The Kaid of Kintafi, who was destined to be my captor, had some years before waged war with Muley-el-Hassan, the late Sultan of Morocco. The Sultan had invaded the mountain territory of Kintafi, and destroyed most of the villages, but not being able to reduce the fortress of the Kaid had won him to his side by offering him the hand of either his sister or his daughter, and had departed after having brought the war to a conclusion, on the peace-with-honour plan. The Kaid rendered him henceforth a limited obedience, responding to his overlord’s demands for taxes, and for assistance in the field when he thought fit, but taking care not to rebuild his villages, so that the aforesaid overlord might find a desert through which to pass if the fit took him to again commence hostilities. El Kintafi, for after the Scottish fashion he is designated territorially, is of the Berber race, and although speaking Arabic he speaks it as foreigner. He is reckoned one of the greatest chieftains of the Berber people in the south.
Eight or nine months of drought had rendered the plain country through which I passed up to Amsmiz almost a desert, and it was pitiful to see the people digging for a kind of earth-nut, locally known as Yerna, white in colour and semi-poisonous till after many washings. The plant I have not been able to identify, but the leaves are something like one of the umbelliferæ. Hooker does not seem to notice it in his Botany of Morocco, and perhaps, when he was in the south, famine had not forced the people to dig for it, or the small thin leaves had all been withered by the heat.
Crawling along the mountain roads I found myself trying to estimate which of the two entailed most misery upon Mankind, the old-time famine, which I saw going on all round me in Morocco, caused by want of water and failure of the crops, or the artificial modern and economic famine so familiar in all large towns, where in the West End the rich die from a plethora of food, and in the East End the poor exist just at subsistence limit by continual work. No doubt, in modern towns, the poor enjoy the blessings of improved sanitation, gas, and impure water, laid on in insufficient quantities to every house; of education, that is, illusory instruction to the fifth standard, to fit them to drive carts and tend machines; but, on the other hand, they have but little sun, either external or internal, in their lives, and know their misery by the help of the education which they pay for through the rates.
The sufferer by famine, as in Morocco, suffers enough, God knows, stalks about like a skeleton, dies behind a saint’s tomb; but in the sun. He believes in Allah to the last, and dies a man, his eyesight not impaired by watching wheels whirr round to make a sweater rich, his hands not gnarled with useless toil (for what can be more useless than to work all through your life for some one else?), and his emaciated face still human, and not made gnomish by work, drink, and east wind, like the poor Christian scarecrows of Glasgow, Manchester, and those accursed “solfataras,” the Yorkshire manufacturing towns. But place it where you will, either in tents, on some oasis in the desert, wandering as the Indians used to wander before America was but one vast advertisement for pills, or in the sweaty, sooty noisy “centre of industry,” mankind is made to suffer; so, perhaps, Tolstoi has the root of things when he suggests that marrying, giving in marriage, and all licensed or illegitimate propagation should cease, and man by non-existence at last attain to bliss.
So in a pass between two walls of earth, with bands of shale crossing them transversely, and roots of long dead Arars sticking through the ground, I came upon the human comedy fairly played out by representative marionettes of every age and sex. First, the father, a fine old Arab, gaunt, miserable, grey-headed, ragged, hollow-cheeked, without a turban, shoes, or waist-belt, and carrying a child which looked over his shoulder, with enormous black and starving eyes; the mother on foot, in rags and shoeless, and still holding between her teeth a ragged haik to veil her misery from the passer by, a baby at her back, and in her hand a branch torn from an olive-tree to switch off flies; then three ophthalmic children, with flies buzzing about their eyelids; lastly, the eldest son stolidly sitting in despair beside a fallen donkey carrying salt, and rubbed by girth, by crupper, and by pack ropes, and an epitome of the last stage of famine and of overwork. And as we came upon them, from a saint’s tomb near by, a quavering call to prayers rang out, and the whole family fell to giving praise to him who sendeth hunger, famine, withholds the rain, and shows his power upon the sons of men, infidel or believer, Turk, Christian, Moor, and Jew, with such impartiality that at times one thinks indeed that he is God. As for the donkey; Bible, Koran, and all the rest of sacred books were writ for man, and the galled jade may wince until the end of time for all Jehovah, Allah, Obi, and the rest of the Olympians seem to care. All our bread, dates, and tea went to the owners of the donkey, and had I been in European clothes I should have bought the starveling beast and put a bullet through his head.
Cistus and heath, with mignonette, dwarf arbutus and stunted algarrobas, with thyme and sweet germander, made a thick underwood upon the hills; and yet, as is the case in all Morocco, and, I think, everywhere throughout the East, footpaths crossed here and there, men seemed to be eternally coming and going, donkeys, more or less wretched in appearance, wandered here and there, and in the air, above the scent of flowers, hung the stench of human excrement, the “bouquet d’Orient,” the perfume which, I fancy, scents the breeze in Araby the blest.
Along the desert trails, in the Sahara [127a] and the Soudan, I fancy, man is rarely long unseen, and camels and donkeys must have been struggling across the sands before the first instant of uselessly recorded time. Still, as in India, wild beasts thrive almost alongside cultivated fields, and in the sandy paths which ran through the thick undergrowth tracks of wild boar appeared; whilst, on the borders of the bare hills, above the vegetation, “moufflon” [127b] skipped, looking so like to goats that I could scarcely credit they were wild.
All the streams we crossed had whitish beds, and a white sediment clung to the grass upon their banks. It seemed there was a salt mine in the neighbourhood which supplied all the province, and underneath us far below, looking like ants, we saw long strings of mules and donkeys meandering along the paths towards the mine. The road gradually got worse and worse, and in few places averaged more than four feet wide, so that I rode one stirrup brushing the mountain and in great terror that I should lose my yellow slipper down the precipice, five or six hundred feet in depth upon the other side, which went sheer down into the Wad N’fiss. Occasionally we had to call to trains of mules advancing to stop till we could get into one of the hollows scooped here and there into the hillside to allow the travellers to pass. The mules in nearly every instance had their packs covered up in the striped blankets made in Sus, and woven in a pattern of alternate black and white bars, with fringed edges, and curious cabalistic-looking figures in the corner of the web. Now and again a Sheikh’s house, perched upon a hill and built like a castle, with turrets, battlements, and Almenas, [128] all in mud, and looking as like a properly constituted fortalice as the difference of income of their owners and that of the owners of the modern stucco fortalice outside an English town permits. Along the road one constant interchange of “Peace be with you” was kept up, as we met other parties of believers going or coming from the Sus, for the other two main highways being closed by the outbreak of hostilities, all traffic had converged upon the road which started from Amsmiz.
Rounding a corner and dipping down a steep incline, almost before we were aware of it, we found ourselves between a castle and a small mosque; all round the “perron” which led to the gate groups of muleteers sat resting; by a side door were lounging several attendants armed with long guns, the barrels hooped with silver and with brass, and, to complete the picture the Sheikh himself in shirt sleeves, so to speak, that is, without a haik, and dressed in a long white garment, sat in the shade studying the Koran. His air of patriarchal simplicity so impressed me that only with an effort I remembered that I too was one of the same faith, and rather rudely I fear, according to Moorish ideas of etiquette, I mumbled a low “Peace be with you” as I passed. From the mosque windows and the door came out a sound of voices as of children shouting all at once, it was the children of the place learning to read, for amongst Arabs no place, however small, no Duar of six tents, lost in some far, remote oasis of the Soudan, is without its schoolmaster. About a league farther along the road, and leaving the castle, which rejoiced in the appellation of Taguaydirt-el-Bur, we got off under some oleander and olive trees by the side of a clear stream to wash and eat.
Mohammed-el-Hosein swears by Allah no infidel has ever seen the place, and asks, if so, let him describe it. A thing indeed which Maupassant himself could hardly have achieved without inspection.