In the tail of the peacock
by Isabel Savory · English · Gutenberg #28016 · 590,011 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: In the tail of the peacock
Author: Isabel Savory
Release date: February 7, 2009 [eBook #28016]
Language: English
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[Illustration: Isabel Savory]
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
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
CHAPTER I
PAGE
TANGIER--COUNTRY PEOPLE--THE PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA--MOORISH
PRISONS--WE RIDE TO CAPE SPARTEL--DECIDE TO LEAVE
TANGIER AND PUSH INLAND 1
CHAPTER II
CAMP OUTFIT--A NIGHT AT A CARAVANSERAI--TETUAN--THE
BRITISH VICE-CONSUL--MOORISH SHOPS--WE VISIT A MOORISH
HOUSE AND FAMILY 27
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 63
CHAPTER IV
THE FAST OF RÁMADHAN--MOHAMMED--HIS LIFE AND INFLUENCE--THE
FLOOD AT SAFFI--A WALK OUTSIDE TETUAN--THE
FRENCH CONSUL'S GARDEN-HOUSE--JEWS IN MOROCCO--EUROPEAN
PROTECTION 97
CHAPTER V
PLANS FOR CHRISTMAS AT GIBRALTAR--A ROUGH NIGHT--THE
STEAMER WHICH WOULD NOT WAIT--AN IGNOMINIOUS RETURN
TO TETUAN--A RASCALLY JEW--THE ABORIGINES AND THE
PRESENT OCCUPANTS OF MOROCCO--THE SULTAN, COURT,
GOVERNMENT, AND MOORISH ARMY 121
CHAPTER VI
WE LOOK OVER A MOORISH COURTYARD HOUSE WITH A VIEW TO
TAKING IT--WE RENT JINAN DOLERO IN SPITE OF OPPOSITION--AN
ENGLISHMAN MURDERED--OUR GARDEN-HOUSE--THE
IDIOSYNCRASIES OF MOORISH SERVANTS--A NATIVE GUARD--THE
RIFF COUNTRY 153
CHAPTER VII
COUNTRY PEOPLE FORDING THE RIVER--WE CALL ON CI HAMED
GHRALMIA--AN EXPEDITION ACROSS THE RIVER IN SEARCH OF
THE BLUE POOL--MOORISH BELIEF IN GINNS--THE BASHA--POWDER
PLAY--TETUAN PRISON 181
CHAPTER VIII
MISSIONARIES AT TETUAN--POISONING IN MOROCCO--FATIMA'S
RECEPTION--DIVORCE--AN EXPEDITION INTO THE ANJERAS--AN
EMERALD OASIS 217
CHAPTER IX
WE LEAVE TETUAN--A WET NIGHT UNDER THE STARS--S`LAM DESERTS
US--WE SAIL FOR MOGADOR--THE PALM-TREE HOUSE--SUS
AND WADNOON COUNTRIES--THE SAHARA--THE ATLAS
MOUNTAINS 249
CHAPTER X
ON THE MARCH ONCE MORE--BUYING MULES--A BAD ROAD--FIRST
CAMP--ARGAN-TREES--COOS-COOSOO--A TERRIBLE NIGHT--DOCTORING
THE KHAYLIFA--ROUGHING IT UNDER CANVAS 281
CHAPTER XI
A PARTING MONA--FORDING SHESHAOUA RIVER--JARS OF FOOD--FIRST
SIGHT OF MARRAKESH--A PERILOUS CROSSING--RIDE
INTO MARRAKESH--THE SLAVE MARKET 311
CHAPTER XII
THE THURSDAY MARKET--WE MIGHT HAVE GONE TO GLAOUIA--LEAVE
MARRAKESH AND SET OUT ON OUR LAST MARCH FOR
THE COAST--FLOWERS IN MOROCCO--ON THE WRONG TRAIL--ARAB
TENTS--GOOD-BYE TO EL MOGHREB 339
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_Except where otherwise stated, the Illustrations are from photographs by
ROSE A. BAINBRIDGE._
FACING
PAGE
PHOTOGRAVURE PORTRAIT _Frontispiece_
THE ROAD TO FEZ 6
R. ON A PACK 12
TWO SHEIKHS 18
TANGIER 24
TETUAN 30
_Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._
OURSELVES AND BAGGAGE 34
CLOUDS OVER TETUAN 44
ALARBI ABRESHA'S HOUSE 54
_Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._
OUR CAMP OUTSIDE TETUAN 60
A VEILED FIGURE OUTSIDE THE GATE 66
A MOHAMMEDAN CEMETERY 80
OUT SHOPPING 90
SHOPS IN TETUAN 94
A CLUSTER OF COUNTRY WOMEN 100
A TYPICAL MOORISH STREET 108
_Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._
A STREET IN THE JEWS' QUARTER, TETUAN 116
_Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._
REFUSE GOING OUT OF TETUAN 124
A MOORISH PRISON GATE 130
A PEEP OF TETUAN 138
_Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._
A SAINT-HOUSE, TETUAN 148
JINAN DOLERO 158
OUR SERVANTS, S`LAM AND TAHARA 164
TWO WOMEN FROM THE RIFF COUNTRY 172
SELLING EARTHENWARE POTS 178
A FERRY-BOAT ON MARKET DAY 184
THE AUTHOR FORDING THE WAD-EL-MARTINE 188
THE BASHA GOING TO PRAY 198
THE FEDDAN, TETUAN 208
CHARMING SNAKES 214
MOORS AT HOME 222
STRAW FOR SALE 230
A GROUP IN THE FEDDAN, TETUAN 236
A BREEZY CAMPING-GROUND ON A ROOF-TOP 254
ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE WAY WE RODE IN MOROCCO 262
LIGHTERS LOADING 268
AFTER RAIN IN MOGADOR 274
WHERE MANCHESTER GOODS ARE SOLD, MOGADOR 284
OUR CAMP AT AIN-EL-HADGER 290
A BLINDFOLDED CAMEL WORKING A WATER-WHEEL 298
SHIPS OF THE DESERT WE PASS ON THE MARCH 308
TRANSPORTING OUR BAGGAGE 314
MARRAKESH 318
THE OPEN GATE 324
THE KUTOBEA, MARRAKESH 328
_Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._
THE WAD-EL-AZELL 334
_Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._
THE SULTAN'S GARDEN 344
_Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._
THE RIVER TENSIF OUTSIDE MARRAKESH 346
_Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._
ONE OF OUR LAST CAMPS. LOADING THE CAMEL 350
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.
[Illustration: THE ROAD TO FEZ.
[_To face p. 6._]
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.
[Illustration: R. ON A PACK.
[_To face p. 12._]
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 Kor[=a]n and a few pious ejaculations.
Hadj Riffi and his fellow-Moors prayed three days at Mecca, and performed
the ceremonies round the celebrated _K[=a]aba_, 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 K[=a]aba, 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 Kor[=a]n, 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 Kor[=a]n.
Few Moors can write or read: there are no books in Morocco, except the
Kor[=a]n 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.
[Illustration: TWO SHEIKHS.
[_To face p. 18._]
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 Kor[=a]n 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.
[Illustration: TANGIER.
[_To face p. 24._]
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.
[Illustration: _Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._]
TETUAN.
[_To face p. 30._]
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.
[Illustration: OURSELVES AND BAGGAGE.
[_To face p. 34._]
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.
[Illustration: CLOUDS OVER TETUAN.
[_To face p. 44._]
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.
[Illustration: _Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._]
ALARBI ABRESHA'S HOUSE.
[_To face p. 54._]
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.
[Illustration: OUR CAMP OUTSIDE TETUAN.
[_To face p. 60._]
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.
[Illustration: A VEILED FIGURE OUTSIDE THE GATE.
[_To face p. 66._]
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."
Hadj Mukhtar Hilalli had travelled considerably farther afield than his
sovereign; he knew Genoa, Marseilles, Egypt, and of course Mecca. The
Mussulman pilgrims passing through Constantinople on their way to Mecca
this year are, he told us, very numerous, the Sultan having ordered the
fares on the Massousieh Company's steamers to be reduced one-half for
them. He thought that about two thousand Moors would be leaving Tangier
in the early spring for the pilgrimage, returning some three months
later. Neither the Hadj's sons nor Mr. Bewicke's soldier joined in the
conversation, but continued steadily to consume tea, all eyes and ears.
At last the trays were removed; and there being no co-religious eye to
shock, Hadj Mukhtar indulged in a cigarette, while we puzzled him with a
few tricks of balance and reach, which pleased him quite as much as his
boys: everybody tried their hands, and finally the Hadj sent his eldest
son for an old, heavy sword, and, squatting on the floor, showed us a
clever piece of leverage with it and his thumb, which it was in vain to
try and imitate.
Watching our failures, he produced a snuff-box, a small cocoanut-shell,
ornamented with little silver and coral knobs, with a narrow ivory
mouthpiece, a stopper, and an ivory pin fastened to the cocoanut-shell to
stir up the snuff inside--Tetuan snuff--noted for its pungent flavour.
Hadj Mukhtar jerked the grains through the narrow mouthpiece into the
hollow of the back of his thumb, where all Moors lay it, then lifted his
hand up to his nose.
Near the door hung his rosary of ninety-nine beads, reminding the pious
Mussulman of the ninety-nine attributes of God. Each of the ninety-nine
beads corresponds to the name of some holy man, and as the bead is passed
along with the hand the saint's name is murmured. Curious that the use of
rosaries in the Spanish Church is said to have been borrowed first of all
from the Spanish Moors.
The eldest son of our host was, his father told us, looking forward to
beginning the Fast of Rámadhan this year--fasting, as he was only a
novice, for half the day instead of the whole of it: evidently as much
importance and excitement were attached to the prospect as later on would
attend the boy's marriage. This same boy of fourteen is learning to
write in Latin characters, for a Moor a most unusual and advanced step:
at present he was only wearing a little red fez cap, not having reached
the age of turbans, with all their dignified symmetry. The Kor[=a]n was
all the literature the boy would ever know. Strange that a strong and
sober people should have for ages confined their studies to the Kor[=a]n,
an occasional Arab poet, and a sacred treatise or two. There is, as I
have already said, no literature, no art, no science, in Morocco, and no
architecture--the Kor[=a]n forbidding, it is said, research or study in
any line except that of religion. Geography is entirely unknown. Like
Moors in general, Hadj Mukhtar may have heard of London and Paris, and
might know the names Germany and Russia, besides Mecca; but none of the
former would have any connection or "place" in his mind, and Morocco must
be, he is confident, the finest country under the sun. If it were brought
home to him that his country is in a decadent condition, he would reply
that at least it is good enough for him as it is; and that if Europeans
were allowed to exploit it and to settle therein, the end would be
prosperity for the Western civilization, and a knuckling-under on the
part of the Moorish--which is true.
We talked on upon one and another subject till it grew late, but before
we left our host took R. and myself to see his wife, downstairs, in a
smaller room. Five wives are allowed by Mohammed, but few Moors in Tetuan
were rich enough to afford as many, and contented themselves with slaves.
We were not impressed by the very plain, sallow-faced lady, with a black
fringe and hard brown eyes, who shook hands with us, and from her
likeness to the eldest boy was probably his mother. The second son was
evidently by a slave: there was no mistaking that likeness--a fat, happy
individual, the greatest contrast to another slave, who, though well
dressed, was pale and miserable-looking. Two or three other corpulent,
smiling blackamoors made up the sum-total of the party in the downstairs
room--most comfortable, lounging on the cushions, they looked, no mean
advertisements of Hadj Mukhtar's "table." The principal and favourite
wife possessed a noisy sewing-machine, which she proudly displayed.
Every Moor's establishment has its slaves--so many, according to his
income: in Tetuan they are sold privately, and frequently exchanged one
for the other, while the wives are as easily divorced. Every year
something like three thousand slaves come into Morocco, chiefly from the
Soudan: a few are stolen from Moorish tribes; the rest are brought in by
Moorish traders, who catch them in various ways, such as scattering
sweetmeats, or in hard times corn, round the villages, up to neighbouring
coverts, just as a poacher at home entices pheasants with raisins, then
pouncing out and carrying them off.
As there are no such things as Moorish women-servants, negresses and
slaves of various types step into the gap, and the evil of this influx of
black blood is seen in the deterioration of a fine race, and the increase
of the type which tends towards thick lips, low foreheads, and sensual
tastes. The slavery of Christians in Morocco, once common, has been by
treaty abolished since the day when the savage Sultan Mulai Ismael had
eleven thousand Christian slaves in Mequinez employed in building his
walls, whose bodies, when they succumbed, were mixed in with the stones
and mud of the buildings. Slaves are not ill treated in the present day,
though now and again one may be flogged to death as the result of fault
or the malice and slander of a jealous fellow-slave: as a rule they live
happily; and if a female slave bears a male child to her master, by a law
in the Kor[=a]n both mother and son are _ipso facto_ freed, though they
continue to live on in the same house.
The last thing Hadj Mukhtar Hilalli showed us was his hummum, cunningly
arranged to flank the kitchen fire at the back. A tiny room; but four of
his wives and slaves could, he explained, take their bath in it at once.
There was a small stone slab inside as a seat, and hot air came in by
means of a pipe in one corner. The _hummum_, or Turkish bath, is partly
enjoined by the Kor[=a]n and partly taken for its own enjoyment; it is a
feature of every Moorish house of any pretension, and largely used by men
and women.
The evening was a dark one, and we picked our way back to the fonda by
the light of lanterns: it is impossible to go out at night in Tetuan
without carrying one; the streets are wholly unlit, and the refuse-heaps
and central gutters unpleasant traps.
Next morning R. and I strolled out of the city in the direction of Ceuta
by way of the _Báb-el-M`kabar_ (the Gate of the Tombs). Just beyond this
gateway congregates in the road _el doollah_ (the drove)--that is to say,
the mules and donkeys belonging to any one in Tetuan who has no work for
them on that particular day. They are all left by their owners at this
spot in the care of a tall, tattered Moor, whose business in life is to
look after them; and there they lie in the sandy road or lean up against
the hot wall or each other, one of the saddest sights on God's earth,
some of them infant two-year-olds, all of them overworked and starved.
About midday the drover drives his charges off to the nearest grass--such
as it is--and the ragged squad troops along the stony track without
bridles and without spirit to abuse its freedom. They have none of them
packs or saddles, unless their sore backs are too deeply aggravated to
allow of exposure to the flies and dust; and in due time, one by one, the
old or the dying drop tacitly out of the ranks; a couple of days--the
scavenging dogs' work is done--and only a tangled knot of bones is kicked
away from the roadside by the feet of the living generation, which have
picked up the scantiest feed, and are straying back citywards again in
the late afternoon, to be called for outside the Báb-el-M`kabar each by
its owner.
El doollah had not started; and leaving them all in the road below us, we
passed the little knots of countrywomen who sit by the Báb-el-M`kabar
selling myrtle for laying upon the graves, and wound our way uphill
through the old Mussulman cemetery, with its quaint domed tombs and
toothed, arched doorways, cracked, decayed, and yellow with lichen, half
hidden among the tangle of bushes and wild flowers on the rough slope.
The older of the tombs are probably those of the first Moors who fled
from Spain in the days of that great _trek_ back to Morocco: a much later
and very conspicuous dome belongs to a brave lady, who, not a hundred
years ago, did her best to defend Tetuan against the Spaniards, fighting
side by side with the Moorish troops, and, in the course of the siege,
accounting for half a dozen Spaniards, thereby earning for herself in due
course a Joan of Arc reputation and a public sepulchre.
[Illustration: A MOHAMMEDAN CEMETERY.
[_To face p. 80._]
The cemetery was overgrown with _ayerna_ root, one of the commonest weeds
in Morocco, poisonous when it is eaten raw, though it is possible, after
boiling the root for ten or twelve hours, spreading it out to dry in the
sun, and grinding it in a mill, to make a sort of bitter bread out of the
flour, and to subsist upon that. This the poor do to a great extent,
whenever corn runs short and they have nothing but roots and grasses to
fall back upon: their pale yellow faces and emaciated bodies tell a tale
of the ayerna root. We grubbed some up with a little difficulty in the
stiff clay soil with nothing but sticks to help. Fifteen inches down we
found the root, a small whitish bulb, the size of a bluebell root.
There is much desolation about the old cemetery, with its crumbling
ruins; but the sun struck a key-note of splendour, and turned the
lichened stones into nuggets of gold.
A black raven sat on a grey rock above us and croaked; below lay the
white city--white beyond all English ideas of whiteness. Two tall
minarets, with simple straight lines, only a mosaic of green tiling let
into their flat faces, cut the peaks of the mountains beyond. At a
quarter past twelve a little white flag slowly mounted to the top of each
mosque; an infinitesimally small black figure appeared against the sky;
then leaning over the parapet and looking down upon the humming city, a
cry broke from the figure, and was carried over to us upon the wind--a
cry which rose and fell, most musical, most sonorous: "Allah Ho
Akbar--Allah Ho Akbar." The black dot moved round the parapet, and east
and west and north and south chanted the great summons to the Faithful to
prayer. And then the little white flag was hauled down.
On the other side of the river the neutral-coloured villages could be
picked out by their white saint-houses. Morocco is stuck as full of
saints' tombs--fuller--than England of dissenting chapels. They stud the
land. Moors rid themselves of much valuable energy in the erection, by
countless thousands, of tombs to the memory of the eccentric or pious
dead; and distances are measured, tracks marked, not from church to
church as in Spain, nor from village to village as in England, but from
saint-house to saint-house, each of which is village-green, club, or
public-house rolled into one, where the men gossip, the pious read,
travellers halt, offerings are brought the dead saint, and sick children
arrive to be healed--all at a little whitewashed building with a dome
like an oven outside, and a horse-shoe arch, an olive- or a fig- or a
palm-tree, a flag-staff hung with morsels of rag, and often a spring of
water. At four cross-tracks, instead of sign-posts, heaps of stones,
cairns, are to be found, placed in such a way as to indicate the
direction in which the next saint's tomb lies.
A saint-house or two spot the green plain below the cemetery, which
merges into the seven miles of flats stretching from the city to the sea,
the haunt of wild duck, plover, and snipe, among wastes of coarse grass,
marsh, and red tangle. Coils of grey river lie upon the flats: the very
flatness over which the stream snakes is at once most strong--serene.
As we walked down the hillside, a brown figure upon a flat-topped tomb
was silhouetted against the plain: he raised himself, and then again
prostrated his body to the earth, his face set to the distant belt of
blue sea, worshipping towards Mecca.
That afternoon we visited Semsar, a village two or three hours' ride from
Tetuan, up in the mountains to the west. R. had a sedate brown mule with
no idea of exerting himself: my mount was a clever little grey, nervous
and rather handy with his heels, nearly kicking me more than once when I
dismounted or mounted carelessly. We rode, as usual, on the high-peaked
Moorish saddles, covered with scarlet cloth, such as every Moor uses--the
stirrup-leathers of twisted scarlet silk, several thick saddle-cloths
underneath, the girths never drawn, the saddle only kept from slipping
over head or tail by scarlet britching and breastplate. It is impossible
to mount unless the stirrup is held. After repeating the sacramental word
"B`ism Allah" (a Moor mounts and dismounts in the name of God), with a
man at his stirrups, he sinks without an effort into his saddle, amidst a
furbelow of white robes, which he has afterwards arranged carefully for
him. Possibly for this reason he gets on and off as seldom as possible,
hugging the convenient maxim, common among the Moors, that mounting and
dismounting fatigue an animal more than carrying a burden. He rides with
his knees up to his chin: he is a natural horseman, and looks at home in
his practically girthless and quite shapeless saddle, which must have
given him a pang, if ever he galloped for his life in front of his
enemies, and reflected that his safety was dependent upon the
breastplate. A man, before now, has, as he rode, unwound his waistcloth,
and twisted it round his horse's neck, for further security against the
saddle's slipping back.
Mr. Bewicke and his soldier rode with us: the latter a dark, lean-faced,
unwholesome-looking man, unable, like so many of his countrymen, to grow
any hair on his face--an obsequious individual too, inspiring little
trust; below his long blue cloak he wore brown riding-boots, embroidered
with orange, and fastening up the back with orange-thread buttons.
My little grey bustled along; but once or twice, when the road fell away
into a steep drop, his weak hind legs gave under him, and he "sat down":
we soon learnt the effect which merely shaking the feet in the great
angular stirrups has on mules whose sides have often been in touch with
the sharp points, and jogged forward wherever the bad road allowed.
We had left the city by another of its six gates--the _Báb-el-Toot_
(Mulberry Gate), the old name pointing back to an energetic past, when
mulberries, silk-worms, and silk-weaving flourished around Tetuan--when
the cultivation of sugar-cane, cotton, and rice in Morocco was more than
a memory.
Following for a time the road to Tangier, we branched off to the right,
and took a rough path winding upwards, passing a spring where women wash
clothes, three parts walled in, to prevent their being seen.
A little higher up and one of the countless saints' tombs came in
sight--better known in this case as the Robbers' Tower, where brigands
congregate at sunset, and from an excellent coign of vantage keep a
look-out on the Tangier road, to drop on any unfortunate so foolhardy as
to be on it late in the day. After dark no Moor from Tetuan would walk
near this saint-house.
Only a few weeks after this very ride a man was murdered on the Tangier
road, why or wherefore no one knew, except that his body was found,
brought into Tetuan, and buried without further investigation, since his
relatives were neither rich nor powerful enough to institute a search and
demand compensation.
Robbery in Morocco is almost sanctioned by Providence; it is made so
simple. The lonely tracks, the absence of police, the inconveniences of
travelling, and the innumerable wells scattered over the country, almost
sunk for the reception of inconvenient bodies--one and all tempt a man to
turn brigand; and yet Europeans are seldom attacked, in view of the fine
imposed upon the tribe in whose territory a crime is committed.
Thus the borders, where several tribes meet, are always unsafe country,
one tribe disposing of bodies which they have done to death by
depositing them in the territory of the next tribe. But even in
"Christian-ridden" Tangier a German was knifed three years ago walking
home, as was his custom, at dusk. He happened to have no money on him.
His murderer was given up to justice--that is, the basha of Tangier said
some one must die, and together with the fine the tribe outside Tangier
produced a man, who was duly executed, though whether he was the
murderer. . . . . .
Meanwhile, we were leaving the millet-fields behind us--stubbles, an
occasional stalk three feet high, no lying for birds--and were in a
country of wild lavender and stunted bushes: these consisted chiefly of
cistus or else palmetto, a little dwarf palm, the fruit of which is eaten
by goats, and the root by natives as a vegetable, while its fibrous
leaves make rope and baskets and a hundred things. A bleak undulating
country, which ran up into rocky blue gorges and grey peaks on the right
hand. The path was almost blocked at one point by an immense cairn on the
top of a ridge--a holy pile, upon which the devout Moor in passing casts
a stone, because from this spot the mountain can be made out on which the
venerated shrine of Mulai Abdesalam lies, in Beni Anos, the goal of
thousands of pilgrims each year. Though it is within a day's ride of
Tangier, the country for miles around is forbidden to any European, and
two Englishmen only have penetrated into the sacred city of Shesháwan,
which lies in the same district. Mr. Walter B. Harris and Mr. Somers, at
different times, got inside, but only at sunset, and after lying in
hiding all night had to flee for their lives at dawn.
Gradually we reached wilder and more rocky country, recalling Scotland as
far as the open moorland went. If fir-trees were planted on the sheltered
slopes, the fir-pins should, in conjunction with the natural soil, form
land capable of growing vines--an idle dream in the Morocco of to-day.
Between two hills in front of us towered a cliff of rocky red limestone,
which might once have formed the bed of some vast stream. Semsar lay
where the waters should have struck the rock beneath as they fell: a more
sheltered village could not be, facing south-east. The cliff above is
still riddled with the remains of an old silver-mine, worked years ago by
the Portuguese: the ladders and scaffolding inside have fallen to pieces,
and after penetrating along dark tunnels on hands and knees for a certain
distance an open shaft intervenes, and further exploration is impossible.
Semsar, nestled into its crevice, takes more or less the local brown; but
among the thatched huts, rising one above the other like an uneven pile
of mud terraces, a few walls were whitewashed, and of course a white
village mosque stood guard over all on the top of a hillock. There is
something a trifle "animal" in these villages, rough clusters of
bee's-comb or ant-heaps or beavers' lodgings as they might be, assuming
exactly the shade of their surroundings, as nests the colour of their
hiding-places, or as the kh[=a]ki-coloured sand-lizard, desert-lark, and
sand-grouse of the great Sahara take on the yellow-ochre tone of that
desert.
A friend belonging to Mr. Bewicke's soldier had ridden out behind us. He
owned a garden at hand, and asked if we would go in and look at it. We
stooped low under a white stone doorway, an imposing structure,
invariably the entrance to every garden: the door generally painted
Reckitt's blue, and kept locked with a key eight inches long, while on
each side of the gateway the cane fence is tumbling to pieces and
offering useful gaps to marauders--a curious inversion of the rule in
Spain, where to this day they bar the window heavily and leave the door
open.
Though to all appearance the owner was a hard-working Moor, the garden at
any rate bore no great signs of expenditure of labour. We found ourselves
in an overgrown wilderness of orange-trees, peaches, pears, figs, plums,
damsons, cherries, white mulberries, quinces, jasmine, all overgrown and
stabbed by the interloping prickly pear--a good fruit, too, in its way,
and a "useful beast" as a hedge.
Half of his oranges were always stolen, the owner said; the remaining
half brought him in from sixty to ninety shillings a year, selling
perhaps at a shilling or two the thousand. He had evidently not the
capital to get the half of what such fruitful soil could give with
Gibraltar at hand for export, nor the means of securing to himself any
money he made; and it is poor work putting money into the hands of the
nearest extortionate sheikh. Yet his garden was, and is to every Moor, a
source of great satisfaction and content: truly a field of the slothful,
a garden where the mystic finds rest and heart's ease, and the two things
which appeal most to sun-baked men--shade and water. It is enough in such
a spot to drowse away the sunny hours amidst the hum of bees, the rattle
of the tree-beetle; to muse upon some book of whose drift only a faint
idea is intelligible, content to leave its problems in the limbo of the
insoluble, where most of life's questions seethe harmlessly enough; then,
turning, give thanks to Allah, who has made gardens for mankind, and doze
again.
Farther on the path led us across streams banked with maiden-hair fern
like rank grass. Water had worn the rock into grotesque shapes, a
cavernous arch in one place, the banks, like a tunnel, almost meeting
over our heads in another. Immense blocks of stone barred the way; it
was not easy riding, but the mules climbed up and down rocky staircases
with much tact, while we sat holding our breath.
Over one of these obstructions the breastplate of my saddle, which had
only been fastened to begin with by three stitches of string, burst, and
I found myself almost over the grey's tail: such a common occurrence that
no Moor goes out without string and packing-needle handy; but this was
past mending on the road, and I changed on to the soldier's mule, whose
top-heavy saddle was no fit at all, and, shifting all over its back,
required careful balance on the rider's part.
The road was only a few feet wide, and so overgrown that, as we jogged
one after the other, trying to dodge grey arms of fig-trees, lying on the
mules' necks under dark masses of foliage which shut out half the light,
hatless, the stiffest bullfinch at home would have been ears of corn
compared with what we went through.
At last, however, it came to an end, and the trail opened out into the
village of Semsar. Nobody was to be seen; dogs barked as usual; some kids
bleated inside a hut. We rode by the crazy hovels; a woman carrying water
emerged, and a boy with a baby. Beyond the last brown erection we came to
a saint's tomb. This meant the village green without any "green." Two or
three country people sat in the usual meeting-place among trodden-down
weeds, talking and smoking their long pipes, congregated round one busy
man, who was chopping a log into a plough with an axe. Around the tomb
was a group of olive-trees, preserved leaf and stick and all, not a
branch even of dead wood off the ground removed, by reason of the
sanctity of the spot. However small a grove, it would otherwise have been
cut down, as affording cover to robbers and _ginns_ (evil spirits).
Thanks to saints' tombs the traveller in Morocco still meets with clumps
and occasional woods of olives. The sunshine glowed on their hoary
twisted branches, and flecked the gnarled trunks; the grey foliage cast
patches of dense shadow on the brown earth under the mammoths, whose
broken lines and odd elbows supported such masses of quiet colour and
solemn shade. We wound our way to the left among the huts. Of any road
between them there was none; the mules could barely climb over some of
the boulders among the refuse.
Once quit of the "green," we saw no one again, and got much mixed as to
direction. Finally, we struck a path with a descent into a pool and below
a fig tree, which, having made ourselves small, we circumvented, and
discovered that it meandered in time to the outside of the village.
Following, we wound southwards by a gorge along a rocky stream, which has
the reputation of rising suddenly after rain, and not long ago drowned
three mules.
Stepping-stones are not provided in Morocco, and it is generally a case
of plunging through a stream to reach the opposite side. Near a city with
good fortune a Jew may pass, the chance may be worth waiting for; but no
Mohammedan Moor would carry an infidel across on his superior back.
In time a different path led us back to Tetuan, and we rode in by the
Mulberry Gate at sunset, as the mueddzin was calling upon true believers
to worship.
On fine days we made many such excursions, and exploited the country for
miles round. Showery and doubtful days were devoted to the city and
shopping.
Shopping in a foreign city tends towards the accumulation of white
elephants, which, safely landed in England, work havoc in an English
home. Long flint guns from the Riff, and old blue dishes from Fez, and
orange-striped rugs from Rabat look strangely out of place with
wall-papers and oil paintings. The East will never sit down with the
West, and the adjuncts of either are bound to "fight." And yet we
shopped.
There are fewer more interesting ways of studying the outside life of the
people; a little gossip and less reliable information are all thrown in
to the bargain. The little Tetuan shops are a species of club, for each
Moor has certain shops at which he habitually sits and may be found with
more or less certainty. While the owner and his goods remain inside the
shop, there is room for two people outside on the sill or doorstep, and a
couple of fat leather cushions are provided for them. Even Mr. Bewicke
was in the habit of sitting every day at Hadj Mukhtar Hilalli's shop and
hearing the news, between four and seven o'clock every evening.
[Illustration: OUT SHOPPING.
[_To face p. 90._]
He interpreted for us in our early days. We spent a whole morning buying
_humbells_ (striped carpets) at a shop where the owner was sitting on the
floor playing chess with a friend and drinking green tea. All over Tetuan
draughts and chess are played constantly on little boards, either on the
doorstep or inside the shop. The game had its origin, like bridge and
polo, eastwards of England, and was introduced into Europe after the
Crusades, together with baths and other civilized habits. Our shopman
looked exceedingly bored at the interruption. However, after much
bargaining, we bought a humbell, having to point to everything we wished
to buy, for no Moor likes a Christian to come inside his shop, because of
his dirty boots. A Moor is either in a pair of clean yellow slippers, or
else they are on the doorsill, and his feet are bare: he tosses all his
silks, towels, embroideries, carpets, on the floor, and sits among
them, while the purchaser stands outside, points to the shelves and heap,
and trusts to the owner's divining which particular silk handkerchief is
wanted.
In another shop we found a second humbell, chiefly black and orange, the
property of a taciturn individual in a snow-white _selham_ (hooded
cloak), a turban to match, with scarlet peak, a dark blue garment
underneath the selham, and a complexion like cream and roses. He lay at
full length on a pile of many carpets. We stopped in front of the shop.
Neither rising, bowing, nor bustling about to show off his goods, the
white figure lay still, looking dreamily through and beyond us. We were
bores. In reply to a question of price, a long sum was murmured. At last
we expressed a decided wish to inspect the humbell, and, slowly rising,
he condescended to lift it from a shelf, his looks suggesting that he
would prefer being left alone. Again we asked his lowest price.
Twenty-one shillings. We offered sixteen. Without deigning to answer, he
solemnly folded up the humbell and put it away, then folded one by one
the goods which littered the floor, and stacked them above the humbell on
the same shelf. Still standing in front of the shop, we repeated our
offer of sixteen shillings. He shook his head decidedly, made a
deprecating gesture, and prepared to sink again on his couch. Mr. Bewicke
forbade us to offer more; we walked away. A voice said in Arabic, "It is
yours," and the humbell was thrown after us; the sixteen shillings were
received with a sigh as the shopkeeper resumed his couch.
Tetuan makes many artistic "towels," which form the ordinary dress of the
countrywomen underneath their old enfolding yellowish-white woollen
haiks; but for quite the majority a towel as skirt and a towel as cape
are sufficient for all purposes. There is the rare addition of a pair of
cotton drawers.
The strong substance and fast scarlet dyes make these towels no mean
substitutes for curtains, except that, like native goods in general, they
seldom quite match, and distract the soul which demands "pairs" in all
and everything.
A Jew we visited in the Jews' Quarter had a fine carpet for sale, made
farther south, something like a Persian, the ground whitish, with
harmonious reds and greens. For a long time we sat and tried to bargain
in his odd little den up a dilapidated staircase and nearly pitch dark:
he wanted £5. The pattern was a little small. We came away without it.
Some of the old _kaftans_ (robes of coloured cloth or satin or silk
brocade, embroidered with gold or silver, buttoned down the front and
with wide sleeves) were well worth buying: none are made like them
nowadays, for common material is used; unfortunately the best are often
in tatters.
We visited the Slipper Market, and, sitting on the doorstep of one of the
shops, gave directions for two pairs--blue velvet embroidered with gold,
and milk-coloured leather embroidered with green. Size, price, and colour
were duly discussed; rain came on, we sat on the doorsill sheltering, and
the basha--Tetuan's governor--was criticised. The slipper-maker had not a
good word for him. To begin with, it seems he has no money, is of no
family, and aristocratic Tetuan refuses to "hob-nob" with him. He
dislikes Tetuan after Fez, whence he was transferred, and where he made
more money. The other day a neighbouring tribe sent him a present of so
many dollars. At the same time they owed him certain taxes, in lieu of
which he accepted the money, but pointed out that the present must follow
in due course. None ever arrived, and the basha sent his brother-in-law
and a soldier to the tribesmen to ask an explanation of its
non-appearance. The brother-in-law was tactless, incensed the tribesmen,
and provoked them to bastinado him, whereupon the soldier lost his head,
and fired his gun off into the air. He was promptly disembowelled.
The brother-in-law returned to the basha, stiff, but alive; and the
country people give it as their verdict that the basha is a rapacious
man. They threaten that they will no longer bring their produce into
Tetuan to market, but will hold their own markets at some place chosen by
themselves out in the country, and Tetuan shall come out to buy. Such a
proceeding would be most inconvenient; for Tetuan is dependent for all
its supplies on the country people, who hold their markets on Sundays,
Wednesdays, and Fridays in the feddan, where they sit upon the ground
packed in hundreds, their chickens, eggs, butter, and produce in general
in their laps and at their feet. Their beef and mutton are but
second-rate, and the shapeless lumps of lean, tough meat take double as
long as an English joint to cook, and make but a poor show in the end,
hacked by the unskilful butchers past all recognition. Goat and fish are
to be had, sometimes partridges, hares, and rabbits, occasionally a
haunch of wild boar. Fish came in on certain days when the wind was
favourable: there was then a rush on the fish market, and almost a free
fight over the great panniers full of shining silvery sardines, and over
the bodies of the sellers seated on the ground. The successful carried
off a handful each, and the cafés and fish shops were soon frying
sardines for dear life, while the little streets were thick with the
steam of native oil and butter. Some big fish, four and five feet long,
came into market sometimes, and a small boy would be hired by a purchaser
to carry one home across his shoulder, its great head hanging down
behind, and underneath a pair of thin brown legs like little sticks
hurrying along the street.
Bread in Morocco is "passing heavy," flavoured with aniseed and full of
grit. Vegetables are to be had in abundance.
The slippers, which had been promised in three days, appeared in three
weeks. Whenever we passed the shop we asked after them: always the same
answer--_M[=a]nana_ (To-morrow). "No, there was no butter to be had
to-day, but _m[=a]nana_." "No, the pillows were not finished yet, but
_m[=a]nana_." "The boots left to be soled were not ready, but
_m[=a]nana_." Tetuan lives upon _m[=a]nana_: it is the reincarnation of
JAM YESTERDAY, AND JAM TO-MORROW, BUT NEVER JAM TO-DAY.
Equally exasperating was the habit of every shopkeeper of locking up his
shop and going off to pray or eat or chat. If a shop had to be revisited
and purchases exchanged, the owner was invariably out, and the door
fastened with lock and key. At 12.15 p.m. nobody could ever be found, but
was presumably at the mosque. Again and again we visited the same shop:
one day the owner was at a friend's shop, the next at home, and so on. We
gave him up, to see his sleek cross-legged figure seated inside the
little cupboard the very next time we passed.
[Illustration: SHOPS IN TETUAN.
[_To face p. 94._]
Walking by a saint-house on the outskirts of the city, devout and
impoverished women were often to be seen there, visiting the shrine and
carrying with them small vessels of food, which they placed on the ground
for the spirit of the holy man to eat. The window of the shrine was tied
with a hundred scraps of rag and dead flowers, bits of wood, and paper
and oddments of all sorts. Empty earthenware bowls later on, and pariah
dogs skulking around, licking their lips, told a tale; but if asked if
they really thought their saint would come up out of his grave and eat
the food prepared for him, it was open to the Mussulman to answer the
Christian, "And do you really believe that your dead friends come and
smell the flowers you plant on their graves?"
Small-pox kills a great many Moors, and an incredible number are marked
by the disease. It is looked upon much as measles are in England: cases
are never isolated, and children are all expected to have it. Each year
it is prevalent, and people may be passed in the street with it out upon
them; but every four years it breaks out seriously, and a large
percentage of the population dies.
Last of all, in our shopping days a few things we bought by auction. No
auctioneer is employed as in European countries, but the owner and seller
himself perambulates the street or courtyard with his goods--a mule, or a
frying-pan, or a carpet--calling out each successive bid which he
receives on his article, pushing his way and jostling the motley mob of
market people, peasants and loungers, silks and rags, until he has got
his price, and hands over to its new owner his late possession.
CHAPTER IV
THE FAST OF RÁMADHAN--MOHAMMED--HIS LIFE AND INFLUENCE--THE FLOOD AT
SAFFI--A WALK OUTSIDE TETUAN--THE FRENCH CONSUL'S GARDEN-HOUSE--JEWS IN
MOROCCO--EUROPEAN PROTECTION.
CHAPTER IV
Manage with bread and butter till God brings the jam.
_Old Moorish proverb._
WE had not been long at the fonda before the Fast of Rámadhan began.
Rámadhan, ordained by Mohammed, takes place in the ninth month of every
Mohammedan year, and lasts for twenty-eight days, during which time the
Faithful fast from dawn, when it is light enough to distinguish between a
black and white thread, to sunset. It alters by a few days every year
according to the moon, and when it falls during summer in scorching hot
countries the agonies of thirst endured mean a penance indeed.
Rámadhan begins when the new moon is first seen. Tidings were sent from
Tangier to say that it had been observed there, which tidings Tetuan
handed on to the farthest mountain villages: a gun was fired from the
Kasbah at sunset, horns were sounded, and Rámadhan began. It sometimes
happens that Tetuan does not see the new moon till the day after Tangier
has seen it at the beginning of the fast, in which case the Tetuan people
are guilty of "eating the head of Rámadhan": this year it was not so.
During the twenty-eight days of the fast, every night, or rather every
early morning at 2 a.m., the householder was awakened by the crashing of
his knocker on his door and a shout bidding him "Rise and eat": the
mueddzin at the same time from the top of the mosque called the hour of
prayer, and long brass horns brayed to the same effect.
The month was almost over before we had learnt to sleep through it all.
As the fonda was in the Moorish Quarter our door was not exempt. Far away
up the street the knockers clanked, nearer and nearer every moment, then
the man's footsteps, then our own knocker sounded like a sledge-hammer,
and "Rise and eat" followed: the man went on to the next door, and back
again shortly up the opposite side of the street. And every Mussulman
arose in the dark and had a large meal. Again at sunrise the big gun
boomed from the Kasbah, the concussion shaking our ill-built room, and we
woke once more.
[Illustration: A CLUSTER OF COUNTRY WOMEN.
[_To face p. 100._]
No doubt the original motive of fasting and abstinence in the Old
Testament was the promotion of sanitary conditions. It is not good to eat
pig in hot countries: thus pork was "unclean," and is to-day in Morocco.
Nor is the consumption of much spirituous liquor wise when the
thermometer marks a hundred and one: hence the Kor[=a]n forbids the use
of strong drinks. The same motive underlies the fast, which rests and
relieves systems over-fattened and little exercised. But the "all or
nothing" theory which governs the uneducated and knows no moderation runs
a benefit into an abuse. Rámadhan had its disadvantages. Tetuan was
revelling at night and in a sodden sleep through the day; work was
slipshod and at sixes and sevens; men were irritable and quarrelsome;
every one looked indisposed; and the excuse for it all was always
Rámadhan. Worst of all, the countrywomen still tramped four and five
hours into market with loads, and children a month old, only half
nourished at the time of the fast.
But Rámadhan came to an end at last: Morocco breathed again. The day
before the fast was over everybody was smiling, and Tetuan had but one
hope, that the new moon would be seen that night, and thus the month of
penance come to an end. After the letter from Tangier had been received
next morning, which said that the new moon had been seen there, the gun
from the fort thundered, the basha went in gorgeous state to the
_Jama-el-Kebeer_ (Big Mosque) on a white mule, all caparisoned in blue,
and read aloud the letter, the city was uproarious, and the mountains
echoed again, for soldiers were sent post-haste up the valleys, and fired
all day at intervals to notify to the fathermost villages that Rámadhan
was over.
And the next day! The first day of the _Aid-el-Sereer_ (Little Feast)!
Everybody was in shining white, if not new, apparel, and all Tetuan was
abroad. That among a people clad so largely in white and in gorgeous
colours means a great deal, and the streets of Tetuan might have competed
with the Park on the Sunday before Ascot. The Moorish crowd was almost
entirely a male one, dressed like peacocks: satins embroidered with gold
and silver prevailed.
And if the snowy haiks and turbans and the resplendent shades of the
kaftans were the first point about the feast, the sweetmeat stalls were
the second. A Moor is a born sweet-tooth, and at every corner of the
streets a board was stacked with creamy mixtures in which walnuts were
embedded, with generously browned toffee full of almonds, with
carmine-coloured sticks, with magenta squares of sweet peppermint, with
blocks of nougat inches thick. And the joys of the feast seemed amply to
compensate for the fast.
Mohammed ordained many minor feasts and fasts. Rámadhan stands out chief
of the one: _Aid-el-Kebeer_ (Great Feast), falling two months and six
days afterwards, is chief of the other.
The three reforms which Mohammed instituted were temperance, cleanliness,
and monotheism, at a time when reform was badly needed. He was born in
Mecca five hundred and seventy years after Christ, an Arab of the tribe
of Beni Has`sim. Christianity was not unknown around him in his day.
Always somewhat of a visionary and introspective turn of mind, when he
was about forty years old he became deeply interested in the subject of
religion. Living in the imaginative East, in a hotbed of mysticism and
superstition, it was easy for him to conceive himself a chosen vessel of
the Almighty, and to assume by degrees the rôle of prophet, in the honest
belief that the words he uttered came direct from that God whose
mouthpiece he conceived himself to be. A small band of followers by
degrees collected round him, and in the ordinary course of events his end
would have been that of a saint with a tombstone white; but, added to the
saint's fanaticisms, Mohammed possessed the talents of a leader, and the
ambition which accompanies those talents.
Men and more men were attracted to him; he instituted among them a
ceremonial of prayer, feasts, and fasts, and built a mosque at Medina, in
which they worshipped. Persecution from their fellow-countrymen followed
as a matter of course, and Mohammed's disciples, who began to call
themselves Mohammedans, turned to him as their chief. The one "able man,"
he naturally assumed the position of a theocratic ruler, and led them
against their enemies; while the words he spoke were committed to memory,
constituting later on the Kor[=a]n.
As a general Mohammed was successful: battle after battle was fought and
won, reverses were amply compensated for, and men flocked to his
standard, while deputations from surrounding tribes poured in upon him,
acknowledging his supremacy, and asking for instruction in his creed.
That creed was admirably adapted to suit the manners, opinions, and vices
of the East: it was extraordinarily simple, it proposed but few truths in
which belief was necessary, and it laid no severe restraints upon the
natural desires of men; above all, its warlike tendencies captivated the
men of its day, and war, which at first had been necessary in
self-defence, was still carried on, and gradually came to be looked upon
by Mohammed and his followers as a lawful means towards spreading their
religion. In the name of a _Holy War_ the conquerors offered their
defeated enemies the option of death or embracing the new religion, while
the women and children taken in battle were sold as slaves, after the
manner of the time.
And the Prophet's influence deepened and extended. Meanwhile, his
sayings, or "the Kor[=a]n," were written down from time to time by one or
other of his followers, on palm leaves, on stone tablets, on the
shoulder-plates of goats and camels, and even tattooed on men's breasts;
while his ritual was strictly carried out--prayer with absolution,
frequent washing, fasting, almsgiving, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and the
recital of the formula "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his
prophet."
Prayer was offered up five times a day, as now, by every true
believer--at sunrise, at midday, at three in the afternoon, at sunset,
and two hours after sunset: the _adzan_ (call to prayers) was chanted at
each time by the mueddzin from the minarets of the mosques. The first
thing in the morning at sunrise the call ran, "God is great; God is
great. Mohammed is his prophet. Prayer is better than sleep. Come to
prayer; come to prayer." The believer, obeying the summons, washes,
enters the mosque, and repeats from four to eight short prayers, with
genuflections between each.
Mohammed strictly obeyed the forms of his doctrine, and himself performed
the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca and the ceremonies round the K[=a]aba. He
was familiar with at least part of the Gospels, but his knowledge was
possibly scant and distorted: he was unfriendly towards Christians. For
the Old Testament he had a profound respect.
As far as can be gathered he was a sober and meditative man: he sought
neither state nor riches for himself, when either might have been his for
the asking. He looked upon women from a point of view not unlike the
characters in the Old Testament--a distinctly Eastern one. He possessed
five wives, and probably concubines--bondwomen in much the same position
as Hagar of old.
Mohammed instituted the veiling of women, with corresponding restrictions
on domestic intercourse, as a check upon undue sexual licence--the curse
of hot climates.
There is no reason to believe that Mohammed was not honest in the
conviction that his mission was divine, and that, if he countenanced
vindictive revenge, rapine, and lust as a means towards the furtherance
of his teaching, he justified the act in his own mind by what he believed
to be revelations from a spirit other than his own.
A great character has perforce its great faults, and the courage and
ambition which made so mighty a leader were naturally enough the rock
upon which that leader split, blinding his eyes and distorting his point
of view, leading him into compromise and error. But though self-deceived
and fanatical, it is improbable that Mohammed was insincere. By the
spirit of his day he must be judged. His day believed in him.
He died early in the seventh century, sixty-three years old, saying,
"Verily I have fulfilled my mission. I have left that amongst you, a
plain command, the Book of God, and manifest ordinances, which, if ye
hold fast, ye shall never go astray." Within two years of his death the
Mohammedan armies had overrun Syria; Egypt was in their possession, and
the whole northern coast of Africa.
The scraps which contained in writing the sayings of the dead Prophet
were all collected by his chief amanuensis: his followers appointed three
judges to overlook the work. The new collection was written in Mohammed's
own pure Meccan dialect, and every spurious copy was burnt. So carefully
was this done that there is but one and the same Kor[=a]n throughout the
vast Mohammedan world.
Mohammedanism satisfied the East for two reasons: first, because it was a
warlike religion, and therefore appealed to warlike tribes; secondly,
because, deeply underlying it, was the strong, calm spirit of fatalism,
that world-old foundation-stone on which many a man has come to anchor.
The very word Mussulman means, "One who has surrendered himself and his
will to God."
ISLAM is the belief in one God,
one Prophet (Mohammed),
the immortality of the soul,
the resurrection of the dead,
the day of judgment,
angels,
a devil.
There are no subtle intricacies in such a creed, no mysterious
contradictions to puzzle the uneducated mind; it amply satisfies a simple
people; and probably no other dogma makes so many converts.
In Morocco to-day the Mohammedan religion is interwoven with the whole
fabric of life. To the Moor Allah is always present, is behind every
decree of the Sultan, and enters into the smallest detail of his own
private life to such a degree that barely a single action is performed
without invoking the sacred name. Religion is, according to the temper of
the individual Moor, "a passion, or a persuasion, or an excuse, but never
a check": for a man may commit any sin under heaven, and "Allah is
merciful; Mohammed is his prophet; all will be forgiven." And this is not
hypocritical: the larger soul includes the smaller--that is all.
It follows as a natural sequence that, because Allah is as much part of a
Moor's life as the air he breathes, he is forgotten. The repetition of
words bulks so largely in Mohammedanism, that, as with the Jews of old,
the letter of the law has killed the spirit. The evil of Mohammed's
religion lies in its essential antagonism towards progress and
civilization: scientific investigation is forbidden; a proverb runs,
"Only fools and the very young speak the truth." Thus Mohammedanism will
never advance or regenerate Morocco; for these tenets are Government
policy.
At the same time there is in Mohammedan society a certain negative virtue
which contrasts strongly with the gross immorality existing in Christian
countries. The conditions of what is lawful for a Mohammedan are wide
enough to content, and extremes offer no temptation. Polygamy, divorce,
and slavery are all allowed, and war upon unbelievers is enjoined as a
duty. And yet "social evils" and the lowest depths to which humanity
falls are almost unknown in Morocco; while what is held to be sin is
rigorously punished--adultery by stoning (a father has no hesitation in
shooting his daughter himself), robbery by mutilation, and so on.
Unlike many Christian churches, a Moorish mosque is never closed: the
sanctuary is always open. It is council-chamber, meeting-place, and for
travellers at night resting-place. There are no priests in the European
sense; but the _basha_ (governor) or the _kadi_ (judge) reads prayers on
Fridays, a sermon follows, and letters or decrees from the Sultan are
given out in the mosque after service.
The treatment of Mohammedan women, against which so much has been
written, is after all Oriental, and nothing more. The Kor[=a]n speaks of
woman as an inferior being, an incomplete creation, needing no education,
to be rigorously and jealously guarded all her life, and who after death
may or may not be admitted into the Mohammedan heaven. Her function, if
rich, is to bear children, and to be treated like a petted lap-dog: if
poor, to work as a labourer. But interrogate the wife of a rich Moor on
the subject, and she will not have the slightest wish to educate herself,
but will affirm emphatically, "We have children and enough to eat. Why
should we want to learn anything?"
It is manifestly absurd to compare Mohammedanism with Christianity, which
are each the outcome of a distinct race, divided by that greatest
barrier--a racial gulf.
Christianity, it must be confessed, bearing in mind the Christian
renegades with whom the Moor has traded, is looked upon by him for the
most part as a thing beneath contempt. It had five hundred years, before
Mohammed was born, in which to impress itself on the East. It signally
failed. And yet only a few years after Mohammed's death his religion had
taken by storm Egypt, Turkey, Arabia, Persia, Turkestan, parts of India,
the Malay Peninsula, the north coast of Africa, and parts of China,
introducing monotheism, and impressing temperance and cleanliness on
uncivilized millions, but never advancing beyond that point. It is borne
in upon one that, in spite of missionary effort, Morocco will change its
religion for that of Christianity when, as its own proverb says, "The
charcoal takes root and the salt buds." The East, when it adopts other
tenets, will exchange its own for a wider and a more universal cult than
that which modern sects and parties are endeavouring and failing to
introduce to-day.
While we were in our small quarters at the fonda, the weather by no means
came up to the high standard it is said to reach in December. A few sunny
days, when we could bask out of doors, were grudgingly sandwiched between
many wet ones, and again and again the Rámadhan sunrise gun awoke us to
gouts of almost tropical rain, a fiery sunrise followed by an hour's
brilliant sunshine, the herald of a shamelessly distorted April day. The
little gutters down the middle of the streets ran like torrents, carrying
off chickens' heads and cabbage-stalks; hail scoured the pebbles; outside
the city "the dry land was over your boots"; the road to the sea was
impassable, and the rivers between Tangier and Tetuan were unfordable;
snow lay in patches on the mountains; half the vale was inundated; the
river could be heard a mile away; both our windows leaked; and down in
the little patio, where the family sat, the waters were out.
[Illustration: _Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._]
A TYPICAL MOORISH STREET.
[_To face p. 108._]
From the west coast at Saffi terrible reports arrived of the havoc the
weather had made of the city. The lowest barometer ever seen had preceded
sheets of rain, and a solid _hamla_ (flood) had entered the gates from
the valley above, filling the narrow streets in a few moments to a depth
of seven and eight feet, and carrying everything before it: men, women,
children, and cattle were swept in a torrent through the water-gate out
to sea, sometimes a hand stretched out above the eddies. Then the gate
became blocked with floating _debris_ and bodies, and the flood rose to
ten feet in the principal street. The townspeople who survived took
refuge on their roofs. The vice-governor was drowned. Houses, shops,
mills, and mosques were gutted as if by fire; furniture and household
goods were ruined; the Saffi shopkeepers were beggared. For many weeks
after the survivors starved upon roots, in spite of a subscription raised
in Tangier to relieve them.
The rain apparently was something like a waterspout. Happily Tetuan was
exempt from waterspouts, and on days when the rain gave over for a time
we rode, or, picking our way along the muddy streets, drank tea with some
Moor.
One dull afternoon we sampled the state of the roads outside, R. on a
donkey, and Mr. Bewicke and myself on foot. Walking out by the Gate of
the Tombs, we bore to the left, and dived into the narrowest of narrow
lanes, shut in with tall cane fences and high mud-banks crowned with
prickly pear, the shape of whose fat, fleshy leaves recalls moles' paws.
The donkey was an unusually large one, and its pack rolled more than
packs in general: before we saw the last of Tetuan its rider had many a
fall off her unsteady perch; and if there is truth in the Moorish saying
that "one does not become a horseman till one is broken," R. may claim to
have qualified. It shied and bucked and came on its nose over rocks; but
this time Mr. Bewicke's boy, Mohr, directed its ways, and thoroughly
enjoyed cudgelling it along with a stick, helped by its rider's switch,
cut from a quince-tree, which often as not hit Mohr instead of the ass.
By-and-by we met a countryman, his wife, and a donkey. The woman, who
wore little except two striped towels, and a handkerchief round her head,
staggered along under a great load of faggots. She was stunted and
wrinkled, removed mentally but few degrees from the three-year-old
weather-beaten donkey which minced along in front of her, also loaded
with faggots. The woman had strips of rough leather bandaged round her
legs to protect them from thorns. Her feet were bare. Her husband
sauntered last of all, presumably looking after the donkey: he had no
load. Another time the donkey also might be exempt, while the woman was
still burdened; and the man, when asked why, if he would not carry the
load himself, he did not at least put it upon the donkey, would reply,
"Because it is too heavy for the ass."
A little farther on and a magnificent Riffi passed us, walking along at a
smart pace into the city, his face "old oak" colour, framed in a turban
of dark red-brown strings of wool. He wore a chocolate-coloured jellab,
embroidered at the edge with white, and sewn with tufts of red, violet,
yellow, and green-coloured silks: a tall, wiry fellow, with a back like a
ram-rod, a thin face, and keen, defiant eyes. The light glittered on his
long, brass-plated Riffi gun: a red leather pouch full of bullets hung at
his side. He was a great contrast to the labourer who passed us
afterwards, also bound for the city--an old and grizzled monkey-faced
man, with his head tied round with a ragged red cloth gun-case. His
jellab hung in tatters, but he also carried a gun, and by a string a
brace of partridges and a wild duck, which "bag," after some bargaining,
became ours for the sum of one-and-sixpence.
Among the brown jellabs and varied turbans European clothes were forcibly
out of their place: a people like the Moors, childlike, patriarchal,
whose lives embody one of the oldest and perhaps best ideas of a simple
existence, may well hate the sight, on the face of their select country,
of prosaic tailoring and hideous head-gear. The traveller in his boots,
where boots are things unknown, passes the muffled women with their
silent gait, the picturesque ruffians with their swinging stride, and is
unable to help feeling not at home and something of a blot on the
landscape.
The lane we wandered up had been, and was still in places, a watercourse,
and we struggled along the steep chasms gouged out of the soft soil, and
clambered over rocks which had withstood the torrent.
By-and-by a red door intervened on our left, fitted into an imposing
whitewashed arched gateway, with a mounting-block on each side, and the
great brass ring-shaped knocker in the middle of the door which the Moors
have left all over Spain--the garden-house of the French Consul. In
another four months, when all aristocratic Tetuan would migrate in a body
into their "summer-houses," and by their mutual presence reassure each
other as to their safety, the Consul would move out of the city: at
present he would look on such a step as sheer madness.
An old negro slave, with a beard like cotton-wool, was at work in the
garden, and, opening the door, let us in to look round. A wide gravel
path led up to the dazzling walls of the house, spotless as a sheet of
glazed cream-laid note-paper, the window-frames and door picked out with
Reckitt's blue. A white railing in front edged the terrace, the steps of
which were tanned by the damp salt air a fine rusty ochre. The house
inside was built on the invariable Moorish lines--kitchen and inferior
rooms on the ground floor, one great lofty room above, and the flat roof
over all. A garden-room flanked the house on the south-east, the front
open to the garden, pillared and arched with the old white plastered
"horse-shoe." In underneath the arches were shade and cool tiling, and
outside more tiled ground suggested steaming brews of fragrant green tea,
tiny glasses, low tables, and long divans spread under the sky.
It was a grey day, and height beyond height on into the Riff country was
cloud-capped, while _shar d'jebel_ (the hair of the mountain, as the
Moors call snow) whitened a few furrowed peaks. The flats lay below to
the left, and a horizontal blue pencil line was scored beyond them.
Cow-birds stalked about the garden among some new vines which the old
negro was putting in.
We sat down on the terrace, looking at the view, and the silence of the
place was above all things most striking. A cavalcade of mules tailed
away in the distance in single file along the faint track to the sea; the
packed white city lay to the right, but no voices reached us; here
cart-wheels, railway-trains, threshing-machines, and busy farm life were
not. It would have been hard to age and wrinkle in such a spot--Adam and
Eve might have felt at home.
It was also a weedy one, this Paradise: a tangle of greenery spread
underneath the oranges, hanging like yellow trimming on a green fabric,
choking the vines and a few scarlet geraniums. Labour, in such indolent
and self-possessed acres, was a crude and gauche idea.
The greybeard with the marmoset face and leathern apron let us out at the
red door: he had a history. His master, a prosperous Moor, once offered
to free him: the old slave refused the offer, on the score that he was
quite content as he was. However, his master urged him to accept, and he
was eventually given his freedom. But later on the master lost all his
money, and ruin was before him. His old slave came back. "See here, my
master; here am I. Take me; sell me"; and he finally persuaded the man to
sell him. He seemed contented enough as the property of the French
Consul, who is a Moor.
We passed a party of closely veiled women, as we strolled citywards,
taking advantage of a break in the wet weather to visit their gardens,
carrying a great key, and accompanied by two or three ink-black slaves,
fine upstanding women, well fed and clothed, looking good-tempered to a
fault, whose children, by the same husband and master, would rank equally
with those of the wives.
Mohammedan women, though veiled and supervised, have at least their
gardens to saunter out to and visit when the tracks allow. Jewesses in
Morocco deserve infinitely more pity. Their one recreation seemed to
consist in walking as far as the Jewish cemetery, ten minutes outside the
Gate of the Tombs, and attending to the gravestones of their friends.
The cemetery is gradually absorbing one side of a rough red-earthed hill;
it has no fence of any description round it, and the flat pale-blue and
white tombstones spread over the ground look in the distance like so much
washing out to dry. The stones are all alike, oblong lozenges, inscribed
in Hebrew.
Here, especially on Fridays, the women's day, Jewesses congregate,
flocking along the cemetery road--the mourners in ponderous black skirts,
vast breadths of crimson silk let into the fronts and embroidered with
gold, white shawls over head and forehead, a yellow sash-end edged with
red appearing behind, and completing their mourning. Some of the shawls
are family heirlooms, and only parted with for five-pound notes.
Loud checks and gaudy colours adorn the Rahels, Donahs, Zulicas, and
Miriams not in mourning, as well as the white shawls; and the procession
troops to the cemetery, sallow, sad-eyed daughters of Jacob, talking a
mixture of Arabic and Spanish, with a few English and Shillah words
thrown in.
Of all life's unfortunates, the Jew in Morocco was once, next to the
negro in the West Indies, the most persecuted and degraded of God's
creatures.
In Tangier and the seaport towns, where the Christian representatives
countenance and support him, the Jew, subject to certain restrictions, is
in the present day a flourishing member of the community; but in the
interior his fate is still a hard one.
There is a Jewish tradition that when Shalmaneser, King of Assyria,
conquered the Israelites, the tribe of Naphthali took refuge in the
interior of Africa, and spread to Morocco. Jewish tombstones are
certainly to be found dating as far back as twelve hundred years, and one
synagogue possesses fragments of the Old Testament written on parchment,
while there is a population of from four to five thousand Jews in the
Atlas Mountains who have lived there since time immemorial.
Perhaps the wandering Jew merely drifted into Morocco just as he drifts
all over the universe, and he would have taken refuge in North Africa
more particularly when Spanish persecution became intolerable.
Once in Morocco, the Moors permitted the Jews to remain because they were
useful to them; but upon certain conditions. They are confined to a
certain quarter of the city--the Jews' Quarter, the Ghetto in
fact--which is shut and locked by a gate at sunset, barring them from the
outer world. In their own quarter they may do as they like, except ride a
horse; the horse is considered too noble an animal to be ridden by the
Jew: outside they may not ride at all, not even a mule, but are obliged
to trudge barefoot through the slush of the rest of the city, summer and
winter. They are compelled to wear one costume--a long black gabardine
and a black skull-cap. Few Jewesses care to leave their quarters by
themselves, for fear of insult. No synagogues or public places of worship
are allowed them, and they must address Moors as _Sidi_, or "My lord."
But these customs are fast dying out. There is one which universally
obtains: the Jews' Quarter is known as the _Mellah_; Mellah means "salt"
in Arabic,--the Jews are compelled to salt the heads of conquered tribes
killed in battle, and of criminals, which are afterwards nailed on the
city walls as trophies and warnings.
In Tetuan the Jews are influential and well treated: many of them wear
European clothes. On Saturday--the Jewish Sabbath--a young masher (a
Mordejai, or Baruch, or Isaac) would boast a pair of brand-new yellow
shoes and white socks, but wear at the same time a dove-coloured
gabardine down to his heels and a mauve sash round his waist.
Claret-coloured gabardines were fashionable, and a black skull-cap
inevitable.
Though Tetuan was lax and liberal in its treatment of the Israelites,
wealthy families of whom it possessed, the Mellah was at once the
noisiest and filthiest quarter of the city, teeming with children (unlike
the Moorish quarters, where there are few), who played and fought,
laughed and cried, by fifties down the three principal arteries of the
quarter, whose few feet of walking-space were lined with small and dirty
greengrocers' and butchers' shops, their stock-in-trade encrusted with
flies. On hot days the Mellah stank; on wet it was deep in black slime.
Once upon a time it ran close to the Jama-el-Kebeer; and when a hundred
years ago the Sultan who had built the big mosque sent his envoy to
examine it, all was approved of except the proximity of the Jews'
Quarter. "Can a mosque be admired near Jews?" was speedily answered by
the Tetuanites, who turned the Israelites neck and crop out of house and
home, giving them another piece of ground walled in and sufficiently
removed.
The sons of Abraham are only tolerated all the world over. As a nation,
Moors loathe them. To a pig, which they count "unclean," they give the
epithet of _jew_: out pig-sticking, when the pig breaks, the beaters
shout, "The jew! the jew!" To begin with, having forced his presence on
an unwilling people, the Jew retains his own exclusiveness, neither
marries a Moor nor eats with a Moor, nor treats him as anything else
except unclean. Not only this, but by unscrupulous cunning Jews contrive
to exercise a maddening oppression over a people with whom they have
chosen to cast in their lot, swindling, extorting money, and playing a
hundred low tricks upon the very race on the produce of whose labour they
live: at the same time their exasperating patience and cringing humility,
court contempt and insult.
[Illustration: _Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._]
A STREET IN THE JEWS' QUARTER, TETUAN.
[_To face p. 116._]
The poorest Moor in Tetuan is a gentleman: the richest Jew is not. But he
has his good points: a great sense of brotherhood, a strong bond of
freemasonry among the Jewish nation, undaunted energy, and an unshaken
faith in their religion are all admirable points in themselves. Energy in
Tetuan was concentrated in the Mellah. The best workmen were all Jews. A
hundred things were sold by them which no Moor made.
Thus in their Ghetto live the Chosen People, the Separate People, of
strange and ancient customs,--leaving the hair uncut for a year after a
relative's death, sitting on the floor, and not on a chair, for a week
after; twisting a pocket-handkerchief round the waist on the Sabbath in
order to save "the work" of carrying it; slitting the button-hole of the
waistcoat in time of distress instead of "rending the garment"; eating
_adafina_ on the Sabbath, an indigestible dish of hard-boiled eggs, meat,
and potatoes prepared overnight and left on the fire till next morning.
There is no end to ceremonials throughout a Jew's life: the first at his
circumcision, the next when his hair is cut for the first time, the next
when he goes to the synagogue for the first time, and so on.
When a Jew was buried in Tetuan, the uncoffined body, wrapped in sheets
on a wooden bier, might only be borne out of the city by the
_Báb-el-Je'f_, literally the Gate of the Unclean Dead--that is, the Jews'
Gate.
The mourners howled and the male relatives cried aloud; friends followed,
talking and smoking cigarettes. It happened sometimes that the grave was
not ready when the cortège reached the cemetery, and that the party would
sit down on the hillside while it was lengthened and deepened; from time
to time the body would be measured with a walking-stick, and the result
compared with the grave.
It is impossible to write about the Jews and omit one certain point.
Before the traveller has lived a week in Morocco he begins to hear of
_protection_, and he carries with him vague words--"protected Jews" and
"protected Moors"--which one sentence can explain. _Protection_ means
that a European living in Morocco, a Portuguese, a Frenchman, an
Englishman--it matters not--has it in his power to make the Jew or the
Moor desiring protection a nominal citizen of that country, Portugal or
France or what not, and can allow him the rights of a citizen and the
protection of the same; while it follows that the Sultan and the Moorish
Government have no more power to touch him than they have to touch a
French or an English subject, the protected Jew or Moor being outside
their jurisdiction, and only answerable to the consul of that country
which has given him protection, whether Germany, France, or any other.
The advantage of protection is to guarantee thereby the safety of
property. It was instituted a hundred years and more ago, to obviate the
difficulties and dangers incurred by Europeans in trading with Jews and
Moors in a country so badly governed as Morocco. Supposing that a
European went into partnership and traded with a Jew or a Moor who was
unprotected, in course of time, when the Jew or Moor became rich, the
Moorish Government would hear of it, and set to work systematically to
bleed him. Naturally the European partner would lose money in the general
robbery. Therefore _protection_.
There is scarcely a Jew of property in Morocco who is not protected, and
there are hundreds and hundreds of protected Moors; but though many Moors
have enjoyed security for themselves and their belongings by this means,
others less fortunate, more especially some years ago, have only escaped
the talons of Moorish despotism to fall into the clutches of
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