South-south-west, a little westerly with a cloudy sky, and with long rollers setting into the harbour of Tangier, and the date October 1st in the last year of supposititious grace. The old white town, built round the bay with the Kasbah upon its hill, and the mosque tower just shining darkly against the electric light, for Tangier passed from darkness to electric light, no gas or oil lamps intervening, gave the effect as of a gleaming horse-shoe in the dark. Outside the harbour, moored twice as far away as the French ironclad, swung the Rabat at anchor, for the captain, a Catalan of the true Reus breed, was bound to supplement his lack of seamanship with extra caution. Towards her we made our way late in the evening in a boat manned by four strong-backed Jews, and seated silently, for it was the first stage of a journey concerning which each of our friends had added his wisest word of disencouragement. Nothing so spurs a man upon a journey as the cautions of his friends, “dangerous,” “impossible,” “when you get there nothing worth seeing,” and the like, all show you plainly that the thing is worth the venture, for you know the world is ever proud to greet the conqueror with praise and flowers, but he has to conquer first. And if he fails, the cautious kindly friend wags his wise head and shakes his moralising finger, thinks you a fool, says so behind your back, but cannot moralise away experience, that chiefest recompense of every traveller. So in the boat besides myself sat Hassan Suleiman Lutaif, a Syrian gentleman, who acted as interpreter, and Haj Mohammed es Swani, a Moor of the Riff pirate breed, short, strong, black-bearded, with a turned-up moustache, and speaking Spanish after the Arab fashion, that is without the particles, and substitution of the gerund for every portion of the verb. El Haj and I were old acquaintances, having made several journeys in Morocco, and being well accustomed to each other’s ways and idiosyncrasies upon the road.
Our bourne was Tarudant, a city in the province of the Sus, but rarely visited by Europeans, and of which no definite account exists by any traveller of repute. Only some hundred and fifty miles from Mogador, it yet continues almost untouched, the only Moorish city to which an air of mystery clings, and it remains the only place beyond the Atlas to the south in which the Sultan has a vestige of authority. [2]
Outside its walls the tribesmen live the old Arab life, all going armed, constantly fighting, each man’s hand against his neighbour, and, therefore, in a measure, raised against himself. And yet a land of vines, of orange gardens, olive yards, plantations of pomegranates, Roman remains, rich mines; but cursed “with too much powder,” as the Arabs say, and therefore doomed, up to the present day, to languish without pauperism, prostitution, and the modern vices which, in more favoured lands, have long replaced the old-world vices which man brought with him into the old world. Even my friends were all agreed that to reach Tarudant in European clothes was quite impossible. Thus a disguise became imperative. After a long discussion I determined to impersonate a Turkish doctor travelling with his “taleb” [3a]—that is, scribe—to see the world and write his travels in a book. [3b] God, the great doctor, but under Him His earthly vicegerents, practicants, practitioners, with or without diploma, throughout the east, enjoy considerable respect; they kill, they cure, and still God has the praise. No one asks where they studied, and if faith in his powers helps a doctor in his trade, the east of all lands should be most congenial to all those who live by lancet, purge, and human faith. My stock of medicines was of the most homeric type, quinine and mercury, some Seidlitz powders, eye wash for ophthalmia, almost, in fact, as simple as that of the old Scotch doctor who doctored with what he styled the two simples, that is, laudanum and calomel.
The multitudinous dialects of Arabic, the constant travelling, either upon the pilgrimage or for the love of travel, which seems inherent in the Arab, render it possible for a European occasionally to pass unrecognised, even although his stock of Arabic is as exiguous as was my own. Behold us, then, approaching the Rabat, a steamer of the Linea Tras-Atlantica EspaÑola, bound for Mogador, some five days’ journey below Tangier, the point at which I intended to put on Moorish clothes, buy mules and horses, engage a guide, and set out for Tarudant, the city where La Caba, Count Julian’s daughter (she whose beauty tempted Don Rodrigo, and to avenge whose honour her father sold Spain to the Moors), lies buried, though how she came to die there is to historians unknown. On board the ship there was no light, no look-out, and the accommodation ladder was triced up for the night, stewards were asleep, and the long narrow vessel dipped her nose into the rollers, rolling and heaving in the dark, whilst we in Spanish, English, Arabic, and Portuguese rang all the changes upon ship ahoy. At last a sulky, sleepy quartermaster deigned to let down the ladder, and we scrambled upon deck.
Next morning found us off Arzila, the Julia Constantia Zilis of the Romans, a small, walled town lost among orange gardens, and girt by walls built by the Portuguese. Over the gateway the half-obliterated arms of Portugal can still be seen, but mouldering to decay, as is the country that they represent. Close to the walls rises the tomb of the Saint of Arzila; the white dome springs from a dense thicket of palmetto, dwarf rhododendron, berberis, and aromatic shrubs, a tiny stream bordered by oleanders (bitter as is an oleander is a proverb in the land) runs past it; above the dome and red-tiled roof two palms keep watch, and whisper in the wind the secrets palm trees know, and tell each other of the East, and of the various changes, Arab and Berber, Moor and Portuguese, they have seen during the course of their slow growth and long extended days. Columbus visited the place; the battle of Trafalgar was fought a few leagues off, and an old shepherd, still living where he was born, above the lighthouse on Cape Spartel, remembers to have seen it as a boy when he lay out upon the hills tending his goats.
Inside the town decay and ruin, heaps of garbage, a palace falling here, a hovel there. A town almost entirely given up to Jews, who carry on their business fleecing the Moors, and still complaining when at last the cent. per cented victim turns and rends. The best-known citizen is Mr. Ben Chiton, an Israelite of the best type, old, and white bearded, and with round, beady eyes, like an old rat, consul of seven nations, with all the seven flag-staffs on his hospitable roof. Dressed in the Jewish gown girt round the waist, wearing his slippers over white cotton stocking’s, and the black cup badge of the servitude of all his race throughout Morocco. His house is neat and clean, almost beyond the power of endurance, Rahel and Mordejai labouring incessantly with broom and whitewash brush, and he himself talking incessantly in the Toledan [5] dialect and thick Jewish accent, of politics, of kings, ambassadors, and as to whether England and France will go to war over the question of the Niger and the like, whilst all the time he presses brandy on you in a lordly glass holding about a pint, which you must swallow no matter what the hour, the while he calls upon the God of Isaac to bear him witness that the house is yours, and shows you, with just pride, the chair on which he says the Prince of Wales once sat, although historians do not seem to chronicle his passage through the town. An Israelite of Israelites, a worthy Jew, come of the tribe of Judah as he says, one to whose house all travellers are welcome; loved by his family with veneration, as the heads of Jewish houses are. Long may he prosper, and may his roof grow broad as a phylactery, and become strong enough to bear the flag-staffs of all the nations upon earth, and his house long remain to show the curious what most probably a Jewish house in Spain was like before the Catholic Kings, in their consuming thirst for unity, expelled the Jews, sweeping at one fell blow commerce and usury out of their sacred land, and setting up a faith so uniform that to be saved by it was so easy that one wonders any one was lost. A few hours’ steaming brings us to Larache (El Areish), once a great stronghold of the Moorish pirates who infested the narrow straits, and who at times ran as far north as Plymouth, westward to Naples, and made the coasts of France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal their especial hunting grounds.
Three of their galleys still lie rotting in the Luccos, and at low tide their ribs can still be seen projecting from the sand. The city, painted red, white, and blue, and the whole scale of tints from brown to Naples yellow stands on a hill, and is to-day the haunt of consuls of all nations, who have replaced the pirates of the times gone by. Consuls of France and Spain, of Portugal, of Montenegro, Muscat, Costa Rica, Brazil, United States, their flag-staffs rear aloft from almost every house-top, and their great flags, large in proportion to the smallness of the state they represent, flap in the breeze; the caps of liberty, the rising suns, and other trade-marks of the various states seeming to wink and to encourage one another in the attempt to be the first to show the glories of the commercial system to the benighted Moors. All round the town the walls and ramparts run, built by the Portuguese during the period when they possessed the place. At the west side a ditch remains, now turned into a garden, and in it artichokes, egg-plants, and pimentos grow, and the green stuffs of various kinds for which the Moors are famous, so much so that in the times they lived in Spain, it was a current saying of a good farmer “that he grows as many egg-plants in his garden as a Morisco gardener.” [6] Just at the corner of the ditch the walls run into as sharp an angle as the bows of a torpedo boat, and on the ramparts usually is seen a colony of storks, who build their nests amongst the mouldering gabions, ravelines, and counter-scarps, and sit and chatter on the brass guns and carronades, with curling snakes around the touch-holes, and with inscription setting forth their date, the place of casting, and the legend “Viva Portugal!” Their gunners are long dead, their carriages long mouldered into dust, and the storks left to sit and mock the pomps and circumstance of foolish war.
From the town sallied out (in 1578) the army under Don Sebastian, who met his fate fighting the infidel at Alcazar el Kebir, near a long bridge over a marshy stream known as Wad-el-Mhassen. The battle still is called amongst the Moors “The Three Kings’ Fight,” for besides Don Sebastian fell two Moorish kings. With Don Sebastian there fell the flower of the nobility of Portugal, and by his death the crown passed quickly to Phillip II. (the Prudent) of Spain, who knew far better than to embark in expeditions into Africa. The battle was memorable, for Abdel-Malik, King of Fez, died of exhaustion on the field, and Don Sebastian, rather than survive disgrace, plunged, as did Argentine at Bannockburn, into the thickest of the fight, and fell or disappeared, for though his faithful servant, Resende, claimed to have seen his body, so much doubt existed of his death that the strange sect known as Sebastianists arose in Portugal. Their tenet was that Don Sebastian was still alive, but kept in durance by the Moors, and in remote and old-world villages believers linger even to the present day. I myself saw a sort of pterodactyle, years ago in Portugal, a strange old man dressed in black clothes, and wrapped, in heat and cold alike, in a thick cloak. The people of the village called him mad, but, looking at the thing impartially, madness and faith are the same thing, the only difference being as to the mountain which the believer wishes to remove.
Lala Mamouna, the female saint who guards Larache from pestilence and famine, sudden death, and the few simple ailments which Arabs suffer from, has her white crenelated sanctuary on a hill which overlooks the sea, and to her tomb women who wish for children to carry on the misery of life, repair, and pray or chatter with each other, and no doubt the saint is just as tolerant of scandal as are the wise old men who sun their stomachs at the windows of a club.
At this accursed port, Larache, of the Beni-Aros, after a signal had been made by a man mounted on a mule, who held one end of a row of flags, the other being made fast to a post, a great annoyance fell upon the blameless captain of the good ship Rabat. The bar at El Areish is three times out of four impassable when steamers call, as here the river Luccos [8] meets the tide, and such a surf gets up that as the people have no surf boats, communication from a vessel to the shore is always dangerous, and not frequently impossible. This, to an ordinary steamer, means either delay or loss of cargo, generally the latter, for when the bar is bad it often takes three or four days to become passable, and as the anchorage is most precarious a south-east gale causes great danger to a vessel lying in the open roads. On this occasion, though, the sea was like a sheet of ice, smooth, shining, and the bar just marked by a thin line of foam. To the astonishment of the uninitiated passengers the fury of the captain knew no bounds, the officers turned sulky, and the one man on board who seemed unmoved was the unlucky priest, who shipped to please the owners of the line, or to appease the folly of the nation, or for “empeÑo,” [9] or for some other reason at present not made known, passed all his time in fishing when in port, or when at sea in studying counterpoint, and playing on a piano which was tuned about the time Queen Isabella was expelled from Spain.
A narrow, nine-knot crank and Clyde-built steamer was the Rabat, full five-and-twenty years of age, boilers too small, but engines sound, and the whole vessel kept as clean as holystone and paint could clean, brass work all shining, and herself ever a-rolling like a swing-boat at a fair, sailed out of Barcelona, owned by the Spanish Trans-Atlantic Company (Chairman: the Marquis of Comillas), and subsidised by the Spanish Government to carry mails down the Morocco coast in order that the majesty of Spain might fill the eyes and strike the imagination of the Moorish dogs, and show them that the Spaniards were on a level with the other nations, such as the Inglis, Frances, el Bortokez (Portuguese), el Brus (the Germans, that is, Prussians), and the Austrians, called by the Moors el Nimperial.
Captain from Reus, taciturn, and shaved each Sunday when the priest said mass, for it is decent for a man to stand before his God with a clean chin, at other times a stubble on his face on which a man might strike a match, so that the match had not been made in Spain. Four officers: an Andalusian, two Catalans, and a Basque; two engineers, and the aforementioned priest, together with a crew of eighteen men and half a dozen stewards, served to get the craft, whose utmost measurement could not be above twelve hundred tons, across the sea.
The Pope had granted plenary indulgence in the following terms: “for looking to the circumstances, the weather, etc., I deign to grant full dispensation according to the ecclesiastic law, from fasting and from abstinence (from meat) to all those who by reason, either of their profession or as passengers, find themselves on board the vessels of this Company, and that for three years’ time, excepting (if it can be done without too great an inconvenience) on Good Friday and on the Vigils of the Apostles, Saint Peter and Saint Paul, also on Christmas Day and any other day which may be opportune . . . on which three days I also dispense from sin the passengers and crew if any difficulty unforeseen by me makes their compliance an impossibility.” Given “en Vaticano” and through the Bishop of Madrid and Alcala under whose Ægis it appears that Spanish ships all sail armed with this plenary indulgence; manned with the priest and men and duly subsidised, it could not be expected that the Rabat cared much for passengers, still less for cargo; so when the lumbering “barcazas” approached the ship, curses loud, guttural, and deep were heard on every side. The unwilling sailors, mostly Valencians and Catalans, stood by to work the donkey engine; but their fears were vain, for it appeared that all the cargo was but four bales of Zatar (Marjoram) for the Habana, and a few thousand melons for the Sultan’s camp. The bales of Zatar soon were dumped into the hold, but five long hours were wasted passing the melons up from hand to hand; in counting them, recounting them, in storming, and the whole time a noise like Babel going on, shouting of Moors, cursing of Spaniards, and the confusion ten times intensified because no man could speak a word the other understood. The Rabat having been only five years upon the coast, no one on board could speak a word of Arabic. Why should they, did they not speak Christian, and are Spaniards and sailors to be supposed to burrow in grammars as if they were schoolboys or mere Englishmen. A miserable Jew, fearfully sea-sick, balancing up in the gunwale of a boat, in a mixed jargon of Arabic and Portuguese kept tale after a fashion, of the melons, and at last the vessel put to sea amid the curses of the passengers, and having earned the name amongst the Arabs of Abu Batigh, the Father of the Melons. Amongst the Arabs almost every man is Father of something or some quality, and lucky he who does not find himself styled, Father of the “ginger beard,” or of “bad breath,” or any other personal or moral failing, peculiarity, or notable defect.
Once more we urge our nine-knot course, and now find time to observe our fellow-passengers. In the cabin a German lady and her daughters are enduring agonies of sea-sickness, on the way to join her husband at Rabat. [11] The husband, known as the “mojandis,” that is, engineer to the Sultan, proves, when we meet him, to be a cheery polyglot blasphemer, charged with the erection of some forts at the entrance to the harbour of Rabat. For a wonder the bar of the river Bu-Regeh proves passable, and the German lady and her husband can land, which is, it seems, a piece of luck, for the bar is known as the most dangerous of all the coast. Rabat, perhaps the most picturesquely situated of any city in Morocco, stands on a hill underneath which the river runs, and the spray from the bar is drifted occasionally into the houses like a shower of snow. Here is the richest colony of the Spanish Jews, and here the best Morisco [12a] families took refuge after the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. The town is estimated to contain some 20,000 inhabitants, and it is one of the four official capitals; [12b] the Sultan has a palace with enormous gardens on the outskirts of the town. Just opposite is built Salee, called by the Moors “SalÁ,” famous for having given its name to the most enterprising of the pirates of the coast in days gone by. To-day it is a little white, mouldering place, baked in the fierce sun, or swept by south-west gales, according to the season and the time of year. The inhabitants are still renowned for their fanaticism, and the traveller who passes through the place is seldom able to dismount, but traverses the place trying to look as dignified as possible amid a shower of curses, a sporadic curse or two, and some saliva if he ventures within range of mouth. Many a poor Christian has worked his life out in the construction of the walls, and the superior whiteness of the inhabitants would seem to show that some of the Christian dogs have left their blood amongst the people of the place. Men still alive can tell of what a scourge the pirates were, and I myself once knew a venerable lady who in her youth had the distinction of having been taken by a Salee rover; an honour in itself to be compared alone to that enjoyed by ladies who are styled peeresses in their own right. Robinson Crusoe, I think, once landed at the place, and the voyages of imaginary travellers make a place more authentic than the visit of the unsubstantial personages of real life. A little up the river is the deserted city of Schellah, and on the way to it, upon a promontory jutting into the stream, is built the half-finished tower of Hassan, an enormous structure much like the Giralda at Seville, and by tradition said to be built by the same architect who built that tower, and also built the tower of the Kutubich, which, at Morocco city, serves as a landmark in the great plain around. The Giralda and the Kutubich spring from the level of the street, but the Hassan tower excels them both in site, standing as it does upon a cliff, and “looming lofty” [13] as one passes in a boat beneath. Schellah contains the tombs of the Sultans of the Beni Merini dynasty. El Mansur (the victorious) sleeps underneath a carved stone tomb, over which date palms rustle, and by which a little stream sings a perpetual dirge. The tomb is held so sacred that till but lately neither Christians nor Jews could visit it. Even to-day the incursions of the fierce Zimouri, a Berber tribe, render a visit at times precarious. The walls of the town enclose a space of about a mile circumference; sheep, goats, and camels feed inside them, and a footpath leads from one deserted gate-house to the other, a shepherd boy or two play on their reeds, and though the sun beats fiercely on the open space, it looks forlorn and melancholy, and even the green lizards peering from the walls look about timidly, as if they feared to see a ghost. On gates and walls, on ruined tombs and palaces, the lichens grow red after the fashion of hot countries, and the fine stonework, resembling the stucco work of the Alhambra, remains as keen in edge and execution as when the last stroke of the chisel turned it out. Outside the town are olive yards and orange gardens, and one comes upon the long-deserted place with the same feelings as a traveller sees Palenque burst on him out of the forests of Yucatan, or as in Paraguay after a weary following of dark forest trails, the spires of some old Jesuit Mission suddenly appear in a green clearing, as at Jesus or Trinidad, San Cosme Los Apostoles, or any other of the ruined “capillas,” where the bellbird calls amongst the trees, and the inhabitants take off their hats at sunset and sink upon their knees, bearing in their minds the teaching of the Jesuits, whom Charles III. expelled from Spain and from the Indies, to show his liberalism.
Our most important passenger was Don Jose Miravent, the Spanish Consul at Mogador, returning to his post after a holiday; a formal Spaniard of the old school, pompous and kind, able to bombast out a platitude with the air of a philosopher communicating what he supposes truth. At dinner he would square his elbows, and, throwing back his head, inform the world “the Kings of Portugal are now at Caldas”; or if asked about the war in Cuba, say: “War, sir, there is none; true some negroes in the Manigua [14] are giving trouble to our troops, but General Blanco is about to go, and all will soon be over; it is really nothing (no es na), peace will, please God, soon reign upon that lovely land.” At night he would sit talking to his cook, a Spanish woman (the widow of an English soldier), whom he was taking back to Mogador; but though he talked, and she replied for hours most volubly, not for a moment were good manners set aside, nor did the cook presume in any way, and throughout the conversation talked better than most ladies; but the “tertulia” over, straight became a cook again, brought him his tea, calling him “Amo” (master), “Don Jose,” and he quite affably listened to her opinions and ideas of things, which seemed at least as valuable as were his own. A Jewish merchant dressed in the height of Cadiz fashion, and known as Tagir [15a] Isaac, occupied much the same sort of social state on board as does a Eurasian in Calcutta or Bombay. Tall, thin, and up-to-date, he had divested himself almost entirely of the guttural Toledan accent, but the sign of his “election” still remained about his hair, which tended to come off in patches like an old hair trunk, and at the ends showed knotty, as if he suffered from the disease to which so many of his compatriots in Morocco are subject, and which makes each separate hair stand out as if it were alive. [15b]
But, as is often seen even in more ambitious vessels than the Rabat, the passengers of greatest interest were in the steerage. Not that there was a regular steerage as in ocean-going ships, but still, some thirty people went as deck passengers, and amongst them was to be seen a perfect microcosm of the eastern world. Firstly a miserable, pale-faced Frenchman, dressed in a dirty “duster” coat, bed-ticking “pants,” black velvet waistcoat, and blue velvet slippers, with foxes’ heads embroidered on them in yellow beads, his beard trimmed to a point, in what is termed (I think) Elizabethan fashion, and thin white hands, more disagreeable in appearance than if they had been soiled by all the meanest work on earth. His “taifa” [15c] (that is band) consisted of one Spanish girl and two half-French half-Spanish women, whom he referred to as his “company,” and whom he said were to enact “cuadros vivos,” that is “living pictures,” in the various ports. They, less polite than he, called him “el Alcahuete,” which word I leave in Spanish, merely premising (as North Britons say) that it is taken from the Arabic “el Cahueit,” and that the celebrated “Celestina” [16] was perhaps in modern times the finest specimen of the profession in any literature. So whilst our captain read “Jack el Ripero” (it cost him two pesetas when new in Cadiz), I take a glance at the inferior races, who were well represented in the steerage of the ship.
Firstly, I came across a confrÈre in the healing art who hailed from Tunis, a fattish Arab dressed in Algerian trousers, short zouave jacket, red fez, pink and white sash, and watch chain of two carat silver with an imitation seal of glass, brown thread stockings and cheap sand shoes after the pattern to be seen at Margate. “Tabib numero Wahed,” that is an A1 doctor, so he says, has studied in Stamboul, where he remained nine years studying and diligently noting down all that he learnt. But, curiously enough, all that he now remembers of the Turkish language is the word “Mashallah,” which he displayed to my bewilderment, until Lutaif, who spoke good Turkish, turned on a flood of pertinent remarks, to which the doctor answered in vile Tunisian Arabic, not having understood a word. Though not a linguist, still a competent practitioner, trepanning people’s heads with ease, and putting in pieces of gourd instead of silver as being lighter, and if the patient died, or by the force of constitution lived through his treatment, the praise was God’s, Allah the great Tabib (doctor), although he sends his delegates to practice on mankind, just in the same way that in the east each man commits his work to some one else to do. At least he said so, and I agree, but fail to see the use of substituting gourd for silver, seeing the vast majority of heads are gourds from birth. Quinine he had, and blistering fluid, with calomel and other simples, and when the Christian quinine ran out, he made more for himself out of the ashes of an oleander stick mixed with burnt scales of fish and dead men’s bones, and found his preparation, which he styled “El quina beladia” (native-made quinine), even more efficacious than the drug from over sea. Also he used the seven herbs, known as the “confirmed herbs,” for tertian fevers, with notable success. A cheerful, not too superstitious son of Æsculapius, taking himself as seriously as if he had had a large brass plate upon his door in Harley Street, and welcomed by his surviving patients in Rabat on our arrival with great enthusiasm. [17a] His wife, a shrouded figure lost in white veils and fleecy shawls, had the dejected air that doctors’ wives often appear to labour under, even in countries where they can rule their husbands openly.
A group of high-class Arabs sat by themselves upon the decks, waited upon by a tall tribesman faced like a camel, and with the handle of his pistol and curved dagger outlined beneath his clothes. This group was composed of sherifs [17b] from Algeria, all high-caste men, dignified, slow, and soft of speech, deliberate in movement, their clothes as white as snow, nails dyed with henna, each with a heavy rosary in his hand, their business somewhat mysterious, but bound to see the Sultan in his camp. Throughout Algeria the sherifs are not allowed to levy contributions from the people openly, but it is said in private, they receive them all the same. Of all the population they are the least contented with French rule, as since the conquest naturally they have fallen somewhat from the position they once occupied, and cannot go about receiving presents for the pains they have taken to preserve their lineage, as they do in Morocco, making themselves a travelling offertory.
All of them wished to know of the late war between the Sultan of Turkey and the “Emperor of the Greeks.” They seemed to think the latter was a descendant of the Paleologi, and asked if it were true the Sultan had killed all the Greeks except fifteen, and if these latter had not fled to “Windres” (London) to seek protection from the Great Queen and to advise her to make preparations against the “Jehad” [18] to come. With them they carried sundry hide bags of gold with which they said they wished to purchase permission from the Sultan of Morocco to export grain, as the harvest in Algeria had not been good owing to locusts, and the lack of rain. Of course this may have been the object of their visit, but since the Greco-Turkish war all the Mohammedan world is on the stir, and men are travelling about from place to place disseminating news, and all the talk is on the victories of the Turks, and on the rising of the tribes in India; in fact, a feeling seems to be abroad that the Christian power is on the wane, and that their own religion once again may triumph and prevail.
At Casa Blanca—called by the Arabs Dar el Baida, that is, the White House—the sherifs go ashore, and I last saw them seated on their bags, outside the waterport, their backs against the ramparts of the town, their eyes apparently fixed upon nothing though seeing everything, telling their beads and waiting patiently, enduring sun and flies until their servant should return and tell them of a lodging fit for persons of their quality. Of all the towns on the Morocco coast Dar el Baida has the most business, the country at the back of it is fertile and grows much wheat, the tribes are fairly prosperous, and the best horses of the country come from the districts known as Abda and Dukala, a few leagues from the place.
Consuls abound, of course, so do hyenas—that is, outside the town—but both are harmless and furnish little sport, except the Consul of America, my good friend Captain Cobb. He, if my memory fails me not, piled up his brig some thirty years ago upon the beach in the vicinity, liked the climate, became a Consul, naturally, and to this day has never returned to his sorrowing family in Portland, Maine.
In thirty years tradition says he has not learned a word of Arabic with the exception of the word “Balak” (look out), which he pronounces “Balaaker,” and yet holds conversations by the hour in Arabic, and both the patients seem contented with their lot. All the attractions to be met with in the town do not detain me; what takes my fancy most is to see tribesmen from the country, armed to the teeth, and balancing a gun full six feet long upon their saddles, sit on their horses bargaining at shops in the same fashion I have seen the Gauchos at a camp-town in South America, their horses nodding their heads and looking half asleep, their owners seated with one leg passed round the pommel of the saddle, and passing hours seated as comfortably as in a chair.
Back to the steamer in a boat, and at the waterport we pass a group of Jews washing themselves, in preparation for a feast. Lutaif ranks as a wit for saying that the Jews will defile the sea, for any wit is small enough to bait a Jew with; and the Arabs, though they will say the same things of a Christian behind his back, all laugh consumedly when a Christian takes their side against a Jew.
On board the uneasy ship, tossing like a buck-jumper in the Atlantic swell, we find more Oriental items ready to hand. The first a tall, thin, cuckoldy-looking Arab knave, dressed in a suit of slop-made European clothes, his trousers half-a-foot too short, his boots unblacked, and himself closely watched by two Franciscan Friars. [20a] It appeared he was a convert. Now, in Morocco a convert is a most rare and curious animal, and he is usually not a great credit to his capturers. On this occasion, it appears, the convert had been dallying with the Protestants, had given them hopes, had led them on, and at the last, perhaps because he found the North-British water [20b] of their baptism too cold for him, or perchance because the Friars gave a dollar more, had fallen away to Rome. However, there he was, a veritable “brand,” a sheep, who had come into one of the folds, leaving the other seven million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand and ninety-nine still straying about Morocco, steeped in the errors of Mohammedanism. His captors were a gentlemanlike, extremely handsome, quiet Castilian, who to speak silver (hablar en plata) seemed a little diffident about his prize, and went about after the fashion of a boy in Texas who has caught a skunk. The other guardian had no doubts. He was a sturdy Catalonian lay-brother, who pointed to the “brand” with pride, and told us, with a phrase verging upon an oath, that he was glad the Protestants had had their noses well put out of joint. The victim was a merry sort of knave, who chewed tobacco, spoke almost every language in the world, had travelled, and informed me, when I asked him where he was going, that the “Frayliehs” (Friars) were taking him to Cadiz “to have the water put upon his head.” He seemed an old hand at the business, and recognised my follower, Swani, as a friend, and they retired to talk things over, with the result that, e’er night fell, the “convert” was in a most unseemly state and singing Spanish songs in which Dolores, Mercedillas, and other “Chicas” figured largely, and were addressed in terms sufficient to upset a convent of Franciscan Friars. Peace to his baptism, and may the Protestants, when their turn comes to mark a sheep, secure as fine a specimen as the one I saw going to Cadiz to have “the water put upon his head.” This missionary question and the decoying of God-fearing men out of the ranks of the religion they were born in, is most thorny in every country like Morocco, where the religion of the land is one to which the people are attached. An earnest missionary, a pious publican, a minister of the crown who never told a lie, are men to praise God for, continually. Honour to all of them, labouring in their vocations and striving after truth as it appears to them. I, for my part, have found honest and earnest men both in the Scottish missions in Morocco and in the ranks of the Franciscan Friars from Spain. Amongst both classes, and in the missions sent by other churches, good men abound; and in so far as these good men confine themselves to giving medicines, healing the sick, and showing by the example of their lives that even Christians (whom Arabs all believe are influenced in all they do by money) can live pure, self-denying lives for an idea, the good they do is great; but that by living, as they do, amongst the Moors, they do more good than they could do at home by living the same lives, that I deny. Amongst Mohammedans plenty of people lead good lives, as good appears to them—that is, they follow out the precepts of their faith, give to the poor, do not lend money upon usury; and, to be brief, practice morality, [22] and believe by doing so that they are sacrificing to some fetish, invented by mankind, to make men miserable. When, though, it comes to marking sheep—the object, after all, for which a missionary is sent—I never saw a statement of accounts which brought the balance out upon the credit side. The excuse is, generally, “Oh, give us time; these things work slowly;”—as indeed they do; and if the missions think it worth their while to send men out to doctor syphilis, cure gonorrhoea, and to attend to every form of the venereal disease, their field is wide; but if they wish to convert Mohammedans let them produce a balance-sheet, and show how many of the infidel they have converted in the last twenty years. Not that I blame them for endeavouring to perform what seems impossible, or try to detract an atom from the praise due to them for their efforts, but when so many savages still exist in Central Africa and in East London—not to speak of Glasgow and the like—it seems a pity to expend upon a people, civilised according to their needs, so much good faith, which might be used with good effect upon less stony ground.Prophets, reformers, missionaries, “illuminated” folk, and those who leave their homes to preach a faith, no matter what it is, are people set apart from the flat-footed ordinary race of human kind; of such are missionaries and the dream world they live in. How many an honest, hard-working young man, who gets his education how he can, by pinching, screwing, reading at bookstalls, paying for instruction to those who live perhaps almost as poorly as he himself, thinks when he reads of Livingstone, Francisco Xavier, the Jesuits of Paraguay, and Father Damien, that he, too, would like to take his cross upon his back and follow them. It seems so fine (and is so splendid in reality) a self-denying life, lived far away from comforts, without books; Bible and gun in hand, to show the heathen all the glories of our faith.
Then comes reality, mocker of all best impulses, and the enthusiastic spirit finds itself bound in a surgery (say in Morocco city), finds work increasing, and his dreams of preaching to a crowd of dusky catechumens dressed in white, with flowers in their hair, and innocence in every heart, turned to Dead Sea Fruit, as with motives misunderstood, with caustic, mercury, sulphate of copper and the rest, he burns the fetid ulcer, or washes sores, and for reward can say after a term of years that he has made the people of the place look upon European clothes with less aversion than when first he came.
If the mere fact of getting accustomed to the sight of Europeans were a thing worthy of self-congratulation, then indeed missionaries in Morocco have achieved much. But as I see the matter Europeans are a curse throughout the East. What do they bring worth bringing, as a general rule?
Guns, gin, powder, and shoddy cloths, dishonest dealing only too frequently, and flimsy manufactures which displace the fabrics woven by the women; new wants, new ways, and discontent with what they know, and no attempt to teach a proper comprehension of what they introduce; these are the blessings Europeans take to Eastern lands. Example certainly they do set, for ask a native what he thinks of us, and if he has the chance to answer without fear, ’tis ten to one he says, Christian and cheat are terms synonymous. Who that has lived in Arab countries, and does not know that fear, and fear alone, makes the position of the Christian tolerable. Christ and Mohammed never will be friends; their teaching, lives, and the conditions of the different peoples amongst whom they preached make it impossible; even the truce they keep is from the teeth outwards, and their respective followers misunderstand each other quite as thoroughly as when a thousand years ago they came across each other’s path for the first time. But if the Arabs constitute a stony vineyard, the Jews are worse, and years ago when first the missionaries appeared in the coast towns of southern Barbary, they fleshed their maiden weapons on the Jews. It struck the chosen people that the best weapon to employ against their new tormentors was that of irony, and so they cast about to find a nickname calculated at the same time to ridicule and wound, and found it, made it stick and rankle, so that to-day every new missionary on landing has to accommodate his shoulders to the burden of a peculiarly comic cross.
Almost all Europeans in Morocco must of necessity be merchants, if not they must be consuls, for there is hardly any other industry open to them to choose. The missionaries bought and sold nothing, they were not consuls; still they ate and drank, lived in good houses, and though not rich, yet passed their lives in what the Jews called luxury. So they agreed to call them followers of Epicurus, for, as they said, “this Epicurus was a devil who did naught but eat and drink.” The nickname stuck, and changed into “Bikouros” by the Moors, who thought it was a title of respect, became the name throughout Morocco for a missionary. One asks as naturally for the house of Epicurus on coming to a town as one asks for the “Chequers” or the “Bells” in rural England. Are you “Bikouros”? says a Moor, and thinks he does you honour by the inquiry; but the recipients of the name are fit to burst when they reflect on their laborious days spent in the surgery, their sowing seed upon the marble quarries of the people’s hearts, and that the Jews in their malignity should charge upon them by this cursed name, that they live in Morocco to escape hard work, and pass their time in eating and in quaffing healths a thousand fathoms deep.
Often at night, awake and looking at the stars and trying to remember which was which, I have broken into laughter when I thought upon the name, and laughed until the Arabs all sat up alarmed, for he who laughs at night laughs at his hidden wickedness, or else because a devil has possessed his soul.
Cargo, of course, was not expected in the Rabat, and as by four o’clock in the afternoon the last few passengers had come aboard, it might have been expected that the ship would put to sea. Not so, the captain gave it as his opinion that it was best to wait till midnight so as to arrive in Mazagan by breakfast time; so for eight hours we waited in sight of Casa Blanca, swinging up and down, giddy and miserable, and in the intervals of misery tried to fish.
Next morning we were off Djedida (New Town), as the Arabs call Mazagan. A yellowish town, peopled by Jews, Moors, and innumerable yellow dogs. Camels blocked all the streets, and above the consul’s flag-staffs a single palm-tree reared its head, fluttering its feathers over the sandstone walls built by the Portuguese in the days when they were navigators, adventurers, and over-ran the world, after the fashion of the modern Englishman. The batteries built by the Moors or by the Portuguese are most ingeniously constructed to expose the gunners, and to batter down the town they are supposed to guard. Outside a street of beehive-looking huts of reeds, each with its little garden, its ten or twelve dogs, thirteen or fourteen children, three or four donkeys, and a score of mangy fowls, and with a bush or two of castor oil plants sticking up in the sand at every corner of the street, gives quite an air of equatorial Africa or Paraguay.
Right in the middle of the Plaza a squadron of some fifty Arab irregular soldiers guard about two hundred prisoners. These latter, heavily ironed and half-starved, were of the tribe of the Rahamna, who for the past twelve months had been in open rebellion against their liege lord the Sultan, Abdul Aziz, whom may God defend. The system in Morocco when a Sultan dies is for the tribes who think they may be strong enough, to refuse to pay all taxes, and then the Sultan is obliged to come in person with an army to discuss the matter, to fight, and if he wins send baskets full of heads to be stuck up on the chief cities’ gates, and squads of prisoners like the band I saw in Mazagan to rot in prison till death relieves them of their miserable lives. Every one of the prisoners in the Plaza must have known that any chance of his release was small, indeed, they knew they were going to be half-starved, either in a dark cellar-like prison, or in an open courtyard exposed to sun and cold, for the Morocco Government allows no rations to its prisoners, and those who have no friends soon die of hunger. [26] Still they were not apparently much put about. People stood talking to them, flies settled on their eyelids, dogs licked their sores, horses and camels jostled against them, the sun poured on their heads, and still they did not suffer in the way our prisoners suffer, for they were not cut off in sentiment from those, their brothers in Mohammed, who stood round and talked to them to pass the time. Pious old ladies, young philanthropists and novelists in search of “copy” who visit Tangier go into “visibilio,” as the Italians say, over the prisoners in the prison, with its flat horseshoe arches at the door, so similar in style to those at Toledo in the old synagogue, now turned into a church. [27]
All those good people and each journalist, all have their word about the darkness, chains, and the want of air; the misery, the crowding at the door to take the chocolate (which should have been tobacco) which the pious lady brings. Each tourist sends home his badly written paragraph to his favourite paper, and goes away lamenting over the barbarism of Mohammedans; and, if he is a “glorious empire” man, thinks of the time when, under the Union Jack, the Moorish prisoner shall have a number and a cell, tin pan to wash in, Bible to read, and all shall be apparelled in Queen Victoria’s livery, until they purge themselves of their contempt and promise to amend their naughty lives.
One thing they all forget when writing of a Moorish prison, that, in spite of dirt, of chains, of want of air, of herding all together in a den, they are happier than prisoners with us, for they can speak, exhale their misery in conversation; they still are men, and leave the prison men, instead of devils, hating all mankind like those who, under our inhuman silent plan, eat out their miserable “terms” cursing the fools who in their foolish kindness hit on a device to turn men into stone. [28] And so I leave the prisoners in the square, thinking as an old Arab says: “It looks as if the Sultan wished to finish with all the Mussulmen.” At any rate, since the last Sultan’s death, three years ago, thousands must have been killed in war, died by starvation, or rotted miserably to death in prisons underneath the ground.
It being a feast day of the Jews all stores were closed in Mazagan, for in Morocco all the retail business is in Jews’ hands, and no religion that I know of seems to have so many days on which men may not work; and therefore it is strange that men have not yet flocked to join their faith.
At last the steamer shakes itself free from the allurements of Mazagan and steers almost due west to clear the reef, which, jutting out about six miles, makes Mazagan the least exposed of all the open harbours on the coast. As Mazagan is distant only three days from the city of Morocco it may be destined some day to a glorious commercial future, with railways, docks, smoke, pauperism, prostitution in the streets, twenty-five faiths instead of one, drunkards, cabs, bicycles and all our vices, so different in their nature from those the Arabs brought from Arabia and have clung to in the same way they cling to their religion, dress, speech, their alphabet, and their peculiar mode of life.
As we steamed out, the town of Azimur was seen under our lee, about twelve miles from Mazagan, situated on a hill close to the river Um er R’bieh, once an important harbour but long silted up by sand. The harbour, once the resort of pirates, is now silted up, and the remembrance of the pirates’ deeds is still kept fresh in people’s memories by a great store of old Delft plates, either taken by pirates in the merry days gone by, or sent from Holland [29a] in the times when vessels from the Dutch ports traded along the coast. To-day the foreign merchants buy them or exchange them for modern china, and their inglorious end is to hang on a wall beside the so-called artistic plenishings of ladies’ over-gimcracked drawing-rooms.
As we turn southwards, after clearing the long reef, it seems as if we had already entered another zone. The hills along the beach become more arid, the plains all stony or covered with low, thorny scrub. Saffi, the hottest place on all the coast, melts past, merely a film of white against the reddish background, and in the distance the foot-hills rising to the Atlas now appear. The largest of them Jebel Hadid, the Mount of Iron standing out like an enormous box [29b] above the coast.
A Yemeni Jew has come on board, bound for Mogador, the city of the Jews. Short, black-eyed, greasy-locked, and with a red fez bound round with a woman’s shawl, he, like St. Paul, is of a mean appearance. Still he has much to tell about Arabia, and the province from which he comes. It appears that near Sannaar, in South Arabia, there is a land called Beni-Mousa. In this favoured spot the inhabitants are all Jews, and none of them are known to speak untruths, at least so says their representative on board the ship. This tribe, he says, is that of Shebatat. A river, which bounds their country, has so fierce a current that rocks and stones are moved along by it, and no mere Gentile can cross the stream. Upon its banks grow two tall trees (Sandaracs, he thinks), which bend across to one another and salute by saying, “Shabat Sholom.” On Saturday they do not bend over to one another, and keep no watch; therefore, on Saturday alone can Gentiles cross the wondrous river, as on that day only does the stream abate its force. All this is true, and I myself am much confirmed in my opinion of its truth, because at night this same veracious Jew produced out of a bag a bottle of spirit (majia) made from dates, and, drinking it, got most uproarious, shouting and singing, falling repeatedly upon the winch to the great delight of all the Moors, and towards midnight avowing his intention of swimming back to the Yemen so that my henchman Haj Mohammed es Swani, who had been a sailor, had to make him fast to a ringbolt in the deck. And as in Arabic without a particle after the fashion of a child or negro, I tried to express my astonishment at such a line of conduct in so grave a man, to a young Arab who stood near me, without a smile he answered, in most perfect English, “I am not certain if I understand all that you say, sir, but I speak English pretty well.” In outward visible appearance he was an Arab of the usual kind, bare legs and yellow slippers, shaved head and fez with rather grimy turban, dirty white drawers, and brown djellaba [30a] with the hood of it over his head after the fashion of a friar. It seemed he was an acrobat from the province of the Sus, from the celebrated Zowia [30b] of Si Hamed O’Musa, the patron saint of all the acrobats throughout Morocco. Not far from the Wad [30c] Nun is situate the district called Taseruelt, and in that district the famous patron saint of acrobats is buried at the above named Zowia. From thence a large proportion of the Arab troops of acrobats, who perform at our music-halls, set forth to tumble round the world.
My English speaking acrobat had terminated an engagement at the South London Music Hall, and was returning to resteep himself in the true faith at home, and also, it is possible, to rest. He told me that his ambition was to marry a European girl, and that his choice would be a German, for he said, “German girls mind the house and sew; English are prettier, but will not sew, and, besides that, they are always drinking plenty.” Out of the mouths of babes and heathens I think a reflection on our national femininity comes with some force. As we stand talking of the “Empire,” “Pavilion,” “Oxford” and other “halls,” both in the provinces and the metropolis, the island which half shelters the roadstead of Mogador came into view.
Kissed by the north-east trade which just envelops Mogador and about half a league of country outside the town, the city, dazzlingly white, lies in the sun, well meriting the name of Sueira, that is, the picture, given by the Moors. Founded in 1760, by order of the Sultan Sidi Mohammed, the plan made by an engineer from France, whose name, according to the Arabs, was Cornut, the city (supposed by some to be the ancient ErythrÆa) is the most regularly built and most commercial of all the empire. A little desert, varying in breadth from three to thirteen miles, cuts off the city from the fertile lands. Sand, and more sand, fine, white, and almost always altering in position, gives an idea of the Sahara made in miniature. The little river Wad el Ghoreb runs near the town, and in the middle of the water a former Sultan has built a palace founded on the sand; but though the north-east trade blows almost all the year, and when it rains the rain comes down in torrents, the palace has not fallen, and, as it never was inhabited, it remains a monument of human folly, surmounting all the powers of providence. Jews, Jews, and still more Jews possess the place; they make their Kidush, keep their Purim, CabaÑas, and New Year; eat adafina, broaden their business and phylacteries, are hospitable, domestic in their habits, each man revered in his own house as if he were a prophet, and all the business of the place is in their hands.
Grave, reserved Jews in gabardines, smart up-to-date young Jews in white straw hats and European clothes, daughters of Israel with handkerchiefs bound round their heads and hanging down their backs, others in Paris fashions, but all with hair like horses’ tails, are everywhere. Donah and Zorah, Renia, Estrella, Rahel, and Zulica, with Azar, Slimo, Baruch, and Mordejai are seen in every street; they sit in shops, lean out of windows, lounge upon the beach, walk about slowly as if they stepped on eggs, are kind in private life, cruel in business; they keep up much communication with Houndsditch, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, and other centres of the “community,” speaking an Arabic garnished with English, seasoned with Spanish, peppered with Shillah [32] words, and rendered as intelligible as Chinook by the thick utterance with which they speak. An amiable race, business once over, and charitable amongst themselves; what is called moral, that is, their customs do not tolerate prostitution, and husbands love their wives, children their parents, and their home life resembles that which writers say is to be seen in England, but which experience generally shows is oftener found in France, where families go out together and men are not ashamed to play with children, and to sit drinking coffee out of doors beside their grandmothers.
So to this New Jerusalem, after a five days’ voyage, the Rabat arrived, and anchored inside the island where the Sultan has a great open prison; there his rebels are confined, and daily die, both those who live and those whom death releases. An iron steamboat, much like a tramp, in shape, but armed with four small guns, and commanded by a German officer, displays the red flag of Morocco, identical in colour with the well-known flag which in Hyde Park has braved a thousand meetings, and around which the “comrades” flock to listen when Quelch holds forth on social wrongs, or Mr. Hyndman speaks on India, and outside the crowd the bourgeois feels a shrinking in the stomach as he smooths his hat to give him countenance. We bid the microcosmic craft good-bye, and go ashore stuffed in a boat with Moors and Jews, some Spaniards, two Franciscan friars, eight or ten bird-cages, and land to find the Jewish feast proceeding, the hotels all full, the shops all shut, and the whole town delivered over to the mercies of Jehovah, who, caring little for a mere Christian, left us to walk the baking street four mortal hours, till just when we were going to buy a tent to sleep in, Lutaif remembered that he had a dear and valued friend who lived in Mogador. Comment upon his memory seemed injudicious. His friend, Mr. Zerbib, a missionary, received us into his hospitable house. We straight forgot our troubles and the Jews’ unseasonable feast, and fell discussing with our host whether or not the thing in Europe known as progress had proved a blessing or a curse, sporadically introduced into Morocco by the waifs and strays, the tourists, traders, runaway sailors, and the rest who, on the coast, act as the vanguard of the army of the light.
