We first called upon the Sultan's Minister of Foreign Affairs, who received us in a little room leading from a pretty portico near the street entrance. It was furnished, I was pained to note, not with divans and rugs, but with a set of red plush and walnut sofas and chairs, such as you would find in the salon of a third-rate French hotel. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was a dear, kindly old gentleman, with a fine white beard down to his waist, but he had a cold in his head, and this kept him dabbing at his nose with a red bandanna handkerchief rolled up in a ball, which was not in keeping with the rest of his costume, nor with the dignity of his appearance. He and Dr. Field got on very well; they found out that they were both seventy years of age, and both highly esteemed in their different churches. Indeed, the Minister of Foreign Affairs was good enough to say, through Colonel Mathews, that Dr. Field had a good face, and one that showed he had led a religious life. He rather neglected me, and I was out of it, especially when both the doctor and the cabinet minister began hoping that Allah would bless them both. I thought it most unorthodox language for Dr. Field to use.
We then walked up the hill upon which stand the fort, the prisons, the treasury, and the governor's palace, and were received at the entrance to the latter by the same gentlemen who had for the last two days been enjoying my discomfiture. They were now most gracious in their manner, and bowed proudly and respectfully to Colonel Mathews as we passed between two rows of them and entered the hall of the palace. We went through three halls covered with colored tiles and topped with arches of ornamental scrollwork of intricate designs. At the extreme end of these rooms the Bashaw stood waiting for us. He was the finest-looking Moor I had seen; and I think the Moorish gentleman, though it seems a strange thing to say, is the most perfect type of a gentleman that I have seen in any country. He is seldom less than six feet tall, and he carries his six feet with the erectness of a soldier and with the grace of a woman. The bones of his face are strong and well-placed, and he looks kind and properly self-respecting, and is always courteous. When you add to this clothing as brilliant and robes as clean and soft and white as a bride's, you have a very worthy-looking man. The Bashaw towered above all of us. He wore brown and dark-blue cloaks, with a long under-waistcoat of light-blue silk, yellow shoes, and a white turban as big as a bucket, and his baggy trousers were as voluminous as Letty Lind's divided skirts. He could not speak English, but he shook hands with us, which Moors do not do to one another, and walked on ahead through court-yards and halls and up stairways to a little room filled with divans and decorated with a carved ceiling and tiled walls. There we all sat down, and a soldier in a long red cloak and with numerous swords sticking out of his person gave us tea, and sweet cakes made entirely of sugar. As soon as we had finished one cup he brought in another, and, noticing this, I indulged sparingly; but the doctor finished his first, and then refused the rest, until the Consul-General told him he must drink or be guilty of a breach of etiquette.
A STREET DANCER
The Bashaw and Colonel Mathews talked together, and we paid the governor long and laborious compliments, at which he smiled indulgently. He did not strike me as being at all overcome by them; he had, on the contrary, very much the air of a man of the world, and seemed rather to be bored, but too polite to say so. He looked exactly like Salvini as Othello. While the tea-drinking was going on we were making asides to Colonel Mathews, and urging him to propose our going into the prison, which he said he would do, but that it must be done diplomatically. We told him we would give all the prisoners bread and water, or a lump sum to the guards, or whatever he thought would please the Bashaw best. He and the Bashaw then began to talk about it, and the doctor and I looked consciously at the ceiling. The Bashaw said that never since he had been governor of Tangier had he allowed either a native or a foreigner to enter the prison; and that if a European did so, he would be torn to pieces by the fanatics imprisoned there, who would think they were pleasing Allah by abusing an unbeliever. Colonel Mathews also added, on his own account, that we would probably catch some horrible disease. The more they did not want us to go, the more we wanted to go, the doctor rising to the occasion with a keenness and readiness of resource worthy of a New York reporter after a beat. I can pay him no higher compliment. After a long, loud, and excited debate the Bashaw submitted, and the Consul-General won.
The first prison they showed us was the county jail, in which men are placed for a month or more. It was dirty and uninteresting, and we protested that it was not the one which the Bashaw had described, and asked to be shown the one where the enemies of the government were incarcerated. Colonel Mathews called back the Bashaw's soldiers, and we went on to the larger prison immediately adjoining. Some time ago the inmates of this made a break for liberty, and forced open the one door which bars those inside from the outer world. The guards fired into the mass of them, and the place shows where the bullets struck. To prevent a repetition of this, three heavy bars were driven into the masonry around the door, so close together that it is impossible for more than one man to leave or enter the prison at one time even when the door is open. And the opening is so small that to do this he must either crawl in on his hands and knees, or lift himself up by the crossbar and swing himself in feet foremost. It impressed me as a particularly embarrassing way to make an entrance among a lot of people who meditated tearing you to pieces. I pointed this out to the doctor, but he was determined, though pale. So the guards swung the door in, and the first glimpse of a Christian gentleman the prisoners had in ten years was a pair of yellow riding-boots which shot into space, followed by a young man, and a moment later by an elderly gentleman with a white tie. We made a combined movement to the middle of the prison, which was lighted from above by a square opening in the roof, protected by iron bars. This was the only light in the place. All around the four sides of the patio or court were rows of pillars supporting a portico, and back of these was a second and outer corridor opening into the porticos, and so into the patio. The whole place—patio, porticos, and outer corridor—was about as big as the stage of a New York theatre. It was paved with dirt and broken slabs, and littered with straw. There was no furniture of any sort. With the exception of the sink upon which we stood, directly under the opening in the roof, the place was in almost complete darkness, although the sun was shining brilliantly outside.
I think there must have been about fifty or sixty men in the prison, and for a short time not one of them moved. They were apparently, to judge by the way they looked at us, as much startled as though we had ascended from a trap like goblins in a pantomime, and then half of them, with one accord, came scrambling towards us on their hands and knees. They were half naked, and their hair hung down over their eyes; and this, and their crawling towards us instead of walking, made them look more or less like animals. As they came forward there was a clanking of chains, and I saw that it was because their legs were fettered that they came as they did, and not standing erect like human beings. The guard who followed us in was over two minutes in getting the door fastened behind him, and my mind was more occupied with this fact than with what I saw before me; for it seemed to me that if there was any tearing to pieces to be gone through with, I should hate to have to wait that long while the door was being opened again. This thought, with the shock of seeing thirty wild men moving upon us out of complete darkness on their hands and knees, was the only sensation of any interest that I received while visiting the prison.
