Tafilet

by Walter Harris

Here comfort, even luxury, awaited me, and pleasant indeed were the eight days I spent in the city before continuing my journey—this time into unknown regions.

Sid Abu Bekr el Ghanjaui is almost the best-known man in Morocco, and probably the most disliked, a fact in which he takes particular pride. Protected by the British Government, to all intents and purposes a British subject, he has by these means been able to amass a large fortune without the native Government having annexed it and imprisoned the possessor. Whether this fortune has been altogether collected by creditable means, according to European ideas of business, I am unable to say, nor is it a matter of any importance. Suffice it that his fortune has made him many enemies, whose jealousy at seeing him easily and safely amassing wealth, while they have been under the constant dread of confiscation by officials, and continual taxation, has reached such a pitch that they have not hesitated to spread all kinds of scandalous reports about his goings on. These reports reached the ears, amongst others, of British philanthropists in England; and while Sid Abu Bekr was engaged in building fresh houses and buying new gardens in his native city, the House of Commons was being harangued as to the perfidies of the so-called “Government Agent” in Morocco City. It did not stop there; newspapers, even foreign European Governments, took the question up, and his name became of common mention in official despatches. As long, however, as his personal liberty was not affected, he merely laughed at these hazardous statements, until one day it was brought to his ears that things looked serious, and that the only English newspaper in Morocco was calling him a slave-dealer, a brothel-keeper, and, if I remember right, a murderer.

Then Abu Bekr girt up his loins to fight, and for some ten days his action for libel occupied the time of the High Court of Gibraltar. I was present on the occasion, and shall never forget the scene when, seated in the witness-box, Sid Abu Bekr, robed in silks and fine linens, answered calmly and expressionlessly the extremely unpleasant questions put to him by the defendant—unpleasant in that they referred to that, to the Moor, most private of questions, his wives and his daughters. Every atrocity, every crime, was stated to have been committed by him; but with no result more than the fact that Sid Abu Bekr won his action with costs, and 500 dollars damages, and an injunction that the libel should not be repeated.

Thereupon, his character legally cleared, he returned once more to Marakesh, where, surrounded by his little daughters, to whom he is devotedly attached, he lives in luxury and wealth.

In the house of this man my days were spent, just as I lived another three weeks with him on my return journey, and I received from him then, just as I have always done, every mark of kindness and hospitality. Even the interior of his house was open to me, and many a pleasant hour I passed playing with his little daughters, whose dresses of silks and brocades sparkled with jewels.

By this time I had found opportunity to take stock of my travelling companions, who, as they played a by no means unimportant part in the success of my journey, deserve some notice.

The chief of our party, by position, age, and, he himself would probably add, acquirements, was the elderly Shereef. In person he was dark, of a sort of coffee-colour, with a grey beard and moustache; a short figure inclined to stoutness, and a bad habit of trying to sing. Himself a native of the Sahara, it was on him that I principally relied for success in my undertaking, my personality and disguise being concealed under the bushel of his reputation and accomplishments. Principal amongst the latter was his knowledge of medicine, a hereditary knowledge it must be understood, part of the baraka, or blessing, of his august family, for he was a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. I unfortunately had no opportunity of seeing the result of his skill, for when in his company I was never in one place sufficiently long to obtain any information as to the potency of the draughts he administered out of one of the three empty soda-water-bottles he had with him. It was entirely my own fault, though, that I did not see him perform the operation he was most skilled in—namely, cataract—for before leaving Tangier I had received a letter from him asking me to bring a large bottle of chloroform and a knife suitable for the purpose. This I steadily refused to do, and I think that the old man felt the slight I had unintentionally offered him, and fancied that I doubted his skill. At least he was always holding forth upon the subject, and continually repeating the story that when in Algeria he had been offered a fabulous salary—the sum varied each time the tale was told—to remain in charge of the military hospital at Algiers, an honour which he had declined. He never tired of narrating the facts and details of his most successful operation. There is a sect in Morocco called “Hamacha,” who are followers of a certain saint by name Sidi Ali ben Hamduch, who lies buried near Meknas. These devotees amuse their audience—and themselves too, let us hope—by throwing into the air heavy cannon-balls, which they allow to fall upon their shaven crowns. On the occasion in question a Hamdushi had unfortunately evidently been wanting in religious power, for the cannon-ball crushed his skull. My old Shereef friend had been called to the rescue, and according to his account, which, let us hope, for the sake of science as well as his own reputation, is a true one, he removed the broken patch of skull, replacing it with the rind of a green pumpkin, and closing the skin over it. In a month’s time the patient was not only convalescent but was once more hard at work practising his religio-acrobatic feats, with not only a remodelled and renovated skull, but even a new crop of hair! Such, then, was the skill of the leader of our caravan.

But there was another member who aspired to play the chief part in our little camp—the black slave-girl. Of all the mischievous impertinent hussies that ever saw the light of day she was the worst. Alternately shrieking with laughter at her practical jokes, and howling with rage because she couldn’t get what she wanted for supper, she was equally annoying in either capacity. At the same time, one could not help laughing at her strange antics. Why she had come at all was at first a mystery to me, until it leaked out that she had insisted upon doing so, and had pulled the old man’s beard until, with tears in his eyes, he had promised to take her—anyhow, come she did. Her mother was a slave of the Shereef’s wife—the wife who lived at Saffi, for there were a couple more at Dads, where he had formerly resided, and where his home really was—who had been bought with her little daughter, our fellow-traveller, some ten years before. The girl was fearfully ugly, as black as jet, with all the typical features of the negro. However, one readily forgave her this, and all her sins as well, for many a laugh her antics caused us when hunger and cold made a laugh worth double its ordinary value. When she was riding she wanted to walk; as soon as she commenced to walk she wanted some one to mount her again on the mule, from which, if she did not purposely alight, she would invariably tumble off. Such was the lady of our party, and she accompanied us as far as Dads, leaving there with the old Shereef some four days before I arrived at Tafilet. She stood the cold and fatigue of the journey well, and ought to be made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, for she had a wonderfully retentive memory of the road and all the places we had stayed at, though as often as not she managed to forget the sternly delivered command that she was not to eat our complete store of dates while our backs were turned. Enough of Embarka, for such was her name.

The next individual in our caravan was of a very different kind and class,—a long, tall, delicate, thin man of some four-and-twenty years of age, with one of the most beautiful voices in speaking I ever heard. He was himself a Shereef, a nephew of the old doctor’s; and a man of absolute fearlessness in danger, and equal gentleness and sweetness of manner in time of peace. He never complained of cold or hunger, though we suffered much from both, but bore all the hardships of the journey, and they were many indeed, not only with every fortitude, but also without ever losing an opportunity to attempt to add to my comfort. As we trudged along the weary desert roads he would for hours together, with a voice that would be the fortune of a Member of Parliament, and gestures that an actor might spend years and never acquire, relate to me strange stories of the past, page after page of Moorish history and tradition, in Arabic as pure and as poetical as any that can exist.

The very opposite was the old Shereef’s son, a boy of some twelve or thirteen years of age. Heavy in body and mind, he had neither the intellect to be amusing nor the inclination to be useful, and served no other purpose of advantage than to be the object of the black girl’s practical jokes instead of any other of us.