By which little speech our faithful attendant meant to convey that to-morrow's rejoicing at the termination of the long and irksome fast of Ramadan was equivalent to the "Ingleez's" Christmas, and that, after putting the house in order and bringing the provisions from the soko, or market, he would do no more trabally, or work—the word being a corruption of the Spanish trabajo—but would don the new haik and bright yellow slippers for which he had long been saving up, and to the purchase of which certain little presents from the children of our household had materially contributed; and would be entitled, by prescriptive holiday right, to "take his walks abroad" with the dolce far niente dignity of a tejjer, or merchant.
I think we members of the little English community of Mogador—or, as the Moors fondly call this pleasantest town of the Morocco seaboard, "El Souerah," or The Beautiful—had almost as good reason as the Moslem population to rejoice at the termination of the great fast. The Moors not being allowed, during the holy month, to eat, drink, or smoke betwixt the rising and the setting of the sun—the more sternly orthodox even closing their nostrils against any pleasant odour that might casually perfume the air in their vicinity, and their ears against even the faintest sound of music—debarring themselves, in fact, from whatever could give the slightest pleasure to any of the senses, a considerable amount of gloom and listlessness was the inevitable result.
The servants in the various households, not over active and intelligent at the best of times, became, as the weary days of prayer and fasting wore on, appallingly idiotic, sleepy, and sullen, would do but little work, and that little never promptly nor well. Meals could not be relied on within an hour or two, rooms were left long untidy, essential little errands and messages unperformed, and a general gloomy confusion prevailed.
Did I, tempted by the smoothness of the sea, desire a little fishing cruise, and send a youthful Moor to the neighbouring rocks to get me a basket of mussels for bait, he would probably, directly he got outside the town-gates, deposit the basket and himself in the shade of the first wall he came to, and slumber sweetly till the tide had risen and covered all the rocky ledges where it was possible to collect bait. Had I told the youngster over night that he must come out to sea with me in the morning, and take care that my boat was put outside the dock, so that she would be afloat at a certain hour, I would find, on going down at daybreak with rods and tackle, that the boat was high and dry upon the mud, and it would take the united efforts of half a dozen Moors and myself to get her afloat at the end of nearly an hour's frantic struggling and pushing through mud and water, necessitating on my part the expenditure of a great amount of perspiration, not a little invective, and sundry silver coins.
And when we were fairly afloat my Mahometan youth would be so weak from fasting that his oar would be almost useless; and when we did, after an hour or so of the most ignominious zigzaging, reach our anchorage on one of the fishing-grounds, then would he speedily become sea-sick, and instead of helping me by preparing bait and landing fish, he would lean despairingly over the side in abject misery, and implore me to go home promptly—a piteous illustration of the anguish caused by an empty stomach contracting on itself.
Nor were these the only discomforts under which we groaned and grumbled.
From the evening when the eager lookers-out from minarets of mosques and towers of the fortifications first descried the new moon which ushered in the holy month of fasting, every sunset, as it flushed the far-off waves with purple and crimson and gold, and turned the fleecy cloudlets in the western sky to brightest jewels, and suffused the white houses and towers of Mogador with sweetest glow of pink, and gilded the green-tiled top of each tall minaret, had been accompanied by the roar of a cannon from the battery just below our windows.
"What the deuce is that?" asked a friend of mine, lately arrived from England, as we strolled homewards one evening through the dusty streets, and the boom of the big gun suddenly fell upon his astonished ear.
"Only sunset," I replied.
"Queer place this," said J. "Does the sun always set with a bang?"