in little hills, reaching far into the interior. We rode into the sunset till we reached the ruins of an old Roman bridge and then back to town in a wonderful pink twilight under a crescent moon. Abraham lifted up his voice and sang a wild Hebrew melody, while Abdallah the donkey boy trotted along beside me, twisting the tail of Zuleiman, my unfortunate mule. When our retinue learned that Baltzell was an M.D., every door flew open to him, as physicians are held in high respect. Abraham consulted him about his fiancée, and Abdallah about his wife. The doctor’s offer to go and see the patients was respectfully declined. The symptoms of both ladies were minutely described, and he was urged to prescribe. The doctor’s own stock of simples soon gave out, and we commandeered my bottle of soda mints and my box of Brown’s bronchial troches, which he distributed freely. At dinner there was quail for the doctor, mere larks for us; his pillow was of down, ours of straw; he had a fine horse to ride, the rest of us had to put up with mules or donkeys!
I liked the Moors immensely, but they did not like us. A handsome boy bit his thumb at me! When I laughed at his insolence, Abraham whispered anxiously, “Do not notice them—it is better not—it is not safe!”
Raisuli, the brigand chief, was believed to be near the city and we were not allowed to ride far beyond the gates. I asked to see a school. Abraham led me to the open door of a cellar, where twenty boys from three to ten years old were seated upon the earth floor repeating verses from the Koran. The master, an old Moor with a long beard, frowned at us, and a youth of fifteen who was writing neatly in a book closed it hurriedly and started to his feet, muttering angrily.
“He is afraid that the shadow of a Christian might fall upon the page. If that happened, he would tear it out and all his labor would be lost,” Abraham explained.
Outside the gate is the Sok, or market place. Here we heard a native teller of tales recite the story of the Fisherman and the Genie. While we were there a caravan from Fez arrived at the Sok, the camels grunted and scolded just like those you remember we rode in the Egyptian desert. That night a friend arranged a concert for us. There were six musicians with a lute, a tambourine, a reban and a shepherd’s pipe. The leader chanted a wailing song, the others joining in the chorus.
“They are singing ‘The Lament for Granada’!” said our host.