IN THE TAIL OF THE PEACOCK

By ISABEL SAVORY.

Author of "A Sportswoman in India"

WITH 48 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
AND A PHOTOGRAVURE PORTRAIT

"The Earth is a peacock: Morocco is the tail of it"

Moorish Proverb

❦

London: HUTCHINSON & CO.

Paternoster Row   ❧   ❧   1903

Isabel Savory

PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY

PREFACE

This book contains no thrilling adventures, chronicles, no days devoted to sport. It will probably interest only those minds which are content with "the C Major of this life," and which find in other than scenes of peril and excitement their hearts' desire.

Such as care to wander through its pages must have learnt to enjoy idleness, nor find weeks spent beneath the sun and stars too long—that is to say, the fascination of a wandering, irresponsible life should be known to them: waste and solitary places must not appal, nor trifling incident weary, while human natures remotely removed from their own, alternately delight and repel. Those who understand not these things, will find but a dull chronicle within the following pages.

If to live is to know more, and to know more only to love more, the least eventful day may possess a minimum of value, and even quiet monotones and grey vistas be found and lost in a glamour born of themselves.

In this loud and insistent world the silent places are often overlooked, and yet they are never empty.

ISABEL SAVORY.

Westfield Old Hall,
East Dereham.
February, 1903.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Except where otherwise stated, the Illustrations are from photographs by ROSE A. BAINBRIDGE.

CHAPTER I

Tangier—Country People—The Pilgrimage to Mecca—Moorish Prisons—We Ride to Cape Spartel—Decide to Leave Tangier and Push Inland.

CHAPTER I

The vague and hazy ideals which the white light of an English upbringing relegates to dreamland and dismisses as idle fancies, rise up in the glare of African sunlight, alive, tangible, unashamed; the things that are, not the things that might be:—the vivid colouring, the hot crowding, the stately men and veiled women, the despotism and stoicism, the unchanging picturesqueness of the Thousand and One Nights, the dramatic inevitability of the Old Testament.—A. J. D.

There was no desert in Morocco.

If a country has not been "read up" beforehand, the imagination has free play and forms many false conclusions: yet though it suffer on the one hand rude awakenings, it is on the other compensated by certain new lights—indelible and unique impressions—which come only in the train of things inconnu. So though we found no desert, there are other things in Morocco.

It is one of the few countries in the world, and they grow fewer each year, which is still unexplored—unknown. Thousands of square miles in Morocco have never been crossed by a European, or at any rate none have returned to tell the tale: maps mark only blank spaces, and have no names for villages, no records of mountains or rivers: there are no roads, still less railways, in the country: the only means of transport along the wild, worn tracks is by camels, mules, and donkeys: he who will not ride perforce walks.

The bare fringe alone of Morocco, its coast towns, and the choice, let us say, of two roads connecting them with its capitals, Fez and Morocco City, are open to travellers; beyond these limits it is difficult and dangerous for Europeans to venture. Of even its coasts towns England knows little enough: a daily paper printed in 1902 describes one flourishing seaport of thirty thousand inhabitants as "a village." There is more vagueness, in fact, about a country three times the size of Great Britain and four days' journey from London than of many a remote corner in the heart of Asia.

The reason is at hand. An old Arabic proverb, "The earth is a peacock: Morocco is the tail of it," typifies the entire satisfaction of its inhabitants with their native land. What is, is good; why "civilize" and "progress"? As far as possible there shall no European enter therein. Realizing that, were new blood allowed to come into Morocco, its own effete and uneducated people would have no chance in the race of life, and end by hopelessly knuckling under to the European, the country isolates itself; nor is it likely that the jealous Powers of Europe will allow any one of their number to disturb that isolation and pluck the tempting fruit.

And so to-day Morocco drowses in an atmosphere of laissez faire, a decadent nation, a collection of lawless tribes, who have changed little for the last two thousand years, living still much after the manner of Old Testament days. They are devout Mussulmans. They believe the world to be flat, and to come to an end with the west coast of Morocco. Their country they call El Moghreb el Aksa, which means, "The Extreme West," or "The Land of the Setting Sun": "Morocco" and "Moors" are entirely European words, and never used by the Moors themselves—the one being a corruption of the name of their capital city, the other having been given them by the Spaniards.

Morocco should be fascinating on the face of it: a great country running into hundreds of thousands of square miles, the only independent Mussulman state of North Africa, with six million followers of the great Prophet, and a perfect climate, soil, and water-supply to boot, needs no extolling. And yet its chiefest fascination lies in things which, from some points of view, ought not to be.

Its remote removal from all appertaining to the twentieth century, its strangely simple, untaught life, the solemn, stately men, the veiled women and their eyes, the steely blue cactus, the white cities and the glaring light, the mystery and the fatalism which intensify the air, are alike oddly inevitable and incomprehensible to a European. The other side of the closed door has always constituted, for the wandering vagrants among mankind, their hearts' desire. For them there is still Morocco; and the door will be shut in their faces again and again by a people and a faith and customs which they can never understand. And though it be useless they will still go on, because it seems the best thing.

About six weeks before 1902 was due, Rose A. Bainbridge and myself left behind us the last outpost of England—Gibraltar—with its cluster of civilization round the bottom of the great Rock. Four hours brought us across the Straits; and seen from the deck of the dirty little Gibel Musa, on to which we had changed from a P. & O. at Gibraltar, Morocco shaped itself into a rugged country, ridge behind ridge of low hills and jagged mountains cutting the sky-line. A long white sand-bank lying back in a bay on the African shore, broken at one end by irregular vegetation, gradually developed upon its slopes a yellowish-white, fantastic city, which resolved itself into Tangier.

Landing at Tangier among vociferating Moors has been described often enough, and needs no further enlargement.

The next morning, November 13, 1901, found us sitting over coffee and an omelette out of doors, on a little balcony opening off the hotel Villa Valentina, over-looking the road to Fez, and facing the broad, blue Straits which divided us from Europe.

It was like a June morning at home, soft and balmy: the city dropped from us down to the beach, and the sun poured upon the flat-roofed houses, coloured yellow to pale cream or washed-out blue, alternating with a lavish coat of glaring whitewash.

Tangier is an example of structure without architecture; at the same time there is a certain fitness in the crude Moorish buildings, whose flat expanse of wall is unbroken either by windows or ornament: they are simple and "reserved." Gleaming in high light under an equally light sky, they huddle almost one on top of the other, built upon every available square yard inside the "papery" old city wall, which looks as if cannon would blow it away. Patches of blue sea break the white city outline, and the towers of the mosques rise above it all: their tesselated surfaces, tiled in shades of green and polished by the years, shimmer in the sunshine like peacocks' tails.

The Road to Fez.

Two or three gateways pierce the drab-coloured city wall, their horseshoe-shaped arches washed over with salmon-pink. The same plaster-work arch repeats itself occasionally in the rough stone- and mortar-work of the houses, all of an inferior quality, short-lived and rebuilt again and again on the débris of successive years, until they stand in time right above the cobble-stones of the narrow streets.

Outside the city wall a few private houses and two hotels lie back among eucalyptus, palms, and bushy stone-pines: several of the legations which represent the European Powers have modern houses, lost in greenery of sorts. Behind these, again, a suburb of jerry-built Spanish houses, with the scum of Spain, is inclined to grow, which offshoot of fifth-rate Europe gives at last upon the rolling pastures and windswept hills of the open country.

Our breakfast-table brought us face to face with every traveller who passed along the great sandy track leading eventually to Fez, which people in Morocco call a road, beaten to-day and for the last two thousand years by the feet of generations of camels, mules, donkeys, horses, cattle, and mankind.

Though the wayfarers, plodding through the dusty hoof-marks, were desultory, it was quiet for few hours even at night, and under our windows we waked to an eternal shuffling in the soft sand, the champing of bits, and guttural Arabic tones.

R. and I leaned over the balcony. Women passed us wrapped in voluminous whity-yellow garments—haiks—black eyes and red slippers alone showing. Date-coloured boys passed us, wearing red fezes and dirty-white turbans. Countrymen passed us in great, coarse, brown woollen cloaks—jellabs—the hood pulled right on over the head, short wide sleeves, the front joined all down, and having scarred bare legs and feet coming out from underneath. These drove strings of diminutive donkeys, a couple of water-barrels balanced across the back of each—supplies of water for Tangier when the rain-water tanks are giving out: there are few wells in the city.

More women, veiled to the eyes, passed us, in delightful shoes—milk-coloured leather, embroidered with green: an African woman, black as a boot, with thick negro lips and yellow metal bracelets on her charcoal-sticks of arms. More donkeys passed us, carrying vegetables to market, driven by countrywomen in yellowish-white haiks, vast straw hats, and the inevitable veil. Two men passed us with an immense open box containing thousands of eggs, hung between them by a pole on the shoulder of each—export for England: forty-eight millions were sent off in 1902, and this morning's omelette might not be our first Morocco egg. A Moor of some means came by, riding at a hard-held ambling walk his star-gazing white mule: the high-peaked saddle and bridle were of scarlet cloth, the stirrup-leathers of scarlet twisted wool; he wore a creamy woollen haik, falling in soft folds down to his yellow slippers, a turban whose snowy disc of enormous size framed his cinnamon-coloured face in symmetrical folds of spotless white, and the top of a scarlet fez showed in the centre of it.

Almost opposite us a beggar had sat himself down at the edge of the road, under the shelter of the high cane fence—a grimy old greybeard, tanned and worn like a walnut, in a tattered jellab and shady turban. "For the love of God; for the love of God," he rolled out incessantly in Arabic, ending in a throaty gobble like a turkey; and the country people threw him, as they passed, of their bundles—here an orange, there a lump of charcoal—whatever it might be it was crammed into the hood of the jellab; and the sing-song and the gobble began again. In a Mohammedan country it is counted a duty as well as a holy deed to encourage beggars: almsgiving represents to the faithful Mussulman equivalent gain in Paradise; and no one starves in Morocco, though occasionally dismissed with a wave of the hand and "God provide for you." Mad people are regarded as saints, and credited with the gift of prophecy. It is an exceedingly holy thing to walk about naked. A holy man in Fez was in the habit of sitting at a missionary's gate stark naked; eventually this proceeding had to be put a stop to, because the holy man would insist upon holding the horses of the missionary's afternoon callers.

Our beggar sat in the same spot day after day, hour after hour, fatuitously happy, blissfully content. "God is great, and what is written is written": remorse, regrets, are alike unknown to Mussulmen; and it is this which dignifies their religion and themselves. Life passes lightly over them, and chisels few lines and puckers in the serene patriarchal faces—they may be scamps of the first water, for all one can tell; it sits lightly upon them.

A small boy in a white tunic and red fez, who called himself Larbi, was playing about near the beggar: being able to speak a little English, he made himself useful to visitors, and was rapidly exchanging his good qualities for the drawbacks of the hanger-on: he came out with us for a day or two, smoked several cigarettes in the course of the afternoon, and picked us useless bunches of ordinary flowers. Remonstrance was futile, but when no more little silver coins were forthcoming he left off shadowing us.

We found our own way down to the great sok, or market-place, in the wake of some donkeys carrying live cackling fowls, fastened by a bit of string and their feet to any part of the donkey and its baskets which came handy. On each side of the road and everywhere in Tangier the obstinate steely-grey cactus, or prickly pear, dominates the landscape: its fat fleshy leaves make as good a protection as the sharp-pointed aloe round the irregular plots of cultivated ground. Alternating with them, tall bound cane fences swish and rattle in the wind.

Steely-grey and a yellow-bleached white describe the vegetation of Tangier, set in its white sand-dunes. Morocco is far from having lot or part in the gorgeous East, as tradition says. To begin with, from the end of August to the end of April hazy days greatly predominate, and thirty inches of rain are put in: naturally the country and people take their cue from the general colour of the sky, from its white-yellow light, in which a wan sun is yet able to produce a glare. Morocco is yellow-white, and the Moors themselves run from the colour of cinnamon, through shades of coffee and old gold, to biscuit and skim-milk. Their houses and their clothes take on the same whites and greys, yellows and browns, and the sand and the scrub again and again repeat the tale. Perhaps it has a saddening effect, borne out in the colourless monotone of the lives of its countrywomen.

Presently we passed a skin-yard, salted goat-skins, drying by the hundred under the sun, spread upon the ground, upon the flat roofs, wherever a skin could lie, curling with dryness, the empty legs of the late owners standing stiff and upright, like petrified stockings, pointing dismally to heaven.

We overtook a string of camels as we neared the sok, strolling along and regarding the skies, R. and myself with an exaggerated superciliousness. They were laden with dates, carpets, and slippers from Fez, and, together with mules and donkeys, constitute the vans and railway-trucks of Morocco, substituting over the face of the land a dilatory calm in the place of speed and bustle.

But at first it was a real effort to take in a tenth part of surroundings so different from those of England; and when we found ourselves in the sok—the hub of Moorish life—it was to be jostled by donkey-drivers shouting "Baarak! Baarak!" by black water-carriers from the Sus country, by veiled women, by negroes from Timbuctoo, by mules and camels, by men walking, men riding, without one sight or sound familiar, in a dream-world of intense life, recalling nothing so much as the Old Testament. It was worth the journey out from home to see this sok—an open space crawling with brown-and-white, cloaked and hooded humanity, mixed up with four-legged beasts, also brown, and the whole more like a magnified ant-hill on the flat than anything human. In front of the squatted country people their stock-in-trade lay in piles, gorgeous in tone: oranges and oranges and more oranges, selling at one thousand seven hundred for a shilling; scarlet chillies—hot blots of colour; pink onions; red carrots; white salt, collected down on the beach; green pumpkins blotched with yellow; besides grain of all sorts, basketsful of charcoal, bundles of wood, dried fruit, flat round loaves of bread, cabbages, and what not. The sound of a perpetual muffin-bell was ringing backwards and forwards—the bhisti of Tangier, with his hairy goatskinful of water across his back, and two bright brass bowls hung by a chain round his neck, a bell in one hand, with the other dealing out drinks of water for a Moorish copper coin of which a penny contains fifteen.

We elbowed our way through the Báb-el-Sok, or Gate of the Market-place, into the city, and found ourselves in a long, narrow, straight street, dropping down to the marsa, or harbour. The irregular, light colour-washed houses jut out promiscuously over the minute cupboard-like shops crammed with oddments of every sort and hue, and leaving scanty room for the owner to squat on some carpet or mattress, until it strikes him that it is time to eat or go to prayers, and he locks up the double doors of his "store cupboard" and strolls away.

Looking down this attenuated Piccadilly of Tangier, over the white turbans and red fezes of the multitude, right away at the far end a field of blue sea was to be seen: half-way between, the faithful were beginning to pass into the big mosque one by one for midday prayers, each leaving his shoes behind him and stepping over the high doorstep barefoot on to the marble floor beyond, thence disappearing behind the ponderous green iron doors, where the great line is drawn between Europeans and Asiatics, debarring from entry any except Mussulmen.

The Villa Valentina breakfasted at 12.45, and cut the morning short. We were out again later with a guide—Hadj Riffi he called himself—bent on a visit to the Kasbah, or fortress of the city.

Hadj Riffi provided a donkey and pack, which of all substitutes for saddles is most foolish, intended only for loads of all sorts to be slung across them; but packs are easy to slip off and on, and have answered their purpose in Morocco since the days when in Judæa Mary rode on one to Bethlehem.

Conducted through the queer, intricate city, we wound along maze-like alleys three or four feet wide, ever the old aromatic smell of the East, almost impossible to recall, yet recognized again in an instant's flash, and born of the Oriental world we jostled against—of Berbers, Arabs, negroes, men from the Sahara, men from the mountains of the Riff, Turks, Greeks, Levantines, Syrians, even an occasional Hindoo, all wanderers up and down the earth, unable to resist the call of the open road, engendered by nomadic habits of old.

R. on a Pack.

One word on the inhabitants of the country. The Berbers are the aborigines of Morocco, and live more or less in the hills and mountains, into which they were driven by the Arabs in the seventh century, when they overran Morocco. The Arabs, on the other hand, live in the plains; and Arabs and Berbers practically halve the country between them. Both peoples divide into numerous tribes, of which the men from the Riff are a Berber tribe. The negroes in Morocco are merely slaves imported from the south. One and all the Arab and Berber tribes are called indiscriminately by Europeans "Moors." The other wanderers in Tangier filter through the land from their own countries: who can tell why or wherefore? Hadj Riffi himself had obeyed his Prophet Mohammed in so far as to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. A journey the prospect of which would horrify a tradesman at home is undertaken by an earnest-minded shop-keeping Moor as a matter of course. What are the twelve uncomfortable days by sea to Jeddah? Or the journey thence to Mecca, lying stretched in a long pannier on one side of a camel, balanced by a second pilgrim in a pannier on the other side, and over the whole an awning spread? But this luxurious travelling is for the rich pilgrim, who swings silently along day after day, under the burning sun or the cold stars, across the tideless sea of sand, towards an illimitable horizon. Hadj Riffi "footed it," spent three days at Mecca, at this time transformed into a city of a myriad tents, among which it is easy enough to be lost, teeming with pilgrims—Chinese, Hindoos, Circassians, Georgians, Bosnians—most of them unable to understand each other, beyond a verse or two from the Korān and a few pious ejaculations.

Hadj Riffi and his fellow-Moors prayed three days at Mecca, and performed the ceremonies round the celebrated Kāaba, the chief shrine and holiest of all holy places, built by Adam and Eve after the pattern of their own Sanctum Sanctorum in the Garden of Eden.

The far-famed Black Stone, presented to the masons by the Angel Gabriel, built into the east corner of the outer wall of the Kāaba, is a semicircular fragment of volcanic basalt, sprinkled with coloured crystals, about six by eight inches large, bordered with silver, and the surface of it reddish brown, undulating, and polished.

Having kissed the Black Stone and performed other rites, the Moors went three days' journey to the Prophet's Mountain to pray; then they took themselves back to Morocco, but on their way, missing a steamer, were obliged to travel by land through Tunis, which took them five months, and, running short of money, lived, Hadj Riffi said, largely on roots.

In the meantime he urged our donkey along, breaking his discourse with "Arrah! Arrah!" until at last it was cajoled under the gateway and into the Kasbah. This fortress, reported a good specimen of Moorish architecture, could impress nobody: it has no regular garrison; the batteries are antiquated, the artillery hopelessly inefficient. The crumbling battlements are overgrown with rank grass and fig-trees, though tradition has it they were once brass, when the city was built of gold and silver.

Tangier is immensely old, and has seen many conquerors, many demolitions. Arabs, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Spaniards, and Portuguese have all in their turn besieged and taken, ruled and deserted, the white city. England has had her turn too. When Charles II. married Catherine of Braganza, Tangier and Bombay formed part of her dowry and passed into British hands. The Portuguese, to whom Tangier then belonged, withdrew; the English entered, repaired the city wall, built forts, and in the course of three years a great mole across the harbour at a cost of £31,000. Trade increased rapidly under the protection of the plucky Tangier Regiment (now the Queen's Royal West Surrey). An English mayor and corporation—six aldermen and twelve Common Council men—were established in the little colony, and attended church in scarlet and purple.

And then the Home Government made a mistake. The slovenly Tangier board in London wasted money, sent adventurers out to Tangier as governors. An exposure of their mismanagement followed, which induced the Home Government to throw up a troublesome charge, and to evacuate as valuable a port as England ever possessed, in a country which, unlike India, is admirably adapted for European colonization, and blessed with every natural advantage Creation can offer.

The mole and fortifications were blown up, Lord Dartmouth and his garrison marched out of Tangier on February 6, 1684, and the Moors took possession of a heap of fragmentary ruins. With Tangier in our hands we could have confidently commanded the passage of the Straits for seventy miles, nor would there have been a risk to Gibraltar of having all her supplies cut off in the event of Spain and Morocco being hostile to us. Fresh-comers to Morocco regret these things: in a few weeks the spirit of the country induces a lazy tolerance and a general apathy towards the past as well as towards the present state of affairs.

We found inside the Kasbah an entirely Moorish element—one sacred spot where no "Christians" may live. A children's school was making a deafening noise on our right, and we looked in to see a group of small boys sitting round an ancient, turbaned Moor, who was sewing at a jellab and paying small attention to his pupils: one and all were on their heels, lighted by the open door, there being of course no windows; and each held in his two hands a board inscribed with Arabic characters, which he swayed backwards and forwards as he swayed his body in time with sentences from the Korān, learnt thus by heart and chanted in a high sing-song key. There were no girls. Boys alone are taught anything; and in general their education begins and ends, as above, with the Korān. Few Moors can write or read: there are no books in Morocco, except the Korān and a religious treatise or two, to tempt them to learn. As for geography, an intelligent Moor will know by name England, France, and Germany, not Russia, and that his own country is the biggest, the best, and the most powerful.

Leaving the noisy little school, which did not approve of being stared at, we came to the empty palace, with its great horse-shoe doorway, painted blue-white and carved in a rudimentary way, called in Arabic "The little garden," descriptive of its inside courtyard, planted with oranges, figs, and palms.

Farther on stands the forge of the fortress: "for the slippers for the horses," Hadj Riffi explained. The blacksmith wore an apron of a whole goat-skin; he pared down the hoof with an instrument like a shovel, helped by the horse's owner or any chance onlooker, for Moors "hunt in packs," and only a mere Christian does anything by himself. The shoe is a complete circle of iron, has three nails on each side, and in some places a bar across the centre.

At last we reached the prison, the principal feature of the Kasbah. Much has been written about Moorish prisons, to be put down by ignorant critics as exaggerated. English visitors have shown up their horrors, only to be forbidden now by a stringent order to go inside. It is hard to say what happens behind the scenes, but torture is lightly thought of in Morocco; "cruelty," as Europeans understand it, has no place nor meaning in ignorant, fanatical minds; and an unpleasant inference is therefore to be drawn.

Of course many of the prisoners are confined, in all good faith, for offences, and will be released in time; but there are also Moors, in high positions socially, or possessed formerly of means, who "wither and agonize" year after year in captivity, their only fault that they were rich or influential in bygone days, thus tempting a jealous rival to remove them out of his path, or a greedy Government to confine them and feed upon their money. If they ever come out, it will be because a wealthy friend has chosen to pay the Government for their release, or because it has happened to occur to the ministers at Court to send for them; and half of them will reappear but scarred remnants of the men who went in. Descriptions of tortures which were unknown even in the Middle Ages in England may well be omitted: tortures which result in blind and tongueless creatures, without hands; bled of every penny they once possessed, and maimed in order to induce them to reveal the spot where their money was hidden, or the friends' names with whom they traded.

We looked in through a small iron grating in the door about two feet square, revealing a space open to the skies, with roofed recesses in the walls round the four sides, where the prisoners had huddled themselves in their rags. At night they are chained by the leg. An Oriental does not require "a bed," but he is provided with no substitute in prison, still less with food and drink, for which he is dependent on friends or relations willing to supply him. Of late years, in certain prisons, a small loaf of bread per day is given to each man. He has the great advantage of being able to talk all day to his fellow-prisoners; but in the case of a refined man such close intercourse has its drawbacks, more especially when a raving lunatic happens to be chained by an iron collar round his neck to one of the pillars. Madmen and all alike, without respect of persons, veritably rot to death, cheek by jowl, in a Moorish prison. Disease, starvation, and injuries tend to shorten their captivity. Whoever has smelt the smell within those walls will endorse the adjective "kindly" Death, than which there surely can be no more welcome visitor.

A few of the sound prisoners, sitting on the ground, were weaving baskets, some of which we bought through the keeper of the prison; then turned away, struck by the stoicism among the prisoners themselves in a situation of such uncertainty. Was it to end in death or release? Who knows? They merely shrug their shoulders, and ejaculate, "Ift shallah" (God will show).

Passing the soldiers guarding the outside of the prison, and out under a second gateway of the Kasbah, we stumbled down what is called one of the Sultan's "highways," something very rocky and not far off the perpendicular. R. chose her own feet, much to Hadj Riffi's annoyance. Though the ways are such that no donkey can be ridden without stumbling among cobble-stones and pitfalls, and thereby running a risk of pitching the rider off the insecure pack into a refuse-heap, it was impossible for a European, in his eyes, to walk and to maintain his dignity at the same time.

Two Sheikhs.

That no Moor runs when he can walk, or walks when he can ride, or stands when he can sit, or sits when he can lie down, is a saying fulfilled to the letter. And what poor man, however heavily he loads his small donkey with garden produce, forgoes mounting himself on top of all, and making the little beast stagger along, at a fair pace too, to market? The life of such a man is not eventful, but what there is of it is good: he sings as he jogs along in a monotonous tone, and has a word for every soul he meets, and a laugh too, curses his donkey—he is never quiet—and lands the produce of his little melon-patch in the market. The melons are sold by degrees, much gossip is interspersed, possibly he washes and prays, then eats, and sleeps a little; more gossip, until the sun tells him it is time to get outside the city gates; and then off he jogs again, singing, talking, back to the little reed-thatched hut, fenced in by its hedge of cactus. Life is too full of—call it resignation or content—to leave room for disturbing speculations, and he is born of a race which never repines: there is Allah and the One Faith, and the sun to lie down beneath and meditate and sleep. Not that the typical countryman is idle—far from it: he is hard-working, without any beer to do it upon.

It is a matter of more speculation as to what the courteous, solemn men, in turbans like carved snow, whom one meets walking along the beach telling their beads, or sees sitting in sunshine reading aloud in a low voice, steadily praising Allah, occupy themselves with from month to month; or the sleek sheikh—a countryman of some means, with smooth coffee-coloured face and a haik whiter than an iced birthday cake—perched between the peaks of his red cloth saddle, under which his hard, hammer-headed mule paces at an intermittent amble.

Probably the sheikh has ridden out of the city to inspect his crops. His house, with his wife, he has locked up: the keys are in his pocket. He swings along a sandy track bordered with cactus, reaches his garden door, which is painted Reckitt's blue, unlocks it, and, tying his mule up inside to a fruit-tree, proceeds to inspect his vines and prune casually some of the ashy-white branches of his fig-trees. Then he sets two ragged countrywomen to work to cut his vines and hoe his beans. He may read a few verses of the Korān later on. He may sleep. Eventually he ambles home. Other days he spends among his friends in the city, sitting in their little shops and gossiping consumedly. He may hire an empty shop of his own for the same purpose, and turn it into what might be called "a club." He will pray regularly; will play chess and draughts sitting in the front of a shop; will drink green tea. Whatever he does is done without haste, and towards evening he strolls serenely, with many interruptions, in the direction of his own house.

The climate of Morocco has never any of the brisk, freezing "grip" of a hard English winter, but rather tends towards encouraging indolence. In Tangier itself energetic English visitors find little superabundant scope for action: naturally enough, the residents, whom an enervating summer or two shears of much of the vitality with which they first landed, end in settling down into an enjoyable, mild routine. There is, however, shooting and a little pig-sticking for who will; but guns may not be brought into the country, and no European would be allowed to exploit its nullahs: if not killed, he would be turned back and escorted into trodden ways.

The principal day's excursion from Tangier is out to Cape Spartel and back again: before we left the place we started early one morning with this end in view, taking a donkey and boy carrying a camera, lunch, etc.—first along a cobbled roadway of which Tangier is immensely proud, across the river by a new bridge, and up the Mountain. The Mountain is the summer abode of Tangier, and shady houses and gardens civilize what was once a wild hill, in the days when our great British minister, Sir John Hay, did an unprecedented thing, and built himself a house there.

Forty years ago no Christian was safe outside Tangier without a guard, and it is largely to Sir John Hay's fearless trust in the honour of the Moor that the change is due. It may still be unwise to walk in lonely places after dark, or to become involved in a street row; for if one ruffian is excited to throw a stone, thirty will follow suit, and Europeans have thus been stoned to death. But those who live out in the Mountain and visitors to Spartel have nothing to fear in these days in the shape of attack and robbery.

It was about ten o'clock when we left behind us the leggy remains of a Roman aqueduct over the river, and, having climbed the Mountain, broke into open ground, stretching far away at the top. The cobbled road resolved itself into an unsophisticated path; the stiff cane fences, shutting out all but the tree-tops in the gardens from view, came to an end; and we were in a breeze off the Atlantic, on undulating hills covered with short scrub, gum-cistus, arbutus, tall white heather, oleander, and pink-and-white convolvulus.

The track led us up and down, and grew more stony as we went on, gradually rising, till we were about a thousand feet above the sea. Looking back, Tangier lay far below, and beyond it in the distance white cragged mountains glinted in the sun.

It was a glorious day, November 24: a fresh breeze, tempered as it so seldom is in England at that time of year. Our path wound round the hills and dipped towards the sea. From the stretches of heather through which we brushed we could hear below us the surf breaking on the rocks: it might have been a corner of the west coast of Scotland.

After eight miles' up-and-down tramp, the lighthouse at the end of the great cape, Spartel, the north-west corner of the African Continent, came into sight. This lighthouse was built at the instigation of the eleven Powers, but actually by the Sultan. The Powers—Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Russia, America, and Brazil—share the cost of its maintenance, and that of the whole road from Tangier to the lighthouse, which follows the line of telegraph-posts, the cable being laid to Spartel. The lighthouse is French built; its fixed intermittent white light can be seen thirty-six miles away, and it stands 312 feet above sea-level.

Sitting down at its base, looking out to sea, we watched the black spines of rock underneath us, set in whirlpools of foam—the Dark Continent showing the last of its teeth. On our left the coast trended away into the hazy distance: to our right across the blue Straits lay the yellow sands of the bay where Trafalgar was fought, and the irregular little town of Tarifa, backed by purple Spanish hills.

The evenings were short, and we were soon on our homeward way. The stunted bushes on each side of the path, disturbed by the devastating woodcutters, could hardly hold a lion in the present day. Yet in the course of Sir John Hay's forty odd years of administration in Morocco two were seen in these same woods, and he shot there himself a striped Hyæna rufus, a great shaggy animal with a bristling mane. One of the two lions ought to have been shot, but he doubled back, and was heard of afterwards travelling at a swinging trot between Tangier and Tetuan. He killed an ox in the valley the next day, and disappeared in the direction of the snow-topped mountains.

In this twentieth century lions in the north of Morocco would be a rare sight: towards the south the mountain-fastnesses hold them still, together with leopards, wild cats, etc.; but, like everywhere else, big game moves off as civilization moves on.

There remains the wild boar. The Moors hunt him with greyhounds, Europeans shoot him, and Englishmen have introduced pig-sticking. The largest pig Sir John Hay speared scaled twenty stone clean, and measured six foot four from snout to tail. But even pig are getting scarce. The Tent Club in Tangier organizes expeditions, and parties go out under canvas for a few days at a time: the result is nothing very great.

When it is a question of shooting pig, the Moors, born sportsmen, join one and all—small farmers and peasants—purely from the love of sport. Some act as beaters, wearing leathern aprons and greaves—such as the Greek peasantry wore—to protect their legs. They carry bill-hooks to cut their way through the thickets, and bring along a tribe of native dogs, which do good service—a cross between a collie and a jackal, veteran poachers, which prowl through the scrub, winding a boar at any distance. The thickets where pig lie are for the most part backed by the sea, and bordered by lake and marsh or plain, in which case it is not difficult to inveigle the driven boar to break where the guns are posted. A haunch of wild pig judiciously roasted, with a soupçon of wine in the gravy, is one of the delicacies of Morocco. As many as fifteen boars have been accounted for in a couple of days' shooting.

The sun went down; the soft air grew colder: we walked quickly back through the outskirts of Tangier, between gardens full of plumbago, dituria, geraniums, hibiscus, pointsettias, narcissus, frescia, and roses of all sorts, besides other flowers. Anything would grow in a soil which has been known to bear three crops of potatoes in one year, and where corn is sometimes sown and reaped all within the space of forty days.

An enterprising English market-gardener is this year growing vegetables and fruit for the London market, expecting to have green peas in Covent Garden in December, the duty on peas and tomatoes having been lowered to 5 per cent. This man acts as agent to a land-owner. Fortunes, indeed, might be made, if it were not a question of find the land; for while land cannot now be bought in Morocco by Europeans, the few fortunates who own inherited acres price them high, and, hoping for a boom in the course of the next fifteen years, demand £400 an acre.

As we turned into the Villa Valentina a wonderful opal light warmed the white city and the sand-hills—they were no longer cold nor colourless; while banks of "rose" sunset-clouds were reflected "rose" in a grey-green sea.

Tangier has two sides to it—one native, the other European. The European side is all which appears on the surface, and it swamps the other. Given each of the eleven Powers, with its minister, its minister's family, its secretary, its attaché, its interpreter, its student; add to these a handful of English residents, a handful of English and American visitors, and a handful of varied nationalities thrown in; back them up with the necessary foundation of purveyors, and lower down still a substratum of leeches and black-sheep, greedy Jews, needy Spaniards, introducing drink and tobacco and gambling,—and there you have before you all the elements of a highly civilized town on the Mediterranean shore. It may be Tangier: it is not Morocco.

Tangier.

The Moorish aristocracy themselves speak of the place as "Christian-ridden Tangier," and will have none of it: the Sultan says it "no longer belongs to him." Its trade is nil, and what there is of it is in the hands of the Jews, who boast eleven synagogues, schools, and a Grand Rabbi at the head of all.

We brought introductions with us to various people, and met with every hospitality in Tangier. Sir Arthur and Lady Nicolson, representing Great Britain, do all in their power for visitors; and the colony of mixed nationalities fills its off hours together, most successfully, with a round of picnics, afternoon rides, tea parties, and other amusements, implied by "wintering at Tangier"; from all of which any knowledge of Morocco, or association with Moors, is far removed indeed.

A seaport which has neither roads nor railways to connect it with the surrounding country, is isolated a week's journey from the nearest capital town, and whose links with the outer world all tend seawards through steamers to foreign countries, can never constitute a study of the land to which it belongs only by right of position.

But Morocco itself had brought us to the north of Africa. Tangier could only be a base for future operations, and consequently a fortnight of Tangier sufficed, finding us bent upon moving on, before the heavy rains broke, and the swollen rivers made travelling impossible. Travelling in Morocco is never at the best of times luxurious. "Say explore, rather than travel," somebody writes, speaking of Morocco; and many were the injunctions and warnings which the post brought us from friends at home—above all, to expect no ransoms, in the event of capture by lawless tribes.

It is true that a Wanderjahr in Morocco has not the luxuries of travel in India; and Englishmen who would break new ground must wear Moorish dress, talk Arabic, and prepare to face considerable risks, with the off-chance of writing in some such strain as Davidson: "To-day I have parted with all my hair except one long tuft over my right ear. I never expect to become white again. My beard is very long. My legs covered with bites of vermin. My cheek-bones prominent, and my teeth sharp from having very little to do."

Not that R. and myself had such adventures in view; but we believed that even as humble followers in the tracks of others we should find no lack of interest in a country so little known, among a people of "The Arabian Nights," under conditions which tempt the Unexpected to stalk out from behind every corner.

CHAPTER II

Camp Outfit—A Night at a Caravanserai—Tetuan—The British Vice-Consul—Moorish Shops—We Visit a Moorish House and Family.

CHAPTER II

Tetuan—the tiger-cat! so curiously beautiful. Recollections of it hang in the gallery of one's memory, not so much as pictures, but as Correggio-like masses of vivid colouring and intangible spirals of perfume.

The place we had set our hearts upon visiting, to begin with, was the northern capital, Fez—only to find, on going into particulars, that insurmountable barriers blocked the way. Even if we escaped the December rains on the ride there, they would break sooner or later, making sleeping out under canvas impossible: the flooded rivers might mean a long delay—probably a week or more—on the banks; bridges in Morocco are harder to find than diamonds on the seashore, and when a river is in flood there remains only to sit down in front of it until the waters abate.

The "road" to Fez, after the tropical rains, soon becomes a slough of clay and water, ploughed up by mules and donkeys, and so slippery that nothing can keep its legs. We decided, therefore, to leave Fez till the spring, when the rains would be over, and to visit for the present a city called Tetuan, only two days' journey from Tangier, camping out as long as we felt inclined, and returning to the Villa Valentina in a week, or when the weather should drive us back. But the gods thought otherwise.

Tetuan was, by report, in the most beautiful part of Morocco: its situation reminded travellers of Jerusalem; it was among the Anjera and Riff Mountains; and though, of course, travel was impossible within the forbidden land of the Riff, it was likely we should gather some interesting crumbs of information, and come across a few of the famous tribesmen, while we were staying on the borders. Above all, it was a Moorish city, and counted an aristocratic one at that: no European element spoilt its originality. On the face of it Tetuan had attractions.

Accordingly we made preparations to be off.

The first thing to be done was to get hold of a man who could cook, act as guide, interpreter, and muleteer: plenty of them presented themselves, and we closed with a certain Mohammed, who had been with Colonel H——. Every third Moor is named Mohammed, or some corruption of it—eldest sons invariably.

Next we ransacked Tangier for commissariat and camp outfit. Out of a dirty little Spanish shop two men's saddles of antiquated English make, with rolls, were unearthed, and hired in preference to some prehistoric side-saddles, with moth-eaten doe-skin seats and horned third pommels.

Tetuan.

Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier.

Then we obtained a permit from the English Consul, for the sum of seven-and-sixpence, authorizing us to apply to the governor of the Kasbah for one of the Moorish soldiers quartered in Tangier, who should act as our escort to Tetuan. The Sultan of Morocco undertakes to protect British subjects travelling in his dominions as far as possible, provided they supply themselves with an adequate escort and avoid roads through unsafe territory. The various tribes from among themselves sometimes provide an armed guard to see travellers safely across their own country, handing them on at the borders to the next tribe, who sends its mounted escort to meet them. The headman arranges for the safety of Europeans, and his tribe answers for their lives. But this plan involves prearrangement, publicity, and fuss. Now from Tangier to Tetuan the road by daylight is perfectly safe—though it happens that, at the time of writing, the body of a peasant, presumably out after sunset, has been found robbed and murdered close to it. Therefore one soldier was all we should want; and at last this bodyguard was supplied, a ragged Moor, with a lean mule and a French rifle—all for five shillings per day.

We next visited a general "stores," lined with the familiar Cadbury, Keiller, and Huntley & Palmer tins: there we invested in corned beef, tinned soup, potted meats, cheese, salt, macaroni, marmalade, tea, coffee, sugar, candles, soap, matches, etc. Things not to be forgotten were nails, hammer, rope, methylated spirit and etna. A revolver for its moral effect is necessary, and may be invaluable in a tight corner. We provided ourselves with two tents, one for the servants and a larger one for ourselves; a set of camp furniture, including kitchen pots and pans; and an enamel breakfast and dining service, which, if time had mattered little, would have been well exchanged for an aluminium set out from England, as lighter and more convenient.

Mohammed hired four mules and another man—Ali—himself taking charge of the cooking department, providing meat, bread, vegetables, fruit, etc.: then with our bundobust complete, and a letter of introduction from Sir Arthur Nicolson to the British Vice-Consul at Tetuan, we started on November 28.

It was one of the hottest mornings we had had, not a fleck of cloud in the sky, and what air there was due east: the sea lay flat as a blue pool, and five or six white sails might have been swans on its glassy surface. Mohammed appeared early in the sandy road underneath our windows. To avoid waking people in the hotel, we handed our diminutive kit out through the window to him—only a couple of waterproof rolls, which held rugs and bare necessities; then locking up the bulk of our worldly goods behind us, slipped out of the Villa Valentina, mounted our mules, and were off across the white sand-dunes bordering the sea.

Tetuan lies forty-four miles to the south-east of Tangier: people with much time and little energy have made a three days' march of it. A range of hills rather more than half-way makes a natural division, and on the top of this watershed a fondâk (caravanserai) stands for the use of travellers during the night: here it is usual to camp.

We were an odd little procession as we left Tangier. Our mounted soldier, Cadour, led the way, in a brown weather-worn jellab, which he pulled right up over his head like a Franciscan friar: his legs were bare, his feet thrust into a pair of old yellow shoes. He carried his gun across his saddle in front of him, inside one arm: it was in a frayed brown canvas case, which had holes in each end, out of which both stock and barrel respectively protruded. With his other hand he jogged incessantly at the mule's mouth. Take him all in all, a soldier's was the last trade he outwardly impersonated. Behind him rode R. and myself, shaking down by degrees into our saddles, glad not to have before us eight or ten hours' jog across rough country on provincial side-saddles, which, apart from the strained position, are inconvenient for slipping off and on again. Behind us followed the two baggage-mules with our tents, etc.: loaded as they were, Mohammed and Ali had climbed upon the tops of their great packs. A mule carries as much as he can get along under in Morocco: the man climbs up afterwards, and does not count.

Two hundredweight, with a Moor on top, is a fair load for a long journey, marching seven hours every day. Enough barley should be carried for each night's fodder: the ordinary mule and pony live on barley and broken straw, beans when in season, and grass in the spring to fatten them. Sevenpence a day will feed a mule, and hire comes to three shillings a day. Good mules are not bought easily, and are worth, on account of their toughness, more than ponies, fetching £12 any day. Ours were but second-rate hirelings, and we made up our minds to buy later on, when starting on a long expedition. A mule should be chosen chiefly for its pacing powers, doing four and a half miles an hour on an average for seven hours a day, without turning a hair or tiring the rider, whose comfort depends on an easy pace. The longer the overlap of the hind-shoe print over the fore-shoe print, the better the pace. Moorish horses are wiry little beasts, but you seldom see a handsome one: either they are ewe-necked or they fall away in the hindquarters; their feet are allowed to grow too long, and their legs are ruined through tight hobbling. Nor is there much inducement to a Moor to breed a handsome foal, liable to be stolen from him, if seen by a governor or agent of the Sultan's. Naturally he breeds the inferior animal he has a chance of keeping, and puts a valuable mare to a common stallion, branding and otherwise disfiguring a colt which by bad luck turns out good-looking.

The slender desert-horse, the habb-er-reeh (gust of wind, as they call him), with the small aristocratic head, a nose which will go into a tea-cup, perfect shoulders, and diminutive sloping hindquarters, is seldom met with and hardly ever used, except quite in the south of the country, where he is given camel's milk to drink.

People as a rule start off on their day's march with the dawn, after a light breakfast of coffee, beaten-up eggs, and dry biscuits; halt about ten o'clock, supposing they are near water; and, if necessary, do two or three hours more, comfortably, before sunset. But we had made a late start, and the sun was far up as we jogged along one after the other, leaving behind the sands, the orange gardens, and the gimcrack Spanish houses, at every step the open country widening in front of us.

We followed a narrow path, one of the countless footpaths which zigzag in and out, and wind away to every point of the compass, like ants' tracks from an ant-hill. Donkeys, mules, countrywomen, eternally pass and re-pass along the polished ways, with the everlasting burdens of charcoal, faggots, vegetables, and flour: life in some form moving along them there always is.

Towards the edge of the horizon, clumps of dwarf palm and coarse grass slanted in the breeze: here and there grey rocks stuck up on the hillside like fossilized bones, and met the blue sky. A stream was meandering, hidden under deep banks, on our right. We wound along the wide valley, doing our best to keep the mules going at a respectable pace, and finding that there was quite an art in accomplishing it on a hireling. Cadour cut in behind, and supplemented our sticks and heels with Arabic words of much effect, his own mule's mouth suffering badly from his jogging, remorseless hand.

Ourselves and Baggage.

A raven, "a blot in heaven, flying high," sailed over our heads up in the blue, and then, leisurely dropping, sat on a rock and croaked at us. Morocco is a country of circling kites and keen-eyed hawks, whose easy, buoyant flight and vibrating "hover" in the hot air are things of undying fascination. Now and again a puff of east wind—life-giving—would stir the whole countryside and pass on, leaving us glowing under a sun which warmed every cranny, and made the section of air just above the flat fields rock with heat. Two countrywomen toiled towards us under their bundles—a couple of figures swathed in yellowy white; they gazed at us as people gaze who have few interests in their lives, then smiled and spoke, gesticulated, and laughed again: a herd of goats was outlined on the hill above; the goat-herd called to another far-off brown-clad figure, and the echoes filtered down to us: a rabbit dashed up out of a palm-bush and scuttled away: and then there was silence profound, and we paced on eastwards, talking and singing a song sometimes, while the sun climbed right-handed.

There is no life like it—that life of the open air and its absolute freedom. Monotonous it would certainly be to many people: small and uneventful matters, and a palette set in greys and browns, charm but a few, for whom solitary rides and waste places are "things in common," and chance meetings and little incidents by the way suffice.

Two or three miles outside Tangier stretch rich undulating lands between low hills: a few divisionless fields bear witness to both primitive and erratic farming, and give that regretful air to the landscape which land not "done well by" always imparts.

The writer has lately read a somewhat pessimistic letter upon the state of Morocco. Morocco is a decadent empire, it is true: primarily, because the two races to whom the country belongs live, and have always lived from time immemorial, under a tribal system; and secondarily, because those same races, Arab and Berber, hate one another with a racial hatred. These two reasons by themselves augur badly for the land they live upon, implying a state of armed neutrality, no cohesion, and no settled peace.

Under a tribal system the tribe is the unit, not the individual—"one for all, and all for one": it follows that transgression and retribution are both upon a wholesale scale, and alike disastrous towards the consolidation of a united nation.

The government in a country cursed by the tribal system must in the very nature of things be despotic: lawless tribes need the tyrant's hand of iron. To the fact of his being a despot the Sultan owes his security, coupled with one other reason. Arabs and Berbers alike are fanatics: religion is the air they breathe, the salt of life. The Sultan is descended direct from the One Great Prophet; consequently the Sultan is acknowledged as lord. His policy is an Oriental one: tribe is played off against tribe, one European power against the other European power; the empire is isolated; innovations are prohibited, lest European civilization should oust Moorish eccentricities. So much for the Oriental policy of "the balance of jealousies."

Despotism breeds despotism. While every Moor below the Sultan ranks as equal, the fact remains that Government officials are all in their own sphere little despots, governing districts many days' journey from Court, with every chance of robbing and oppressing those under them, until the day of reckoning comes, when the Court, hearing how fat their fine bird has grown, summons him to the capital, and the process of plucking and imprisoning their wealthy servant follows.

Life exists upon life, from the sheikhs (farmers), who live upon what they can squeeze out of the peasants, to the bashas (governors), who exist on tithes, taxes, and extortion wrung from the sheikhs and townspeople, up to higher officials, who receive no salaries, and line their pockets by a process of bleeding the bashas and others . . . . . . thus ad lib. Even the gaolers—also unpaid—earn their living by extorting money from the prisoners. The whole system of government reacts upon itself; for the venality of the officials drives the tribes to redress their wrongs at intervals by raids and open rebellion, to punish whom there follows slaughter upon slaughter, and the country is laid waste.

Hence the principal reasons—wheels within wheels—which account for the Morocco of 1902: its prehistoric customs, its uncultivated acres.

No reformer, no missionary, will alter the condition of Morocco. The Moors themselves have made it what it is; but since for an Ethiopian to change his skin is no light matter, there is small probability of the Moors themselves unmaking it.

A gloomy prospect, yet one which, taking the case of the people and looking upon it from a "happiness" point of view, must not be altogether judged from a European standpoint. The likes and dislikes of Moors are not the likes and dislikes of Europeans, and most of them view their good times and bad times with equal calm, as merely the will of Allah. Besides which, anything in the shape of law and order and daily routine rasps their raw nature. Just as a Moor prefers to eat to repletion when there is food, and to go without when there is not, so he would choose a desultory and irresponsible life, alternating between perfect freedom and excessive tyranny, to any regular humdrum form of government which Europe could offer him.

The country people we met, if hard-worked, had at the same time cheerful enough faces: their enjoyment of life probably equals that of the English labourer.

On the whole, it is possible that, when the day comes—as it must come—that an effete and inadequate people goes to the wall, and civilized blood occupies their room, it may bring good, but that good will be tinged with regret—certainly in the eyes of those selfish mortals to whom one country, neither wire-fenced nor scored by railways, nor swept nor garnished, but coloured to-day by the smoke of many thousand years, still offers palmy days. Thus giving thanks to Allah for things as they are, after the manner of the country, we jogged along, looking out for a halting-ground: it was between twelve and one o'clock, and time to stretch our legs.

The river and some oleander-bushes, with green lawns between them, offered all we wanted. Cadour took off his brown jellab, and spread it for us to sit upon. There we lunched and waited for an hour. Some oxen were ploughing close to us, driven in a desultory way by a figure clad in a pair of once white drawers, and a once white tunic with a leather belt. All which this husbandman wanted being corn enough to supply himself, and no surplus to fall into the sheikh's hands, the field was naturally small. A well-to-do farmer might rise to growing a little maize or cummin or millet or fenugreek for exportation, perhaps some broad-beans, chick-peas, or canary-seed; but the duties are heavy. Wheat and barley have been forbidden export: the infidel shall not eat bread of the true believer's corn.

Our Arabic at that time was nil; there was no chance of a word with the ploughman unless through Mohammed. Such a mere scratch of a furrow as he made, into which the grain would be casually thrown, with never a harrow or substitution for one! Allah provides, and there is no reason to interfere with his arrangements: "B`ism Allah." Thus will the fields be reaped, the corn ground, the bread made, the loaf eaten, with the same old invocation muttered beforehand: "B`ism Allah" (In the name of God).

The two little oxen drew the patriarchal plough, hewn out of a log of wood, and shod with an iron point, entirely by means of their heads, to which it was fastened with dried grass-fibres across their foreheads and round their horns, making a sort of large straw bonnet on top of all which they held high in the air or sideways, with expressions of extreme disgust. In the middle of the field, yoked by the bonnet to a second plough and a fellow-ox, the companion had inconsiderately lain down, to the great inconvenience of its foolish partner, which remained standing, with its head forced into the most unpleasant angle downwards, and the stoical expression of a true Mussulman underneath its bonnet.

On the opposite side of the stream some sheep, suggestive of the lean, tough mutton we fed upon, were searching round for anything in the shape of pasture: flocks of small cows and calves were on the same quest between the palmetto-bushes: somewhere a boy in charge was no doubt asleep.

By this time Mohammed was impatient to be off: the bits were put back into the mules' mouths, we got into our saddles again, and pushed on. In wet weather the track must be a bad one to follow: innumerable streamlets, which have eaten out deep gullies in the clay, have to be crossed, making the going hard upon heavily laden beasts, and after heavy rains impossible. We slipped about a little. Mohammed and his man had their hands full with the two baggage-mules, which they had long ago given up trying to ride. The slopes became more bleak: far away in the distance Cadour pointed out our destination, a white speck on the top of a range of hills, to be seen for a moment and lost sight of the next, as we dipped down on to lower ground. Another hour brought it very little nearer: fresh irregularities between opened up continually, meaning détours to the right or left. A few plover wailed over some marsh: in such places partridge, hares, golden grouse, and quail ought to be found; but since every male possesses a gun of sorts, from the peasant hoeing beans upwards, and is not troubled with game laws or ideas upon preserving, they become rarer.

We passed clump after clump of white narcissus in full bloom, and marigolds in yellow patches; but as we neared the hills the country grew wilder, and short scrub, palmetto, and cistus took the place of coarse grass.

At last we were at the foot of the pass, and the end of our march was all uphill, steep in places, the scrub turning into respectable bushes, with almost a "jungly" aspect. The baggage-mules were pushed and urged ahead. At last, about five o'clock, the sun setting, we reached our camping-ground, up in the teeth of a rising wind.

Standing by itself, the caravanserai—called a fondâk in Morocco—was a white-walled enclosure, with a great open space in the middle and colonnades all round the insides of the four walls, where men and mules huddled and slept unconcernedly. There is also one room to be had; but filthy, of course, such quarters always are, and dear at any price (the rate for accommodation is not large). One look into the walled enclosure, crowded with transport animals and their drivers, was enough, and we turned to see to the pitching of the tents outside.

The panorama of hills in the west had a red, lurid light, such as Julius Ollsson loves to paint: across the stormy glow trailed a few white wisps of smoke where the peasants were burning wood on the hillside for charcoal. Making a détour of the fondâk while there was light to see, we chose the west side for our camp, apparently the most sheltered; but the place is a temple of the four winds and gusty upon a breathless day.

It was quite dark before the men had things ready, hampered as they were by the gale which was getting up and the want of light. We tried to keep warm, and watched the first star come out from a knoll; at last took refuge in our wind-shaken tent, unpacked, and sat ourselves down with outstretched legs, wrapped in a medley of garments, round the little camp-table, lit by the flicker of two candle-lanterns, the flaps of the tents snugly fastened together from within, awaiting Mohammed's first culinary effort.

By-and-by from out of the chaotic kitchen-tent, pitched in the dark, filled with confused commissariat, and further blocked by Cadour, Ali, and their small effects, Mohammed emerged, and handed in through an opening in our tent chicken and eggs cooked in Moorish fat. After a long interval tea followed, and fruit. We sat listening to the wind, writing up a diary and talking till bed seemed the best and only warm place. The gale woke me after an hour or two: the tent, torn by raging gusts, threatened to give at every moment. I got up and took a look outside. A wild, gustful night indeed, of glimmering stars and a great white half-moon—cold too: the mountains stood out sharp; there was little cloud; round our tent a guard of men from the fondâk—always supplied, for the safety of travellers—were sleeping on the ground, heads and all wrapped up in their jellabs,—the moon shone on the queer bundles, and on our five mules, picketed opposite the tent door, backs to the wind, munching their barley. Neither of us got much sleep; roused periodically by the hammering in afresh of our strained tent-pegs, by the men's voices, which would relapse into silence for half an hour, and then break out again; above all, by the flapping and rattling of the canvas. For a moment there was a lull, and we heard the mules feeding and the thousand sounds of the night; then a wild blast almost carried the tent away, and the monotonous undertone of voices would begin once more.

We were up early, spent little time over dressing in a stiff breeze, and turned out to look at the weather. Banks of cloud lay piled up in the wind, but rain never comes with the sharki (east wind). The sun was up—no chance of seeing it for the present.

Mohammed boiled eggs and tea, and in another twenty minutes we were ready to quit our exposed camping-ground.

From the fondâk to Tetuan the distance is only fifteen miles, half a day's journey. The day before we had done twenty-eight miles, and ought to have started at dawn, avoiding the pitching of our tents in the dark. To-day we were off betimes.

It was cold, and I walked the first hour or two, Cadour and R. riding behind with my mule, coming slowly down the steep, rocky ridge into the valley in which Tetuan lies. It was a bad bit of riding, a continuous descent, and the baggage-mules fell far behind: the rocky ravine was uncultivated and treeless, scrub and rocks only on the bare mountains. Sometimes a crest would have a saw edge against the sky, suggesting fir woods; but as a matter of fact every tree worth having which is not planted by a saint's tomb, and therefore holy, has long ago been made into fire-wood, no coal finding its way into the interior of Morocco, and mining being a thing unknown.

At last the slopes gave on to more level ground and strips of cultivation: we had our first view of Tetuan, at that distance little more than a streak of white lying in the shelter of the hills.

It was better going; and R. having jogged on some way ahead, I waited for Cadour, climbed into my saddle, and caught her up. Here and there, perched on each side of us, far above in the mountains, wherever an oasis of green lay between sheltering cliffs, a village had sprung up, an irregular cluster of brown-and-white huts, thatched with cane, weathered to shades of brown, the whole pile hedged with grey aloes and cactus, on the steep mountain-side—also brown—where, unless looked for, they could easily have been passed over altogether.

These were the only signs of man; for Tetuan shared the speciality of the fondâk the night before, in vanishing behind intervening hills and never growing any nearer. But the mules this time were fresher, or we had learnt the art of keeping them up to the mark; they broke into a canter, and scampered across the rich-looking flats bordering the river Wád Martîl. The Wád Martîl is the proud possessor of one of the seven bridges which the Empire of Morocco can show—a somewhat quaint construction, but a bonâ-fide stone bridge: no carriage could have crossed it; the middle cobble-stones were so steep and rough that they amounted to rocks. But Morocco knows not carriages, and at least it was a bridge.

Once across, Tetuan was not more than a few miles off.

Seen from any height, it is one of the whitest cities in the world, and the whitewashed walls lend themselves to flat shadow as blue as the sky above. Tetuan has been described as "a cluster of flat-backed white mice, shut up in a fortress in case they should escape": it has also been likened to Jerusalem, with "the hills round about." For my own part, it was like nothing I had seen, nor was prepared then and there to classify—this heap of chalk, this white city. Not a particle of smoke floated over it: purity and sunlight alone were suggested by the outside of the platter. The Moor has a weakness for whitewashed houses, for long white garments, for veiled women: there shall be no outer windows in his house, nor in his own private life. Ugliness there may be, enough and to spare, inside these white cities—it oozes out sometimes; but as far as possible let a haik and a blank wall enshroud it all in mystery.

None can fix the age of Tetuan: once upon a time the city was on the seashore—now seven miles of flats lie between, and crawling mules and donkeys link the two, working backwards and forwards, week in, week out, jogging down with empty packs to the cargo-steamers, and labouring back across deep-flooded country half the year, under solid burdens, to the city. From the flat roof-tops the weekly visit of a merchant-vessel is duly looked for, and a long black steamer lies at anchor for the day in the narrow ribbon of blue sea seen to the east, near the white Customs House, which stands back from the beach.

Clouds Over Tetuan.

Southwards Tetuan faces the Riff country, range after range of mountains, inhabited by that indomitable tribe, whose "highlands" are closed to Europeans. The river Wád Martîl, between Tetuan and the Riff, winds across the seven miles of flats to the sea, and is fordable in two or three places except in heavy rains; and days "in the mountains"—safe within sight of the city—promised us many an expedition, and opened up another world of heights foreshadowed and gulfs forbidden, where the hours were all too short.

Behind Tetuan to the north, the mountainous Anjera country, wild, bare hills abut upon the very city wall.

The name Tetuan means in Arabic "The eyes of the springs," and all over the city water gushes out of the limestone rock—the hardest water, I submit, that ever mortal tried to drink. Such a supply is worth a kingdom to an Eastern city. Every tank, fountain, and hummum (Turkish bath) has its never-failing supply, gratis, from the heart of the hills. The little streets are watered by it, and the sewage carried off on the lower side of the city in a strong current, which—still useful—works primitive corn-mills under the wall on the south side, where a sack receives the flour from a couple of flat revolving stones. A miller was robbed the other night asleep by his sack: the door burst open, and he expected a bullet, but was let off with a clout on the head and the confiscation of his sack.

Having ground the corn, sewage and all is conducted over the land, and enriches the fertile apricot- and peach-orchards, corn-fields and vineyards. The great orange-gardens lie beyond in the rich river-deposit. There is no want of fruit round Tetuan: May sees pomegranates, apricots, peaches, figs, prickly pears, in due course; September brings the grape season; acres upon acres of gardens are covered with green muscats ripening on the dry ground, and protected from the sun by branches strewn over the plants.

West of the city, upon which side we rode in, there are fewer orchards and more fields. Since crossing the Wád Martîl a string of travellers had caught us up and passed us: a soldier as escort led the way; a rich Jew ambled on a fat brown mule hard behind; a muleteer and three starved mules laden with Isaac's worldly goods brought up the rear.

The muleteer, a happy fellow in a brown jellab, sang all the way, as he rode sideways on his beast. He begged a match from Cadour, produced a ragged cigarette from inside his turban, and lit it skilfully in the wind: he probably lived chiefly on cigarettes, kif, and green tea, eating when there was bread; he was lean and sun-dried as a shred of tobacco, would sleep in snatches and often, his jellab-hood over his face to keep off the sun or the dew.

We got very near a pair of snowy ibis, or cow-birds, as they are called, attending on two grazing cows. White as geese, parading about on black stilt-like legs, which raise them a foot or more off the ground, they have yellow bills and a slightly puffed throat, in flight extending their long legs behind them. Cow-birds wage war on the parasites of mules, donkeys, oxen, and sheep, hopping about the fields and dropping down on to their backs: they are never shot.

Morocco is by no means short of bird life. Only that morning, as we rode along, we saw several pairs of whinchats, any number of crested larks, some plover, pied and grey wagtails, starlings, and a sand-martin. Starlings in Morocco fly literally in clouds like smoke, blackening the sky wherever they are surging and wheeling. A single shot into the middle of a flock has brought down from sixty to seventy of them.

We jogged up the last yard of rocky path, and found ourselves in front of Tetuan in rather less than four hours after leaving the fondâk, to the satisfaction of Cadour: it was an improvement on the day before. This ornament of the cavalry had now come out in a clean white turban, in view of entering the city: he puzzled us at this point by leading the way off the road to a white wall in the middle of the field, behind which travellers occasionally camp, devout people pray, and sheep are slaughtered at the time of the Great Feast. Here he produced our luncheon. But we, in the innocence of our hearts, would "lunch at a café" in Tetuan, after calling at the British Consulate and leaving our letters of introduction: this, with signs and a Spanish word or two, was brought home to Cadour, and we turned back, skirted the white city wall, reached a gate built in an angle, and rode in under the archway, passing a few figures in jellabs reclining and talking beside a great stone water-trough, which was running with fresh water.

Following one of the worst-paved streets upon Allah's earth, whose slippery rocks and pools of brown manure-water offered no tempting footpath, the first Union Jack we had seen for many a long day appeared above a wall and spoke Britain: towards it we made our way. A soldier in a long dark blue cloak and high-peaked red fez was sitting at the Consul's office door: he took our letters of introduction, and, without our being able to explain ourselves in Arabic, insisted on ushering us straight into the presence of the Consul—Mr. W. S. Bewicke.

We found him surrounded with papers and cigarette-ends: he would most hospitably take no denial in the matter of lunch, but made us come into the house at once. His long, narrow dining-room was flanked by a small kitchen; above, the same shaped, long, narrow sitting-room was flanked by a small bedroom; a flight of narrow, steep stairs divided all four rooms, and completed the Consulate: this simple plan is usual in a Moorish house of the sort, and admirably adapted for the Eastern habits of the people. The Consul considered it inadequate. A sunny, walled garden lay in front; big orange- and banana-trees, both covered with fruit, shaded precious seedlings; a large tank, filled with gold-fish, took up much space under the windows; and in the background a high cane fence penned in turkeys, geese, ducks, and chickens, scratching and squabbling under orange-trees. There are no grassy lawns in these gardens: they are devoted to fruit, shrubs, and flowers, bisected into equal divisions by tiled or grass paths.

People in Morocco, as all the world over, collect curiosities nolens volens. Mr. Bewicke's dining-room was no exception. Guns from the Riff, eight feet long; brass powder-horns, knives, daggers, pistols, engraved and inlaid with silver, ivory, and coral; a long brass horn, once blown from the top of the mosque, sacred and difficult to get; copper vessels, pots, pans, jugs, bowls; blue china from Fez; quaint Jewish candelabra and lamps; brown and white native pottery,—all found a place.

A young Riffian named Mohr acted as butler, a coffee-and-cream-coloured boy, with a girlish face and a head with a close weekly shave, all except one long love-lock, which, combed out, fell over one ear in a glossy brown curl. It is worn by all Riffs as good Mussulmans, and serves a double purpose, that of scalp-lock when the head is decapitated by enemies and borne by the lock instead of by the mouth, and that of handle, by which Azrael, the Angel of Death, carries the body to heaven on the last day. Mohr wore a Riff turban of brown string, several yards long, wound round and round his head, a white tunic and belt: his legs were bare; and leaving his yellow slippers behind him on the threshold, he moved noiselessly round the table with gracious manners, and, when he spoke, made nonchalant gestures with his hands.

Had we come a few days earlier, we should have fallen in with a thousand men from the Beni Has`san tribe, who had come down to pay their respects to the new basha (governor) of Tetuan, and to offer him presents.

They had fired off a good deal of blank powder, and a stray bullet or two into the Consul's garden door; had rushed about the feddan (market-place), discharging their guns; and had thrown stones at some one. On their way to Tetuan the thousand odd had pillaged right and left, stealing fruit and robbing houses. Finding some women washing, they stole the clothes, and report said two women as well. At last twenty of them were caught and put into prison, after which the nine hundred and eighty marched back to their own country.

Lunch over, we walked with Mr. Bewicke into the city. While Tangier might be called an anæmic copy of a Moorish town, Tetuan has the strength of a bonâ-fide life-study, and all that is curiously beautiful, strangely obscure, is unsparingly suggested. The longer a European lives there, the more the paradoxes in Moorish life force themselves upon him, and the more tangible grow certain intuitions which his surroundings convey.

It is not only such contradictions as lie on the surface—the squalor of some filthy fondâk, the emaciated raw-skinned donkeys, the bent-backed women, rubbing shoulders with the white-scented robes, the sleek mules, the luxurious tiled houses—these a blind man could see: the under-currents which will puzzle an Englishman more the longer he lives there are known to those only who have dwelt much in Morocco, and they belong by every right to a life which is drawn to the letter in "The Arabian Nights."

The ramifications of the narrow streets in Tetuan would take a quarter of a lifetime to master, and then an unexplored alley might be found, though it is easy to walk across the entire length or breadth of the city in ten minutes. Down a dozen intricacies we dived with Mr. Bewicke, through a labyrinth, half dark in places, where houses built overhead shut out the sun. Looking along the narrow streets, the buildings jostle one another, and the flat blank walls slope backwards out of the upright, at every turn a haphazard colour-scheme in white and mauve and chocolate, in blue and ochre and cream.

Here a long dark tunnel opens into sunlight and shops on each side, with great vines trailed on trellis-work—like a pergola—overhead, and sunlight in blotches on the cobbled paving below: there, just beyond, the Slipper Quarter, and we find ourselves in the thick of the tap-tap of the mallets on the hard-hammered leather—dozens of busy little shops on each side, lined with yellow matting, and hung from top to floor with rows of lemon-yellow slippers for the men, rose-red slippers for women, embroidered slippers for the wealthy, crimson slippers for slaves, slippers with heel-pieces and slippers without. In each shop a man and boys at work: the white turbans and dark faces bending over the leather, the coloured jellabs which they wear, the busy hard-white-wood mallets in the deft brown hands, even the waxed thread, the red jelly which glues the soles together, the gimlets, the sharp scissors, have a passing fascination for the wandering Moor himself, who sits down lazily in front and talks to the workers. Still more for ourselves. Leather bags are being sewn next door and ornamented with work in coloured leather and silks. Within hearing of the "tap-tap" lies the skin-yard, and the skins are scraped and tanned and dyed and turned into slippers all in the same square acre or two, whence they depart many of them for Egypt and supply the Cairo bazaars.

A few steps farther, and there is a steady clanking of hammers on anvils, beating out hot iron—the Blacksmiths' Quarter. Not the old turbaned blacksmiths nor boys with shaved heads, in tunics grimed with age, and leather aprons sewn with red leather, nor the primitive bellows and quaint iron points, all being beaten out for the ploughs, are the features of the Blacksmiths' Quarter; but the sheep. Every forge has its sheep, every shop its pen like a rabbit-hutch, made out of the side of a box, where the sheep lives when it is not lying just at the threshold of the shop in the sun, beside a half-finished meal of bran in a box. Sheep after sheep, tame and fat, take up half the room in the street: there are sometimes a few hens, often a tortoiseshell cat curled up on a sack, but to every shop there is always a sheep fattening, as no other animal in Morocco fattens, against the Aid-el-Kebeer (the Great Feast), when every family kills and eats its own mutton.

The little shops in Tetuan group themselves together more or less. There is another quarter where sieves are made, a corner where baskets and the countrywomen's huge straw hats are plaited, another where carpenters congregate, and an open square where rugs, carpets, and curios cram the shops, and so on.

We left the warm heat from the glowing cinders and the cascade of sparks, and walked on into the feddan (market-place), which was teeming with women from the hills and villages round, come in to sell provisions.

The Jews' Quarter lies on one side of the feddan, shut in by a gate at night and locked—a squalid, noisy, over-populated spot, where the worst-kept donkeys and most filth are to be met with. Tetuan is a clean city: on every animal killed the "butchers" have to pay a tax; the tax goes towards the sweeping of the streets once a week, and towards their paving—that is, if the basha is conscientious: the last basha ate and drank the tax.

A gutter runs down the middle of the streets, where chickens are killed, and the heads and uneatable parts of flesh, fish, and fowl thrown. Mules and donkeys walk along the gutter, while foot-people flatten themselves against the walls. A well-laden mule fairly absorbs the width of the little streets.

The condition of these wretched transport animals is not due so much to wanton cruelty as to neglect, and to a callousness bred of long familiarity. A Moor will not trouble to prevent his beasts having sore backs and fistulated withers and raw hindquarters, any more than he sees that his children are warmly clad and suitably fed. Fond of both, he is foolish and apathetic, treating his mules roughly, cramming them with unnecessary food or neglecting them, and invariably working them till they drop.

One or two little cafés we passed round the feddan, and banished any connection between them and lunch for ever and a day.

A little room in the shade hung with yellow matting, no chairs, but a wide divan at the far end, where a few Moors sat cross-legged or reclined, smoking long pipes of soothing kif, and eating the pernicious haschisch—this constitutes a café. A few of the Moors are playing cards; the rest look on. A dome-shaped pewter teapot, filled with a brew of steaming tea, stands on a low table, with a painted glass beside it half full of mint, which a freckled boy in a coarse jellab fills up from the teapot to the brim and puts to his lips; then he lights a cheap cigarette. A great urn, with an oil lamp under it, stands in one corner.

No self-respecting Moor patronizes these cafés: he is the most fanatical of Mohammedans in a land reputed to be more strictly religious than any Eastern country. In public he observes his Prophet's laws, only indulging sub rosa in smoking—"eating the shameful," as it is called.

Mohammed knew very well that Eastern peoples drink to get drunk, and smoke and eat opium for the purpose of intoxicating their senses. Kif, a herb something like hemp, produces this effect on the brain. He therefore forbade both.

When a Moorish "swell" wants to amuse himself, instead of passing the time at a café he goes out for the day into the country. There is generally an expression of perfect satisfaction with life as he finds it, on his lineless biscuit-coloured face and in his brown agate eyes—a content seldom expressed under the top-hats in the Park. Time is to him no "race": he drifts easily down the years; knows no other home than, it may be, Tetuan; nor is conscious that Tetuan sleeps, as it has slept for ages, curled up, underneath the towering hills, white, petrified, like Lot's wife.

Still down more streets, and on towards the Belgravia of the city we walked, leaving steaming little hot-fritter shops, where sfins are fried in oil and eaten with honey, where cream tarts may possibly be made and honeyed cakes, and crisp pastry prepared with attar of roses, and candied musk lemons, and dates mixed with almond paste. We left the fried-fish shops and fried spitted-meat shops behind, whence emerge kabobs—second only to coos-coosoo—and a smell indescribable; and we wound down tortuous alleys, past quiet windowless houses, whose great painted doors, yellow and brown, studded with enormous nails and knockers, spoke respectability.

Never a straight street for six yards. Here an angle with a door; turn down under an archway: there a tiny branching alley, which we follow: here another door; plunge down the opposite way. A woman passes us with a friend, walking as only women in Morocco walk—figures in creamy haiks of the finest wool, which swathe them entirely from top to toe like a sheet, a pair of eyes barely showing between the folds. At the bottom of the haiks a flash of colour obtrudes, tomato in one, beetle-green in the other, and filmy muslin over both, which in their turn allow a glimpse of ankles wrapped round in snowy linen folds—rose-pink, gold-embroidered slippers completing the whole, suggestive of a tea party.

A yard farther and we pass El-Jama-el-Kebeer (the Big Mosque), which, unlike that at Tangier, stands with its doors wide open, but in front of which no infidel may linger. There was a vision of a cool tiled courtyard and splashing fountains of white marble and clean yellow matting, of endless tiled pillars vanishing into shade. There are saint-houses in the city where women are allowed to pray, but only upon one night in the whole year in El-Jama-el-Kebeer—a field-day among the wives and concubines, who flit like white moths through the darkness in flocks to worship, carrying red-and-blue lanterns.

At last we reached the house of the Moor upon whom Mr. Bewicke intended us to call—a specimen of the best Moorish houses.

Alarbi Abresha has been nicknamed "the Duke of Westminster"—the wealthiest man in Tetuan. A slave responded to the hammer of the great knocker, demanded who knocked, and then opened the door. Alarbi Abresha was out; but his son, a youth badly marked with small-pox, received us, dressed in a jellab of pale blue, tasselled, and worked in white. Mr. Bewicke asked after the house. No one in Morocco inquires after the wife or family distinctively.

Alarbi Abresha's House.

Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier.

A long passage led us into a large patio (courtyard), in which orange-trees were growing. It was open to the sky, the floor tiled with shining tesselated tile-work; a marble fountain rippled in the middle: the dado round the four walls, the three rows of pillars which on all sides supported the gallery above—all were tiled in the same mosaic of small saffron-yellow, powder-blue, and white tiles, which are baked, coloured, and glazed in primitive potteries outside the city, and made only in Tetuan and Fez. A Moorish house is the essence of purity and light, with its whitewashed walls, its absence of all stifling furniture, and its capability of being sluiced down from top to bottom every day with rivers of water by barefooted slaves.

"The Duke" had spared no dollars to make his house beautiful. Of the triple row of arches, supported by the pillars round the patio, the outside row was a plain horse-shoe, the inner toothed, the inmost carved. Through an avenue of pillars the rooms all round the patio look out upon the fountain and the orange-trees. Slaves occupied them. The kitchen also and the hummum are always on the ground floor. We were taken up to the first floor by the tiled staircase, with a plaster fan-shell ceiling, and were shown into the best room—the room belonging to the master of the house. The tiled floor was hidden by an ugly modern French carpet in strips: white and coloured mattresses were laid all round the walls upon the floor instead of chairs. Two immense brass bedsteads stood in recesses, blue silk four-posters; a great cushioned mattress on the carpet beside the bed is reported to be used by the wife; a slave will often sleep in the same room. The lower half of the whitewashed walls was hung with ancient silk brocaded hangings, a long-forgotten relic of the old wandering life as nomad Arabs, and still used by Arabs for the insides of their tents. The richer the owner, the better his silk hangings: the design is invariably a succession of horse-shoe arches, more or less embroidered, and giving the rooms a warm, luxurious air. In the mosques very fine mats are used; in ordinary houses, cafés, and shops, yellow matting lines the walls. Above the old hangings the Duke had hung a line of immense and tawdry gilt-framed mirrors. There were clocks in the room to the number of ten, some of them going; two inlaid cabinets; three cases of artificial flowers under glass; a great wooden coffer—the wife's property—holding a wardrobe of clothes; a gun on one of the walls; a rosary; a thermometer made in Germany: these were the only knick-knacks. Moorish rooms combine bedroom with sitting-room, but are devoid of washing-apparatus, tables, chairs, books, or pictures. Bathing is done in the hummum or in the courtyard of the mosque; of books there are none; while pictures Mohammed forbade, as inclined to lead to idolatry. Query: have many artists been lost to the world in fourteen hundred years among a sect numbering a hundred millions?

The ceiling and woodwork of the room were painted in barbaric, gaudy hues, which mellow with age and "tone" like a faded Kashmir shawl. A row of tiled pillars divided the room lengthwise, and raised the inner half a step above the outer: it was immensely lofty, lighted by the great double doors only, which stood wide open on to the patio. Glass is not used in Morocco: the windowless rooms are aired by the unfastened doors which look on to the patio, itself open to the winds of heaven. The outside world can have little idea of the life going on within the courtyard house: there is much seclusion therein, in fitting harmony with the spirit of Morocco.

Fireplaces do not exist, though from December to March the thermometer has sometimes, on single occasions, touched freezing-point at night. Earthenware pans of charcoal, used for cooking, can be carried upstairs for warmth.

The other rooms in Alarbi Abresha's house were all more or less replicas of the best room shorn of its gilt. As the laws of the Medes and Persians, so is the arrangement of the mattresses (divans) round the walls inside a Moorish house.

A Moor does not spend his day indoors. He eats and sleeps at home, but is otherwise sitting talking with his friends in the city, or in his shop, or out at his garden-house or fields.

He eats in any one of the divanned rooms in which he happens to be at the time, his rule being to "sleep where you will and eat where you will." A slave carries in his dish of meat on a tray, and puts it on a table four inches in front of the divan. Beef, mutton, and chicken are cooked in oil till they fall apart and can be eaten with the fingers. He eats vegetables and fruit, murmurs a "B`ism Allah" beforehand and a "Hamdoollah" (God be praised) at the end; washes his hands; drinks green tea, or begins his meal with it and bread of fine white flour. His wife has the refusal of the dish after her lord, never eating with him; and the slaves follow her. As many as five dishes may be brought up at a meal; and the master of the house, sampling each, chooses which he will eat, and sends the rest away. If he has a guest, it is the height of politeness to select small pieces off the dish and put them within the guest's reach, or, still better, into his mouth.

Moors, unless they are wealthy men, eat "by the eye"—that is, not according to what they require, but according to that they see set before them: frequent hiccups express gratification at hospitality received, accompanied by "Hamdoollah." The amount which a Moor can eat is prodigious. There was a man at Fez who was reverenced as a saint by his neighbours, because he had been known to eat a hundredweight of coos-coosoo (porridge) and a whole sheep at a sitting.

Alarbi Abresha, Junior, meanwhile, took us on into his father's guest-house, a suite of magnificent rooms, decorated in execrable taste, the barbaric glories of the old Moorish style giving place to modern French vulgarity. A courtyard house can be a strange mixture. Its woodwork, possibly arrar, a cypress of beautiful grain, scented like cedar, cinnamon-coloured, and immensely hard (out of which the Roman patricians cut their precious tables, valued at their weight in gold if as much as four feet wide: beams of arrar put into the Córdovo Mosque by the Moors a thousand years ago still exist); its old silk hangings; its tiles, kept polished like jet, and never desecrated by anything harder than a slippered sole,—all alike are the finest relics of a taste which ruled in the construction of the Alhambra, where Mauresque design is seen at its best. The aristocrats of Tetuan are descendants of the old Andalusian families, who, having left Morocco and invaded Spain, settled there, built the Alhambra, were in the course of time driven back over the seas, and took refuge in Tetuan and other coast towns. Their very title-deeds, together with the keys of their houses in Granada, are still in the possession of their descendants in Tetuan.

While the best work in the courtyard houses of to-day harks back to the brave days of Spain, the Moor of the twentieth century has less of the vitality and originality which distinguished his forefathers, and he is apt to mix cheap up-to-date decoration with the patio and the windowless wall, of which the Duke's guest-house may stand for an example.

When the great door had shut behind us, and we were outside in the street again, it seemed both narrow and prosaic after the sunny patio, with the yellow-fringed orange-trees almost branching into the rooms, and the fitful accompaniment of running water, dear to the Moorish ear.

In the course of the afternoon Mohammed, Ali, mules, and baggage put in an appearance, and we found them waiting in the feddan, anxious to put our tents up in the middle of the noisy, crowded sok, where the wind, which had dropped but little, was whirling dust round in clouds, and where we should have been the centre of a staring throng—at the same time, an ideal place in the servants' eyes, suggesting cafés and conversation the whole night through. The camping-ground which "the infidel" selects is an insoluble puzzle to the Moor, and they went off mystified and disappointed, under orders from the Consul to pitch the tents outside the city.

Later on we followed, by a street redolent and sweet with honey, of which a great quantity had just come in from the Riff country, leading to Báb-el-Aukla (the Gate of Wisdom), so called because the elders of the city, the wise men, used to sit outside on some of the great rocks: a fine two-storied, square-shaped gateway, with a pointed arch and toothed ornament above it. Three little windows overlook the arch; the black noses of small cannon protrude in a long row out of the white parapeted walls; a flagstaff tops the whole, and flies the crimson streamer of Morocco. A line of sea-green tiling beneath the cannon breaks the flat wall, where the heads of turbulent tribesmen hang occasionally, sent over from some neighbouring raid by the Sultan's orders, and first salted by the Jews in the city, nolens volens. The cobbles were slippery under the gate. The huge, heavy wooden doors, studded with iron bolts, are barred and locked every night half an hour after sunset. Inside, looking back, just at the parting of two streets, a great white wall faced us, topped with green tiles, grass-grown; below, a horse-shoe arch, somewhat in relief, belted with coloured tiles, defaced by age, contained a long solid stone trough, into which two spouts of water gushed—never dry in this city of springs. Mules and donkeys and country-folk all stop and drink, and the front of the trough is carved.

Báb-el-Aukla is the finest gate in the city.

Go where you will in Tetuan, at every turn water bubbles into time-worn and artistically moulded troughs and basins, under quaint arches, tiled in blue and brown and white. In the narrow winding street-ways, between the houses, half dark, still the bubbling of water is heard, and the shining wet trough seen.

As we left the city and walked down the sandy road which leads to the sea, our tents lay a quarter of a mile off, two white spots, pitched on grass just off the road, the mules picketed by them.

We had a somewhat light meal at six o'clock, Mohammed's chicken turning out like hammered leather. He was no cook.

Our Camp Outside Tetuan.

An Arabic proverb says, "What is past is gone, and the future is distant; and to thee is the hour in which thou art." It was obviously never intended by the Creator that mankind should make plans. Morocco may have its drawbacks, but it is at least one of those few and blessed spots where it is waste of time to plan: life is a matter of to-day, and

To-morrow?—Why, To-morrow I may be

Myself with Yesterday's Seven Thousand Years.

Thus some time that evening, when, after coping unsuccessfully with the chicken, it struck R. and myself that Tetuan had attractions over and above the head of Tangier, we settled then and there to stay on at Tetuan as long as we liked the place, though the weather looked very much like rain, not at all like camping out, and we had no clothes with us to speak of.

Overcoming or ignoring these difficulties, we finally decided to pay off our three men, send them back by themselves to Tangier with the tents and camp outfit, write to the Villa Valentina, pay our bill, have our boxes packed up and sent over to us at Tetuan by muleteer, and move ourselves into the Spanish fonda (inn) inside the city. Thus were we left for the next six days with one clean collar apiece.

In Tangier there had been some speculation on the elasticity of the Spartan wardrobes which we had brought out from England, at a moment when the dread of a vast impedimenta happened to lie strong upon us. In Tetuan such panics bury themselves. The slimmest wardrobe will suffice. A country's own materials, whether home-spun of Kashmir or sheep-skin coat of Afghanistan, naturally meet its requirements best: deficiencies are easily supplied, and later on we lived in mufti off the backs of Tetuan sheep.

Lying in bed in the early morning before it was light, duck were to be heard calling up the river; and, breakfast over, we strolled down to the banks, where the thick green orange-trees on the opposite side bore a crop of cow-birds, sitting like a covey of white cockatoos on the tips of the branches among the golden oranges, so thick and snowy that the tree might well have burst into abnormal flower.

By nine o'clock the camp was struck, and we had burnt our ships: the last of the five mules, three men, and baggage tailed off out of sight along the road to Tangier.

Under a cloudy sky, prophesying rain, we walked into the city to look for quarters: better, perhaps, a fonda in Tetuan than a tent at the fondâk in wet weather.

CHAPTER III

Difficulties of "Lodgings" in Morocco—A Spanish Fonda—A Moorish Tea Party—Poison in the Cup—Slaves in Morocco—El Doollah—Moorish Cemetery—Ride to Semsar—Shopping in Tetuan—Provisions in the City.

CHAPTER III

This by God's grace is El Moghreb—Morocco—and here a wise man is surprised at nothing that he sees and believes nothing that he hears.

It is not easy to find a lodging in Morocco: there are no dâk bungalows—no large white English residences, with the familiar and hospitable Burra Sahib, a retinue of servants, spare horses, and a spacious bedroom at the disposal of the unexpected guest. Hotels, except at Tangier, are impossible for any length of time, unless to the vagaries of Spanish or Jewish cookery the heart can harden itself.

We steeled our souls, assisted by the grateful sense of freedom from all petty society functions, which in the nature of things are unknown in a city where one vice-consul, six women missionaries, and a post-office alone represent the British flag—where there is no English doctor, no English church.

Tetuan met all our needs: the only question was where to live.

Immediately outside its walls lies a land of gardens and orchards. Every Moor who can afford it has a garden, wherein he cultivates grapes and fruit-trees,—a dim reflection of that Paradise of his, which must be chequered with acres of shade cast by great rocks and gigantic olive-trees; which must be abundantly watered by running brooks of milk, honey, and wine; whose soil shall be flour, white as snow. The Moor's Garden of Eden reserved for the faithful after death bespeaks abundance and repose, differing but little from a certain Heaven of Epicures, wherein pâtés de fois gras were eaten to the sound of trumpets. Somewhere in his garden outside Tetuan he builds himself a garden-house, to which in the summer he migrates with his wife and slaves and the children of both, his divans, carpets, and kitchen utensils: the town house is locked up and stands empty while he spends four or five months under his vines and figs.

At the time we arrived in Tetuan—early December—not a garden-house but still lay empty; and naturally in their direction our longing eyes turned—an impossible desire, it was said, thereby clinching the resolve to make a superhuman effort to bring it to pass: between living in the city and a garden there could be no choice. In the meantime a Spanish fonda must constitute a make-shift until that came which is laid down for those who wait.

Inside Tetuan two hotels presented themselves. With fonda number one we could not come to terms; it was not attractive-looking: we took a high-handed line and left. Fonda number two, after much haggling in Spanish, agreed to take us both at the modest sum of seven-and-sixpence a day, all included. No sooner was the bargain struck than a messenger arrived post-haste from fonda number one, to say that they would take us at our own terms. Their golden opportunity was lost. Report said fonda number one might be a trifle cleaner, but fonda number two had the better cook: the inside man carried the day in favour of number two.

A Veiled Figure Outside the Gate.

It was one among many flat-roofed whitewashed houses in the Moorish Quarter, in a street barely six feet wide. There was no outlook except from the roof-top, where the washing dried: there were no windows, the rooms depending for light upon double doors opening on to the tiny tiled patio—except in our own case, where the second room allotted to us was built over the top of the street, and had two windows cut in the walls by the Spanish occupants, neither of which quite shut, and provided us with an ample supply of air. The room beyond possessed dilapidated doors, which gave upon the patio. The patio was, of course, open to all the rain of heaven as well as to all the sun: it was the principal sitting-room of the family, where, downstairs, on fine days, they plucked chickens, made bread, washed, sat and received callers, did needlework and chattered; on wet days creeping disconsolately round the lake of water in the middle of the tiled floor, where the rain dropped—splash—taking refuge on one sheltered seat in company with three dogs, a cat, and a tame chicken, or retiring into the dark little rooms which surrounded the lake.

The family comprised Spanish parents, married daughter and husband, three unmarried sisters, a brother, and a lodger—an old Spanish music-master. The fonda was run by the married daughter, a lady with a temper, who made everybody else work: her mother and one sister cooked; the second sister was busy with a trousseau and a young man; the third and prettiest—Amanda—waited on us. On the whole we were not uncomfortable, in spite of the Spanish element. Our rooms were clean: one afternoon we found a chicken sunning itself in a patch of sunlight on the floor of one—nothing worse. Dinner was sometimes, and Amanda was always, lacking in certain points to a critical eye. Sometimes it was a skirt, sometimes a petticoat, she wore: except on high days, it was doubtful and dependent upon chance threads and pins. All Amanda's blouses were low-necked, whatever the time of day: the stains and slits and remnants of torn frills were unique. She wore her sleeves turned up, and silver bangles on her arms. Amanda never buttoned her boots, and often put in an appearance with bare feet.

But Amanda was redeemed by her head-dress and her manners. She wound a crimson shawl gracefully over her dark head, after the fashion of a mantilla, with an effect beyond reproach. Amanda had a gracious way of putting things: she bore herself with infinite dignity, and a je-ne-sais-quoi which pointed to a mixed ancestry; she had well-shaped hands.

At seven o'clock in the evening her knock preceded preparations for dinner, while she munched something or hummed a tune meanwhile. Seas of thin soup invariably preceded a dish of shapeless masses of "soup-meat," garnished with boiled peas. The third course consisted of chicken or partridge: on less happy occasions foreign and "shudderous" dishes appeared; a peculiar jelly shell-fish was the lowest ebb—that and pork we resented. Last of all, a tall glass fruit-dish would arrive, the standard sweet—flan (caramel pudding). Then a long pause. Finally, Amanda's step, with a great plate of hot toast and a tall tin coffee-pot: black coffee was the best part of the meal.

A day or two after settling into the fonda we were asked to our first entertainment in a Moorish house. Hadj Mukhtar Hilalli wanted Mr. Bewicke and ourselves to "tea" with him.

As in the case of "the Duke's" house, so here, all the womenkind were hidden away on account of the Consul. Mohammedans are jealous and suspicious of their wives and daughters to a degree, and strongly resent, if not prevent, an Englishman's going up on to the flat roof, lest he have a view of fair occupants beyond or below. Nevertheless, the wives always contrive to peep out of some loophole and see all there is to be seen.

Hadj Mukhtar Hilalli received us all three alone, as a matter of course, and led us upstairs to his best room. Like many others among the better class of Moors, our host had a shop and himself sold groceries. At the same time his sister is the wife of one of the Ministers; and as there is no respect of persons in Morocco, Hadj Mukhtar Hilalli might be called upon himself any day to fill a high official position, and be obliged to go, raising money, if he had not wherewithal to support the post, which, if a lucrative one, would soon repay the outlay.

Trade at Tetuan, and apparently everywhere else over Morocco, is not what it once was: the old flintlocks, inlaid with silver wire and lumps of pink coral, are unknown since the last gun-maker died; snuff-nuts, even slippers, do but a small business. Living is more expensive than it was: it cost Hadj Mukhtar three shillings a day to feed himself and the whole household, he said.

The room into which we went—our host leaving his yellow slippers in the doorway, and motioning us all to sit down on the divans round the walls—was hung with a silk dado, tiled in mosaic, and overlooked a good-sized patio with a running fountain.

Our dirty boots compared unfavourably with the Hadj's clean, bare feet, which, as he sat down cross-legged on the white and embroidered cushions, were hidden underneath his voluminous garments; whereas ours, not to the manner born, contracted cramp, unless stuck out in an ungainly way.

A gorgeously upholstered bed filled up one corner of the room; a gun hung on the wall. There was nothing else.

Three little sons of the house and Mr. Bewicke's soldier-servant having followed us in and seated themselves, preparations for tea—already waiting, arranged in front of the divans on four brass trays, standing on four low tables a few inches high—began.

Hadj Mukhtar Hilalli, sitting on his heels in front of his tea-table, making tea with his thin brown hands, and presiding over it all with true Oriental dignity, was a veritable Moses or Aaron reincarnated. Women and men alike mature rapidly in this country, putting on flesh and becoming matronly and aldermanic without at the same time growing lined or aged: a wealthy man of twenty-five is portly and slow of movement—the result of Eastern habits coupled with the climate.

Hadj Mukhtar Hilalli, barely forty years old by his own account, had a white beard and moustache, no wrinkles, eyes of mild blue and benign expression, equally guileless and unfathomable.

Talking in Arabic to Mr. Bewicke, he drew the tray close to the low divan in front of him, saw that his sons provided cushions for our backs, and proceeded to wash the green tea in a bright nickel pear-shaped teapot, with water from the great brass urn which stood over a charcoal-burner: the washed tea was then transferred into a twin teapot, which the Hadj generously filled with immense lumps of sugar out of a glass dish standing on a tray by itself, stacked high with great blocks split off the cone with a hatchet. Heavy with lump sugar, a handful of mint and bay leaves was also crammed into the little remaining space in the teapot, the boiling water out of the urn was turned on over all, filling up every chink, the lid shut down upon the steaming fragrant brew, and the teapot set back upon the brass tray, the centre of a ring of tiny gilt and painted glasses.

The eldest son—a boy of fourteen, dressed in red, and wearing a leather belt embroidered with blue, and a fez-bag fastened thereto to match, whose head had evidently had its weekly shave that afternoon—lit a lamp underneath a little incense-burner, filling it with sticks of sweet-scented wood, till an odoriferous blue smoke rose from it. With much care he carried the burner to us, and put it inside our coats, thoroughly impregnating every thickness with warmth and odours of cedar-wood. It was taken last of all to Mr. Bewicke's soldier, who manipulated it correctly as a Moor, putting it inside his flowing apparel, and sitting down with every fold closed in round him like a miniature tent, the burner smoking away inside. A scent-spray was then handed, with which we anointed ourselves in Moorish fashion, inside our hats, up our sleeves, and round our necks.

Meanwhile, Hadj Mukhtar Hilalli poured out tea with a great elevation of the teapot, raising his arm and showing greens and blues mixed to perfection underneath his k`sa—a white woollen or silk robe worn only by gentlemen—which, semi-transparent and gauze-like, fell in white waves over his shoulders on to the divan. Under the k`sa was a long garment with wide sleeves and buttoned all down the front—a kaftan—of sea-green cloth, embroidered with gold. The kaftan just revealed a waistcoat of a shade of blue, with gold and green buttons and embroidery. Underneath this, and above his white cotton shirt and drawers, he probably wore a woollen jacket. But greens and blues and gold were alone visible. Sometimes several kaftans or several jellabs are worn one on top of the other, all colours mixed, particularly if the owner is travelling. Moors are a wool-clad people for the most part, due to the wet winter climate: the men's brown woollen hooded jellabs keep out the rain more or less, and the women's white woollen haiks answer the same purpose.

The Hadj turned up his sleeves as he made tea, the underside of them being embroidered for this purpose. It was ready by this time, and brought us on a brass tray by the eldest son. Though the little glasses are not capable of holding much, the violent sweetness and the flavour of mint prevent the uninitiated from doing justice to the regulation three cups which courtesy demands should be drunk. But it grows, even upon the European, that steaming golden-brown beverage, fresh and fragrant with sweet thymes, while something in the climate of Morocco tends to make sugar acceptable after a few weeks. We supplied ourselves with sponge cake, pounds of which were piled on a brass tray in front of us: sweet biscuits, toasted nuts, almonds, and raisins abounded on the same lavish scale; while a wicker basket, like a large waste-paper basket, was full of thirty or forty round cakes of bread, several sizes larger than a Bath bun, made of the finest semolina flour, flavoured with aniseed and baked a warm biscuit colour.

The Hadj pressed third cups upon us, but with the innate breeding of every Moor understood the limited capacity born of early days in Morocco. A Moor is nothing if not courteous, and, whatever his real feelings, conceals them under polite speeches. He will, as somebody has said, "cut your throat most politely, most politely," or with profound urbanity offer you a cup of poison.

Our host had sipped a first cup before allowing the tea to be handed round—a custom observed to assure the guest that the teapot was free from poison, and that no deadly drink was offered us, containing seeds which should propagate a horrible disease in the intestines, destroying life sooner or later. Poisoning is only too common among the Moors themselves, cases occurring almost every day in the country.

Once, when Sir John Hay was having an angry discussion with a governor—Mokhta—coffee was brought in. Mokhta, as usual, took the cup intended for the Englishman, and put it to his lips, making a noise as though sipping it, but which sounded suspiciously like blowing into it, and then offering it to Sir John. Not fancying the bubbled coffee, he declined, saying to Mokhta, "I could not drink before you. Pray keep that cup yourself," and helping himself at the same time to the second cup, which he drank. Mokhta put down the cup which he had offered Sir John, and did not drink it.

Some one in Tetuan dies every year of poisoning. Wives frequently kill their husbands. No two brothers, both in ministerial offices at Court, would dream of sitting down and eating together without precautions beforehand, on account of the marked pieces in the dish. One brother, as he dines, may invite the other, who happens to enter, to join him in the meal; but he will reply, "I have already dined." He dare not.

Meanwhile, Hadj Mukhtar Hilalli talked away in Arabic to Mr. Bewicke, who translated for us. He said that Menebbi, the Minister of War who went over to England with the last embassy, and who is practically Prime Minister, lost a considerable amount of influence during the short two months he was away, but that he was rapidly gaining ground, and might be said to be completely restored to favour again. Menebbi is the only one of the Sultan's Ministers who is likely to help him to reform the Government of Morocco. A clever, crafty brain, the whole Court under his thumb, it yet needed but an absence of eight weeks to generate in that hotbed of Eastern intrigue such a tissue of false evidence and lies as nearly cost Menebbi his position, if not his life. His enemies possessed the Sultan's ear; every Menebbi had been removed from the army; he had probably not a single friend left in Morocco. With the fickleness of their race, his name was cursed at every street corner; and when spoken of, the people said, "There is no Menebbi." Hurrying back from England, the tidings of his fall reached Menebbi when he landed at Mazagan: he was to be arrested. But the man they had to deal with was one of those few who make a full use of every opportunity life ever offers. From Mazagan to Morocco City, where the Court was, a distance of a hundred and forty miles, he had a relay of mules and horses posted, and he rode without stopping. There were dead and sorry beasts left on the road that day. Menebbi rode up to the cannon's mouth, so to speak: he need never have gone to Morocco City, but that would have meant his sinking into private life and his banishment from Court; he preferred to "play to the uttermost," and he staked life and fortune on the card he held. Things in Morocco City hung on an eyelash: the great man galloped in from Mazagan, went straight to the palace, never paused a moment, straight to the Sultan's private door, straight into the presence itself. And who shall say what Menebbi said to the Sultan through that night which he passed with him—what false accusations he refuted, what diplomacy he used? Next day Menebbi was not at prayers; he was "sick": in other words, he had tidings of a plot to kill him on his way to the mosque. However, in time he righted himself: now his enemies are under his heel, and Menebbi breathes again.

The Hadj spoke of the great wish the Sultan has to visit England—an impossibility, for in the eyes of his fanatical subjects he would be countenancing the unbelievers, and his throne would be handed over to a successor: the throne to which he succeeded, for the first time in the history of Morocco, without having to fight his way to it—a fact owed to the Wazeer's sagacity. Keeping the death of the old Sultan secret for a few days, the Wazeer meantime bribed and forced the Ministers to accept the young heir as Sultan, hurried to Fez, summoned every citizen to the mosque, had the doors locked, proclaimed the news of the Sultan's death, and surprised or forced the whole mosqueful into swearing allegiance to the present ruler.

So far the Sultan knows only two or three places in his whole kingdom, and has practically spent his life at one—Morocco City, or Marrakesh, as the Moors call it. Nor would his journeys be reckoned blessings by the unfortunate country through which he passed. Only able to move with an army, that army, without any commissariat or transport, feeding itself upon its march, wipes corn and food off the face of the land as a sponge wipes a slate. "Where the Sultan's horse treads the corn ceases to grow." He seldom travels with less than thirty thousand followers; and, supposing he is passing through a turbulent tribe, fights his way as he goes, leaving ruin and desolation behind. "They make a desert, and they call it peace."