IN THE PRISON
The inmates looked exactly like the poorer of the Moors outside, except that their hair was longer and their clothing was not so white. There was one man, however, quite as well dressed as any of the Sultan's counsellors, and he seemed to be the only one who objected to our presence. The rest did nothing except to gratify their curiosity by staring at us; they did not even hold out their hands for money. They were very dirty and poorly clothed, and their long imprisonment had made them haggard and pale, and the iron bars around their legs gave them a certain interest. The atmosphere of the place was horribly foul, but not worse than the atmosphere of either the men's or women's ward at night in a precinct station-house in New York city. Indeed, I was not so much impressed with the horrors of the Sultan's prison as with the fact that our own are so little better, considering our advanced civilization. I do not mean our large prisons, but the cells and the vagrants' rooms in the police stations. There the vagrant is given a sloping board and no ventilation. In Tangier he is given straw and an opening in the roof. To be fair, you must compare a prisoner's condition in jail with that which he is accustomed to in his own home, and the homes of the Moors of the lower class are as much like stables as their stables are like pigsties. The poor of Tangier are allowed, through the kindness of the Sultan, to sleep on the bare stones around the entrance to one of the mosques. For the poor sick there has been built a portico, about as large as a Fifth Avenue omnibus, opposite this same mosque. This is called the hospital of Tangier. It is considered quite good enough for sick people and for those who have no homes. And every night you will see bundles of rags lying in the open street or under the narrow roof of the portico, exposed to the rain and to the bitter cold. If this, in the minds of the Moors, is fair treatment of the sick and the poor, one cannot expect them to give their criminals and murderers white bread and a freshly rolled turban every morning.
If I had seen horrible things in the Sultan's prison—men starving, or too sick to rise, or chained to the walls, or half mad, or loathsome with disease—I should certainly have been glad to call the attention of other people to it, not from any philanthropic motives perhaps, but as a matter of news interest. I did not, however, see any of these things. Dr. Field, I believe, was differently impressed, and is of the opinion that the outer corridor contained many things much too horrible to believe possible. He compared this to Dante's ninth circle of hell, and made a point of the fact that the guard had called me back when I walked towards it. I, however, went into it while the doctor and the guard were getting the door open for us to return, and saw nothing there but straw. It seemed to me to be the place where the men slept when the rain, coming through the opening in the roof, made it unpleasant for them to remain in the court.
It may seem that my persistence in visiting the prison is inconsistent with what I have said of foreigners forcing themselves into places in Morocco where they are not wanted, but I am quite sure that, had any one heard the stories told me of the horror of these jails, he would have considered himself justified in learning the truth about them; and I cannot understand why, if the members of the legations who tell these stories believe them, they have not used their influence to try and better the condition of the prisoners, rather than to introduce game-laws for the protection of partridges and wild-boars. It is, perhaps, gratifying to note that the two gentlemen of whom I spoke as having visited the prison in the last ten years were the American Consul-General and another resident American. Both of these contributed food to the prisoners, and reported what they had seen to our government.
On the whole, Tangier impresses one as a fine thing spoiled by civilization. Barbarism with electric lights at night is not attractive. Tangier to every traveller should be chiefly interesting as a stepping-stone towards Tetuan or Fez. Tetuan can be reached in a day's journey, and there the Moor is to be seen pure and simple, barbarous and beautiful.
III
FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO
There are certain places and things with which the English novel has made us so familiar that it is not necessary for us to go far afield or to study guide-books in order to feel that we have known them intimately and always. We know Paddington Station as the place where the detective interrogates the porter who handled the luggage of the escaping criminal, and as the spot from which the governess takes her ticket for the country-house where she is to be persecuted by its mistress and loved by all the masculine members of the household. We also know that a P. and O. steamer is a means of conveyance almost as generally used by heroes and heroines of English fiction as a hansom cab. It is a vessel upon which the heroine meets her Fate, either in the person of a young man on his way home from India, or by being shipwrecked on a desert island on her way to Australia, and where the only other surviving passenger tattooes his will upon her back, leaves her all his fortune, and considerately dies. Long ago a line of steamers ran to the Peninsula of Spain; later they shortened their sails, as the Romans shortened their swords, and, like the Romans, extended their boundaries to the Orient. This line is now an institution with traditions and precedents and armorial bearings and time-hallowed jokes, and when you step upon the deck of a P. and O. steamer for the first time you feel that you are not merely an ordinary passenger, but a part of a novel in three volumes, or of a picture in the London Graphic, and that all sorts of things are imminent and possible. It may not have occurred to you before embarking, but you know as soon as you come over the side that you expected to find the deck strewn with laces and fans and daggers from Tangier, and photographs of Gibraltar, and such other trifles for possible purchase by the outbound passengers, and that the crew would be little barefooted lascars in red turbans and long blue shirts, with a cumberband about their persons, and that you would be called to tiffin instead of to lunch.