If some of the foreign ministers would use their undoubted influence with the Bashaw to amend this, instead of introducing point-to-point pony races, they might in time show some reason for their invasion of Morocco other than the curious and obvious one that they all grow rich there while doing nothing. The foreign resident has a very great contempt for the Moor. He says the Moor is a great liar and a rogue. When people used to ask Walter Scott if it was he who wrote the Waverley Novels he used to tell them it was not, and he excused this afterwards by saying that if you are asked an impertinent or impossible question you have the right not to answer it or to tell an untruth. The very presence of the foreigner is an impertinence in the eyes of the Moor, and so he naturally does not feel severe remorse when he baffles the foreign invader, and does it whenever he can.
As a matter of fact, the foreign invader at Tangier is not, in a number of cases, in a position in which he can gracefully throw down gauntlets. There is something about these hot, raw countries, hidden out of the way of public opinion and police courts and the respectability which drives a gig, that makes people forget the rules and axioms laid down in the temperate zone for the guidance of tax-payers and all reputable citizens. As the sailors say, "There is no Sunday south of the equator." It is hard to tell just what it is, but the sun, or the example of the barbarians, or the fact that the world is so far away, breeds queer ideas, and one hears stories one would not care to print as long as the law of libel obtains in the land. You have often read in novels, especially French novels, or have heard men on the stage say: "Come, let us leave this place, with its unjust laws and cruel bigotry. We will go to some unknown corner of the earth, where we will make a new home. And there, under a new flag and a new name, we will forget the sad past, and enter into a new world of happiness and content."
When you hear a man on the stage say that, you can make up your mind that he is going to Tangier. It may be that he goes there with somebody else's money, or somebody else's wife, or that he has had trouble with a check; or, as in the case of one young man who was fêted and dined there, had robbed a diamond store in Brooklyn, and is now in Sing Sing; or, as in the case of a recent American consul, had sold his protection for two hundred dollars to any one who wanted it, and was recalled under several clouds. And you hear stories of ministers who retire after receiving an income of a few hundred pounds a year with two hundred thousand dollars they have saved out of it, and of cruelty and bursts of sudden passion that would undoubtedly cause a lynching in the chivalric and civilized states of Alabama or Tennessee. And so when I heard why several of the people of Tangier had come there, and why they did not go away again, I began to feel that the barbarian, whose forefathers swept Spain and terrorized the whole of Catholic Europe, had more reason than he knew for despising the Christian who is waiting to give to his country the benefits of civilization.
Tangier's beauty lies in so many different things—in the monk-like garb of the men and in the white muffled figures of the women; in the brilliancy of its sky, and of the sea dashing upon the rocks and tossing the feluccas with their three-cornered sails from side to side; and in the green towers of the mosques, and the listless leaves of the royal palms rising from the centre of a mass of white roofs; and, above all, in the color and movement of the bazars and streets. The streets represent absolute equality. They are at the widest but three yards across, and every one pushes, and apparently every one has something to sell, or at least something to say, for they all talk and shout at once, and cry at their donkeys or abuse whoever touches them. A water-carrier, with his goat-skin bag on his back and his finger on the tube through which the water comes, jostles you on one side, and a slave as black and shiny as a patent-leather boot shoves you on the other as he makes way for his master on a fine white Arabian horse with brilliant trappings and a huge contempt for the donkeys in his way. It is worth going to Tangier if for no other reason than to see a slave, and to grasp the fact that he costs anywhere from a hundred to five hundred dollars. To the older generation this may not seem worth while, but to the present generation—those of it who were born after Richmond was taken—it is a new and momentous sensation to look at a man as fine and stalwart and human as one of your own people, and feel that he cannot strike for higher wages, or even serve as a parlor-car porter or own a barbershop, but must work out for life the two hundred dollars his owner paid for him at Fez.
There is more movement in Tangier than I have ever noticed in a place of its size. Every one is either looking on cross-legged from the bazars and coffee-shops, or rushing, pushing, and screaming in the street. It is most bewildering; if you turn to look after a particularly magnificent Moor, or a half-naked holy man from the desert with wild eyes and hair as long as a horse's mane, you are trodden upon by a string of donkeys carrying kegs of water, or pushed to one side by a soldier with a gun eight feet long.
There is something continually interesting in the muffled figures of the women. They make you almost ashamed of the uncovered faces of the American women in the town; and, in the lack of any evidence to the contrary, you begin to believe every Moorish woman or girl you meet is as beautiful as her eyes would make it appear that she is. Those of the Moorish girls whose faces I saw were distinctly handsome; they were the women Benjamin Constant paints in his pictures of Algiers, and about whom Pierre Loti goes into ecstasies in his book on Tangier. Their robe or cloak, or whatever the thing is that they affect, covers the head like a hood, and with one hand they hold one of its folds in front of the face as high as their eyes, or keep it in place by biting it between their teeth.
The only time that I ever saw the face of any of them was when I occasionally eluded Mahamed and ran off with a little guide called Isaac, the especial protector of two American women, who farmed him out to me when they preferred to remain in the hotel. He is a particularly beautiful youth, and I noticed that whenever he was with me the cloaks of the women had a fashion of coming undone, and they would lower them for an instant and look at Isaac, and then replace them severely upon the bridge of the nose. Then Isaac would turn towards me with a shy conscious smile and blush violently. Isaac says that the young men of Tangier can tell whether or not a girl is pretty by looking at her feet. It is true that their feet are bare, but it struck me as being a somewhat reckless test for selecting a bride. I will recommend Isaac to whoever thinks of going to Tangier. He speaks eight languages, is eighteen years old, wears beautiful and barbarous garments, and is always happy. He is especially good at making bargains, and he entertained me for many half-hours while I sat and watched him fighting over two dollars more or less with the proprietors of the bazars. He was an antagonist worthy of the oldest and proudest Moor in Tangier. He had no respect for their rage or their contempt or their proffered bribes or their long white beards. Sometimes he would laugh them to scorn—them and their prices; and again he would talk to them sadly and plaintively; and again he would stamp and rage and slap his hands at them and rush off with a great show of disgust, until they called him back again, when he and they would go over the performance once more with unabated interest. Mahamed always paid them what they asked, and got his commission from them later, as a guide should; but Isaac would storm and finally beat them down one-half. Isaac can be found at the Calpe Hotel, and is welcome to whatever this notice may be worth to him.
A WOMAN OF TANGIER