Nothing reminds one that within half a mile a town, in which three thousand people live, is near, except the footpaths which zigzag in and out, crossing the fields, emerging out of woods, and intersecting one another, as the rails seem to do at Clapham Junction. A fusillade tells that a Sherif from the Sus has just arrived; all Amsmiz sally forth to meet him mounted upon their best, charging right up to the Sherif, and firing close to his horse—wheeling and yelling like Comanches—making a picture shadowy, fantastic, and unbelievable to one who but three weeks ago had left a land of greys. The Sherif’s people open fire, and when the smoke clears off the Sherif himself, mounted upon a fine white horse, rides slowly forward, holding a green flag. The people fall into a long line behind him, which, by degrees, is swallowed up under the horse-shoe gateway of the town. Mohammed el Hosein, whom I had sent to look out for a horse, appears with a little, undersized, and brachycephalic Shillah, leading a young, black horse, unshod, with feet as long as coops, in good condition and sound in wind and limb, and with an eye the blackest I have seen in mortal horse—a sign of perfect temper; incontinently I determine in my mind to buy him at all cost. We praise our horses—that is, the Shillah praises his—but I, as a Sherif, am far too grand to do so at first hand; so Swani lies like a plumber about mine—which stands and kicks at flies, and looks—like horses do when one is just about to part with them—much more attractive than one ever thought before.
The Shillah leads up his horse, which I pretend hardly to notice; and, luckily for me, he speaks no Arabic. Then he looks at my horse, and, I imagine, grabs him, for Swani springs upon the horse’s back, and runs him ventre à terre over the rough stubble, and, stopping with a jerk—the horse’s feet cutting the ground like skates—gets off, and says that, help him, Allah, the horse is fit for Lord Mohammed, and that I only sell him because I am so tender-hearted about the sore upon his back.
This makes the Shillah think there is a “cat shut up inside,” [112] for no one sells a horse for a sore back amongst his tribe. We try his horse—that is, Mohammed el Hosein makes him career about the field without a bridle; and then I mount him, and display what I consider horsemanship. Nine dollars and the horse? By Allah, seven; but the Shillah, who has not tried my horse, looks at his colt, and says: “I brought him up, fed him with camel’s milk, rode him to war, and he is six years old; nine dollars and the horse.” We shake our heads; and he, mounting his horse, yells like a Pampa Indian, and charging through the cane-brake bare-backed, and with nothing but a string on one side of his horse’s neck, rushes up a steep bank and disappears, riding like a Numidian. I say it was a pity I did not give the nine, but am assured all is not over, and that the man has probably gone to bring back “a bargain-striker” to complete the sale. Throughout Morocco, when animals change hands, the bargaining lasts sometimes for a week; and at the last a man appears, sometimes a passer-by, who is pressed into the undertaking, who, seizing on the bargainers’ right hands, drags them together, and completes the deal.
In about half-an-hour our man comes back, bringing the local “Maalem,” that is Smith, who talks and talks, and as he talks surveys me from the corner of his eye. At last the Shillah yields, takes the seven dollars, counts them with great attention, tapping each one of them upon a stone to see if “it speaks true,” and then mounting my horse essays its paces. As it fell out the horse, which galloped like a roe, with Swani, set off with a plunge which almost sent the Shillah over one side, and turning flew to the mules and stopping by them refused to move a step. The Shillah thought, of course, he had been done, and I had most reluctantly to mount the horse and make him go. We give our word the horse is not a jibber, and swear by Allah if he is, and the Shillah will send him back to Mogador, he shall receive his money and his own horse on our return.
He takes our word at once and grasps my hand, puts his own bridle on my horse, and bending down kisses his own horse underneath the neck, and says, in Shillah, that he hopes I shall never ill-treat it, I promise (and perform) and bid my own horse farewell after my fashion, and the Shillah mounts and rides out of my life towards the town. A little dour and fish-eyed, turbanless and ragged man, legs bowed from early riding, face marked with scars, a long, curved knife stuck through a greasy belt, hands on a horse as if they came from heaven; his farewell to his horse was much more real than is the leavetaking of most men from their wives, and moved me to the point of being about to call him back and break the bargain, had I not reflected that the pang once over, the poor Shillah would never in his life be at the head of so much capital. [114]
In less than half-an-hour the Maalem had shod the horse, shortening its feet with an iron instrument shaped like a trowel, and nailing on the shoes, which almost cover the whole foot, with home-made nails; he stays to guard our animals (and spy upon us), and we prepare for our first al fresco night.
Unlike America, where travellers sleep out of doors from Winnipeg to Patagonia, in the East, except in crossing deserts, to sleep out of doors without a tent is quite exceptional, and yet one never sleeps so soundly as on a fine night beside a fire, one’s head upon a saddle, feet to the fire, and the stars to serve as clock. Even the wandering Arabs generally carry tents, and thus, in my opinion, all through the East much of the charm of camping out is lost. All that we do is a convention, and Arabs are not savages, but on the contrary even the Bedouins are highly civilised after their fashion, and the civilised man must always have a roof, even of canvas, over his head to shut out nature. Not but that your common Moors, like to “your Kerne of Ireland” in ancient days, do not sleep out, for nothing is more common than on a rainy night, in camping at a village, for the Sheikh to send a guard to watch a traveller’s horses, and for the guard to “liggen in their hoods” all the night long. So at Amsmiz, under a fig tree, I made my camp, despite the protests of Lutaif, the Maalem, [115] and Mohammed el Hosein, who joined in saying that it was not decent for a man of my (Moorish) position to camp outside the town. Swani himself was rather nervous, and, as it turned out, there may have been some risk, for a strong “war-party,” as they would say upon the frontiers in America, drove almost every head of cattle belonging to the town that very night. We slept as sound as door-mice, and the Maalem, who kept watch with an old muzzle-loading rifle stamped with the Tower mark, slept like a top, knowing the duty of a most ancient guard, for during the night I thought I heard a noise of people passing, and waking saw him fast asleep with the old rifle by his side full cocked, and with a bunch of rushes in its muzzle either for safety or for some other reason not made plain. Darwin relates the peculiar and ineffaceable impression a night he slept under the stars, upon the Rio Colorado, in Patagonia, made on him. He says the cold blue-looking sky, the stars, the silence, the dogs keeping watch, the horses feeding tied to their picket pins, and the sense of being cut off from all mankind, appealed to him more than the beauty of the tropics, the grandeur of the Andes, or anything that he remembered in his travels. And he was right. Nothing appeals to civilised and to uncivilised alike so much as a fine night when one sleeps near one’s horse, and wakes occasionally to listen to the noises of the night. Men from the counter, from the university, riff-raff of towns cast out like dross into a frontier territory, all feel the spell. The Indians and the Arabs feel it, but do not know exactly what they feel; still, in a house, under a roof, they pine for something which I am certain is the open air at night.
’Tis said some ancient wise philosopher once took an Indian from the southern Pampa and showed him all the delights, the pomps and vanities, of Buenos Ayres: showed him the theatre with Christian girls dancing half naked, took him to Mass at the cathedral, led him along the docks, let him fare sumptuously, and then accompanied him to gaze upon the multifarious faces of strange women, who used to lean from almost every balcony and beckon to the stranger in that town; and then the Indian, fed, instructed, with his mind enlarged by all the pomp and circumstance of a Christian town, was asked to say if he liked Buenos Ayres or the Pampa best. The story goes that, after pondering a while, the Indian answered: “Buenos Ayres very large, beautiful things, very wonderful, Christian women kind to poor Indian, but the Pampa best.” A brutish answer of a brute mind. ’Tis patent that the man was quite incapable of understanding all he saw; no doubt our gospel truths were all unknown to him, the philosopher who took him round to haunts of low debauchery either a fool or knave; but on the other hand, riddle me this: how many men of cultivation, education, and the rest have seen the Pampa, prairie, desert, or the steppes, and putting off the shackles of their bringing-up, stayed there for life, and become Indians, Arabs, Cossacks, or Gauchos; but who ever saw an Indian, Arab, or wild man of any race come of his own accord and put his neck into the noose of a sedentary life, and end his days a clerk?
And so of faiths. The missionary for all his preaching would never mark a sheep, had he but gospel truths alone to draw upon. What brings the savage to the fold is interest, guns, cotton cloth, rum, tea, sugar, coffee, and the thousand things for which a commentator might search the Scriptures through from end to end and not find mentioned. In Central Africa the Christian and the Moslem missionary are both at work marking their sheep as fast as may be, and each one as much convinced as is the other of the justice of his cause. With a fair field, without the adventitious aids of Christian goods, the Moslem wins hands down.
The Christian comes and says “My negro friends, believe in Christ,” and the poor negro, always eager to believe in anything, assents, and then the Christian sets him to black his boots, and all that negro’s life he never rises to an equality with his converter. Then comes the Mussulman and cries “Only one God.” The fetish worshipper who has had a dozen all his life, thinks it a little hard to give them up, but does so, becomes a Moslem, and is eligible to be Sultan, Basha, Vizier, Kaid, Sheikh, or what not; so that, put rum and rifles on one side, let preaching be the test, in fifty years from the Lake Chad to Cape Town there would not be a single negro, except a few who stuck to their old gods, outside Islam.