I am hardly correct, by the way, in speaking of Lanniya as "house-maid," for Moorish maidens and wives never go in the service of European families, being prohibited by their religion from showing their faces; it is only widows and divorced women who may go about unveiled, and mingle with Christians.
The next morning, soon after the last gun of Ramadan had sounded its joyous boom in my ear, I was up and stirring, donning my shooting apparel and preparing for an early country walk with my faithful four-footed comrade. I had no fear of exciting the fanaticism of the Muslim population by going out shooting on their holy day, for there is not much bigotry in Mogador,—Moors, Christians, and Jews observing their several religions peacefully side by side, so that three Sundays come in every week, the Mahometan on Friday, the Jewish on Saturday, and then ours.
The sun, just rising from behind the eastern sand-hills, was gilding all the house-tops and minarets, till our white town looked like a rich assemblage of fairy palaces of gold and ivory; the smiling sea, serene and azure, came rippling peacefully up to the base of the rugged brown rocks, enlivened to-day by no statuesque figures of Moorish fishermen; nor did a single boat dot the broad blue expanse of the unusually smooth South Atlantic, of which the fish and the sea-fowl were for once left in undisturbed possession.
As I gazed from the flat roof away over the great town, I heard from many quarters loud sounds of music and merriment. As I passed presently through the narrow streets, with their dead white walls and cool dark arches, scarcely a camel was to be seen at the accustomed corners by the stores of the merchants, where usually whole fleets of the "ships of the desert" lay moored, unloading almonds, and rich gums, and hides, and all the varied produce of the distant interior.
Outside the town-gates the very hordes of semi-wild scavenger dogs seemed to know that the day was one of peace, for they lay in the sunshine, nor barked and snapped at the infidel intruder as he walked over the golden sands, along the edge of the marshy pool, past the pleasant-looking Moorish cemetery with its graceful verdant palm-trees, a calm oasis in the sandy plain, and out across the shallow lagoon formed by overflows of high tides, by which a few late trains of homeward-bound camels went softly stepping, looking wonderfully picturesque as they marched through shallow waters so beautifully gilded by the morning sun, their drivers doubtless eager to reach their own home or the shelter of some friendly village to participate in the modest revelries of the joyous season. How I wandered along the shore of the "many-sounding sea," enjoying a little rough sport, and the blithe companionship of the big doggie; how I saw never a Moor upon the rocks, but many Jews with long bamboo rods, busily engaged in fishing for bream and bass and rock-fish, it boots not to describe with a minuteness which might be wearisome to my readers, for I am not now writing "of sport, for sportsmen."
So let us turn homewards, as the sun is getting high in the heavens, and note the scenes by the way.
Yonder, near the marshy corner of the plain, haunted by wild-fowl, and carrion crows, and mongrel jackal-like dogs, is the rough cemetery of the despised "Jehoud," the Israelites who form so large and so wealthy a portion of the population of Mogador. Among the long flat stones that mark the graves of the exiled sons and daughters of Israel there is a winding crowd of white-draped figures, a funeral procession. Unwilling to intrude upon their grief, I pass on, casting an involuntary glance at the picturesque garb and wild gesticulations of the mourners as the women's loud and bitter cry of "Ai, Ai, Ai, Ai!" sounds weirdly through the air, just as it may have done in the old scriptural times, when "the mourners went about the streets" and gave unchecked vent to their grief in public, even as they do to this day.
But as I neared Morocco Gate, from the neighbouring "Running Ground" came very different sounds—a din of many drums, a squeaking of merry fifes, the firing of many long Moorish guns, the shouting of men and boys, and the eerie shrill taghariet of the Moorish women.
And as I passed in front of the round battery, out from the great gate of the New Kasbah came the crowd of men, women, and children who had been clamouring joyfully in the Running-Ground, a bright throng of brown faces and white raiment, interspersed with the gay colours worn by the little children, and dotted here and there by the blood-red of the national flag. Suddenly from a cannon just behind me came a cloud of smoke enveloping me and the dog, and a bang which fairly shook us, and then another and another. The firing of the guns from this battery was the spectacle the Moorish populace had come out to see.
It was an uncomfortable sensation to have big guns going off just behind one; they were only loaded with blank cartridge, of course, but we were quite near enough to be knocked down by a stray piece of wadding, and something did once whistle past my ear suggestively.