Almost in sight of Fuerteventura, the nearest in shore of the Canaries, between Wad Nun and the Cabo de Bojador, not quite within the tropics, Cape Juby lies. From the Wad Nun, almost to St. Louis Senegal, nothing but sand, a lowish coast, no settled population, and but little water; and yet a Scotchman, one Mr. Mackenzie, who in the seventies had an idea to flood the Sahara and trade direct from London to Timbuctoo, induced some lords and gentlemen to found a company and put their factory on an island off the Cape. [149b]
The island is a lone rock, disjoined from land by a little channel at high tide. Upon it, without much ceremony, the company erected buildings, built a wall, mounted the inevitable cannon to keep the peace, and tried to start a trade. Just opposite the island grow a few tamarisk bushes, in Arabic called Torfaia, and near these bushes is a brackish well. The tamarisks give the name, and the spot is called Torfaia up and down the coast, being remarkable as the only place where any vegetation lives. The population is nomad and composed of wandering Arab tribes, who in remote times came from the Yemen and still speak the dialect of the Koreish in all its purity. When the wind blows, the sand moves like a sea, so that the company found their walls, built for defence, were in about three months all sanded up, and an Arab on his camel could fire right down into the fort.
Upon this likely spot Mr. Mackenzie and his company pitched to establish trade with the interior of the Sahara, pending the time their ships could sail direct to Timbuctoo. If I remember rightly, the Empire (British) was to be increased, the wandering Arabs all to acknowledge Queen Victoria’s reign, and peace and plenty, with a fair modicum of profit, be the order of the day.
Below Wad Nun the Arab tribes live practically as they lived in Arabia before Mohammed. Morocco is too far away to be much feared, the negro tribes to the south and east not strong enough to fight, the Touaregs not disposed to attack men like the Arabs who can only give hard knocks; whilst in the Senegal the French, in spite of that consuming hunger for sand, as witness Southern Algeria, Tunis, and the desire they are said to have to make a sandy empire from Tripoli to Senegal, are not so foolish as to adventure, merely for glory, to attack the desert tribes. Thus any Sheikh, or Sherif, who has a little power becomes a king, after the style of Chedorlaomer in the Bible, and rules over other kings who do him homage, if he has power enough at his command. Some kinglet of this kind was duly found, and a treaty made with him. In fact, the man appeared in London, passed by the title of King of the Sahara, stayed at a good hotel, and no doubt did members of the company good service by his stay. But as mischance would have it, treason broke out at home whilst the Saharan King was sojourning amongst the infidel. On his return “patriots,” that is, I fancy, other Sheiks the company had overlooked and not “made right,” refused to ratify the treaty, and the poor King was treated as a traitor who had sold his fellows to the Christian dogs.
Years passed away (sixteen I think), and managers went out who drew their salaries; clerks not a few contracted fever, and some died; Arabs attacked the place with varying success; the people of the fort went out to hunt in peace time, and in war sat drinking gin; but still no business was effected, and the whole place began to look like a small Goa, Pondicherry, or some Spanish island in the Eastern seas, where every other man has a fine gold-laced uniform, but has no food to eat. Then some one had a luminous idea, which was to sell the place to the Sultan of Morocco, who, wishing to extend his empire, bought it, and has to-day the pleasure of keeping a steamer running from the Canaries, week in week out, to keep the garrison supplied with water, for the well beneath the tamarisks has given out.
My negro visitor was from Wad Nun, had been to London twice and did not like it, in fact, remembered nothing but the cold and the striking fact that the horses had short tails. Yet he was intelligent after his fashion, and greatly exercised as to the reason which impelled those Argonauts to sail to such a Colchis, and glad to tell how they bought nothing but a little wool, and wondered if they knew of gold mines, or what kept them stuck for sixteen years in such a place. The manager, Mackenzie, was a Scotchman, which he interpreted to be a title of respectability, and informed us that Mackenzie’s name was known far in the Sahara, and that at times natives would ride up, who had never seen him, and greet him as Sidi Mackenzie, for they all had heard of his red beard, his title (Scotchman), and of the strong spirit kept in a barrel which none but he might drink. My negro tapped his head and told me it was full of news, but that, unluckily, his purse was empty, or he would long ago have left the place. I did not take the hint, and he retired wishing me patience, with a negro grin.
Patience was what I most had need of, except, perhaps, tobacco, at the time. So strolling out on to the Maidan, the rain having ceased at last, I sat down on a large stone under an olive tree to think about the situation and enjoy the view. In a magnificent amphitheatre of hills with snowy mountains towering overhead, just at the angle which the Wad el N’fiss makes after the first five miles of its course, about the middle of a valley almost ten miles in length, the Azib [152] of El Kintafi lies; around it fifteen or twenty acres of Indian corn, a grove of olive trees and pomegranate gardens, wild and uncared for as gardens always are throughout the East. The house itself with its mosque, the various court-yards, towers, kiosques, stables, fortified passages, and a long stretch of crenelated wall, covers almost as much ground as Kenilworth or Arundel. Built all of mud, and here and there painted light yellow, it yet looks solid, and in one angle rises the tower of the mosque covered with tiles like those of the Alhambra.
The castle wall upon one side runs almost sheer down into the river which tosses on a stony bed, leaving a sort of sandy beach, on which grow oleanders, and across the stream the shoulder of Tisi Nemiri [153] almost reaches to the bank. Above the oleanders ran a mill stream in which the tiniest barble played or hung suspended in the slack water, aping the attitude of salmon lying suspended in the shallow water of a linn. Between the mill stream and the beach grew some Indian corn fenced in with Suddra bushes, looking steely-grey in the bright sun, or as if frosted, when the moon turned every twig and thorn to silver in its cold light. Curious little round hills studded the valley in various directions, and on the west side rose Ouichidan to an apparent height of about fourteen thousand feet, or, say, six thousand feet above the bed of the N’fiss. Almost at the top of Ouichidan there is a spring held sacred by the Berbers, who have retained many Pagan customs and superstitions, although Mohammedans. It is said that from the top a view of both Morocco city and Tarudant is seen, but Allahu Alem, God he knows, for never has the foot of unbeliever trod the snow, nor has the pestilent surveyor, with his boiling tubes, his aneroid, theodolite, and all his trumpery, defiled the peak.
What is known, is that a pass leads into the Sus over a shoulder of the mountain, and a poor Jewish merchant whom I subsequently met, informed me that whilst crossing it he had prayed more fervently than he had done since quite a child, and said devoutly, “May Jehovah keep me from all such cursed roads.” Amongst the maize fields, which at my time of sojourning as guest of El Kintafi were all ripe, negroes and negresses were husking the heads of maize which had been reaped, and were all gathered up in heaps. Their flat and merry faces, red and yellow clothes, loud cries, and air of working as for amusement, brought back the Southern States, and as half the men answered to Quasi, and the women all appeared to be called Sultana, the illusion was complete. Most of the negroes had become Mohammedans, and, of course, the women had to follow suit; few of them spoke Arabic or even Shillah, and a sort of ganger, who spoke Soudanese, lay in the shade and made a show of overseeing their pretence of work. Upon the flat roof of the palace prisoners heavily chained tottered about and husked the Indian corn, each man resolved to do as little work as possible, and spend the greatest possible amount of time in walking to and fro. Poor devils, mostly tribesmen from a rebellious tribe which lived upon the head waters of the N’fiss, and which neither the Kaid, his father, or his grandfather, had ever been quite able to subdue. The rebellious tribe is a feature of the Eastern world. No Sultanate so small, no little caliphate lost in the hills, no territory of mountains or of plains that is without its rebels. Throughout Morocco one comes now and again upon a tribe in open warfare, if not with the Sultan at least against its Governor. They raise an army, fight in the hills, take prisoners and cut their throats, behave, in fact, as Arabs have behaved since they first came into our Western life, and at the last the Sultan or the Governor prevails, and a few dozen heads of the chief tribesmen adorn the city walls, making long smears of blood down the pale yellow wash, and shrivelling by degrees into a hideous mass, like an old fly-blown shoe. Yet on the roof of the Kaid’s Kasbah [154] the prisoners gave a scriptural note, and made one think on Jeremiah, [155] the prisoner-prophet, who must have wandered up and down as they did, before Pashur smote him and set him in the stocks, putting him daily to derision and making everyone to mock at him. Not that the Berbers mocked at the prisoners on the castle roof, but, on the contrary, sat with the blazing sun upon their shaven pates, talking to them from the Maidan, gave them bits of bread, and so behaved themselves that, chains and famine, lice and sores discounted, the condition of the prisoners was nearer to that of men at large than that of the betracted, ticketed transgressors in a London gaol. At times upon the roof the prisoners lay full length and held their chains up in one hand to test their legs, and, lying close to the parapet, chaffed the negroes as they came and went carrying as little maize as possible in small baskets holding about a peck. At night the Kaid, who had a not unnatural wish to keep his prisoners safe, lowered them one by one into a deep, dry well, a mule revolving slowly round a rude kind of capstan, as with an esparto rope hitched in a bowline below their arm-pits, one by one they were lowered underneath the ground. When all were down, four negroes placed a large flat stone over the well, and the Muezzin called on the faithful all to praise God’s name. What the state of the well was down below is hard to say, but in the morning when the stone was rolled aside a stench as from a Tophet rose, and early on the fourth day of our enforced “villegiatura,” a starveling donkey was driven past our tent with the body of a prisoner (escaped from prison and from life) thrown over it, the head and feet dangling upon the ground, and the donkey-driver pricking his beast with a piece of sharpened cane in an old, thoroughly-established sore over which the flies buzzed, settled, flew off again and then alighted on the eyelids of the corpse.
And so the second day went past in rather greater comfort than the first, the rain having ceased, and we became aware that it was best to resign ourselves to what the Kaid and Providence might have in store for us. About the evening prayer I despatched Lutaif to try and get an audience and find out why we were detained, but, after waiting more than an hour at the castle gate, he returned to say that the great man was invisible, but that his Chamberlain would come and see us after supper-time. The Chamberlain not having come by sundown, and our animals not having eaten for four-and-twenty hours, I sent Swani to “stand and cry at the gate,” after the Eastern fashion, with the result that soon the slave who had the key of the corn arrived and struck a bargain with me, I undertaking to tip him handsomely on my departure if he fed our beasts. This he declared he would do, but kept them half-starved, and totally refused to sell, either chopped straw or hay, most probably having got orders from the Kaid to feed our animals well, and having sold half the corn, which he no doubt took everyday out of the granary, to passing travellers. However, unjust stewards are not uncommon even in England, and he kept his key so bright (it measured nearly eighteen inches long), and dressed so charmingly in palest Eau de Nil, with a black cloak bound round with pink, and lied so easily, and with such circumstance, that I forbore to lay his case before the Kaid, reserving to myself the power of not rewarding his hypothetic services at my departure if he went too far in his small villainies. Night brought the Chamberlain heading a small procession of negroes carrying our supper, composed of various dishes of meat and couscousou, piled up on earthenware dishes placed in a wooden case, shaped like an old-time stable sieve and covered with a conical-shaped top of straw through which were run strips of red and black leather in a curious pattern forming a kind of check. A dish of Moorish bread fresh from the oven and made of brownish flour, well-garnished with particles of the rough stones of the bread mill in which the corn was ground, made up the banquet. We squatted on the floor, Swani went round and poured water from a tin dish upon our hands, and, after a pious Bismillah, we all dipped bits of bread in the red grease and oil of the highly seasoned dishes and began to eat, ladling the food into our mouths most painfully with the right hand, and lifting the huge dishes to our mouths to drink the soup. A loud Bon jour warned us the Persian was outside the tent, waiting to tell us his adventures and to impart the gossip of the place. Entering, he sat down with a sonorous “Peace be on you all,” and, after one or two cups of tea and a few cigarettes, began to talk. The Kaid, he said, was puzzled about us, had thought at first of sending us in chains to the Sultan’s camp, again had thought of letting us proceed, and yet again of sending us under a guard of his own men to the Consul at Mogador, but at the last had not imparted his design to our informant. He thought that probably a messenger had been despatched to the Sultan in his camp, and if that was the case we had better make our minds up to at least a fortnight in the place, and afterwards, if the Sultan should send for us, a fortnight at the camp, for things in palaces go slowly; [157] but, said the Persian piously, “may God not open the door of the Sultan to you, or to any other man.” By this I took it that should the Sultan send for us we should pass an unpleasant quarter of an hour, though as there were several Europeans in the camp, notably Kaid M’Lean, the instructor-general to the army, and a French doctor called Linares, we might be able to get things arranged upon the peace-with-honour plan. This matter duly gone into with proper Oriental deliberation, the Persian entered on his tale. Born sometimes in Shiraz, at others in Tabriz (according to his fancy), it appeared that at an early age he had left his country as an Ashik, [158] that is, a wandering singer, and gone to Turkey. There he had acquired the Turkish language as he averred, but subsequent intercourse with Arabs had mixed the tongues; in the same fashion a Spaniard, Italian, or Portuguese gets mixed, on learning either of the kindred languages. Such as it was, his jargon suited me, and I spoke Arabic more fluently to him than I ever spoke that tongue before, or think to speak it until I meet another Ashik similarly graced. We spoke without a verb, without a particle, like idiots or children, largely in adverbs and in adjectives, and without shame on either side, each thinking that the other was but little versed in Arabic, and that he condescended to adopt a jargon to help his weaker friend. The Persian’s faithful fiddle was out of order, owing, he said, to his falling off a donkey whilst on the “roads of hell” which led up to Kintafi, but though without it, he sang for hours, songs which he said treated of love in Persian, and which I took on trust as not containing anything subversive of morality, or fit to raise a blush upon the cheek of those used to our Western ways. Hafiz he said he knew by heart, and much of Jami, and those Rubaiyat which every weekly newspaper has its columns full of he knew, but found them too materialistic for his taste.