BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE
They come with a rush and with wild yells before the little steamer has stopped moving, and remind you of their piratical ancestors. They look quite as fierce, and as they throw their brown bare legs over the bulwarks and leap and scramble, pushing and shouting in apparently the keenest stage of excitement and rage, they only need long knives between their teeth and a cutlass to convince you that you are at the mercy of the Barbary pirates, and not merely of hotel porters and guides.
My guide was a Moor named Mahamed. I had him about a week, or rather, to speak quite correctly, he had me. I do not know how he effected my capture, but he went with me, I think, because no one else would have him, and he accordingly imposed on my good-nature. As we say a man is "good-natured" when there is absolutely nothing else to be said for him, I hope when I say this that I shall not be accused of trying to pay myself a compliment. Mahamed was a tall Moor, with a fine array of different-colored robes and coats and undercoats, and a large white turban around his fez, which marked the fact that he was either married or that he had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. He followed me from morning until night, with the fidelity of a lamb, and with its sheeplike stupidity. No amount of argument or money or abuse could make him leave my side. Mahamed was not even picturesque, for he wore a large pair of blue spectacles and Congress gaiters. This hurt my sense of the fitness of things very much. His idea of serving me was to rush on ahead and shove all the little donkeys and blind beggars and children out of my way, at which the latter would weep, and I would have to go back and bribe them into cheerfulness again. In this way he made me most unpopular with the masses, and cost me a great deal in trying to buy their favor. I was never so completely at the mercy of any one before, and I hope he found me "intelligent, courteous, and a good linguist."
As a matter of fact, there is very little need of a guide in Tangier. It has but few show places, for the place itself is the show. You can find your best entertainment in picking your way through its winding, narrow streets, and in wandering about the open market-places. The highways of Tangier are all very crooked and very steep. They are also very uneven and dirty, and one walks sometimes for hundreds of yards in a maze of dark alleys and little passageways walled in by whitewashed walls, and sheltered from the sun by archways and living-rooms hanging from one side of the street to the other. Green and blue doorways, through which one must stoop to enter, open in from the street, and you are constantly hearing them shut as you pass, as some of the women of the household recognize the presence of a foreigner. You are never quite sure as to what you will meet in the streets or what may be displayed at your elbow before the doors of the bazars. The odors of frying meat and of fresh fruit and of herbs, and of soap in great baskets, and of black coffee and hasheesh, come to you from cafés and tiny shops hardly as big as a packing-box. These are shut up at night by two half-doors, of which the upper one serves as a shield from the sun by day and the lower as a pair of steps. In the wider streets are the bazars, magnificent with color and with the glitter of gold lace and of brass plaques and silver daggers; handsome, comfortable-looking Moors sit crossed-legged in the middle of their small extent like soldiers in a sentry-box, and speak leisurely with their next-door neighbor without gesture, unless they grow excited over a bargain, and with a haughty contempt for the passing Christian. There is always something beneficial in feeling that you are thoroughly despised; and when a whole community combines to despise you, and looks over your head gravely as you pass, you begin to feel that those Moors who do not apparently hold you in contempt are a very poor and middle-class sort of people, and you would much prefer to be overlooked by a proud Moor than shaken hands with by a perverted one. But the pride of the rich Moorish gentlemen is nothing compared to the fanatic intolerance of the poor farmers from the country of the tribes who come in on market-day, and who hate the Christian properly as the Koran tells them they should. They stalk through the narrow street with both eyes fixed on a point far ahead of them, with head and shoulders erect and arms swinging. They brush against you as though you were a camel or a horse, and had four legs on which to stand instead of two. Sometimes a foreigner forgets that these men from the desert, where the foreign element has not come, are following out the religious training of a lifetime, and strikes at one of them with his riding-whip, and then takes refuge in a consulate and leaves on the next boat.
I find it very hard not to sympathize with the Moors. The Englishman is always preaching that an Englishman's house is his castle, and yet he invades this country, he and his French and Spanish and American cousins, and demands that not only he shall be treated well, but that any native of the country, any subject of the Sultan, who chooses to call himself an American or an Englishman shall be protected too. Of course he knows that he is not wanted there; he knows he is forcing himself on the barbarian, and that all the barbarian has ever asked of him is to be let alone. But he comes, and he rides around in his baggy breeches and varnished boots, and he gets up polo games and cricket matches, and gallops about in a pink coat after foxes, and asks for bitter ale, and complains because he cannot get his bath, and all the rest of it, quite as if he had been begged to come and to stop as long as he liked. Sometimes you find a foreigner who tries to learn something of these people, a man like the late Mr. Leared or "Bébé" Carleton, who can speak all their dialects, and who has more power with the Sultan than has any foreign minister, and who, if the Sultan will not pay you for the last shipment of guns you sent him, or for the grand-piano for the harem, is the man to get you your money. But the average foreign resident, as far as I can see, neither adopts the best that the Moor has found good, nor introduces what the Moor most needs, and what he does not know or care enough about to introduce for himself. Tangier, for instance, is excellently adapted by nature for the purposes of good sanitation, but the arrangements are as bad and primitive as they were before a foreigner came into the place. They consist in dumping the refuse of the streets, into which everything is thrown, over the sea-wall out on the rocks below, where the pigs gather up what they want, and the waves wash the remainder back on the coast.
SANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL