The Rulers of the Mediterranean

by Richard Harding Davis

I had read in books on Morocco and had been given to understand that when you were told that the price of anything in a bazar was worth three dollars, you should offer one, and that then the Moor would cry aloud to Allah to take note of the insult, and would ask you to sit down and have a cup of coffee, and that he would then beat you up and you would beat him down, and that at the end of two or three hours you would get what you wanted for two dollars. It struck me that this, if one had several months to spare and wanted anything badly enough, might be rather amusing. The first thing I saw that I wanted badly was a long gun, for which the Moor asked me twelve dollars. I offered him eight. I then waited to see him tear his beard and unwrap his turban and cry aloud to Allah; but he did none of these things. He merely put the gun back in its place and continued the conversation, which I had so flippantly interrupted, with a long-bearded friend. And no further remarks on my part affected him in the least, and I was forced to go away feeling very much ashamed and very mean. The next day a man at the hotel brought in the gun, having paid fourteen dollars for it, and said he would not sell it for fifty. We would pay much more than that for it at home, which shows that you cannot always follow guide-books.

There are only five things the guides take you to see in Tangier—the café chantant, the governor's palace, the prisons, and the harem, to which men are not admitted. They also take you to see the markets, but you can see them for yourself. The markets are bare, open places covered with stones and lined with bazars, and on market-days peopled with thousands of muffled figures selling or trying to sell herbs and eggs and everything else that is eatable, from dates to haunches of mutton. It is a wonderfully picturesque sight, with the sun trickling through the palm-leaf mats overhead on the piles of yellow melons at your feet, and with strings of camels dislocating their countenances over their grain, and dancing-men and snake-charmers and story-tellers, as eloquent as actors, clamoring on every side.

The café chantant is a long room lined with mats, and with rugs scattered over the floor, on which sit musicians and the regular customers of the place, who play cards and smoke long pipes, with which they rap continually on the tin ash-holders. The music is very strange, to say the least, and the singing very startling, full of sudden pauses, and beginning again after one of these when you think the song is over. It is not a particularly exciting place to visit, but there is no choice between that and the hotel smoking-room. Tangier is not a town where one can move about much at night. There is also a place where the guests tell you that you can see Moorish women dance the dance which so startled Paris in the Algerian exhibit at the exposition. As I had no desire to be startled in that way again, I did not go to see them, and so cannot say what they are like. But it is quite safe to say that any visitor to Tangier who thinks he is seeing anything that is real and native to the home life of the people, and that is not a show gotten up by the guides, is going to be greatly taken in. The harem to which they lead women is not a harem at all, but the home of the widow of an ex-governor, who sits with her daughters for strange women to look at. It is a most undignified proceeding on the part of the widow of a dead Bashaw, and no one but the guides know what she is doing. I came to find out about it through some American women who went there with Isaac in the morning, and were taken to call at the same place by an English lady resident in the afternoon. The English woman laughed at them for thinking they had seen the interior of a harem, and they did not tell her that they had already visited her friends and paid their franc for admittance to their society.

The other show places are the governor's palace and the prisons. The palace is a very handsome Moorish building, and the prisons are very dirty. All that the tourist can see of them is the little he can discern through a hole cut in the stout wooden door of each, which is the only exit and entrance. You cannot see much even then, for the prisoners, as soon as they discover a face at the opening, stick it full of the palm-leaf baskets that they make and sell in order to buy food. The government gives them neither water, which is expensive in Tangier, nor bread, unless they are dying for want of it, but expects the family or friends of each criminal to see that he is kept alive until he has served out his term of imprisonment.

WATER-VENDER AT THE DOOR OF A PRIVATE HOUSE

A great deal has been written about these prisons of the Sultan, and of the cruelty shown to the inmates, notably of late by a Mr. Mackenzie in the London Times. You are told that in Tangier, within the four square walls of the prison, there are madmen and half-starved murderers and rebels, loaded with chains, dying of disease and want, who are tortured and starved until they die. For this reason no one in Morocco is sentenced for more than ten or twelve years, so you are told, because he is sure to die before that time has expired. It seemed to me that if this were true it would be worth while to visit the prison and to tell what one saw there. When I was informed that, with the exception of two residents of Tangier, no one has been allowed to enter the Sultan's prison for the last ten years, I suspected that there must be something there which the Sultan did not want seen: it was not a difficult deduction to make. So I set about getting into the prison. It is not at all necessary to go into the details of my endeavors, or to tell what proposals I made; it is quite sufficient to say that in every way I was eminently unsuccessful. It was interesting, however, to find a people to whom the arguments and inducements which had proved effective with one's own countrymen were foolish and incomprehensible. For two days I haunted the outer walls of the prison, and was smiled upon contemptuously by the Bashaw's counsellors, who sat calmly in the cool hallway of the palace, and watched me kicking impatiently at the stones in the court-yard and broiling in the sun, while the governor or Bashaw returned me polite expressions of his regret. I finally dragged the Consul-General into it, and brought things to such a pass that I could see no way out of it but my admittance to the prison or a declaration of war from the United States.

Either event seemed to promise exciting and sensational developments. Colonel Mathews, the Consul-General, did not, however, share my views, but arranged that I should have an audience with the Bashaw, during the course of which he promised he would bring up the question of my admittance to the prison.

On board the Fulda, I had had the pleasure of sitting at table next to the Rev. Dr. Henry M. Field, the editor of the Evangelist, and a distinguished traveller in many lands. While on the steamer I had twitted the doctor with not having seen certain phases of life with which, it seemed to me, he should be more familiar, and I offered, on finding we were making the same tour for the same purpose, to introduce him to bull-fights and pig-sticking and cafés chantants, and other incidents of foreign travel, of which he seemed to be ignorant. He refused my offer with dignity, but I think with some regret. I was, nevertheless, glad to find that he was in Tangier, and that he was to be one of the party to call at the governor's palace. On learning of my desire to visit the prison Dr. Field added his petition to mine, and I am quite sure that Colonel Mathews wished we were both in the United States.