Three of their galleys still lie rotting in the Luccos, and at low tide their ribs can still be seen projecting from the sand. The city, painted red, white, and blue, and the whole scale of tints from brown to Naples yellow stands on a hill, and is to-day the haunt of consuls of all nations, who have replaced the pirates of the times gone by. Consuls of France and Spain, of Portugal, of Montenegro, Muscat, Costa Rica, Brazil, United States, their flag-staffs rear aloft from almost every house-top, and their great flags, large in proportion to the smallness of the state they represent, flap in the breeze; the caps of liberty, the rising suns, and other trade-marks of the various states seeming to wink and to encourage one another in the attempt to be the first to show the glories of the commercial system to the benighted Moors. All round the town the walls and ramparts run, built by the Portuguese during the period when they possessed the place. At the west side a ditch remains, now turned into a garden, and in it artichokes, egg-plants, and pimentos grow, and the green stuffs of various kinds for which the Moors are famous, so much so that in the times they lived in Spain, it was a current saying of a good farmer “that he grows as many egg-plants in his garden as a Morisco gardener.” [6] Just at the corner of the ditch the walls run into as sharp an angle as the bows of a torpedo boat, and on the ramparts usually is seen a colony of storks, who build their nests amongst the mouldering gabions, ravelines, and counter-scarps, and sit and chatter on the brass guns and carronades, with curling snakes around the touch-holes, and with inscription setting forth their date, the place of casting, and the legend “Viva Portugal!” Their gunners are long dead, their carriages long mouldered into dust, and the storks left to sit and mock the pomps and circumstance of foolish war.
From the town sallied out (in 1578) the army under Don Sebastian, who met his fate fighting the infidel at Alcazar el Kebir, near a long bridge over a marshy stream known as Wad-el-Mhassen. The battle still is called amongst the Moors “The Three Kings’ Fight,” for besides Don Sebastian fell two Moorish kings. With Don Sebastian there fell the flower of the nobility of Portugal, and by his death the crown passed quickly to Phillip II. (the Prudent) of Spain, who knew far better than to embark in expeditions into Africa. The battle was memorable, for Abdel-Malik, King of Fez, died of exhaustion on the field, and Don Sebastian, rather than survive disgrace, plunged, as did Argentine at Bannockburn, into the thickest of the fight, and fell or disappeared, for though his faithful servant, Resende, claimed to have seen his body, so much doubt existed of his death that the strange sect known as Sebastianists arose in Portugal. Their tenet was that Don Sebastian was still alive, but kept in durance by the Moors, and in remote and old-world villages believers linger even to the present day. I myself saw a sort of pterodactyle, years ago in Portugal, a strange old man dressed in black clothes, and wrapped, in heat and cold alike, in a thick cloak. The people of the village called him mad, but, looking at the thing impartially, madness and faith are the same thing, the only difference being as to the mountain which the believer wishes to remove.
Lala Mamouna, the female saint who guards Larache from pestilence and famine, sudden death, and the few simple ailments which Arabs suffer from, has her white crenelated sanctuary on a hill which overlooks the sea, and to her tomb women who wish for children to carry on the misery of life, repair, and pray or chatter with each other, and no doubt the saint is just as tolerant of scandal as are the wise old men who sun their stomachs at the windows of a club.
At this accursed port, Larache, of the Beni-Aros, after a signal had been made by a man mounted on a mule, who held one end of a row of flags, the other being made fast to a post, a great annoyance fell upon the blameless captain of the good ship Rabat. The bar at El Areish is three times out of four impassable when steamers call, as here the river Luccos [8] meets the tide, and such a surf gets up that as the people have no surf boats, communication from a vessel to the shore is always dangerous, and not frequently impossible. This, to an ordinary steamer, means either delay or loss of cargo, generally the latter, for when the bar is bad it often takes three or four days to become passable, and as the anchorage is most precarious a south-east gale causes great danger to a vessel lying in the open roads. On this occasion, though, the sea was like a sheet of ice, smooth, shining, and the bar just marked by a thin line of foam. To the astonishment of the uninitiated passengers the fury of the captain knew no bounds, the officers turned sulky, and the one man on board who seemed unmoved was the unlucky priest, who shipped to please the owners of the line, or to appease the folly of the nation, or for “empeño,” [9] or for some other reason at present not made known, passed all his time in fishing when in port, or when at sea in studying counterpoint, and playing on a piano which was tuned about the time Queen Isabella was expelled from Spain.
A narrow, nine-knot crank and Clyde-built steamer was the Rabat, full five-and-twenty years of age, boilers too small, but engines sound, and the whole vessel kept as clean as holystone and paint could clean, brass work all shining, and herself ever a-rolling like a swing-boat at a fair, sailed out of Barcelona, owned by the Spanish Trans-Atlantic Company (Chairman: the Marquis of Comillas), and subsidised by the Spanish Government to carry mails down the Morocco coast in order that the majesty of Spain might fill the eyes and strike the imagination of the Moorish dogs, and show them that the Spaniards were on a level with the other nations, such as the Inglis, Frances, el Bortokez (Portuguese), el Brus (the Germans, that is, Prussians), and the Austrians, called by the Moors el Nimperial.
Captain from Reus, taciturn, and shaved each Sunday when the priest said mass, for it is decent for a man to stand before his God with a clean chin, at other times a stubble on his face on which a man might strike a match, so that the match had not been made in Spain. Four officers: an Andalusian, two Catalans, and a Basque; two engineers, and the aforementioned priest, together with a crew of eighteen men and half a dozen stewards, served to get the craft, whose utmost measurement could not be above twelve hundred tons, across the sea.
The Pope had granted plenary indulgence in the following terms: “for looking to the circumstances, the weather, etc., I deign to grant full dispensation according to the ecclesiastic law, from fasting and from abstinence (from meat) to all those who by reason, either of their profession or as passengers, find themselves on board the vessels of this Company, and that for three years’ time, excepting (if it can be done without too great an inconvenience) on Good Friday and on the Vigils of the Apostles, Saint Peter and Saint Paul, also on Christmas Day and any other day which may be opportune . . . on which three days I also dispense from sin the passengers and crew if any difficulty unforeseen by me makes their compliance an impossibility.” Given “en Vaticano” and through the Bishop of Madrid and Alcala under whose ægis it appears that Spanish ships all sail armed with this plenary indulgence; manned with the priest and men and duly subsidised, it could not be expected that the Rabat cared much for passengers, still less for cargo; so when the lumbering “barcazas” approached the ship, curses loud, guttural, and deep were heard on every side. The unwilling sailors, mostly Valencians and Catalans, stood by to work the donkey engine; but their fears were vain, for it appeared that all the cargo was but four bales of Zatar (Marjoram) for the Habana, and a few thousand melons for the Sultan’s camp. The bales of Zatar soon were dumped into the hold, but five long hours were wasted passing the melons up from hand to hand; in counting them, recounting them, in storming, and the whole time a noise like Babel going on, shouting of Moors, cursing of Spaniards, and the confusion ten times intensified because no man could speak a word the other understood. The Rabat having been only five years upon the coast, no one on board could speak a word of Arabic. Why should they, did they not speak Christian, and are Spaniards and sailors to be supposed to burrow in grammars as if they were schoolboys or mere Englishmen. A miserable Jew, fearfully sea-sick, balancing up in the gunwale of a boat, in a mixed jargon of Arabic and Portuguese kept tale after a fashion, of the melons, and at last the vessel put to sea amid the curses of the passengers, and having earned the name amongst the Arabs of Abu Batigh, the Father of the Melons. Amongst the Arabs almost every man is Father of something or some quality, and lucky he who does not find himself styled, Father of the “ginger beard,” or of “bad breath,” or any other personal or moral failing, peculiarity, or notable defect.
Once more we urge our nine-knot course, and now find time to observe our fellow-passengers. In the cabin a German lady and her daughters are enduring agonies of sea-sickness, on the way to join her husband at Rabat. [11] The husband, known as the “mojandis,” that is, engineer to the Sultan, proves, when we meet him, to be a cheery polyglot blasphemer, charged with the erection of some forts at the entrance to the harbour of Rabat. For a wonder the bar of the river Bu-Regeh proves passable, and the German lady and her husband can land, which is, it seems, a piece of luck, for the bar is known as the most dangerous of all the coast. Rabat, perhaps the most picturesquely situated of any city in Morocco, stands on a hill underneath which the river runs, and the spray from the bar is drifted occasionally into the houses like a shower of snow. Here is the richest colony of the Spanish Jews, and here the best Morisco [12a] families took refuge after the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. The town is estimated to contain some 20,000 inhabitants, and it is one of the four official capitals; [12b] the Sultan has a palace with enormous gardens on the outskirts of the town. Just opposite is built Salee, called by the Moors “Salá,” famous for having given its name to the most enterprising of the pirates of the coast in days gone by. To-day it is a little white, mouldering place, baked in the fierce sun, or swept by south-west gales, according to the season and the time of year. The inhabitants are still renowned for their fanaticism, and the traveller who passes through the place is seldom able to dismount, but traverses the place trying to look as dignified as possible amid a shower of curses, a sporadic curse or two, and some saliva if he ventures within range of mouth. Many a poor Christian has worked his life out in the construction of the walls, and the superior whiteness of the inhabitants would seem to show that some of the Christian dogs have left their blood amongst the people of the place. Men still alive can tell of what a scourge the pirates were, and I myself once knew a venerable lady who in her youth had the distinction of having been taken by a Salee rover; an honour in itself to be compared alone to that enjoyed by ladies who are styled peeresses in their own right. Robinson Crusoe, I think, once landed at the place, and the voyages of imaginary travellers make a place more authentic than the visit of the unsubstantial personages of real life. A little up the river is the deserted city of Schellah, and on the way to it, upon a promontory jutting into the stream, is built the half-finished tower of Hassan, an enormous structure much like the Giralda at Seville, and by tradition said to be built by the same architect who built that tower, and also built the tower of the Kutubich, which, at Morocco city, serves as a landmark in the great plain around. The Giralda and the Kutubich spring from the level of the street, but the Hassan tower excels them both in site, standing as it does upon a cliff, and “looming lofty” [13] as one passes in a boat beneath. Schellah contains the tombs of the Sultans of the Beni Merini dynasty. El Mansur (the victorious) sleeps underneath a carved stone tomb, over which date palms rustle, and by which a little stream sings a perpetual dirge. The tomb is held so sacred that till but lately neither Christians nor Jews could visit it. Even to-day the incursions of the fierce Zimouri, a Berber tribe, render a visit at times precarious. The walls of the town enclose a space of about a mile circumference; sheep, goats, and camels feed inside them, and a footpath leads from one deserted gate-house to the other, a shepherd boy or two play on their reeds, and though the sun beats fiercely on the open space, it looks forlorn and melancholy, and even the green lizards peering from the walls look about timidly, as if they feared to see a ghost. On gates and walls, on ruined tombs and palaces, the lichens grow red after the fashion of hot countries, and the fine stonework, resembling the stucco work of the Alhambra, remains as keen in edge and execution as when the last stroke of the chisel turned it out. Outside the town are olive yards and orange gardens, and one comes upon the long-deserted place with the same feelings as a traveller sees Palenque burst on him out of the forests of Yucatan, or as in Paraguay after a weary following of dark forest trails, the spires of some old Jesuit Mission suddenly appear in a green clearing, as at Jesus or Trinidad, San Cosme Los Apostoles, or any other of the ruined “capillas,” where the bellbird calls amongst the trees, and the inhabitants take off their hats at sunset and sink upon their knees, bearing in their minds the teaching of the Jesuits, whom Charles III. expelled from Spain and from the Indies, to show his liberalism.
Our most important passenger was Don Jose Miravent, the Spanish Consul at Mogador, returning to his post after a holiday; a formal Spaniard of the old school, pompous and kind, able to bombast out a platitude with the air of a philosopher communicating what he supposes truth. At dinner he would square his elbows, and, throwing back his head, inform the world “the Kings of Portugal are now at Caldas”; or if asked about the war in Cuba, say: “War, sir, there is none; true some negroes in the Manigua [14] are giving trouble to our troops, but General Blanco is about to go, and all will soon be over; it is really nothing (no es na), peace will, please God, soon reign upon that lovely land.” At night he would sit talking to his cook, a Spanish woman (the widow of an English soldier), whom he was taking back to Mogador; but though he talked, and she replied for hours most volubly, not for a moment were good manners set aside, nor did the cook presume in any way, and throughout the conversation talked better than most ladies; but the “tertulia” over, straight became a cook again, brought him his tea, calling him “Amo” (master), “Don Jose,” and he quite affably listened to her opinions and ideas of things, which seemed at least as valuable as were his own. A Jewish merchant dressed in the height of Cadiz fashion, and known as Tagir [15a] Isaac, occupied much the same sort of social state on board as does a Eurasian in Calcutta or Bombay. Tall, thin, and up-to-date, he had divested himself almost entirely of the guttural Toledan accent, but the sign of his “election” still remained about his hair, which tended to come off in patches like an old hair trunk, and at the ends showed knotty, as if he suffered from the disease to which so many of his compatriots in Morocco are subject, and which makes each separate hair stand out as if it were alive. [15b]
But, as is often seen even in more ambitious vessels than the Rabat, the passengers of greatest interest were in the steerage. Not that there was a regular steerage as in ocean-going ships, but still, some thirty people went as deck passengers, and amongst them was to be seen a perfect microcosm of the eastern world. Firstly a miserable, pale-faced Frenchman, dressed in a dirty “duster” coat, bed-ticking “pants,” black velvet waistcoat, and blue velvet slippers, with foxes’ heads embroidered on them in yellow beads, his beard trimmed to a point, in what is termed (I think) Elizabethan fashion, and thin white hands, more disagreeable in appearance than if they had been soiled by all the meanest work on earth. His “taifa” [15c] (that is band) consisted of one Spanish girl and two half-French half-Spanish women, whom he referred to as his “company,” and whom he said were to enact “cuadros vivos,” that is “living pictures,” in the various ports. They, less polite than he, called him “el Alcahuete,” which word I leave in Spanish, merely premising (as North Britons say) that it is taken from the Arabic “el Cahueit,” and that the celebrated “Celestina” [16] was perhaps in modern times the finest specimen of the profession in any literature. So whilst our captain read “Jack el Ripero” (it cost him two pesetas when new in Cadiz), I take a glance at the inferior races, who were well represented in the steerage of the ship.