THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESENTED BY PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID THINGS SEEN IN MOROCCO BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Atheneeum of 6th December 1902 : " It is hardly too much to say that Mr Dawson's latest story does for the Moors what Morier's Hajji Baba did for the Persians. At anyrate we find here what few books in the world, and certainly no other work of fiction in English, can boast of a deep and accurate knowledge of Moorish life, manners, and ways of thinking. . . . Such intimate knowledge is rarely combined with the skill to impart and the imagination to vivify it. Mr Dawson has both. . . . Indeed the Oriental atmosphere is rendered so admirably that future translators of the Arabian Nights could scarcely choose a better model." DANIEL WHYTE JOSEPH KHASSAN : HALF-CASTE HIDDEN MANNA AFRICAN NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENT BISMILLAH THE STORY OF RONALD KESTREL IN THE BIGHT OF BENIN GOD'S FOUNDLING THE SULTAN OF MOROCCO: MOULAI AHI) KL AZIZ IV THINGS SEEN IN MOROCCO BEING A BUNDLE OF JOTTINGS, NOTES, IMPRESSIONS, TALES, AND TRIBUTES BY A. J. DAWSON WITH SEVENTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON 1904 TO SIR ARTHUR NICOLSON, BART. K.C.B.,K.C.I.E., C.M.G., HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY'S ENVOY-EXTRAORDINARY AND MINISTER-PLENIPOTENTIARY IN MOROCCO, THESE NOTES AND SKETCHES FROM MOROCCO ARE DEDICATED, WITH ASSURANCES OF THE AUTHOR'S SINCERE APPRECIATION, GRATITUDE AND RESPECT Vll CONTENTS PAGE B'fsM ILLAH ! .... i PHILLIP FROBISHER'S IMPRESSION n EAST AND WEST 27 THE STORY OF PAT DERRY 35 UNDER THE PARASOL . . 53 THE BEACHCOMBERS . 63 UNDER THE RED FLAG . 90 MY FRIEND THE SHEIKH . . .95 BELOW THE SALT . . . . 113 THE PALM OIL CURSE 117 BELOW THE SURFACE 121 THE SHEIKH AND THE DIAMOND 128 His EXCELLENCY'S AIGRETTE 146 THE SHEIKH AND THE GREAT NORTHERN . . .163 THE ROYAL NAVY OF MOROCCO . . . .179 THE FEAST OF THE SHEEP 186 THE OPEN ROAD 194 ! A SWAN'S SONG FROM MOROCCO 229 MOROCCO, THE MOORS AND THE POWERS . . 245 A FRENCH PREFACE AND MOROCCO 275 THE DIPLOMATIC CORPS IN MOROCCO .... 292 | THE SULTAN OF MOROCCO, . .299 I THE MOORISH PRETENDER, . . . 306 ; THE PRESENT SITUATION, . . . . . -317 ACHMET'S CHARM 334 n/i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Sultan of Morocco, Moulai Abd el Aziz IV. . Frontispiece Within a Few Hours' Journey of Gibraltar Tangier from the Bay . . . To face page n The Main Street of Tangier 39 The Entrance to a Palace Garden in Marrakish . 68 At the City Gates Marrakish . . . 81 Where the Basha of Tangier holds his Court . 103 The Moorish Soldier from Life : an Elderly but Average Specimen . . ,,132 The Moorish Soldier as Depicted by an Artist of the Nazarenes . ,,132 Wayside Entertainers in Morocco A Very Old Hand at the Gimbri . . . 161 Food ... 195 Prayer . . 195 A Fountain near " That Far-off Court " at Marrakish 207 Town-gate Idlers Al Ksar el Kebeer , . 226 The White Roofs of the First and Last Town seen by the Visitor to Morocco Tangier . . ,, 250 Kaid Meheddi el Mennebhi ex-Minister of War and Favourite Wazeer . . . ,,299 The Rogui's Letter . . . . ,,314 The Author in Moorish Guise 350 XI B'lSM ILLAH! ONE has read of an age of exquisites ; it is not the age we live in. Ours is the day of the specialist. Less pleasing, you say? And that is quite possible. More widely informed, however, one may suppose, if not more really understanding. One thing your exquisites and specialists seem to have in common. It is a good thing, but, like every other flower in the garden of our life, it is not without its own peculiar thorns. They are all for form and detail, these tremendously able fellows, and, peering so far beneath the surface in their own especial claims, they are apt to miss the general contour of hill and valley round and about them. The painting is a big affair, but, by your leave, the picture is a bigger. "Workmanship, give us perfect workmanship on perfectly prepared backgrounds, and hang the ensemble / " Your specialist is rather apt to get like that. Which is really a pity, for, as we ignorant outsiders would point out, the finished presentment is, after all, the end and aim of even the most perfect craftsmanship. The experts forget that, and are given to sniffing if reminded by the contemplative Philistine. One of the results is that many authors can take no pleasure in the printed page, few painters can be happy in a picture-gallery, and the majority of musicians avoid concerts as they would the plague or a barrel-organ. 2 MOROCCO Scientific exactitude is a fine thing, in science. But depend on it, Mr Gradgrind missed the choicest flavours, the richest morsels in life's feast. Moghreb al-Acksa, the country we call Morocco, is a land of phantasy which has eluded the all- apportioning specialist as successfully as it has evaded the outstretched, forthright hand of European civilisa- tion, the coaxing digits of Exeter Hall, the solemn, record-gleaning studies of tape and camera-armed would-be historians, and the levelling, empire-building tactics of Christian statesmen. The Richard Burtons of this life are not numerous ; they scarcely belong to an age of specialists. Mr Cunninghame Graham deserves well of his readers, by token that he has been too wise to attempt scientific exploitation, or historical portrayal, of Sunset Land, and too keen of vision to miss its essential beauty. Another modern writer has made the attempt, and England is in his debt for a prodigious, a really wonder- ful budget of very useful facts and figures in connection with the Land of the Moors. But for flesh and blood pictures thereof eheu ! As well might one delve in Buckle's Civilization for the spirit and essence of the Arthurian legends. To be sure, the much-besmirched artist tempera- ment is, one must suppose, an essential qualification for the right presentation of pictures, in prose or poetry, music or painting, and lacking it no armament of knowledge, however elaborate, will serve. But even granted the requisite gift of artistry, there is danger in the specialising tendency and a certain barrenness which comes with the prolonged pursuit of exactitude and laboriously-finished completeness. Compare Browning's Englishman in Italy with his MOROCCO 3 Italian in England. Both are good, but when compared, how generously vivid and instantly pictorial is the first, and how palely inadequate the second ! Certain kinds of knowledge do positively hamper artistic intuition, and for a mental view of some beautiful foreign place which I desired to possess and carry in my heart to look at during foggy afternoons in London a picture, in fine I would go, from choice, to a man of art fresh from spending his first week in that particular spot. For commercial intelli- gence there are the consular reports. Baedeker and Whittaker, each in his walk, is admirably useful. For historical records and exact information turn we to the historians, and, if possible, to those among them who lived in the place of which they wrote. For my picture, my live, warm picture, give me a quiet half- hour with that man of art (painter and writer both, if I am to be given perfection) whose mind still tingles and glows from the vividness of its first fleeting im- pact with its subject. When he has spent years in the land, and become an authority, he is above noticing the tints I want preserved ; he knows too much of the internal complexities to condescend to the drawing of the very outlines my mind's eye demands. And if the foreign place be any such weird, elusive and mysterious land as Morocco, then I know he will present me with an admirable sketch of its rugged body corporate, and leave me entirely lack- ing where its strange spirit and essence, the cloudy fascination that is Morocco, is concerned. Oh, those first impressions, their heart-throbbing intensity, their wet-eyed distinctness ; never to be forgotten, rarely recorded, yet more rarely actually conveyed to others ! It is grievous that man, bustling 4 MOROCCO on in the vulgar race for facts classified bones should brush aside, lose and ignore the living beauty of these early visions which, in the dazzling actuality of their colouring, the outstanding vividness of their lines, partake of the supernatural, of something per- taining to a Fourth Dimension. But there are commonplace books, you say. Yes. But do those who fill them see visions ? Or are the impressions, thus neatly stored and laid away, for the most part like their pigeon-hole, commonplace? B'ism Illah! And I who write these lines am forced to admit here that I have read some books which purported to deal with Morocco and were written soon enough in all conscience after the author's first glimpses of the country, from hotel windows and the like. And they were wildly bad, those books, madly, stupidly and everything else short of humorously bad, for the reason that they con- veyed nothing ; certainly not atmosphere, assuredly not facts. I hold no brief for ignorance, God wot (unless it be my own), but I will say that it was not alone the writers' ignorance of their subject that made these books worthless ; it was not that they had not seen enough of Morocco ; it was that they had seen nothing, and never would, lacking, it seemed, the vision that shows men life with sufficient vividness to enable them to convey the same upon the written page. There was another book the most vivid it may be that ever had Morocco for its subject a book that truly gave one the hot, mysterious atmosphere of the country, and that book did but tell the story of a failure, of an unsuccessfully-attempted journey of not the slightest importance. In the letter it was MOROCCO 5 sufficiently inaccurate in places, for its writer was no old traveller or established authority on Morocco ; but as I live that book contained more of the essential spirit of Sunset Land than do the score of standard tomes on the subject which face me as I write. It was called, as Moors call the country, Moghreb al- Acksa. Sensible traders, however, do not decry their own wares, but rather extol these, belittling only the oddments which they are unable to stock. First impressions are as flashingly elusive as summer lightning. Men and women of to-day are mostly sensible traders. " Rafael made a century of sonnets. You and I would rather read that volume (Taken to his beating bosom by it), Lean and list the bosom-beats of Rafael, Would we not ? than wonder at Madonnas. Dante once prepared to paint an angel : Whom to please? You whisper 'Beatrice.' You and I would rather see that angel, Painted by the tenderness of Dante, Would we not ? than read a fresh Inferno" Asked to give a name to that characteristic of Morocco which most clearly distinguishes it from other semi-savage lands, a well-known traveller, quite fairly, if uninformingly, replied, " Its distinctiveness." Its inherent impressionistic force does distinguish the Land of the Afternoon. Its power of vividly and instantly impressing its image upon a receptive and understanding mind is very remarkable. The Eastern traveller would be apt to curl his travelled lip if he heard a man speak of the Eastern picturesque- 6 MOROCCO ness of Morocco. He would be wrong. There again, a man would have been misled by the too eager pursuit of special knowledge. There is as much of the storied East in Morocco of to-day as you shall find in the whole of British India. There is more, far more, that is essentially Oriental about country life and travel in the foot-hills of the Atlas than the inquiring globe-trotter will ever discover between Point de Galle and Kandahar. That is it. In Morocco there is very much of the essential, the undisturbed fibre, the uninfluenced spirit of place and of people. It is Moghreb al- Acksa, the extreme north-west ; it is nearer to Pall Mall than is any other point in the Orient. And it is farther, ay, immeasurably farther, in every other sense of the word than the geographical specialist's, as any man who knows both India and Pall Mall may be made to feel by journeying due south from his hotel in Gibraltar for, say, one week. And this distinguishing feature of Morocco, whilst sufficiently remarkable, is not so surprising as at first blush it may appear. A thousand years before Christ, Hanno graved upon a stone, in the temple of Saturn at Carthage, some account of his adventure to the beyond-land, past the Pillars of Hercules, with sixty galleys of fifty oars each. The records of the twentieth century after Christ contain no suggestion that any change has crept over the province of Sus or the manner of those that dwell therein since Hanno's venturesome outsetting. A thousand years after Hanno's voyage Procopius Csesarea wrote that two white pillars of stone stood beside a spring near Tangier, and that upon them he read inscribed, in Phoenician script, MOROCCO 7 these words : " We have fled before the face of Joshua the robber, son of Nun." Within twenty years of Annus Hegirae the Arabs, pouring through the Nile delta like ants, had reached the extreme north- west. There they were held awhile in check by the original occupants, the present people of the hills, who then were bitterly and savagely resenting the proximity of Roman influence, as the other day they were resenting the intrusion of Major Spillbury of the Globe Venture Syndicate. But the Arabs brought craft to bear upon the hardy, irreconcilable Berbers. It was not, "We desire your lands for ourselves," but rather, " Permit us to assist you in removing the accursed infidel from your neigh- bourhood ! " Directed by Arab skill, Berber strength did snap the Roman yoke ; only to discover, within a score of years, that the existence of the Berbers as an inde- pendent nation was gone for ever. As a nation. But to this day they have preserved themselves, their mountain homes, their language, their hardy customs and savage methods, absolutely and entirely intact, as any Christian (who rates his life lightly) may discover for himself by stepping across their frontiers say a fortnight's journey from London. For thirteen hundred years, then, the descendants of Mohammed's followers, ruled always (nominally if not actually) by Shareefs, whose sway over their subjects has rested solely upon their assumed descent from members of the Prophet's family, have occupied Morocco, or Mauretania, as its Roman invaders named it. Its history has been a chequered one, blood- stained for the most part, barbarous always, accord- ing to Christian standards, and distinguished by an MOROCCO invincible conservatism. By force of Berber endur- ance and Arab craft and daring, the Moors conquered and occupied Spain, and terrorised Europe right down to the beginning of the nineteenth century, at which late day tributes reached Moorish coffers each year from all the principal European centres, by way of bribes to ensure against piracy and the capture and enslavement of European travellers and sailors. During the past century the decadence of the Moorish nation and people has been undeviating and all- embracing. And now the day of Morocco's final disintegration is undoubtedly at hand ; she has truly earned her pathetic name of Sunset Land. Across her south-eastern boundary the perfectly-equipped armies of a great European power lie waiting (occasionally urging) the fall of the over-ripe fruit. Germany has made every preparation to reap com- mercial benefit by this last act of an Empire. Britain, once the holder of the most valuable strategic vantage point in Morocco, if not in the whole of North Africa, exhibits all the signs of truly British aloofness, or indifference ; whilst it must be admitted her hands are very fully occupied in other parts of Africa and elsewhere. The end is near. It may be next year, or it may be next decade ; but the end is near, and the Sick Man of Africa will never rise from the couch of his decline. So much for the political maze, the seductive quagmire of prophecy. Remains the fact that, up to the present, the realm of which Abd el Aziz IV., by Allah's mercy, is the ceremonial head, the infinitely bewildered sovereign, continues the only independent and unexploited state in the whole of Northern Africa. Curiously, it is also the only portion of the MOROCCO 9 continent that is within range of the naked eye from Europe, and practically within modern big gun range. Traces of its influence are writ large over southern Europe. Itself remains most singularly impervious to any sort of outside influence. Its life to-day, within a few hours' journey of British Gibraltar, with its parochialism and its twentieth-century scientific appliances, is an exact replica of the life of which one reads in Genesis. Historians aver that the Berbers are the descendants of those who gave place to the children of Israel in Canaan. Granting this, and that Scripture presents a faithful picture of the lives and customs of those Canaanites, it is not less than marvellous that one should be able to see that picture, unchanged and in the living, within a few miles of Europe, and in the twentieth century. It is this marvel, principally, and kindred features of Morocco's sphinx-like face, which give it its distinction among Oriental countries ; its wonderful impressiveness, its instant power to burn an indelible picture into the mind of an open-eyed traveller, subtly, with a force and power of fascination which may not be denied. " Quite vulgar souls are made to feel it," said a Morocco traveller to the present writer last year. " It bewilders them. They don't understand, of course, but m'sha Allah ! they come back to it as certain sure as dates have stones. Did you hear of the beginning of things here with Phillip Frobisher, the Manchester man? Not that he was a vulgar soul. But his soul had mostly lived in a rather vulgar sort of body." I had not heard, so I said nothing, but listened, for j my informant was a man to be listened to where Al 10 MOROCCO Moghreb is concerned. No rule of record " authority " he, but a man who has sought the strange, savage spirit of the land, and wooed Morocco in her most hidden places. So, too, I give the story here for what it is worth, by way of illustration, and without any pretence at apology. What can't be endured must be skipped, say the cynical specialists of criticism. PHILLIP FROBISHER'S IMPRESSION AT the time of the story Phillip Frobisher had just ceased to be "young Mr Phillip," or " Phillip Frobisher, Junior," and had attained the solid dignity of " Mr Phillip Frobisher of Messrs Frobisher Bros.," the well-known Manchester spinning firm. His Spanish-born mother, a landscape painter whose work had brought her credit in Paris and London, he had lost during childhood. The grave, shrewd, self-contained father, whose recent death had made of Phillip a full partner in the business, had systematically and con- sistently schooled his only son in the traditions of the " house." Phillip Frobisher had been brought up not so much as an independent human entity as a future partner in Frobisher Bros. The other two members of the firm were slightly reduced re- productions, rather paler in tone than the original, of Phillip's father. Phillip was a tall, personable fellow, grave like his father, rather less shrewd and more sanguine, darker of skin, and more smooth and fleshy in outline, but otherwise the same solid, steady-gaited, level- headed sort of person. Any display of emotion had been impossible in the presence of the father. Phillip had grown up without inclination toward this or any other sort of display. The traditions of the house did not demand such things. They demanded calm, grave, courteous concentration during business hours, ii 12 MOROCCO and sober, decent restfulness, with study of the Economist, at other seasons. Lunching or dining with a member of the firm was not an undertaking to enter upon carelessly, or with a mind frivolously unprepared. You might be sure of excellent food and sound wines ; but the whole thing was rather suggestive of a Cabinet Council or a whist-party of early Victorian days. And now, at twenty-eight, prosperous Phillip Frobisher had no conception of any less solid, four-square attitude in life than this. The death of his father, after three weeks of uneventful illness, rather disturbed the young man. It was an out-of-the-ordinary sort of happening to which routine arrangements did not apply. Phillip found concentration of his thoughts at the office a matter less simple and natural than usual. He even dreamed of a night more than once, and each time of the dark-faced, alert-looking mother, whose portrait, showing her at work before an easel, faced his father's in the vandyke-brown dining-room of their sub- stantial Manchester home. "The boy had better take a change," said Thomas to Samuel Frobisher, as one might recom- mend a dose of Gregory's powder for a child. " Why not let him arrange this transfer of agents in Morocco for us? A fortnight in Tangier and a fortnight's travelling would set him up." So it was decided, with grave thought for the young man's physical welfare and an eye to the firm's interests. And as to Kismet (Destiny, Fate, or what do you call it ? ), Frobisher Brothers were far too business-like to waste consideration upon such intangibilities. And so Phillip Frobisher, wearing the tall hat and frock coat of his daily life, started PHILLIP FROBISHER'S IMPRESSION 13 from Liverpool aboard a Papayanni boat bound for Tangier, and his Uncle Samuel, much preoccupied with a sleek note-book and final instructions, was there to bid his nephew bon voyage. Now, as Kismet, or what you may call it, decided, the Papayanni boat called at Cadiz on her way out, and, in order that engineers might doctor some small flaw in her machinery, remained there for three days. Phillip Frobisher left her side in a boat manned by swarthy, swearing, laughing rascals, natives of the port, and proceeded, clad in sober morning coat and bowler hat, to present a letter of recommendation to a distant connection of his own on his mother's side of the family. It was intended that he should have made a week-end trip from Tangier for this purpose, but the gods who direct the affairs of Manchester business gentlemen, advised possibly by those of the scented South, disposed matters otherwise. The Southern gods are incorrigibly romantic and dramatic theatrical if you will. Their climate justifies, nay, demands, a certain measure of what Northerners might call gaudiness. Phillip landed then at one of the wickedest ports in Spain. The Custom-house officials annoyed the Man- chester man a good deal. Their attitude toward porters and passengers struck him as undignified, unbusiness-like, almost indecent. From shrill vi- tuperation and pictorial blasphemy to exaggerated bows, suave phrases and hat raising and back again within a few minutes ; this sort of thing embarrassed Mr Frobisher, and left him uncertain as to whether mutely raising two stiff fingers to the brim of one's bowler hat were not too effusive a response to the bare-headed, hand-upon-heart, low bow of 14 MOROCCO an ornately gilded, white-gloved superintendent. " They are wanting in method and in sense of pro- portion," he thought, as he named his destination, with laborious incorrectness, to a be-sashed and be- scarred pirate, who drove a typical bull-ring nag in a carriage which apparently was held together by fragments of palmetto cord and sardine boxes. The Englishman's Spanish relative was not in Cadiz, but that worthy's twenty-year-old son was; as dapper and world-worn a personification of latter- day Spanish decadence as a man might wish to see. Juan Guiterrez was the young man's name, his manners were delightful, his English fair, and his inmost feeling toward Phillip Frobisher that of an elderly and blase satyr good-humouredly bent upon hospitality toward some innocent lout of a school- boy. His own idea of his attitude was that it was that of an accomplished man of the world, a gallant, bound by courtesy to the initiation and entertain- ment of a singularly gauche and woolly Boeotian. Frobisher's view of Guiterrez, on the other hand, was that the young gentleman was a graceful and plausible youth, well-intentioned but unnecessarily deferential, and too showily attired. From stand- points so antithetical to our own do others see us. As a fact, Juan was not at all a bad fellow as young men go. But his workaday code of morality, had he given it words, would have rendered any respectable Briton speechless from excess of horror, by reason that it was a little less restrained than the code the Briton keeps for actual use, and a violent outrage upon that which we preserve as an ornament and for the judging of our neighbours. But, judged by any standards you choose, Cadiz PHILLIP FROBISHER'S IMPRESSION 15 is rather a wicked city, and not over-picturesque, when you compare it with other Spanish towns of similar importance. That, however, was the very thing that our Manchester man could not manage. He could not compare, and so his picture lacked perspective. After dinner, Guiterrez steered his guest among the cafes, places of casual entertainment, in which the very air was heady and redolent of the full- bodied wines of Andalusia and of picadura smoke, and alive with sibilant sounds of gossip in a musical tongue. They supped gaily, though frugally, in one among a score of brightly-painted cubicles, at a vault- like restaurant, walled in by generous barrels of wine. And, after the meal, a word from world -worn Guiterrez brought a nut-coloured lady of the establishment, who for the delectation of the pair danced three separate measures upon the little table at which they sat. Frobisher maintained his gravity and his reserve until the lady flung him her over- scented handkerchief, with an ogle pronounced enough to have moved mountains. Then he lost both, remembered the traditions of the Manchester house, and insisted upon a swift, undignified adjourn- ment. Guiterrez shrugged his^ graceful shoulders, that in the senorita's eyes he might be disassociated from his crude companion, and shortly afterwards they parted for the night. Despite much bewilderment and a good deal of such small embarrassment as that described, Phillip Frobisher was enjoying himself, unaccountably. The last word represents his own view of his enjoy- ment. A daylight visit, picnic fashion, to a vinedo upon the Jerez road, that was owned by a member 16 MOROCCO of the Guiterrez family, was endured by Juan some- what more gracefully than a 'Varsity undergraduate might suffer a Methodist tea-meeting, and was unre- servedly enjoyed by Frobisher. Withal it was by way of being a revelation to him a revelation which did not jar. It may be that his three days in Spain planted no new growth in the mind of Phillip Frobisher. It is a fact that the experience, as it were, ploughed and harrowed the fallow mind of the Manchester man, leav- ing it porous, and open to the seed of impressionism as it had never been before. It did not furnish him with new desires and a fresh outlook upon life, but it stirred into sentient being all kinds of rudimentary unsus- pected attributes of his nature, and stretched and loosened into pliancy the trim and rigid loopholes of his schooled vision. He heard his dead artist mother lovingly spoken of by these her warm- blooded compatriots. Somewhere in the red centre of his calmly pulsing veins the blood of the mother that bore him may have stirred faintly. He was an open-eyed, almost impressionable, man of business who landed in Tangier a few days later from the Papayanni boat. But in Tangier business awaited the man from Manchester, and, his traditions rallying about him, he concentrated his mind exclusively upon that business until it was finished. A holiday task it was the partners had chosen for him, and thirty-six hours after landing Phillip Frobisher signed the necessary papers, made the necessary terse, grave report for Manchester, posted it, and turned about to open his new-ploughed mind to Tangier to Morocco he would have said, unaware as yet that Christian- PHILLIP FROBISHER'S IMPRESSION 17 ridden, infidel-polluted Tangier, biblically Eastern as is its every aspect, is yet one of the few spots in Sunset Land which to the end of the chapter must remain anathema to every true Moor. Exactly what curious process then set to work in the mind and heart of Phillip Frobisher must needs remain a secret between the man and whatever god or gods became his. Possibly the said god or gods alone know. The rest of us can no more than follow the outward and visible signs, drawing therefrom whatsoever conclusions our particular gods may incline us to. I am going to tell you simply what Phillip Frobisher told my friend, upon a certain moonlight night, sitting beside a tent's mouth near a village called El Mousa, in the Gharb, just seven months after he landed in Morocco. He was squatting on a mattress at the time. His beard was six inches long, his head shaven, his skin tanned to a rich saddle- brown, and his dress, to the very drawers, kaftan, yellow riding-boots, and white Wazanni djellab, that of a Moor of the richer sort. Upon his right lounged Yusef Seydic, the Syrian who lived with him, at first (as interpreter, and then as his instructor in Arabic. On his left was Hamadi ben Ibn, the Ribati Moor, who, with his smattering of English and Spanish, had accompanied the Manchester man upon his first journey in Morocco. Near by the mules and horses were tethered, contentedly munching their barley. Upon a great brass tray between them a German- silver teapot sprouted green mint. Each man held before him his little glass of syrupy green tea. Hadj Mohammed Drawi, who was superintending the build- ing of Frobisher's white house near Arzila, sat a little ;|removed from the rest, fingering a rosary. 18 MOROCCO " Why did I remain?" said Frobisher, reflectively chewing the words of the question he repeated, and gazing dreamily out past the questioner into the violet heart of the valley, where a little stream, in- visible in this twilight hour, murmured and gurgled over the flat stones on its way down from the springs among the olive hills. " What drew me, you say ? But is not that to ask a mere man to explain the in- wardness of the workings of Allah the One ? " " Ah ! So you were drawn as far as Mohammed- anism too, were you ? " " I have not said that." a No ; you must forgive me. But I wish you could tell me of the beginning ; how it came about, your cutting the old life so entirely for one you had never known before." "My friend, I fear I cannot explain. But from this distance it does appear to me that I cut the old lifelessness for new life, which one must know for life at a glance ; instead of, as you say, cutting the old life for one I did not know. As for what wakened me, as I said, that is the sort of question which a man may not answer from his own knowledge. The Manchester business man you knew did not inherit the bat-eyed sordidness you found him wrapped in from both parents. Spanish blood came to me from my mother, who was an artist. She must have seen things themselves and not merely the market value of things. Some gift of hers to me, long neglected,, may have brightened into consciousness under these warm skies. ' Whose hand shall measure God's span?' You know the Moorish saying. But it wad wonderful, wonderful in one day ! " And now there were stories and to spare in the PHILLIP FROBISHER'S IMPRESSION 19 man's eyes as he gazed in silence out into the evening haze of the valley below ; stories and to spare, for who could read them. " On the morning of the Qth October," he began, speaking in as low and expressionless a voice as that affected in conversation by a Moorish aristocrat, " in infidel-afflicted Tangier, I concluded the last task I performed in the vexatious vanity which is called business. Outside that futile pursuit it seems I had never done anything in all my life. Poor, starved creature that I was, I believe I had never thought anything outside business. That morning I finished business el hamdu 1'Illah ! x It happened that this was the first day of an important Moorish wedding in Tangier, and during the afternoon the great Sok 2 was an Arabian Nights picture such as you know well. Powder plays were unceasing, the horsemanship being wonderfully dashing and fine. Story-tellers and snake-charmers drove a thriving trade. The Sok was absolutely thronged, the men in new slippers, fresh lemon-coloured, the crooning women muffled in snowy haiiks, the children clad in all the colours of the rain- bow, and others devised of men. Ghaitah, shibbabah, and t'bal, 3 filled the hiving air with sound, if not with music. The jangling bells of the water-carriers with their dripping, laden skins, and the nasal cries of the sweetmeat pedlars pierced the mass of other sound shrilly, and presently the call to evening prayer over- rode all else and brought momentary calm. " Jostled here and there among the throng, I wandered, like a man walking in his sleep, half stupefied, yet more, far more receptive than ever in 1 The praise to Allah ! 2 Market-place. 3 Flute, reed and drum. 20 MOROCCO my life before, and drinking in the strange, wild Eastern beauty of it all at every pore in my body. It seemed this was no trance. The men who brushed past me were real enough. All my life before was the trance then, and this rich, primitive glamour, the only hint of which that had ever reached me having come by way of childish studies in a great illuminated family Bible, this was the real thing ; this was life, and here was I in the heart of it. " Owing to some foolish misunderstanding, the true significance of which I never learned, I, the quite purposeless observer, became the central figure of a squabble. I had peered into the veiled face of some Shareefa 1 from Anjerra, it seemed. But the trouble among the excited knot of her followers had its root, no doubt, in my complete lack of understanding. It was quite a scene for Christian-influenced Tangier. Drawn daggers figured in it, and the Kaffir, son of a Kaffir, who tells you this was like to receive more than hard names it appeared, when the good " " Nay, it was nothing ; I did but speak," broke in Hamadi ben Ibn, the Ribati servant and follower of Frobisher, speaking, deprecatingly, in the Moghrebin. "As he says," continued Frobisher, "he did but speak. Understanding was all that was needed, j My extreme innocence made apparent, the the incident was closed, and, escorted by Hamadi here, I reached my hotel, in an admiring maze of wonder- ment, and safely. But all this is simply Tangier Sok, you say ; a thing seen and to be seen by any tourist, who returns at the week's end to Camberwell or Man- chester, and no bones about it. Just so, just so ! 1 The wife of a Shareef, or one claiming descent from the Prophet's family. PHILLIP FROBISHER'S IMPRESSION 21 " That night, after dinner, sitting upon a balcony which overlooked that wondrous market-place, the twinkling lights of its tiny coffee-shops whispering through space to me of the unchanging East, the primitive youth of the world, as the family Bible had pictured it for me, I was introduced to a strange young English-speaking man, Christian or Nazarene, as the Moors would have called him, intensely interest- ing pagan, as it seemed to me, who had been born in this Biblical land of European parents, and lived in it a sort of petted outlaw in Christian eyes, a foreign devil-god more respected than disliked by Moors. This swarthy young athlete spoke to me of his life inland, half - native and half - European, wholly picturesque and curious. Some two or three of his Moorish followers squatted near by while he talked, motionless, dignified figures, sheeted and hooded in all-covering white. He was leaving Tangier for his home in the interior next day. He left me, at length, in a dream of patriarchal orientalism, and in a few moments the moon showed me his commanding figure before Bab el Fas, the city gate, which was opened to him, with many creakings and complainings, by a sleepy guard, who undoubtedly saw the Israelites enter Canaan. Rose then from out the shadow cast by the eaves of a cupboard-shop Joshua the son of Nun or it may have been Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses with a bleating, black-avised ram upon his shoulders, and obtained entry to the city in the wake of my new friend. The great gate clanged to and its yard-long bolt was shot. A nightingale sang 1 Come ! ' in a garden on my right, and from an oleander below me his mate trilled response. Beyond, the bay glistened like molten lead under a 22 MOROCCO half-moon, and close at hand a sleepless wight strummed languidly at his gimbri, and murmured of the one God, and of gazelle-eyed loves of his own in Beni Aroos. When I stumbled into my bedroom, as the daybreak call to prayer was booming across drowsy Tangier from its emerald-sided minarets, Hamadi here lay across its entrance, far gone in sleep. Dear life, how far was I already from the counting- house in Manchester ! " " ' You had better ride with me to-day ; I shall make a short stage of it. This rascal here can come along, too, to see you safely back to-morrow. You had better come and have a taste of camping out.' " 'But how shall I find a horse?' I asked. He turned to 'this rascal,' my Hamadi here, and bade him go find horses for us both. And so, without thought, the thing was done. It was done ; and and I remained ; and that is all ! " " But but, my dear fellow, that accounts for a day's journey. You have been seven months in the country. They tell me you have sold out from your firm at home. You have a house building ; you well, look at you ! " But Frobisher was looking fixedly, dreamily out into the soft heart of the young night. However, he may have seen the picture of himself, his reincarnation, there, for he resumed gravely, " Well, we set out after mid-day breakfast, Hamadi and myself, with my picturesque new acquaintance and his little caravan of four men and three times that number of mules and horses. Just so and not otherwise did men set out when Abraham's flocks grazed over virgin hills in those glad, dim springtides of the earth's youth. And so, you would say, a greasy PHILLIP FROBISHER'S IMPRESSION 23 Barbary Jew sets out on a blood-sucking journey of extortion among his oppressed and swindled Moorish debtors. Oh, I grant all that freely enough. Only I am trying to tell you why I remained ; the thing as it was, that is the thing as I saw it. As I see it. I had lived in Manchester. I had perversely looked long enough at the sordid side of the shield. Why should I choose to look at usurious money-lenders in a land which furnishes forth living pictures of the stateliest themes and characters of the Scriptures and the Thousand and One Nights? " I say we journeyed, then, as men journeyed in the days of Abraham, across land the very shape of which, with its sugar-loaf hills, and its rounded hillocks, against the sky-line, over which camels and laden asses, driven by hooded footmen, appeared cut out ; illustrations to legends of genii, necromancy and the flashing, passionate romance of the desert, of the nomadic East. And before the sun sank behind that boulder-strewn haunt of wandering robbers called the Red Hill, we came to a halt beside a little camp prepared by men who had left Tangier that morning. Fifty yards from the camp, upon one side, was an oleander-skirted pool fed by a spring. Upon the other side was the road, the Open Road, in itself a romance of old time and of all time. A hundred twining snakes lying side by side and melting one into another as far as the eye could see ; hollows beaten out of the sun-baked earth by the feet of countless thousands of horses, mules, asses, oxen, sheep, camels and men ; men spurred forward by love, by fear, by hate, by ambition, revenge, greed, and by that in- eradicable wandering instinct which was as quick- silver to the heels of Arabs, or ever Mohammed 24 MOROCCO brought word of the One to earth, and will be till the last Arab in the world falls, gun in hand, athwart the scarlet fore-peak of his saddle, calling upon Death to witness his unswerving faith in the singleness of God. " To me, with my new-opened eyes, it was all very beautiful, very fragrant of the earth's young days. But the talk of my host rather jarred upon me. He aimed, I fancy, at the tone of a sporting club's smoking- room, and that purely upon my behalf. Also, he was over generous in the matter of his Rioja ; a c take no denial' host. I agreed readily when the proposal came to turn in. My host had, without assist- ance, emptied one bottle and the half of another of the Rioja. I fell at once into a light doze. An hour later I woke and saw that my friend lay on the broad of his back, reading by the light of a guttering inch of candle stuck in the mouth of a wine-bottle. Curiosity moved me and I glanced at the cover of his book. It was a battered copy of Nuttall's Standard Dictionary. Picture it and in those surroundings. " 'Yes,' he said with a not over-jovial laugh, ' I'm not altogether a savage, you see. I never hear any- thing but Arabic, except when I come to Tangier. I think and dream in it. So I peg away at this occasionally, just to keep the words in my mind. And it's not such bad reading as you might think, either ! ' " When next I woke it seemed the whole world was sleeping most profoundly, and that in the most singularly beautiful pearly violet light the mind of an artist could conceive, or unavailingly strive to repro- duce. It was that traveller's snare, the false dawn, as I know now. It might have been the coming of the PHILLIP FROBISHER'S IMPRESSION 25 Kingdom of God for all I knew then. I slid out quietly from under my blanket, stepped across my host, where he lay asleep beside the tent's mouth, and tip-toed out into the open. I walked toward the oleander-sheltered pool, and then sat me down on a flat stone, for the reason, upon my life, that I could stand no more. The strange, sad, ghostly beauty of it all possessed me as a palsy might, and my joints were become as water under me. I am conscious of having wept, sitting there on that stone, as a child having won from loneliness and danger to its mother's lap. It seemed the whole world, kamari* was before my eyes, an unending, beautiful array of smooth hills and dewy valleys, soaked in that marvellous mother- ! o'-pearl light in which I felt the first of men must have seen the earth. The morning star gazed down upon me serenely radiant. Creation was at my hand, an intimate revelation of beauty. I could see the spheres slowly revolving in their appointed paths. Under the lee of my friend's little tent I could see the shrouded white forms of the sleeping Moors. Near by, tethered to stakes, the animals munched straw. I gazed down the beaten highway of a hundred trails, and presently a dim, white figure approached along that highway, smoothly, silently, swiftly drawing near from out the heart of the dawn. It was a man, loping along like a pariah dog, a stick upthrust between his neck and his kaftan, his few garments kilted above the knee, his waist tightly girdled, a palmetto bag swinging beside him, his slippers firmly grasped in his left hand. He melted past our little camp and out into the dimness of the valley beyond, without a sound ; the courier from Fez. 1 Moon-coloured. 26 MOROCCO " Here comes the day, I told myself, for the eastern cheek of heaven's face whitened suddenly. A minute later and night ruled. I had seen the false dawn. So I sat on, thinking, to see the real dawn. I was seeing so much so very much. By Allah and His Prophet, I was seeing the dawning of my own life ! "And so when day came I decided to ride on with my host. He made me very welcome in his strange half-native home. I stayed there a month. And then and that is how I came to remain." My friend could glean no more from Phillip Frobisher. He has certainly " remained " ever since, save for a few brief journeys in Southern Europe. It is a simple, fascinatingly simple and patriarchal life that he leads in his great white house, with its colony of dependants, its stream-thridded garden, its peacocks and its orange-shaded courtyard, near Arzila. As for Messrs Frobisher Bros, of Manchester, they passed from astonished solicitude to disgusted con- tempt. But they made a handsome thing out of Phillip's retirement. It was little he cared. EAST AND WEST MOROCCO is a land of tyranny, oppression and corruption. To deny that were to mnounce oneself a poor, unobservant student and no rue lover of Sunset Land. But the casual observer s far less likely to deny than he is to exaggerate, and be error of judgment into which, of all others, he is nost apt to stumble, is one of a kind so fundamental bat it will distort and disguise his whole future field )f observation for him if not soon corrected. This nisjudgment has its origin in lack of catholicity, and s fostered by Europe's physical nearness to the land >f the Moors. Briefly it lies in the application of the norals of Christendom and the ethical standards of nodern Europe, in one's estimate of a Muslim com- nunity, dwelling in a land as actually remote from lurope as Tierra del Fuego. No less lacking in ruth and symmetry is this sort of view of Morocco ban would be a man's view of a harvest scene in ural England if the fixed standard of comparison ind judgment carried in that man's mind were derived rom the study of the Matterhorn in January. Near is Morocco lies to the shores of Europe, no country )n earth is more entirely beyond and outside the Durview of European tastes and standards. And oso permits this truth to escape him need never lope for real insight, either into what newspapers call ;he " Situation in Morocco," or into the true inward- less of Moorish life. 27 28 MOROCCO Take, for example, the matter of slavery in Morocco. A certain type of European visitor shudders when he hears the word, and, should he pursue the beaten track to Marrakish, will be sure to tell you afterwards, with gusto, and before mention of anything else, of the ' slave-market he saw there. " Sold as chattels in open market, I assure you. Oh, it is an abominable country ! " Well, well, and so it may appear to the modern citizen of Christendom. We of the West cannot justify the institution of slavery. Perhaps no man truly can. Certainly we Christians cannot, but the Mohammedan is not in the same case at all. He can justify it. His religion (which is a more real thing to him than religion and temporal law together to the average Christian) recognises the institution and lays down wise and humane laws for its regulation. The Western reader is hereby recommended to the per- usal of those laws in Al Koran. Slavery among white men undoubtedly involved a great deal of, cruelty and barbarity. Domestic slavery among j Mussulmans, in Morocco, for example, involves nothing of the sort. To our shame be it said, the thing that makes English-speaking men de- termined in their hatred of slavery is the fact that English-speaking men horrified the world by their barbarity when they dealt in slaves. Not so the Muslim. The average slave in Morocco has at least as good a life as the average poor man in England. He not only is not ill-treated because he is a slave, but he is not looked down upon for the same reason. He is, upon the whole, a very well-treated dependant at the worst. At the best he is the favoured " com- panion of the right hand " of men of power and wealth ; EAST AND WEST 29 he holds high office and is humbly deferred to by his less fortunate fellows among freemen. No, the slave in Morocco is by no means a persecuted and pitiable chattel, but a well-cared-for household de- pendant, whose life is full of possibilities, and who may die a Grand Wazeer. But, as has been said, the casual Western visitor to Morocco shudders at ; mention of slavery. Let us use a parable, as the Moorish wont is. Mr Blank of Brixton Hill, " educated up to the nines " |(to use the phrase I heard used by one enlightened tourist to describe another in Gibraltar last year), is observantly parading the main street of Tangier. He is taken in tow by some picturesque nondescript of a resident, in whose veins are traces of half the nationalities of the Mediterranean's shores, and shown the sights. As a matter of course he is taken to the prison. Your Tangerine nondescript soon learns that horrors appeal most strongly to the in- quiring stranger from the hotel. He looks through a grating into a sufficiently unpleasant dungeon, as unlike the modern white-washed cell of Wormwood Scrubbs as anything could be. England has possessed nothing like it for at least eighty years. One prisoner attracts his attention. He pushes inquiry regarding this prisoner, and feels the while like a philanthropic M.P. or a Royal Commissioner. He learns : (i) The prisoner has occupied his present quarters for just six days. (2) He is the head man of such and such a village, near the Red Hill. (3) Some travellers were robbed outside that village a month ago, and the order went thence from Tangier that the thieves be handed over to justice, and with them a fine of $400. (4) No ; $400 had 30 MOROCCO not been stolen from the travellers, but 200 had. (5) The thieves were duly handed over, and were in prison. (6) No ; this head man was not one of them. (7) Yes ; oh, yes, he was quite innocent of the robbery. As yet only $220 of the $400 de- manded from this village had been received by the Basha of Tangier. " But what of that ? " cries Mr Blank. " Here's a man innocent on your own confession, suffering imprisonment in this noisome hole for a robbery of which he knows nothing ! Why, you might as well imprison me! Horrible injustice! And when will this poor fellow be set at liberty ? " c< Ah ! who shall say ? Such things are from Allah. Probably when his relatives bring in th< remainder of that $400." " Horrible corruption ! How much is that ii English money ? " " The $ 1 80 ? About twenty-seven pounds." " And if it is not paid ? " " Hadj Mohammed will remain if Allah wills it." " What, always ? " " If it be so written." "Good Heavens!" " Truly, there is but one God, in whose ham are all things." " Shameful 1 " exclaims Mr Blank, and wall away to regard Morocco as a sink of barbarous iniquity for the rest of his days. And without doubt the system does fall short of perfection, even more markedly, perhaps, than do the systems of party government, trial by jury, correction by means of solitary confinement, warfare upon a humanitarian basis, and other shining trade-marks of EAST AND WEST 31 European enlightenment. But as to how far short the system falls Mr Blank is a poor judge (in much the same way that the average juryman is a mighty poor judge of conflicting evidence cleverly spread before him by opposing counsel), for the reason that he regards it, or rather the examples of its outworking upon which he happens, from a purely European standpoint. He, as it were, mentally sets the case in the Old Bailey, imagining the robbery in question as ja burglary in Tooting, and the imprisoned headman as a sort of chairman of the Tooting vestry, who, when at liberty, administers a prosperous linen-draping establishment. Now, granting the Tooting burglary, the Old Bailey setting were well enough ; and in the lease of the linen-draping vestryman, Mr Blank's deductions would be admirably just. But in Tangier, ou see, it is not only the prison and the pallid wretches there incarcerated that are such a big remove from the Old Bailey and Wormwood Scrubbs. The crimes are different in detail and n essence ; the people, traditions, laws, customs, code, point of view, powers of endurance, values all are wholly and entirely different. Naturally, then, when Mr Blank, escorted by his nondescript guide, peers through the prison grating in Tangier's Kasbah, he ees something totally different there also. If Hadj Mohammed, the imprisoned headman, with his cigarette between his fingers, were allowed to peer into an English prison yard when a hanging was toward, he would be at least as horrified, believe you me, as Mr Blank could be at any sight the Tangier Kasbah has to show. Indeed, I am inclined to think that a week's "solitary " in an English penal establish- ment would set Mohammed craving for the fetid 32 MOROCCO atmosphere of the Tangier prison with its kief and tobacco smoke and free gossip. In the robbery case instanced, the amount claimed by the persons robbed was $200. The amount de- manded by the Tangier Basha, from the village upon the outskirts of which the robbery took place, was $400. Corruption at the outset, you say. Why, yes, from our standpoint. Several persons pocket fees in connection with crimes committed, even in England. I n the ordinary course $400 being demanded from a village, the m'koddem, or headman thereof, would at once bustle about and collect $500, pocketing $100, even as his superior would pocket $200, and the Grand Vizier (if the case were one of sufficient im- portance to be heard of in court) a similar or a greater proportion. " Then it comes to this," you would say, " that the villagers themselves are the only sufferers/' That is pretty nearly so. And it is as well to remember that the actual robbers are probably among the villagers, and known to them. It is also probable that their plunder was really no more than half the amount stated by their victims say $100. So that the village actually loses $400, innocent and guilty in it suffering alike. And that is an outrageous piece of injustice, in English eyes. It is not so in Moorish eyes, however, which, after all, is more to the point. The average Moor had far rather run the risk of such occa- sional injustice than the inevitable quarterly payment of so much from his small earnings towards the main- tenance of a police system for the protection of the innocent. The villagers are each and all police in the interests of their own village. They have little or no ethical objection to robbery as a profession, and EAST AND WEST 33 generally find the proximity of a really clever robber something of an acquisition to the community. If perchance a man has accumulated wealth, great or small, experience teaches him to fear greedy officials far more than outlaws. In short, the existing system, an exemplar of which so horrified Mr Blank, suits the men who live under it a deal better than would the system to which Mr Blank is accustomed. And all this, by your leave, is not at all a defence of the Moorish system of internal administration (which is about as poor a thing in the way of ad- ministrations as may be conceived), but merely a little parable meant to illustrate the futility of judging Moorish affairs by European standards. The East is not the West, and never will be, any more than earth is heaven or hell. And what is sauce for the one will always be an emetic for the other, while the two great groups of the human family exist. The theories, beliefs, tastes, and, above all, the point of view of the one, cannot be truly adopted and assimilated by the other, no matter what clever pranks may be played in the way of skin-grafting and surface amalgamation. And for these things, as for all things that are, let each branch of the Family render praise to its Triune God, the " One Incomprehensible" and Merciful, or its One God, " Lonely and Merciful," as the case may be ; for the world were a dreary place indeed if all its sons and daughters were as like as peas in the one pod. No white man who knows Morocco (even though he be a missionary) will deny that the one kind of Moor who is never to be trusted is the foreign-speak- ing Moor who has been brought a good deal into c 34 MOROCCO contact with Christians on the coast. His moral fibre, such as it is (rate it high or low as you choose), is invariably sapped from the native by familiar inter- course with Europeans, and he takes nothing from us in place of it, save a liberal assortment of our vices. And by the same token, what of our Western morality, our Christian virtues of temperateness and self-control, once we slide far enough into the life and customs of the East ? And that question re- minds me that I have the story of poor Pat Derry. It shall be given here for the point it illustrates, and for what it is worth. THE STORY OF PAT DERRY " T GUIDE! I guide! Ihyeh I guide!" _L The too-persistent wight who thus chanted his claim upon public attention sat crouched beside the hotel's front steps, a blurred, picturesque break in the moonlit emptiness of a sea-fronting terrace. In that light the bay beyond was a crescent of molten lead, its two horns, the gun-mounted port arsenal (impressive till you learned that the guns were fitted for no tougher work than that of saluting), and the old tower which links decadent modern Morocco to the Mauretania of Roman occupation. In the crescent's shimmering centre the Sultan's navy rode at anchor ; an old merchant steamer, pur- chased from the infidels and used, when not engaged in the transport of pickled rebels' heads, chiefly for the purpose of carrying grain for his Shareefian Majesty's troops from one port to another. Inside the white hotel was electric light and silence. Hotel and electricity both were spawn of the infidels, and established there on Moorish terri- tory, because that the Sultan, when wearied by the giving of many refusals, had given his consent. In the little hall office, the maestro, scanning figures, sipped his evening coffee. In the bend of the marble stair- way a sloe-eyed Spanish chambermaid sat chewing nougat. In the passage between kitchen and dining- 35 36 MOROCCO hall, two Moors, waiters, squatted on their heels, smoking kief. In the drawing-room, the Spanish widow resident ogled provocatively a middle-aged English tourist, who drank champagne at thirty-two pesetas a bottle, and shared the same with his neigh- bour at the table tfhote. In this way, then, the widow paid for her wine. She was scrupulously honour- able. She postponed her serious evening rendezvous with the young gentleman from the Italian Legation by exactly thirty minutes each night, to permit of the just settlement of this wine and ogle barter. As for me, I lounged in the entrance way, looking out over the terrace at the moonlit bay beyond ; marvelling at the blackness of the Hill of Apes, picturing to myself the doings of the crooked, yard- wide streets of the city behind me, wondering how it could be that I had stayed away from the glamour and fascination of this bloody but beautiful Morocco for so long a stretch as eleven years. I had landed no longer ago than the afternoon of that very day. And the epicure in me had bade me land as a tourist, telling no one of my coming, seeking out no old friends, and allowing myself to be borne off to the hotel by a jabbering donkey-man. "Thus," the epicure had said, confident in its undying foolishness, "shall you taste again the savoury sting of first im- pressions ; so shall you lend subtle bouquet to your pleasure/' "I guide! I guide! O, N'zrani, b'Allah ! I guide. Naddil! Jirri!" (I will arrange! Haste thou !) The discordant wretch beside the steps was mazy with hasheesh, as I had seen at a glance. His head far back in a dingy djellab-hood, he had crooned THE STORY OF PAT DERRY 37 over his "I guide!" till recollection of his objective had left the man. Suddenly he had been wakened to realities, probably by hunger for food, or for opiates. Hence his exclamations, and the boldness which made him pluck at my coat. This clouded my charmed vista; it interfered with my enjoyment of the moon-washed scene. " Seer fi-halak-um ! " (Get hence !) I snapped, forgetting that the use of Arabic was out of keeping with my role as tourist. The Moor started dreamily to his feet. His obedience cuffed me to repentance. Was I not a tourist and fair game ? "All right," I said in English. " Go ahead ! I come." And with a gesture I explained myself, accepted the would-be guide's services, and assured to him the kief and coffee money which his soul desired. He grunted, as though his unaffected satisfaction required explanation, and forged ahead of me on the sands, bound apparently for the city gate. At least the tattered rascal no longer worried me, for he had no other English than the brief lie that introduced as guide a beggar who lived idly upon bounty, and had never thought of playing guide until that evening, when an empty kief-pipe and an empty belly combined to inspire an effort of some sort. So much I gathered from the mutterings which reached me from out the djellab-hood of my escort. We reached that corner whence one advances either to the city gate, or, by the hill road, to Tangier's great outer Sok. The would-be guide hesitated. The business was strange and distasteful to him. 38 MOROCCO " Nay," I heard him muttering in Arabic. "Others may show Tanjah to the Nazarene to- morrow. I will take him to the Fool's Fandak, where I shall be fed and he shall give me money to buy hasheesh from some traveller withal im sha 5 Allah!" (By God's grace!) This rather interested me, and I followed along the hill road contentedly enough. The city might wait. My time was my own, B'ism Illah ; and I needed no guide in those familiar intricate alleys. Also, I desired knowledge as to what and where the " Fool's Fandak " might be. A fandak, you must know, is a place. No lesser or more particular word will serve. It is generally an enclosed space in which beasts are tethered, and in the cloisters about which men may rest and eat and gossip. Attached to your fandak there may or may not be a house ; there will almost certainly be a smell, biting, acrid and far- reaching, the odour of congregated men and beasts in a land where sanitation is not. As we bent our heads to escape contact with the lamp outside Hadj Absalaam's little Sok coffee- house, a breath of wind from the sea no more than a careless yawn, an out-puff of drowsy Africa's breath, so to say lifted my escort's djellab-hood backward to his left shoulder and showed me the face of the man. I confess to starting back a pace. Morocco is full of disfigured faces, but you might almost have said my guide had no face at all. It was just a flattened expanse of cross-seamed skin ; a slanting gash for mouth, two fiery eye-holes, and no more ; a night- marish and horrible sight. " Tortured in a country kasbah, or man-handled and left for dead in some mountain gorge,' I told I UK MAIN STKKKT OF TANUIKR THE STORY OF PAT DERRY 39 myself ; and was relieved when the poor wretch jerked forward the mask-like hood of his djellab. We crossed the Sok, mounted by the British Legation, and dipped into the valley beyond. Just then my nostrils became aware of the unmistakable proximity of a fandak. Sure enough we halted a minute later at a great gateway set in a wall of aloe and prickly pears ; and, odours apart, I heard the stamping of heel-roped animals and the monotonous twanging of gimbri strings ; sounds thridded by a weak, unceasing tootling upon a wheezy ghaitah or flageolet. " Give a little money, N'zrani ! " exclaimed my guide, extending his right hand, scoop-wise, before me, and speaking in his own tongue the only one he knew. " A nice sort of guide," I thought. Had I been truly a tourist and strange in this country the situation had been disconcerting enough without doubt. We were some distance from the protecting publicity of Tangier's lights. " For what purpose, rascal, should I give thee money ? " I said sharply, and in my best Moghrebin. " That I may have hasheesh and kief," replied the Moor, with no inflection of surprise in his voice. " H'm ! We shall see. There is earning to be done here as well as giving, sir guide. If this be thy 1 Fool's Fandak/ lead on. I will rest here awhile and drink a glass of coffee." There was no startling the fellow. He was a most singularly imperturbable dog. It may be that his phlegm was born of hasheesh, however, or that he fancied most tourists passed their evenings in this manner. At all events, with a sharp tug at a 40 MOROCCO palmetto cord, my guide lifted the stone which kept the fandak gate latched, and we entered a roomy courtyard or corral, wherein a score of mules, stallions and donkeys were fidgeting over the wispy remains of their supper. A pool of light in one of the farther corners of this yard indicated the opening by which one reached the humanly-inhabited part of the fandak. This corner my guide steered for, I after him, picking my way cautiously among miry foot-ropes and loose cobbles. From the pool of light we passed into a very spacious, oblong apartment, ventilated in Moorish fashion by narrow perpendicular slits in its walls close to the raftered roof, and by the ever-open door- way. On the walls two great wicks floated in Moorish lamp-brackets of oil, and about the paved floor stood a few cheap German lamps. Some two score men, all Moors, lounged about the room, which had no other furniture than mats, rugs and half a dozen little tables each about six inches high. Two groups were card-playing. Two men were strumming at gimbris, their eyes fixed as hemp will fix a man's eyes. One made his moan listlessly upon a ghaitah ; and the rest, lighting, knocking out and relighting long kief-pipes, gossiped, or lay at ease, silent. At the far end of the apartment a man sat bolt upright, scanning a newspaper through steel-framed spectacles. His dress was nondescript and negligent to the verge of indecency, but purely Moorish. Yet there was the newspaper! This man sat upon a mattress. One guessed it was his sleeping-place. Suddenly he turned his head toward the door; a movement of the man who had brought me to this 11 Fool's Fandak " had caught his ear. The light fell THE STORY OF PAT DERRY 41 across his unshaven chin. I stared. The man moved and caught light upon the upper part of his face. I started forward. " Good God, Derry ! What what do you here ? " I cried, and strode forward, careless of my booted feet, and scattering a row of slippers by the door as I moved. "Eh? Oh hang it! Where have you come from ? U'm ? Sit down ! " I squatted on the mattress beside him when our hands had met. After touching my hand I noticed that he mechanically raised his own fingers to his lips, Moorish fashion. The last occasion upon which I had taken this man's hand had been somewhat other- wise. It was eleven years before, and the young Irishman had then been setting out upon the third of his adventurous exploring journeys in the interior, disguised as his custom was as a Moor, at the head of a little caravan of seven beasts and four men. A week later I had left the country. And now now I sat down beside Derry on his mattress. "Well, whose is this Fool's Fandak, anyhow?" I asked, feeling my way among the innumerable ques- tions engendered by the situation. " Eh ? Heard that, then, have you ? It's mine." "Well, but do you I mean" "Yes, I live here; it's my show. It's not exactly a business ; not a paying concern, you know. But it doesn't cost much. You knew that I had a little money of my own. Yes, I live here. I wonder no one's told you. Of course, the white men don't know me now, you know. They'd tell you I'd gone Fantee ; lived native, or something. I do, in a way. The clothes ? Oh, yes ; one picks up habits. Yes, I 42 MOROCCO live here right enough. Let me see ; nine, ten over ten years now. Have a er won't you smoke ?" Kief-pipes lay before my old friend, but nothing nearer a white man's taste. He had just noticed it. I drew cigarettes from my pocket. "Look here, Deny," I said, whilst taking a light from him, " I don't want to pry, you know. Chacun a son godt, and and so on ; but what the Dickens are you driving at anyway ? How do you come to be living in living here ? " He regarded me heavily, and I noted with regret the yellow cloudiness of his eyes. I thought he seemed to be weighing in recollection's scales the quality of our friendship as warranty for my curiosity. " Well," he said slowly, "it's a queer, beastly sort of story. But if you want it, and w r on't repeat it to any of the other Christians in Tangier, I'll tell it you." I gave my word and waited. " Well," he began, and then paused, a vaguely pained look flitting over his thin face. " By the way, ye know, you mustn't think I run a hasheesh den. Nothing of that sort. By God, * Fool's Fandak ' it may be, but it is a genuine fandak for travellers anyway. No women here ; no dancing-boys, or trash of that sort. Coffee and tea I give 'em, and, mark you, I've got 'em to take the English tea at that the black sort, I mean ; less nerve-shattering than their green truck, ye know. The hasheesh and kief; well, you know what Moors are. They will have it. They bring it. I don't supply it. I \ er " His eyes fell on the kief-pipes and little embossed | hasheesh cup beside the mattress, rose then andi THE STORY OF PAT DERRY 43 met mine. Then, slowly, colour mounted in Berry's face, and a silence fell between us while the Moors stared incuriously at the Fool and his guest. We must be frank, I thought. " Hang it, old man, I can see ! You don't suppose the contracted pupils and yellowness mean nothing to me. I noticed all that as soon as I saw you." "Ah! well," he said, " habits fall upon one; grow about you from the soil you live in hey ? I don't take much." I sighed. " But let me hear the yarn," said I. " Well, when I last saw you I was starting for Tafilet ; wasn't that it ? Yes. Well, it was a devil of a bad journey in every possible way ; in every possible way it was bad, was the last of my journeys. My men all died or left me in the Atlas ; and I was stranded in Ain Tessa with lame beasts, and not another soul but old Hamadi the cook. One day's journey from there I was making homeward toward Fez in disgust I reached a big fandak, after sundown and in a howling storm of rain and wind. Oh, but it was a horrible night ! Up to your girths in mud, no road, lame beasts, and poor old Hamadi whining like a wounded dog. We couldn't possibly have pitched a tent, so we went into this great fandak, thinking to "make sure of one comfortable night's rest after a very exhausting week. I was keen about it. I remember thinking how fine it would be to roll in my blankets on a dry floor. Man, I ran at it ; b'Allah, I ran into the place ! " Derry paused, glaring vacantly over my right shoulder toward that mouldering, wind-swept grey fandak in a savage Atlas gorge ; a place that in all human probability no other white man had ever 44 MOROCCO clapped eyes on. I had tasted something of the strenuous delights of the Open Road in Morocco. I knew with what an appetite a man views walls and roofs, be they ever so crumbling and weather-worn, after a dozen hours spent in a high-peaked Moorish saddle, scrambling over rock-strewn quagmires in drenching rain. " But it was an uncanny place, that fandak," hummed Derry, rolling the words reminiscently over his tongue; "a howling, god-forsaken Stonehenge kind of a place it was. Had been a mountain kasbah of sorts ; big as a village, old as the Flood, and rottenly decayed in every stone of it. We tethered the beasts and got my pack into one of the two rooms built in a corner. You know the style. One a sort of store-room, that we made for ; the other, the tea and coffee-making place, and headquarters of the fandak-keeper. Most of the travellers slept round about the roofed-in sides with their animals, and so paid nothing beyond the fee for stabling. " You remember my horse old Zemouri ? The most gallant beast, the bravest, gamest horse ever lapped in hide." I nodded. Derry's love for this barb had been something of a byword in Tangier in the old days. It was said that when he was so nearly starved, on the Berber trip, Zemouri munched the last score of Tafilet dates while Derry cinched up his belt a hole or two and comforted himself sucking the stones. Not many women have been better loved, I fancy. " Well, it had been a devil of a day, apart from the going and the weather. It seemed that for a week we had passed close to mares at least once an hour. Now you remember how old Zemouri carried THE STORY OF PAT DERRY 45 on when there was a mare in the case. That journey was worse than ever. By the Lord, the old horse was in a lather before ever you clapped saddle on his Dack. Mares Heavens and earth, he could scent them miles away! He travelled in a tremble on his lind legs, and near wrenched the arms out o' me, on a Mequinez curb that would have broken some horses' aws to look at. Barley b'Allah, Zemouri had no time to eat; it stopped his neighing. He never closed an eye at night, and rarely ate a mouthful, if there was anything feminine within sight. Poor old Zemouri ! He grew thin as a rail, and yet pranced all day like a two-year-old. He carried me where no other horse could, when he was dying ; and he did it all with an air, bedad ! A brave, a cavalier, was Zemouri, if ever there was one. " Well, of course I had found him the best place in the fandak; the corner close to the rooms, with no other beast within twenty yards of him. The horse was utterly worn out, but glad of the shelter, and inclined to feed and rest, I thought. So we went into the room to boil tea and enjoy our precious comfort. We fed and rested, listening to three very decent and sociable robbers, who were for making an evening of it, in a mild sort of way, in the little coffee place. Then I made up my bed, and went out to feed Zemouri, reckoning he'd be cooled by then. He was, and I was mighty pleased with the idea of the old horse having a good night. Two brimming tumnies of washed barley I left him, and then I went in and curled up under my blanket, praising St Patrick. " I was asleep in two minutes, and in five I was wakened by Zemouri's neighing and stamping. Bless the old fool,' I cried, * what's wrong with him 46 MOROCCO now? ' I climbed over Hamadi, and out into the mire and rain, to get round the arch sheltering Zemouri. An egg-pedlar had just arrived and was already chewing black bread, while his raw-boned skeleton of a mare with the egg-pack was sidling up within six paces of Zemouri, and never so much as a string t< her fetlocks. I cursed the man for a pig-eating clown and told him to tether his ramshackle mare somewher the far side of Al Hdtoma. He stared and grinnec like an idiot. God knows! It may have been ha sheesh. I wasn't so used to that stark intolerabl phlegm then. However, he called me * Sidi ' humbl; enough, and mumbled something about moving hi mare and seeing that my lordship's horse was no again disturbed. And so, as he led his poor beas away, and Zemouri quietened down quite remarkably I went back to bed, and was asleep before I coul< cover myself. " Ten minutes later Zemouri was neighing wildly and pawing the fandak wall like a mad thing, tumbled out, swearing, and found that wretched egg pedlar lying smoking on a pack-saddle, watching hi< straying mare as she dodged Zemouri's heels and squirmed in towards my barley. The man gave me his insufferable glassy grin again when I spoke to him. I didn't lift my hand. I laid hold on mysel properly. I gave the man a tumni of barley and a loaf of good bread for himself, and I bade him civilly By God, I begged him ! go and hang himself and his mare on the other side of the fandak. It made me sweat to see his grin. I coaxed Zemouri, and went back to my bed. " But I didn't get to sleep so quickly this time. I was over-tired, I was worrying horribly about poor olc THE STORY OF PAT DERRY 47 Zemouri, and all my nerves seemed in a listening strain, shivering like harp-strings. However, I dropped off after a while and slept a few minutes. Then Zemouri brought me out in one bound, my skin all pricking. The mare was browsing about within a few yards of my horse, and the pedlar, back in his old place, chewing my bread and staring stupidly, half asleep, at his beast. I was angry. Oh, yes, too angry to dare say much. I drove the pair out as a man shoos poultry. Zemouri hadn't eaten six mouthfuls and seemed to be treading on hot irons. I reckon my temperature was well past fever point when I got back to bed. " I don't know if you've ever been placed that way, to be so dog tired that you ache with it in every muscle, and yet to be in such a feverish sweat of irritation that you can't even lie still, leave alone sleep. I was listening. My God, how I listened ! That was the trouble. I could not give over listening, with every hair on my head and every pore in my skin, it seemed. It was " Derry paused, staring over my shoulder as before. "Well, to cut the yarn shorter the same thing happened seven separate times. Seven times that poor wretch of a pedlar grinned and stared stupidly in my face, when fury was boiling out at my pores like steam at a safety-valve. What possessed the pedlar, heaven knows. The devil possessed me. I could have sat down and cried to see dear old Zemouri using up the last drops of his vitality so. But I was too red-hot with irritable fury and aching weariness. " The seventh time came, and the pedlar grinned again. I still think he had no right to grin in that 48 MOROCCO maddening, fat-headed way at a wretch in my condi- tion. Poor chap ! There was a big mallet there, used for driving in tethering stakes. I lifted it above my head. I felt myself foaming at the mouth. I couldn't speak to that staring, grinning thing. The muscles in my arms leapt to strike him. -I smashed that mallet down full and square on the pedlar's glassy face. I felt the thing give horrible! I swung the mallet again and again all over him. I jumped on him with both feet. I and then men came running from everywhere, and I stopped. I knew I had killed the pedlar ; I had murdered a defenceless man. I heard the people hiss at me like serpents. I saw them turn the body, find no life in it, and turn again to me. I was very cold. The mallet I still held. I was very cold. By the saints, how cold and still I was, who had been so hot ! " The egg-pedlar could never have stared more fixedly than poor Derry was staring over my shoulder now. I thought I should not get another word out of him. But presently his attitude became relaxed, his figure, as it were, caved in. I noticed then how the last decade had aged and broken up the sinewy young Irishman I had known. " I must get him out of this hemp-chewing, tea-sipping death-trap somehow, if he is to live at all," I told myself. Then he went on again, speaking very listlessly, and with a slurring economy of words. " I don't know how we managed to oret out of that place alive, Zemouri, Hamadi and me. If they'd 've guessed I was a Christian the Moors would have torn me in pieces. As it was I kept the mallet and let my gun be seen. You know what Moors are in the country, too. A man more or less ! He is dead, it THE STORY OF PAT DERRY 49 was written. You know the tone. I gave the fandak-keeper four dollars and told him to see to a burying. Then we got away with our animals before daylight. But I had to live with myself, you see. You might think I had left that dead pedlar behind, got quit of him. But I hadn't, by thunder! He rode on my back that day, and I've never been free of his smashed grinning headpiece since. Eh ? " I had not spoken. " But he hasn't worried me so much of late. I fancy I've pretty near worked clear. It's odd, you 'know, but I've an idea that the nearer I get to him if he went to the place I'm going to when he died the freer I get of him. And that's queer, isn't it ? " " H'm ! But how about this place and your living here?" I asked. " Why, don't you see that's how I'm working it off? I murdered a Moor in a fandak; and a pretty bad fandak, too. Well ! This is a pretty good fandak, don't you see ? And Moors come and go here as they like, and never a bilyun to pay. It's all free. My little two-fifty a year was for life, you know. Oh, I'm working it off. You'll excuse the habit, but I must have a pipe," he said with a dismal sort of a smile. And he filled and lighted a long kief-pipe with an ease of familiarity that my gorge rose to see in a white man. I had to leave him at last, for I had no notion of sleeping in that kief-clouded den. He took ha- sheesh before we parted, and I left him pretty rm.ddled. A strong man in a way, I thought, and beyond the ordinary true to an active conscience. Yet, in another way, how pitiably weak! Perhaps I did not rightly understand living native then, I 50 MOROCCO know more of it now. And I have never met a man strong enough to do as Derry had done, and still and yet not do as he had done in the ways of weakness. Next morning I found that beggar-guide crooning on the hotel door-steps, bemused and hasheesh- drunk. He asked me for money, and remembering that I had paid him nothing the night before, I tossed the wretch a few reales and turned to leave him. "You talk with the Nazarene at the fandak. He tell you everything, eh ? " said the beggar, in Arabic. " Maybe you do not believe. Christians believe nothing. But it is all true true as Al Koran. Ihyeh, all true ; all true ! " I wondered why the man chuckled, and how he knew. I could see he was in no condition to weigh his words. "What is true?" I asked him. "What do you know about it ? " " What does old Cassim know? Ha! Ihyeh, old Cassim knows many things. What do I know? Look! Here is the face the Christian smashed with his mallet in the fandak by Ain Tessa ! What do I know ? I know I have grown fat these ten years in the Fool's Fandak. Not for nothing was Cassim's face smashed. What do I know? Ihyeh! But, Sidi ! the white lord will not tell his Christian brother of these things. It were not well that an old man should lose his home. I I Cassim sayeth many foolish words, meaning nothing. What do I know ? Ha ! Ihyeh, ihyeh ! Give a little more money, Sidi!" He had lowered his hood again, so that I no longer had the featureless horror of his head before THE STORY OF PAT DERRY 51 me. But the creature's proximity was something more than I could stomach just then, so I walked off slowly, thinking. There was no doubt of the truth of his words, I thought. He was the egg-pedlar of the fandak. And my old friend had dragged through ten years of living death, with murder on his soul, for this ! In my ignorance I decided I could make up for all that now. I had a horse saddled, and rode up to the Fool's Fandak." Yellow, frowsy, cloudy and sad, I found my friend typical picture of the hemp slave in morning time. My news stirred him deeply, but not as a free man iad been stirred by it. Rather as one who, relieved >f an aching pain, would turn upon his other side and leep, there in the bed of his sickness. Three full days I was kept busy before I finally lad him clothed as a white man and sitting in a room lext mine at the hotel. And then, in the garments of is own people, he looked a strange, shrunken creature, ar more of a wreck than before at the fandak. He efused to see other white men ; and, after a few days, he hotel-keeper, with many apologies, complained to me of the kief smoke and smell of hasheesh in the corridor by my friend's room. Silver stopped this complaint. But within a day or two the man came puling to me about Moors 4 disreputable natives" he called them trapesing ibout his hotel and congregating in my friend's 'oom. I did what I could, but the thing was dis- heartening. One afternoon I was surprised to find Berry's 'oom empty. I waited till sundown, but he did not 52 MOROCCO return. I had my suspicions, but barely admittec them to myself. After dinner I rode up to the fandak, foisting upon myself the pretence that I wanted to take another look at the wretched place that monument to a good man's fatally wrong-headec devotion to a very honest conscience. I found Derry there, as I knew I should, sur- rounded by flattering Moors, dressed Moorish fashion and sipping hasheesh in honey from a gilt-flowerec mug. He never left the fandak again, for four days later the Moors came to me with word that the " Fool " was dead. " You must forgive me, old man," I found scrawled on a scrap of brown paper that was clenched betwixt his dead fingers. "You don't understand. I know how kindly you meant. But it's better this way, perhaps. Anyhow, I think I've worked it off now. " PATRICK DERRY." UNDER THE PARASOL 'TPHE highest spiritual authority in Morocco is i the recognised temporal head of the realm ; at this present, his Shareefian Majesty Abdel Aziz IV., whom may Allah direct. It were not easy to define the exact nature of the Sultan's sway, his position in the eyes of his subjects. Loyalty to the throne, in the European sense of the word, is absolutely unknown, uncomprehended among Moors. Mauldnd, Our Lord, as his people call him, would certainly hold no sway whatever beyond the confines of his court, and very little there, failing his spiritual rank as the first of all living Shareefs ; descendants, that is, of the Prophet. Among the wilder hill tribesmen and the original owners of Morocco, the Berbers, it is this aspect of The Lofty Portal's greatness, and this alone, which lends weight to his decrees, and some glamour of sacredness to his will and person. But, withal, the tax-collecting must needs be performed by an army among the mountain Berbers, who will never carry their reverence for Allah's Anointed so far as voluntarily to pay him tribute in cash or kind. But the Berbers, it must be remembered, are not of Arab stock. Islam swept upon them at the points of the invaders' lances. Among Moors proper, reverence for the 53 54 MOROCCO Sultan's holy descent, and respect for the undoubted j power of life and death which that descent and its position have given, are proven genuine, if only; by the historical fact that even royal acts of the most revolting brutality have failed to cause a Sultan's' overthrow, though several have suffered death at the hands of their personal guards, or among their! women. The Moors would never rebel against their | Lord by reason of his cruelty or injustice ; but they would dethrone him without ceremony or compunction were his holy descent disproved, or proved inferior to those of some other royal Shareef. The Moorish people, as a mass, have silently endured, and even now would submit to almost any enormity in the shape of oppression from an acknow- ledged Sultan. Yet if, at the instance of European ambassadors, for example, a measure of legislative reform were introduced which impinged ever so slightly upon religious precedent or established tradition, the submissive hive of toiling humanity that peoples Morocco would rise with the unanimity of a drilled army and wipe that reform out of existence. But if some poor half-crazed f'keeh dreamed a dream, journeyed afoot to the Court in far Marrakish, or Fez, fell upon his knees before the Shadow of the Sacred Parasol, and urged the same measure of reform as being the teaching of his vision (though that vision were born merely of an empty stomach by over- indulgence in hasheesh), the reform would be universally adopted law and practice throughout the Far West before a dozen moons had waxed and waned. In name and theory all Moorish Sultans are absolute autocrats. As a fact, history shows that as UNDER THE PARASOL 55 with Christian monarchs so it has ever been with rulers of Islam in Morocco and elsewhere ; when a strong man succeeds to the Parasol he becomes actually an autocrat ; in the case of weaker saints the autocracy is only nominal. The Moorish Court has always (and at the present time more than ever before) been so constituted that only a very strong man could dominate it and bend its various influences to fit his own will. The immediate entourage of the ruler has generally contained one minister capable of driving his master under pretence of slavishly following him. The hareem of most Sultans has provided at least one dominating personality, and is always a power to be reckoned with by those whose fate it may be to have dealings with the Moorish Court. The Oriental predilection for the society and companionship of those whose position is practically, and often technically as well, that of slaves, is particularly noticeable in Morocco, both at court and in all great households. Such petted companions do not criticise one ; they flatter. Their very presence and their bounty-fed sleekness is a sort of tribute, pleasing to the Eastern mind as are the misfortunes of his neighbours to the Western person of culture. But, regarded in another way, there is no master so masterful as your pampered dependant. Nazarene Bashadors, in their official wisdom, may not always recognise the fact, but fact it is that the Moorish Government rarely orders a new supply of tents, far less signs a treaty, without the approval of some power behind the curtain, some stained and scented favourite who sits rustling her silks, jingling her bangles, sucking confectionery, and playing with human destinies in the eternal twilight of the hareem. 56 MOROCCO The women-kind of Moorish Sultans are always a large and varied assortment, embracing beauty in black and white, and all the shades between. Martiniere, who should know, speaks of thirteen Frenchwomen being in the hareems of the last three sultans. It is well-known that the mother of the present Sultan, a woman who was always consulted by Moulai Hassan in affairs of State, and who no doubt dictated her son's policy upon his real accession after the death of " Father" Ahmad, the Regent- Wazeer, in 1900, was a Circassian bought in the mart at Constantinople by the late Hadj Abd es Salam, and presented to his Shareefian Master, the then reigning monarch. And it was because this reputedly beauti- ful Circassian became her lord's favourite that her offspring, Abd el Aziz, was trained for the Parasol, and chosen by his father to succeed to it, whilst some of his brothers, or step-brothers, were imprisoned, others exiled to Tafilet, and others buried in the obscurity of remote governorships. In view of these things it will readily be under- stood that competition for entry to the Shareefian hareem is keen. Great nobles and ambitious ministers will bribe the arifahs, or wise women, in charge to admit their pretty daughters and press them before the Sultan's notice at suitable seasons, such as on a Thursday afternoon, the eve of Muslim Sabbath, when the late Sultan always had his women paraded through the hareem gardens, in order that he might choose two or three to bear him company during Friday. The present writer knew a Moorish official who, fancying his position was a little shaky, decked out the pearl of his household, his favourite fourteen-year-old daughter, and sent her as an offer- UNDER THE PARASOL 57 ing to the hareem of the Elevated of Allah. It delayed his downfall by precisely twenty-one days, at the end of which time he was flung into prison and the whole of his property confiscated by the Sultan. It may have been that the daughter was found wanting, or that his Shareefian Majesty never set eyes upon her pearliness. In any case, it was written, and the profit thereof, to the Shareefian coffers, was considerable, for Hadj Mohammed had been ever a great " eater-up " of the district under his rule, though a good fellow enough in his way, at liberty now, and, so Fez gossips affirm, creeping into favour again. May Allah have a care of him ; his was a most admirable seat upon a horse. Putting aside intrigues and conspiracies, which are no more to be numbered than are the sands of the seashore, or the sins on a Wazeer's conscience, the Moorish Court is generally more prolific of princes and princesses, shareefs and shareefas, than anything else. Each one of these saintly little personages is brought up in an isolated sanctuary, each boy among them having a slave of his own age told off as his companion, to be called brother. Disinterestedness is rare in most Oriental countries. By this method the young shareef is supposed to be sure of one devoted adherent through life, and all things con- sidered, he is perhaps quite as safe to achieve this as the average European is likely to retain the disinter- ested attachment through life of his god-parents, for example, or any other of his relatives. The girls are matrimonially disposed of as speedily as may be, and without much effort or ceremony. They inherit no rank. The boys are married off at State functions directed by the Sultan, and only the intended heir 58 MOROCCO (each Sultan appoints and chooses his own successor) is given high rank and brought prominently before the public as the Ruler's son. So much, then, for the greatest of all checks upon absolute autocracy in Moorish government those that may be called domestic. Then there is the company of the 'Aoldma, or "the Learned Ones"; the theologians and commentators, who, as experts in Mohammedan custom and the lore of Islam, are supposed to advise Majesty at all points as to what Alkoran counsels and what it forbids. It must not be imagined that these grave and reverend seigneurs form a Parliament or an episcopal bench. On the contrary, they have no fixed status, and the very number of them is constantly changing and never known. One may only say of these f'keehs that they preserve and expound religious tradition, which in the world of Islam means public opinion and public morality. Their opinions are always asked in every matter of moment, because at the last analysis it will be found that in Morocco all progress, movement, policy, the whole life of the nation, hinges upon and is moved by the Mohammedan faith. Moorish Sultans are always sufficiently politic to seek the countenance of the 'Aoldma, because whatever the 'Aoldma approve Morocco will swear to and abide by. On the other hand, the Elevated Presence, by token of his descent and position, is himself the chief of all "wise men," and practically holds the 'Aoldma in the hollow of his hand. Hence its members invariably ascertain the tenor of the Sultan's wishes (the parents of his convictions) before themselves expressing an opinion. And should the Elevated Presence be bent upon a course that is clearly contrary to Al Koran's UNDER THE PARASOL 59 teaching, the Aolama are apt to ponder solemnly awhile, and then announce that the point involved is clearly one of those left for the decision of Allah's Anointed, who, as the Father of Islam, is the best judge of its interests. But, natheless, the Aoldma is a slight check upon the Autocrats of all the Moors, and a very present refuge in negotiation with friends, and in the fending off of infidels with their thirst for " improvements." Descending the scale of authority, from the Lofty Portal's own sacred person, one must reckon first with the prime favourite of the hour. That favourite may be a woman ; that is an unseen, and accordingly the more absolute, power. If a man, the favourite will probably be Grand Wazeer (Wazeer el Kabeer) and, to all intents and purposes, the active ruler of the land, having control over all monies and appointments, with unlimited power for oppression and imprisonment, and practical power of life and death. If an able and ambitious man, this favourite will probably unite the position of Wazeer el Barrani, or Minister of Foreign Affairs, with that of Grand Wazeer. But, in Tangier, where the Ministers of the European Powers reside in their Legations, there is Hadj Mohammed Torres, Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, who is really the only Moorish official in personal touch with the Representatives of Western civilisation, and, accord- ing to the Christian estimate, the only honourable and straightforward Moorish official living. Hadj Mohammed is reputed to have passed his eightieth year ; his position is one rich in opportunities, his is a country in which official salaries are practically un- known and official rapacity a thing looked for and expected, yet, to his lasting credit be it said, this 60 MOROCCO Commissioner for Foreign Affairs is still a man poor in worldly gear, and one of his sons, a working shoe- maker in a cabin hard by the official residence, has made slippers for me, while his brother sold candles in a cupboard a little farther on. Hadj Mohammed is probably the only office-holder in Morocco who does not accept bribes as a matter of ordinary routine. Be it noted, as an instructive fact, that he is far from being the most popular of officials among his own countrymen. There are two other important Ministers in the governmental system of Sunset Land, those of Finance and the Interior; and the latter has far more to do with money than the former, for the Minister of the Interior has the nomination of pro- vincial governors in his hands, and these be posts for which men must pay heavily, in hard coin, in flocks and herds, and in goods and chattels ; where- as the Mul el Mai (he of Finance) presides over an exchequer, details as to which are probably known to no man a treasure which is divided between the three capitals, Fez, Mequinez and Marrakish, and which, it is said, can be opened only by agreement between the keepers, the governors of the palaces, the chief eunuch, and the wise woman in charge of the hareem. 1 Gentlemen of considerable official dignity and influence are the Bearer of the Parasol (mul el m' dal), the Fly-flicker (mul el shtiash), the Master of Ceremonies (mul el meshwar), the Executioner with the gun (mul el m'kahel), the Spear-bearer (mul el mzreag), the Headsman (seeaf), the Flogger (mul el azfel), the Tea-maker, Tent-layer, Cushion and Spur-bearers, and a few others whose strength lies 1 See Meakin's Moorish Empire^ p. 206. UNDER THE PARASOL 61 in the known fact of their personal nearness to the Elevated Presence. All these, like the various Ministers, like Allah's Anointed himself, expect to be approached only by those who bring " something in the hand." The more important the person, the more considerable must the " something" be, and if it is a personage of highest rank whom you would interview, then must a list of your intended presents precede you, and according to the nature of that list so shall your reception be, cordial or brusque, pleasant or forbiddingly cold. In Morocco the Court is more distinctly the centre of all light and authority than would be the case in any Western land, and this for the reason that daily sight of his Lord is the only gauge by which an official may judge of the safety or otherwise of his tenure of office, of his life and liberty even, and of his freedom to prey upon his less highly-placed fellow- man. Also, to the man about the Court, each day brings its chances of gifts in store. By a well-chosen present, an aptly-turned phrase, by the discovery of a fellow-courtier's disloyal scheming, by a deft touch of flattery, by any of a hundred and one trivial chances, a sedulous dependant of the Court elevated by Allah may at any moment be raised to the highest pinnacle of power, rank and wealth, in place of some un- fortunate wight, who is stripped of these gauds and loaded down with chains in some rat-infested old grain-well or other dungeon all in less time than Christians take to obtain a summons for debt or trespass. The diplomatist or traveller who looks to find a higher code of honour (as such matters are under- stood in Christendom) the higher he goes in the 62 MOROCCO Moorish social or official scale is foredoomed to dis- appointment. Some of the most brazen liars in Morocco are men of very high standing. An English Minister once tore up a treaty and flung it at the Sultan's feet, stung to fury by the crude dis- honesty of the men he dealt with. Needless to say he gained little by that. Deceit is a perfectly legiti- mate weapon, according to the ethics of all Oriental courts, and is used as such. In the courts of Christendom it is an illegitimate weapon, and, one gathers, is used as such. The Westerner gains nothing by losing his temper over his Oriental adversary's use of cunning; but he does gain materially by the use of judicious firmness, just as he loses inevitably when he persists in adopting toward an Eastern potentate the same attitude and tactics which have served him in dealings with his own race. Upon the whole, European official deal- ings with the Moorish Court are colourless and unin- teresting, but I must tell here the tale of a certain unofficial transaction between Morocco and a Western Power, because I think the story too good to be missed. THE BEACHCOMBERS H, yes ! " said the slighter of the two men on the beach, speaking with the last extreme of languid bitterness. " So long, certainly ! And good luck by all means, if you can place any value on wishes from me. God knows I've no further use for wishing myself. You've more grit left in you than I have, Jones! " The other man paused. He had been strolling off along the sun-whitened sands toward the town. He turned now, with a shrug of his broad, scarcely- clad shoulders, and regarded curiously the limp, recumbent figure of the man he was leaving leaving stretched there in the shadow of a ruined fort, a crenellated shell, with toothless, half-buried cannon, and walls which glib guides dub Roman. "I told you my real name yesterday," he said, with brusque geniality. 4 'But I didn't reciprocate," rejoined the other, screwing one elbow further into the powdery sand. " Jones is a good enough name for you, isn't it ? And I'd just as soon continue as Smith till till the only kind of luck I wish myself comes ; and that's death ! " " Rats ! One square meal and a cigar would alter all that, sonny. By the hokey, a good fat kesk'soo an' a cigarette 'ud see me through. An' I'll worry 'em out o' this blooming old city to-day, too ; you can kiss th' Book on that, Mister Smith since it's Smith an' Jones you prefer. So long! " 63 64 MOROCCO Now kesk'soo is a purely Moorish dish, and Jones was but a recent arrival in Sunset Land, whilst the other man had spent many years in different corners of it. Yet Jones's -mouth watered at mention of kesk'soo, while nothing short of a European hotel meal, with napery and attendance, would have served to stir Smith's wearied imagina- tion. That was the loss of Smith ; or perhaps, as Jones would have called it, "his damned gentlemanly way." By exactly what manner of devious and down- ward-tending bypaths a man having such a way with him had happened upon just Smith's present level in the social structure, Jones had not yet learned. A certain indolent reticence was part of the slender man's way. As for Jones, his little affair was simplicity itself. He had killed his man in Gibraltar (though himself modestly deprecated the distinction, saying, " An' it wasn't a man, when all's said, but only a snickering Rock-scorp pimp ; a thing in patent- leather boots an' a pink-striped shirt ; stunk like a polecat, he did, o' women's scents rot him!") aid served two years' imprisonment there for man- slaughter " under great provocation." An English- Australian sailor, second mate of a tramp, he had been judged by his peers on the Rock, who admitted that the creature slain only missed inclusion in the vermin list "for lack of a tail." His two years served, Jones had drifted across the Straits, "to grow my hair," and in Morocco, unfortunately, had taken to stone-face gin from Hamburg a false and fiery friend who strews all the world's beaches, and its forsaken guts and gullies, with the stark victims of its fierce liaisons. THE BEACHCOMBERS 65 Jones had become a feature of the town, even as one of its smells, its fountains, its city-gate beggars, or the mad f keen of the camel fandak. So had Smith, slim, languid Smith, whom men had known by another name in Spain, in London, in Fez and elsewhere. But this difference lay between the two as features of the crooked, hiving streets : Jones was grinned at good-humouredly alike by Moors and Christians, and that even when cursed by the latter sort and refused the drink or other alms he sought ; but Smith was cursed and sneered at without smiles. A man mostly reaps as he sows, after all, particu- larly in primitive or barbaric communities. And Smith dealt openly in listless contempt, and in the snarls of stung pride, cracked self-respect, and vanity scotched and mutilated, albeit breathing and bleeding still. " And to think it's come to this," muttered Smith in his sand-bed, when Jones's retreating figure had dwindled to the smallness of a locust a locust show- ing black, not yellow, upon that sun-bleached ribbon of sand. " By the Lord, I couldn't creep much lower! A kind of partner with that with this beggar ; and and a mighty poor partner at that ; doing less than a share of the work. Grrr ! Why haven't I ended it all before now ? Liquor ! Don't I know the whole miserable round? I don't even hanker after liquor. By Heaven! I desire no other thing than an end to it all." The man rose in sections, cumbrously as a four- footed beast leaves the litter for its daily toil. Erect, he shaded his lack-lustre eyes with one hand a shapely hand shielding a face by no means unrefined or ill-looking and gazed out over the sparkling 66 MOROCCO water-rows which mark the Atlantic's meeting with the Mediterranean. Then, with curious, mechanical deliberation, he began to shed his few garments, his sole remaining badge of civilisation. " Fine weather for bathing," he sneered aloud ; adding then an inarticulate jibe, by way of recognition of the feebleness of his spoken satire. And now, suddenly, the dignity of a fixed resolution was furnished forth upon the face of the man, over-riding the weakness of its habitual lassitude. He stepped on, across the hot, powdery sand, to the brown ribbon that won its colour and firmness from the action of the uttermost crest of the innermost breaker, the last of an unending dozen. The beach shelved steeply here, and the sea sucked hungrily to draw back each crisp curl of foam it flung upon the sands. Smith met the first breaker with his finger-tips, and emerged on its far side, swimming. A dozen such short dives and he was becalmed in placid blue water beyond the breaker line. The thought in his mind was, " Where's the sense in grinding through the breakers all this way? Why not have finished back there among them? But there's time enough. No one to interrupt one here. Last thoughts, last wishes, regrets, pros and cons I have no use for such. I've done all that; thought everything there is to think about the thing. Now for the end ; rest. Here goes for the bottom." He dived, there in the calm, clear water of the bay, and in his ignorance believed he had taken his last look at God's green earth, the world of which his life and temper had so sickened him. He did not THE BEACHCOMBERS 67 realise that this was to pit the desires of one naked shred of humanity against great and unalterable forces of Nature. Presently he rose, spluttering, angry, gasping and humiliated, to the sunny surface. He floated idly for a few minutes. As the good air filled his lungs again it seemed turned to gall and despair. " God ! Can't I do even this thing properly ? " he muttered. " I'll do it among the breakers." So he headed for the shore, swimming slowly, rocked luxuriously by the great, unbroken rollers, which seemed smoothest and most peaceful in the moment preceding the furious crash with which they broke, and careened riotously landward in boiling torrents of white froth. Smith rose with delicious softness and ease on the back of an enormous roller. For one instant the whole ocean seemed at rest, the naked human floating idly high above it. Then the roller crisped, and broke thunderously, turning the wisp of humanity completely over and pounding him under hundreds of tons of white foam. There was his chance, this little human who desired death. Death was roaring in his ears now. So different from diving against and through them is attempting to swim with and past Atlantic breakers. Smith emerged, battered and gasping, in the trough. " Ough ! Hough ! " He could no more keep back the gasping cries than he could avoid instinctively striking out now upon the smooth surface of the hollow. Two gasps, and with a prodigious roar the next breaker had him in its tumultuous toils. The man had no thought of suicide now ; nor life, death, misery, hope or any other consideration 68 MOROCCO occupied the mind of him. He was just an in- significant atom of unthinking human flesh and blood, beaten, bruised and gasping, struggling blindly, desperately to reach dry land. And at the last of it, when all mental consciousness had departed from him, though he still struggled feebly, Smith's feet touched bottom, and he staggered, panting and trembling, to the line of dry sand, across which he fell on his face, helpless, gasping, with heaving chest and an unendurable thudding pain in his left side. So he lay, through the better part of an hour ; and the pitiless white sun peeled flakes of grey skin from off his shoulder-blades, while the more pitiless damnation of self-knowledge bit into the shaken soul of him. He was moodily drawing on his trousers, when the man he called Jones appeared from the landward side of the old fort. "He's drunk, noisily drunk fool!" That was Smith's first thought. " Gad ! he's brought liquor and grub for me at all events. I am hungry." That was his second reflection ; and, unlike its predecessor, this second surmise was correct. "You see me, Smith?" shouted Jones. "I've struck oil. I've struck gold nuggets the real thing. Here, have a drink ! Come along into the old humpy. I've got to talk an' you've got to listen ; and we may as well feed. I struck old Bensaquin for this and I'm goin' to strike him for dollars to-morrow. Oh ! but I've rung the bell this trip. We are about to retire from this beach, Mister Smith and live on our means." " H'm ! I tried the retiring while you were gone, too, but" "You tried what? You never set eyes on my THE ENTRANCE TO A PALACE GARDEN IN MARRAKISH THE BEACHCOMBERS 69 colour, sonny; you couldn't. It's virgin hey? Come on in, an' while we feed I'll stake out the claim/' Together they entered the old fort, and sat them down in the embrasure which had sheltered them for more than three weeks now ; ever since their first coming together, in fact, wanderers from the poles of respectability, mutually drawn, it seemed, by the magnet of vagabondage existing for both in the tropical no-man's land of the Beach. The beach in this case happened to be a sea-shore. The Beach is everywhere, however, south and east of Europe ; within and without the sound of breakers. They had Moorish loaves, fried mincemeat on skewers, a square-face of gin and an earthen jar of spring water, with a greasy copy of A I Moghreb al- Acksa for napery. It was with a shrug of disgust, contemptuous hatred of all his circumstances, that the smaller man fell to upon the coarse food, but it was none the less a fact that as the meal progressed this same course food put fibre into the man's voice and movement, and light where vacancy had been in his eyes. " So you've found a billet, have you ? " said Smith, when, raw hunger appeased, he began hand- ling the food with more decent deliberation. " Found a billet?" echoed the other from a full mouth. " By the hokey, I've done a deal more than that. What's a billet? In a country like this, too? No, sir I've found a fortune. That's what's the matter with me. A fortune for both of us. Because you've got to help me lift it ; and, anyway, we're pards, whack and whack alike. Yes, sir ! What d'ye think of a cool ten thousand sterling apiece, hey ? Cut a tidy 70 MOROCCO dash on that, even in the old country, couldn't you ? My oath ! I shall take a little farm and breed a prad or two. Queer," he hummed, on a full-fed reminis- cent sigh ; " but the sight of a mare an' foal always did fetch me, even back home in th' old days, at Shoalhaven. That's N.S. W., you know. Ah, h'm ! " " You haven't been drinking at all, have you, Jones?" asked Smith, raising the square-face to his own lips as he spoke. " Well, I haven't much chance while you're about," grinned the other. " But no ; it's not jim-jams, sonny, but just copper-bottomed, hard-wood cert, and you can kiss th* Book on that. And now we've fed I'll tell you. You know there's a new American Consul-general here; came last month?" -Yes. Well?" " Well ! Now this afternoon old Bensaquin met me in the inner Sok an' gave me a letter to take to the American Consul ; to be given into his own hands. Up I goes to the U.S. Consulate, like any gold- braided Excellency, and asks for the Consul-general. Engaged with th' commander of the United States warship lying in th' bay there. I could sit down an' wait. 'All right,' says I ; an' just strolls out on that little green balcony an' squats down in th 1 shade. Next minute I'd pricked up my ears. I was right under th' Consul-general's window, an' th' shutters were open, that being the shady side. 'Well, some one was saying, 'what's the exact amount of our claims just how anyway ? ' That was th' commander, I reckoned, because it wasn't th' new Consul's voice. 'Well, I've worried it down a bit from the original,' says th' Consul, 'and now it's a hundred and twenty thousand dollars Moorish, you THE BEACHCOMBERS 71 know an' not a cent less/ D'ye see? That's about twenty thousand sterling, isn't it?" Smith nodded, with a fair show of interest. He was fed now, and smoking. " ' H'm,' says th' commander, 'an' you don't want to present yourself at Court before next year ? ' ' Jes' so,' says th' Consul. * An' what's more, I don't want to be enforcing claims then, but making myself agreeable an' getting concessions.' " They kep' quiet for a bit, an' then th' commander took a fresh light for his cigar. Yes, they were as close as that to the window. ' Well,' says he, between puffs, * by what I can make of it you'd best let me play the stern and unforgiving partner, like that Jorkins chap in Dickens, you know. My orders were to hang about here while I could be of any use in settling our outstanding claims, as you know. Well, now, it don't matter a cent how I personally stand with th' Sultan. I've no particular use for th' old chap's good opinion. And I'd rather like to pay another visit to the Court anyway. I've been in this Moorish racket before, ye know before you were out o' school-days. Tell ye what I'll do. I'll jes' steam along as far as Mogador, putting in at the little ports for a day, just to show 'em our guns. You send a courier to the Court with word that I await cash settlement of our claims at Mogador. Say my orders from Washington are all-fired peremptory. Say my ship'll wait one month on th' coast, an' that you fear I shall then come personally for settlement at Marrakish; and that failing cash up then, me bein' a brutal sailor chap, I'm likely to proceed to th' bombardment of the coast towns. I tell you that's the only way to talk to these beggars. You can rely on me. I know this country 72 MOROCCO all ends up. And at th 5 month's end, off I go with my little caravan to Marrakish. You'd better say a fortnight, just to stir 'em. But I'll wait a month really. You jes' tell th' old huckster, in the name of the United States, he's got to stump up to th' last cent into th' hands of Commander Hawkins. I'll do th' rest. How's that?' " Well, they palavered a bit more, an' th' Consul- general he reckoned it was a great scheme. * That courier shall start for th' Court to-night, captain/ says he. And so they settled it ; an' presently I got my letter delivered an' cleared off to old Bensaquin for backsheesh, thinkin' th' thing out in my mind as I went along. * Now,' says I to myself, 'here's twenty thousand pounds as good as goin' a-beggin'. Twenty thousand isn't here nor there to th' U.S. Government anyway. But it 'ud be th' devil an' all of a fine thing for Smith an' me th' makin' of us. It's lying round kind of loose in this old Bible-story country.' Now what do I want to get th' fingerin' of it? I want mighty little. There's mighty little 'twix me an' twenty thousan' notes. I want a partner; a gentle- manly sort of chap who knows th' native gab inside out. That's one thing. Then I want just enough money to take me an' my pard down to Mogador, in th' wake of that U.S. warship ; to let us land as though from th' warship, one of us in some sort of uniform, for choice, an' get together half a dozen Moors an' animals, with a little grub, an' th' loan of a few guns. An' then, hey for Marrakish, me an' my partner! that is th' secretary an' th' U.S. commander; an' an' whose goin' to stop me comin' back with that twenty thou'? By the hokey, sonny, it's just the deadest bird that ever was hey ! ' THE BEACHCOMBERS 73 " It's a most ingenious scheme," said Smith, slowly, " a most ingenious scheme ; and upon my soul, I almost wish it could be worked." " Wish it could what ? " " Yes, wish we could have worked it. The money would be a deal more good to us than to the States. But, of course, it can't be done. You don't seriously think it could be done, do you ? " " Seriously think ! Why, holy smoke, what else d'ye think I've bin talking for? Think it could be done! Man, th' thing'll do itself. Old Bensaquin will advance th' ready. I'll tell him th' whole thing, halving th' amount, an' we'll promise him two an' a half each. Do it when you've got th' language at your fingers'-ends, an* I've got all th' particulars. My colonial ! You don't seem to see what a clipper- rigged scheme this is. Why, what in blazes is there to stop us doing it ? " "The thing's on your nerves, Jones, that's why you don't see it. It's stealing, my dear man; common or garden theft." " Oh, rats ! Are we in a kid-glove sort of a posi- tion on this beach ? An' who'd lose by it, anyway ? " "We should. Penal servitude, Jones; a long period." Smith was chewing his moustache feverishly, and his thoughts, with maddening persistence, ran upon pictures of himself bowling down golden Piccadilly in a hansom to open a bank account with ten thousand pounds. Not to Franois Villon himself did money ever seem more sweetly desirable than it seemed to this plexus of irresolution who, a few hours earlier, had set out to quit this world for one in which money probably is not. Yet he spoke reasonably and with 74 MOROCCO indifferent wisdom, you see ; and habit lent an indolent aloofness to his words which chilled Jones to the bone. Poor Jones, with his cheery muscularity, his crudeness, and his simple desire to win clear of the beach and acquire a competence! Jones returned to the attack then, chilled and feeling that the odds were against him. He was no thought-reader, or student of such indicative minutiae as the moustache-chewing practice, but just a plain, kindly, rather gross man, full to the throat of a scheme of golden promise that, to him, seemed morally legitimate as sea-fishing or smuggling he ranked such things as equal and that no doubt was as morally legitimate as the commercial cornering of foodstuffs on change. "You've lost nerve, Smith," he said, " and that's what spoils your eye for th' colour in this scheme. It's not the scheme's fault. Th 1 scheme'll wash every time, an' don't you forget it. But this forsaken beach has sapped your nerve, an' you're just seein' things when you talk of penal servitude. Why, man, I could carry this thing through with both hands tied behind me. It's binnacle-steering work. Penal servitude ! Penal blazes ! Why " He talked a good deal in that strain ; and at the end of it Smith said languidly, "It's simply common theft, just robbery, none the less." Then Jones rose, shaking fragments of food from his great loose frame as he did so, and strolled out before the ruined fort in time to see the moon rising, slow and silvery, from behind the Hill of Apes. He was whistling in a disjointed, discordant manner. But Jones lacked his companion's training in indiffer- ence the training that comes of habit. He had THE BEACHCOMBERS 75 really risen to hide the fact that there were tears of hot disappointment in his eyes. And he had not hidden it. Suddenly a hand fell upon his shoulder lightly, a small hand, used gently, in Smith's " damned gentlemanly way." "Look here, Jones, don't grizzle! I'll do it. I'll go with you." " You will ? You'll work it with me ? God bless you ! Give us your hand on it ! " "Eh? Oh, that's all right. I daresay it's right enough. As well one thing as another," said Smith, listless as ever now the step was taken. Jones had not heard his barefooted approach, but had swung violently round at the touch of Smith's hand. And so the thing was settled. " Ye see, I never could've attempted it without you," explained the now jubilant Jones. " Even the Sultan wouldn't be such a Juggins as to take me for a naval swell ; whereas you, Smith, dashed if I shouldn't take you for something tony in th' gold-laced, Govern- ment House line myself." " Would you ? " murmured Smith, as a bored man acquiesces in a tea-table comment on the weather. "And then there's th' lingo, you see. You'll be able to do the talking." " Yes ; I shall be able to do the talking, certainly. Do you know, I think I'll go to sleep now." " Sleep ! Oh, well, all right, old man ; as you like. I shall get into the city and tackle old Bensaquin. There's no time to lose." "Just so. I'll say good-night, then. I wouldn't give the show away more than I could help. Your Barbary Jew's a snaky beast." 76 MOROCCO So they parted, Jones striding off in the moonlight, uplifted and elate, Smith retiring to the flaky-walled embrasure which was home to them both, and there stretching himself full length upon the sand. " Rum beggar, my word ! " quoth soaring Jones. " These Old Country gentlemen tss, tss ! But I guess the real thing's in him. Smoke ! if I can only rummage up something gilt-edged in the way of a uniform ! " An hour later saw him closeted with Bensaquin the Hudi, in the heavily barred and bolted cupboard in which that venerable son of Israel lived and carried on his varied and delectable concerns. The Jew proved wary and cautious, yet amenable. He even improved upon Jones's scheme by managing, through the good-nature of an American with whom he had business, to secure passages to Mogador for the two Christians aboard the United States warship Hiawatha, Commander Hawkins. And as the com- manders of men-of-war do not look to take fares, this meant that the American Government gave free board and lodging, and a safe convoy through the initial stages of their adventure, to two persons bent upon diverting from the said Government's coffers the sum of twenty thousand pounds sterling. Honest Jones was tickled to the deepest shallows of his simple soul by this aspect of the business, and ate for three at the petty officers' mess. American sailors fare plenteously and well. Even Smith seemed languidly amused and pleased, while his com- panion in crime was made literally to swell from pride when, on a perfect May morning off Rabat, Com- mander Hawkins himself called Smith to his side upon the quarter-deck and engaged that polite adven- THE BEACHCOMBERS 77 turer in friendly and apparently interested conversation about Morocco and Smith's business there ! This was the first of several amiable chats for Smith. Once or twice it happened that Jones was present in the flesh at these meetings. I say in the flesh, because mentally he could not have been said to take part. Commander Hawkins ignored him with a rudeness most exquisitely polite. Just before the end, the commander happened casually upon Smith alone, and addressed the young man genially, as usual. After various remarks, " Er your er Mr Jonah, I think you said his name was ; may one ask how er what you " " Mr Jones Jones is my partner, sir." Smith's eyes met those of the commander, levelly, without compromise. " Ah ! I understand. Quite so. Good-morning, Mr Smith." The captain resumed his promenade. " Misguided young ass, all the same, one fancies. But they are loyal, these young Englishmen. Quite the public- school glare he gave me young fool ! If that Jones is not however, it's not one's own funeral, of course." Smith and Jones were duly landed in the man-of- war's launch at Mogador. In that they spread them- selves as much as possible. Then, as unobtrusively as might be, they made their ways to the house of a Jewish merchant, a correspondent of Bensaquin's. Animals and a few Moors were there engaged, and that afternoon a little caravan rode out of the town bound for the Court at Marrakish. Smith was the central figure, mounted on a showy horse and dressed in a Spanish military uniform, tarnished yet fine, the worse for wear, but ornately frapped and gilded. 78 MOROCCO The Jewish merchant had his instructions. Native gossip was to be set moving; and native gossip would travel to the Court faster than Smith and Jones could hope to make the journey. It was a queer embassy without a doubt ; but) once clear of the coast, appearances mattered little. Smith was the American commander ; Jones, the bubbling and elated, merely his secretary and lieu- tenant. Yet the chief was the mouthpiece of all orders, even to their cook ; and, as a fact, the captain of the expedition was Jones. Jones had no Arabic. That was the loss of him. But as sheer indolence made Smith transmit his partner's orders almost literally, they were fairly peremptory and vivid, even at second hand. One day out from Marrakish the two met a courier jogging toward the coast, the heels of his stained slippers pulled well up, his staff sticking out from the back of his neck, the slack of his crimson trousers tucked into his girdle and a big palmetto satchel upon his shoulders. "This chap's a Sultan's special courier, I fancy," said Smith. " Is he, by God ! Hi ! Stop him, partner." Smith obeyed. " Make him turn out his swag." " It's as much as his life's worth." " Well, that's not as much as twenty thou'." Under pressure, the Moor revealed a great sealed letter addressed in Arabic to Commander Hawkins. " Tell him that's you, and read it," said Jones. The commander, in his tarnished finery, read aloud a flowery list of excuses, fair promises, requests for delay, and the rest of the stock cant with which THE BEACHCOMBERS 79 his Shareefian Majesty wards off pressing claims upon his treasury. " H'm ! All right. Pocket the letter, partner, and get that fellow to tail on to our crowd. We must make some show entering the city to-morrow." The thing was done as the real chief ordered. The languid gentleman in uniform made it so. At daybreak next morning two of the followers were sent on ahead to herald the approach of this illustrious mission. "Tell them to lay it on pretty thick, partner. Say the Americano is mighty wrathy, and must have his audience to-day, or to-morrow at latest, else back we go to the coast to prepare for bombardment." Again Smith made it so, and the main body of the caravan moved slowly forward. Now it happened at this particular juncture that the Prophet's lineal descendant, his Shareefian Majesty at Marrakish, was in a chill tremor of anxiety anent the action of the infidel upon his south-eastern frontier. It did appear to the Sultan that the years of the French " creep in" upon his decadent realm were about to end in a final snap which would send three columns hurtling into Fez from Ain Sefra, and establish the tricolour in place of the blood-red emblem of pretended Moorish integrity. Therefore, argued the simply crafty potentate, let me by all manner of means kowtow to all other Nazarene pigs and particularly those not allied to the French pigs. Our adventurers were hospitably and respectfully welcomed at the city gates, before a chevaux-de-frise of gory rebels* heads, and immediately beneath the Nazarene's Hook, that hideous spike upon which gentle Moulai Ismail of honoured memory loved to 80 MOROCCO impale Christian captives, pour passer le temps, and by way of impressing his puissance upon their surviving fellows. The American Bashador was to be received on the morrow, announced the salaaming m'kaddem. Meantime, would his Excellency and suite deign to find entertainment in his Sacred Majesty's most palatial guest-house ? To this his languid Excellency consented with an admirably official nod, playing his part, all unconsciously, to a miracle. His Excellency's secretary had wit enough to recognise the superlative verisimilitude of his partner's rendition of the part ; yet, for himself, could not for his life refrain from the gushing urbanity of a Regent Street shop-walker when acknowledging this city-gate welcome, and hugging to himself all that it meant in the out-work- ing of his scheme. But, fortunately for the success of his plans, the simple soul had not a word of 'Arabic beyond " Thank you!" and "Get away!" Bright and early on the morrow, too early, as Downing Street reckons time, even for the taking of the morning tub, his American Excellency was summoned to the Sacred Presence. In view of the urgency of the matter in hand, and, to be accurate, of his Serenity's cold perspiration over news from his south-east frontier, the audience was to be a private one ; in a room of the palace, that is, and not a-horse- back in a courtyard, with the harassing accompani- ments of gun-firing and discordant fanfares, such as the Sultan orders when in good heart. Only the Eyebrow, or Chamberlain, the Grand Wazeer, and the usual more or less hidden circle of slaves were in attendance upon the Prophet's descendant when he first clapped eyes upon Messieurs THE BEACHCOMBERS 81 Smith and Jones, the former at ease in his elaborate if slightly archaic Spanish uniform, the latter dis- sembling his nervous eagerness, as one supposes he thought, by alternately scowling like a stage pirate and washing his hands in mid-air after the fashion set by retailers of inexpensive feminine attire. His American Excellency, using the Moghrebin with colloquial fluency, greeted the Parasol, and stated the claim of the United States of America more listlessly than the average man orders soda- water at the breakfast-table. His Shareefian Majesty, having tremulously taken snuff on the fork of his thumb, was understood to murmur graciously the wish that his illustrious visitor might attain great longevity. Regarding the incon- siderable trifle just mentioned, the Eyebrow explained with gusto that a messenger bearing with him the 120,000, in panniers, was even then on his way to the coast in search of his American Nobility. Nobility smiled satirically and translated to his secretary. The secretary, throwing aside his earlier and linen-draping manner, assumed the mien of a mediaeval executioner, and said, in a hoarse English whisper, " Tell him he's a liar, and show him his own letter. Remember what the commander told the Consul ; it's the only way to treat these beggars." Still smiling, " My scribe sayeth," murmured Smith to the Eyebrow, "that your Excellency is a liar. He also remindeth me of this thy letter, which reached me not at the coast, but on the road hither. In this is no mention of money save in the way of pro- crastination, the which I am bound to tell you my Government order me to respond to only from out the mouths of the great guns upon my ship." F 82 MOROCCO Again his Shareefian Sublimity attempted to take snuff, but, as though to keep his sacred knees in countenance, the puissant right hand of Allah's Anointed trembled so violently that the precious stuff was all spilled 'twixt mother-o'-pearl tube and royal nose. The Eyebrow ventured tentatively to bluster a little upon the personal point of honour. This was suppressed, however, by an impatient movement of the Sultan's. " A mistake has been made. Your Excellency shall receive the money by royal courier within the moon." His Excellency translated, and, prompted by his secretary, replied, "The Sun and Moon of all the Faithful misunderstands us. Our instructions are urgent and definite. We set out for the coast to-morrow morning. The money must be paid over to us, in panniers, this afternoon, and an escort pro- vided from his Shareefian Majesty's soldiers to guard us and the money on our way out of Marrakish. We go in any case. If with the money, in all peace and content; without it, the " The sacred snuffbox jerkily intervened. The Eyebrow bent his head to catch Majesty's murmurs. " The money will be paid and the escort provided this afternoon. Your Excellency has his Serene Majesty's gracious permission to take your leave of him, and he wishes that your Excellency may live," etc. Smith carelessly voiced a hope with reference to Majesty's shadow, and the incident was closed, the audience terminated. "A hundred and twenty thousand dollars in panniers this afternoon to-day ! Jee-wosh ! What a gold-leaf, copper-bottomed miracle ! A hundred " THE BEACHCOMBERS 83 Thus Mr Secretary Jones to his uniformed commander in hoarse whispers and as they left the palace together. " Yes. Seems all right. Thing worked fairly well, didn't it?" rejoined the commander. " Worked fairly well? Great snakes ! I wonder what you'd call a really first-rate scheme that worked very well. I don't think you've rightly got on to the thing. A hundred and " " Yes, yes ; I know. But there's no need to make an anthem of it/' said Smith, quietly. 11 No need to Smoke! And they make anthems in Europe when a king and queen get a son ! " Jones's feelings were clear and emphatic enough if his speech was a little involved. His was indubitably the mind which had conceived the whole scheme. Upon his initiative entirely, and at each audacious turn, the thing had been carried through. Yet, in its out-working, the affair did, in Jones's eyes, , so resemble a fairy-tale of the lived-happily-ever- after order, that the man trembled and was overcome by a dread of its all proving unreal before he could actually finger the prize. The hours immediately following upon their audience at the palace formed a period in his life never to be forgotten by the man Jones. Wearied out at length by the outward and visible signs of his partner's distress, Smith left the perspiring wight alone in the guest-house, fretting and quaking in an agony of anxious impatience, and strolled out into the shaded courtyard to smoke and think. A severe moralist might have disputed and objected to the enunciation of the fact, but it never- theless was a fact, that this reprehensible, this criminal 84 MOROCCO expedition in which the pair were engaged had done Smith a world of good, and that both morally and mentally as well as physically. It is safe to assert, as a general rule, that to engage one's self in crime is not good for the soul. Yet, for truth's sweet sake, it must be repeated that his share in this buccaneering and fraudulent quest had infinitely purged the moral nature and heightened the mental stature of the man who had found suicide too much for him on the beach before the old ruined fort. " Upon my soul ! " he muttered to himself, " but this is a deuced discreditable business for my father's son to be engaged upon a most infernally discredit- able business. I know what I'll do if Allah permits us to scrape clear with with the swag. I'll get right away to Australia or America, or yes, gad! yes to America, of course ! And make a clean start, and let the Government have my share of this haul anonymously. Hang it, I've got to live with myself. One must keep moderately clean. Conscience money. I've seen the sort of thing in the Agony column of the Times. Gad! but I'll do it, too. As for Jones poor old Jones! A most excellent chap in his way. He won't know his hands are dirty, and so, in a way, I suppose, they won't be. And it'll very likely make quite a worthy, rate-paying sort of citizen of Jones. It's all a matter of the point of view. I honestly believe he'd cut his hand off rather than rob an individual. Oh, Lord, here he comes, with his nail-biting sweat of nervousness! Ah, Jones ! Quite jolly out here in the shade, isn't it? I suppose our royal escort will be along presently." Jones stared in wan amazement at his partner's THE BEACHCOMBERS 85 sang-froid. "As though it were a porter with our baggage ! " he exclaimed. "Well, it's no good grizzling. The thing's all right. Why, these must be our fellows sure enough ! " Into the courtyard then clattered two palace guards, mounted showily. Behind them a man led a string of five not overladen mules with iron-clamped boxes in their shwarries. Behind these again rode a Court official, and last came a single mounted guard. The courtyard gates were closed, the shwarries were carried into the patio, and the rest of the after- noon was solemnly devoted to the counting out of one hundred and nineteen thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven big bright Moorish dollars. The odd thirteen, so characteristically on the right side for the palace, Commander Smith magnanimously forgave. The money was repacked securely, the palace official took his departure with laden purse, and the two Christians passed the night within easy reach of their prize and its guardians. Not a hitch of any sort came to justify Jones's nervous foreboding. The little caravan was under way shortly after daylight, and the palace guards accompanied it a good day's march toward the coast. After their departure the adventurers distributed their bullion evenly amongst their bedding and provisions, and so approached Mogador bearing burdens ap- parently of the most commonplace description. Twenty miles out from Mogador the party met another caravan, heading toward Marrakish. Traders, Smith called them, after a glance at the little line of hooded white figures and laden pack- 86 MOROCCO animals. The newcomers drew rein as they reached our adventurers a common courtesy of the Open Road calling for no remark. "The prosperity of the morning to you!" said Smith, carelessly enough, as the closely-hooded leader of the caravan ranged alongside him on a big blue stallion. "Ah! Yes, one fancied it must be you two. Don't move, Smith ; don't move, sir. Three of my followers are American seamen (though they mayn't look it in this rig) and trophy-holding marksmen. Present arms, men ; and keep your eyes about you. Ah, Mr Jonah ! It is Jonah, I think ; or am I mixing names ? You will be so good as to dismount, Mr Jonah. Smith, get down. We will camp here for an hour, just to see that the bullion for my Government is all shipshape. Bo'sun ! " One of the hooded figures of the caravan slid smartly from his beast, cast his djellab, and came to the salute as upon Commander Hawkins's own quarterdeck a trimly-uniformed petty officer of the United States Navy. " Upon my word," resumed Commander Hawkins, the leader, " I am half inclined to think it all nonsense, this notion that one must wear Moorish dress in travelling here. You may take this garment, bo'sun, and just pitch my little tent sharp as you like." The commander had drawn off his all-cloaking djellab, and now displayed his fine figure in trim, warm weather mufti. The tent pitched: "Just see to our friend Mr Jonah, and and the things, bo'sun. Mr Jonah, perhaps you will rest awhile with my men here ; good, clean American sailormen every one, Mr THE BEACHCOMBERS 87 Jonah. No doubt you will find topics of mutual interest. Now, Smith, just step inside here with me, if you please. One finds serious conversation almost indecent in such a glare of sunlight." The com- mander motioned Smith to a camp-stool, and sat himself cross-legged upon another, facing it. "Now, first of all, have you the dollars with you, Smith ? " he asked pleasantly. "Yes," replied Smith, somewhat gloomily but with composure. " Ah ! The whole lot, intact ? " " Thirteen short of the hundred and twenty thousand." " Really ! One is moved to compliment you, Smith. You really did remarkably well. One knows something of that Court and its methods. And now tell me, Smith, what in the name of simplicity induced you to allow your er your mission to become common native talk in Mogador ? " "That! Oh, Jones insisted on that as a means of letting rumour pave the way for us at Court." " Ah ! Mr Jonah is unfortunate in his influences. Did it not strike you that the same means might pave your way to to this meeting after the other ? One's crew is allowed ashore in batches, you know. In that way the rumour naturally reached one in time. It was your scheme's weak point, this contribution of Mr Jonah's, don't you think? " " Oh, as to that, I think his scheme was pretty sound for a simple-minded man. He is a singularly good-hearted, simple soul at bottom in spite of though you find us " "Ah! one somehow guessed it. Then the whole scheme was Mr Jonah's. One could almost have 88 MOROCCO sworn it. You er made the acquaintance on bed- rock, so to say, Smith ? Deep spoke to deep, eh and that sort of thing ? " " He's a thoroughly good sort, really," said Smith, half in aggression and half pleadingly. " H'm ! Just so. Well, now, Smith, one does not want unnecessarily to humiliate white men, particularly before natives. There must be no attempt at er at leaving this party, if you please. We can look further into matters on board. In the meantime keep cool and go straightly. Smith. Never despair. One feels bound to say that one gave you a hint about the undesirable character of your partner- ship quite a while back, on board. However now keep cool, Smith. We are both entitled to our own opinions about the wholesomeness for you of Mr Jonah's intimacy. Meantime, sir" and here the commander's voice took on a sudden solemnity, a grave dignity very impressive to hear "be thankful, be very thankful, that things are as they are, and you where you are. You are free now of that dirty load from the palace. It has reached its true destination and is in the right hands. Be you very thankful for that." " Why, frankly, I have been since the moment I recognised you. I meant to make for your country, anyhow, and However, that won't interest you." His real thought was : "You won't believe that I meant to repay my share, so I won't bother telling you." But the commander was a far-seeing sailorman, shrewd, Bohemian, and with a temper of ripe and catholic benevolence. Smith did presently reach America, and under his own name too which brings one upon the heels THE BEACHCOMBERS 89 of quite another story. Under his own name, Smith was Commander Hawkins's private secretary. And Jones, the last I heard of simple-minded Jones, was that he had shipped from 'Frisco as mate of an island brig bound for Honolulu. UNDER THE RED FLAG ALL men cannot be courtiers, even in " The Land of the Afternoon," and, of course, there are some powers in the country outside the neighbour- hood of the Exalted Presence. There are, firstly, the provincial governors who purchase their posts from the Minister of the Interior, or, in a few cases, are appointed by our Lord himself, by way of reward for services rendered, for rare presents given, or, in the case of a man of Shareefian blood or a possible rival, as a dismissal from Court. In the interior these governors inhabit great ksor, or castles, which are really small villages enclosed by a fortified wall, and built about the central residence of the governor himself. In his own district the power of one of these governors is supreme, maintained by his own soldiers, and suffici- ently demonstrated by punishment in his own prison for who should doubt it. At intervals a governor is supposed to journey to Court to make his obeisances to the Presence, and to hand over tribute from his province to the Sultan's treasury, besides presents to his Lord and to the watchful army of Court idlers. If such visits are not sufficiently frequent or profitable to the Sultan, the backward governor is invited to attend without delay. If, in response to such an invitation, he brings but a light token of his fealty, his visit ends in a dungeon, troops are sent to ransack his kasbah for treasure, and within a day or so his post, his 90 UNDER THE RED FLAG 91 residence, his women, chattels and gleanings of every sort and kind are sold, practically to the highest bidder, probably to some trusted former adherent who has managed to accumulate gear during his reign, and, having heard of his superior's summons to Court, has journeyed thither himself with full hands and well- laden pack animals. The present writer knows one intelligent Moor who has twice occupied the position of a lesser monarch in this way, ruling a countryside as absolute autocrat thereof, and who at this moment is pleased if he find bread twice a day and a blanket for chilly nights in the reeking dungeon which he shares with a score and more of other chained unfortunates. His crime was that " Father " Ahmad, the late iron-handed Wazeer el Kabeer and Regent, considered that his yield of tribute to the State coffers was a good deal less than might have been squeezed out of his district. So Ba Ahmad invited my friend to Court, and, being a temperate man and always averse to any unneces- sary taking of life, did not follow the quite ordinary custom of handing the governor corrosive sublimate in his tea, but merely threw him into an underground granary and had him industriously flogged, with a view to extorting information regarding hidden treasure. The governor, whether from innocence or obstinacy, kept a stiff upper lip, and took his daily meed of punishment without comment. Presently, " Father" Ahmad being a practical, if not a merciful, man, the floggings ceased, and when the month of Ramadan was well passed, and the mire of the tracks dried, his Shareefian Majesty's troops, directed by Ba Ahmad, proceeded to "eat up" my friend's district, among others, in the course of the 92 MOROCCO usual spring forays for taxes. This " eating up" is a temperate phrase enough, and annually justified by fact. The Shareefian troops do leave little more in a countryside which they have thrashed for taxes than a swarm of locusts would leave in a bed of mint upon which they had called a noon-day halt. Their most approved method of settling a question as to the existence of hidden treasure in a village is to capture the inhabitants, lop off the heads of the men, for pickling and spiking upon the gates of their Lord's capitals, preserve the young women, burn the village to the ground, dig up its foundations, in case of buried money, and leave no living thing where that village stood, beyond its scavengers, the pariah dogs. To ride through a recently-chastised district in the wake of the Sultan's army is to journey with a sore heart, and, unless one goes well laden, with empty bellies for man and beast. But these visitations do not spell revolution, or civil war, or anything at all like it. They were written, they come when and as Allah permits, and there's an end of it. Fatalism is talked of in Europe. It is only in the world of Islam that it is understood, felt and lived. With us of paler Christendom it is an article of faith that the meek are blessed for that "they shall inherit the earth"; that they who mourn or are poor in spirit, and persecuted, are also blessed ; also that no sparrow may fall from a housetop without the cognisance of God the Father and Comforter. These beliefs are a part of religion in Europe. They, and others like them, are the basis of life in Morocco. Christians extol the enduring faith of Job. Mohammedans imitate and equal it in daily life. We of Christendom profess to hold earthly treasures baubles, and wear out our lives, and the UNDER THE RED FLAG 93 lives of others whom we retain to help us, in the search for such treasure, and in its accumulation. The sorriest beggar in all Morocco, the most ignorant dolt in the Soudan, proves by his life, and often by his death, that our empty profession is his living belief. And his philosophy of fatalism, if rooted, as Westerners are wont to affirm, in laziness and indif- ference (it is really rooted in the fact that his religion is actual, real and literally genuine to him), is dignified and marvellously enduring. "It seems the pesky thing will wash, anyway ! " said a well-known American, speaking of the same philosophy after watching a chained file of prisoners squatting on their ham-bones in pitiless sun glare in the Sok, or market-place, at Mogador. They were starved and chain-galled, these men, with bruised bodies and blood - encrusted feet. Four of their number had died on the march, their dead heads having then been cut off that their bodies might clear the connecting chain. Their crime was that their kaid had not paid sufficient tribute to the Sultan. Now, as they squatted in the shadeless market-place, a passer-by occasionally gave one a dish of water that he might moisten his parched throat and blackened lips withal. The man so relieved would murmur a "God be with thee." Not a single murmur could be heard among his unrelieved fellows, who calmly, im- passively stared straight before them, or answered evenly enough the casual remark of a bystander, smoked if the wherewithal were given them, or failing this were as sedately reflective and dignified without. Their religion and the fatalistic philosophy born of it were not mere professions with these men. I well remember, during an early visit to Morocco, 94 MOROCCO making a short journey with a Moor of repute and standing in his own town. At night we were enter- tained by a village sheikh, a friend of my companion's, and a man who interested me greatly. " How did you come to know Sheikh Mohamet ? " I asked my companion as we jogged out of the village in the dawning next day. " Oh, I met him in prison some years ago Tetuan prison it was. He was a stranger there and his people had not reached Tetuan. And so he had no food or blankets. He shared mine, and we became friends." The matter of course nonchalance of it all ! Imagine yourself asking an equal, a fellow clubman, a similar question, and receiving as answer: "Oh, Robinson ? I met him in gaol. We were at Worm- wood Scrubbs together." And Robinson the mayor of his town, remember. In this connection I must set down here the yarn of an English friend of mine and his friend, Sheikh Abd el Majeed. I give it as my friend gave it me. MY FRIEND THE SHEIKH YOU will understand, of course, that I was no stranger to Morocco at the time of the story. A new arrival in Sunset Land is necessarily blind to much that goes on in that singular survival of patriarchal days which lies within sight of southern Europe. And he must walk warily if he would keep a whole skin and live to walk elsewhere. I was camping at the foot of Ain Sfroo during a very leisurely pilgrimage from the interior toward Tangier ; beautiful sea-girt Tangier, where the English and other infidels do congregate; "the city given over to dogs, and the spawn of dogs," as Believers pleasantly put it. My head man, Boaz (a jewel for a journey), had hit upon an ideal spot for our little camp. Behind us the jagged peaks of the Ain Sfroo soared and towered into the sky-line. Before my own tent a gnarled old olive, cruddled and bowed like an eighty- year-old field labourer at home, gave me pleasing shelter. Close beside my servants' tent ran a little brook of merry, brown mountain water ; and all round and about us the foot-hills met the plain in a stretch of verdure, so clear and pleasant to the eye that one fancied it had been a bowling-green of the gods ; of some sportive community of Djinnoon, let us say. I fancy I had dozed for a few moments (I had taken no siesta that day, and we had ridden, albeit in leisurely style, since dawn) when the sound of strange 95 96 MOROCCO voices, and the clean, quick footsteps of mules roused me, and I saw that a party of strangers were about to pitch their camp for the night within a hundred yards of where I lay, attracted no doubt by the beauty and fitness of the spot for that purpose. " Who comes ? " said I, lazily, to Boaz, who was stewing a chicken for me over a charcoal brazier. Boaz had evidently taken stock of the newcomers and already exhausted his interest in them, for he replied languidly, " Four dssdseen" (Guards), "and one who is already twice dead and buried." I thought this good enough to sit up for, and I noticed then that in the midst of the four mounted men two rode mules, pack-laden, and two were on gaunt horses, with high scarlet-peaked saddles was one afoot, his wrists bound with palmetto cord to the stirrups of a rider upon either side. "What then?" said I to Boaz. "Who is the Mead man'?" " It is Sheikh Abd el Majeed " (Sheikh Slave of the Glorious, that is) "of Tazigah; not for long a Sheikh, b'Allah, since it is but three moons since his father died May God have forgiven him ! and now now you see him ! " I was interested. I had known city-gate beggars in Morocco who had been Bashas or Governors of the towns they begged in. Also, I had known a water- pedlar who became a great Wazeer and ended his days, after enjoying great power and riches, in a particularly noisome dungeon in Marrakish. So this captive at the soldiers' stirrups was the young Sheikh of Tazigah. I had been in Tazigah, disguised as a Moorish woman of the peasant class (I confess to MY FRIEND THE SHEIKH 97 some pride in the statement, which perhaps two other Nazarenes might truthfully make), and knew something of the queer savage border-land town it was. You see the Kaid of the Ain Sfroo province is the nominal ruler of the whole of the Ain Sfroo, and, as a fact, does rule and extort taxes right up to the very outskirts of this same town of Tazigah. Into the town itself his myrmidons have not yet pierced. Beyond it, men laugh at Basha, Kaid and Sultan alike, never having paid a tax, save to their own brigands, and hold- ing that the gun, the knife, and the strong right arms of mountain-bred men are in themselves the law and its dministration and its penalties. Stern, hardy, free men are they ; and the Tazigs of Tazigah, they claim e same sort of immunity. But their claim is not, as ith that of the mountaineers beyond, undisputed, 'azigah is on the border-line. But for the young >heikh of Tazigah to be bound to the stirrups of ascals of the Kaid's guard this was woeful, I lought. " They must surely have caught him outside the own ? " I said to Boaz. " Ay, at the house of that crawling son of the legitimate Hamed Fasi, I believe," replied Boaz, urning the chicken in the stew-pan. " But, b'Allah, "azigah of to-day is not the Tazigah of my day or tie worms would be eating those same guards by ,ow. But now, you will see, Tazigah will become as village of the plain, and Kaid Achmet may he ride ver a little more uneasily, till his bones rot! will gather his taxes there, as he might in the salted place f the Jews." I was not in a position to contradict this prophecy, o called for the bread and the tea-pot, and settled G 98 MOROCCO down to the discussion of a somewhat elderly but admirably-cooked chicken, while Boaz and his comrades courted surfeit upon some three-year-old meat, pre- served in rancid butter, and some fritters which seemed to possess all the properties of oil-skin, or very thick waterproofing material of some sort. Dinner ended, I lit a cigarette, and bade Boaz convey to the neighbouring guides, with my salaams, some tea and sugar, and a certain tin of sweet biscuits of a sort that no Moor I had ever met could resist. Word of the guards' gratification being duly brought to me, I allowed a decent interval to elapse, and then, followed by Boaz and his two assistants, strolled down the slope to the tent of the soldiers and their captive. The idea of the pinioned young Sheikh possessed me. " Peace be upon ye, O Believers! What news ol ye? Nothing wrong with ye?" And so forth, ac- cording to custom, I showered the usual salutations upon the four brigands (for Raid's guards all through Morocco are nothing better than brigands), received their orthodox responses, and was bidden welcome. A place of honour was cleared for me upon a ragged carpet before the tent-pole, and some of my own tea was poured out for my delectation, in a little blue, gold and crimson mug, such as I have seen children in England place before their dolls. A sprouting head of mint was in the pear-shaped metal tea-pot, and one drank a spoonful of sugar to two of the decoction, making hideous noises with one's lips the while, and gasping after a drink as though choking from delighted surfeit. This if one would be truly courteous. Opposite the tent-pole, on the side farthest from MY FRIEND THE SHEIKH 99 the entrance, I saw lying Sheikh Abd el Majeed. The young man was stretched upon his right side, his wrists bound behind him to a stake at the edge of the tent, and his ankles bound together with palmetto cord. In his eyes one read something of the dignified philosophy with which all Mussulmans the world over meet misfortune, and a good deal of haughty contempt for the persons and methods of those who had brought him low ; and at the back of all else one saw some- thing of the indescribable horror and loathing which the semi-savage feels for the state of captivity. Bill Sykes probably does not like a cell at Holloway ; but I fancy it must be less objectionable to him than an eighteen-penny cage to a skylark, or pinioned captivity to a Tazigah Moor. And Abd el Majeed was born a chief, you will remember. I gave him sympathetic greeting with my eyes, as far as I could make those organs express my feelings ; and I thought he understood, and returned me a not ungrateful glance from his own heavily- fringed big eyes, which in that light appeared as black as sloes, and far more glossy. Speaking then as one entirely without information on the subject, I ventured upon inquiries regarding the prisoner. The chief of the soldiers answered me with unhesitating candour, and as though the prisoner himself, being already a corpse, had no longer hearing or any other sense to be offended. " Ihyeh ; that's the young Sheikh o' Tazigah ; and him the Kaid has desired to entertain these many moons. His body should mean dollars in our pockets, sure enough ; and without doubt the trick by which we won it deserves good pay. We got Hamed Fdsi to send him word of a horse no man could bestride, 100 MOROCCO by token that the beast could kick a house from off his back, and if the house could have been builded there. Now, as all men know, the vanity of the Sheikh was that mare never dropped the foal he could not handle, and ride, and cow withal. The Sheikh came down from Tazigah, as if to his wedding, and crafty Hamed had him soon astride my chestnut there, a heavy-headed, peaceful beast, that would not kick a snapping dog, but will go down on his knees when I tell him, like any camel. * Down, Daddy Big-head,' I shouts from my place behind Hamed's cow-shed. And in a moment the four of us were upon the Sheikh, while crafty Hamed picks up the gun the young man had propped against the house- front. Oh, 'twas undoubtedly a brilliant to-do ; it should make a song in Ain Sfroo for many a day. And so there lies the body o' him, and the Raid's dollars as good as in our pockets. And mind you, he was no weakling in his life, but a mighty muscular young man, the Sheikh o' Tazigah. A great capture, truly ! But these be mere trifles in a soldier's life." It was rather uncanny, I thought, this use of the past tense in speaking of the young man who lay listening, with his great eyes smouldering in the dusk of the tent. But, to be sure, he had fatalism to support him, the hardy philosophy of his blood and breeding, and his belief in a very luscious Paradise for all young Sheikhs who were true believers. Still, it must have been a leek to eat for a gallant young man, and well I knew that the cords that bound him must be a suffocating torment to Abd el Majeed. Moreover, there was a large grey mosquito upon the bridge of his nose, and a drop of perspiration trickling to the corner of one eye. MY FRIEND THE SHEIKH 101 " And what might be the trouble, then ? " I asked. " What thing hath given an edge to your Raid's desire to entertain the Sheikh ? " " Ihyeh, 'tis a double edge, Sidi ; a blade to cut bone as well as body. The Sheikh is twice dead, as all here know." "Ay, so Boaz hath told me," said I, forgetting my assumption of ignorance in the matter. " But the forging of the blade what led to it, O brave soldier ? " " Why, Sidi, that is surely plain to all men ? First, the Kaid desireth taxes from Tazigah, and so would have its Sheikh by the heels, and place one of his own people in that place ; and second, who is to marry the Raid's daughter now ? " I started at this. "Why, Allah alone knoweth, friend," said I. " But what is that to the Sheikh ?" "Sidi, thy life has surely been led in some far place. The Sheikh, in his life, was married to our Raid's daughter. 'Twas thought the thing would bring Tazigah properly under our master's rule. And on the morning after his wedding, what did the Sheikh do but turn his wife away with a paper of divorce, for all the world to see ; the woman and her bridal gear, foot and pack, he sent them all bundling down the hillside to her father's castle again. And there she hath remained, a catch for who would marry a great Raid's daughter with a record. What keener edge would ye have for our Raid's desire to entertain the Sheikh?" I nodded. The young Sheikh was in sober truth " twice dead/' I thought. And if you are curious regarding the Muslim view of such things, let me commend to your notice the 24th and 22nd chapters of Deuteronomy. The Mohammedan 102 MOROCCO rule is based upon the Jewish, but is milder. Prompt divorce suffices without stoning. But in the case of a powerful Raid's daughter " Y' Allah t'if!" I thought. "The Sheikh is indeed very dead!" And then, turning my eyes upon his recumbent figure (there is something which stirs the heart strangely in the sight of a man lying bound hand and foot, like a brute prepared for slaughter ; it is his utter helplessness, I fancy, that moves one's bowels of compassion), I was startled to note a light of unmistakable appeal in the black eyes as they met mine. It seemed Abd el Majeed must have read my thoughts, and his eyes seemed to say, " Nay, not dead, but maybe dying for lack of the helping hand of some true man ! " Almost involuntarily, and certainly without pause for thought or consideration of the difficulties involved, I returned the captive's look with a distinct affirmative, a glance which I well knew said plainly to him, " I will give that helping hand ; watch thou for me ! " It was a reckless promise, but, having made it, it was incumbent upon me to use my best endeavours to redeem it. Up to that moment I had not given one fleeting thought to the matter of the prisoner's possible escape. I had merely felt regret for his poor case ; regret for the tragedy of things Moorish, the inevitable tyranny, oppression and suffering of this most mysterious and romantic of the old-world realms. But for any attempt at rescue well, if a Nazarene sets himself to remedy the lot of every unjustly- oppressed wight he comes upon in the Land of the Setting Sun, he needs more than the wealth of the Indies at his back, the enduring strength of an elephant, the patience of Job, and the sort of philo- sophy which makes a man impervious to the basest MY FRIEND THE SHEIKH 103 sort of ingratitude or treachery. And, with all this, he may look to succeed in unsettling a few score of people, and temporarily improving the lot of one in ten thousand if he live long enough. But I had passed my word, though no word had passed my lips. The syrupy, mint-scented tea was exhausted, so, in rising to leave my hosts, I promised to send them a further supply ; and was informed that, for an un- believer, I was really a most excellent and redoubt- able person, of very respectable origin and goodly bearing. I predicted glory, riches, and a sumptuous pavilion in Paradise for my hosts, each and severally, and with pious wishes for their well-being in both worlds took my departure, followed by my trusty Boaz. On the way back to my tent ideas jostled one another in my mind, and I am bound to say that none of them were of much account. " Now, if only I had some sort of a sleeping-draught to give them, in place of this tea, that might advance our case a little," I thought, as I scooped some tea into a tin for Boaz to carry to the guards. But my medicine chest was small ; quinine, calomel, and two tiny bottles half-full of chlorodyne being all that I possessed in the way of drugs. " Well, well ; better half a loaf than no bread," I muttered. "Bring the teapot, Boaz." He brought our large pot and we made a strong brew of tea. Into this I emptied my two half bottles of chlorodyne, wondering the while what the estimable inventor of that soothing drug would have thought of my dispensing. I remembered that the stuff had given me sleep more than once in cases of mild but painful dysentery. " Boaz!" I growled, with sudden sternness, "you 104 MOROCCO have some hasheesh in your pouch. Now, don't deny it ! " I had endeavoured, unsuccessfully, of course, to wean the man from the use of the drug. He confessed somewhat sulkily. " Well, then, go thou and ply the guards with it every particle of it. And give them this tea. But drink none of it your- self, and take no hasheesh, for I have work afoot to-night." I rather think Boaz saw my game then, for there was a leer in his eye as he walked off to do my bid- ding. But I thought I would reserve my confidence until he had accomplished this first stage of my plan. I was uncertain what his attitude might be. He had his own skin to consider, of course, and the arm of the Kaid of Ain Sfroo was notoriously long, as his wrath was consuming and ill to meet. I smoked quietly for half an hour, and listened to the murmurs of good fellowship which reached me from the guards' tent. The mosquitoes were exceptionally lively that evening, and I thought, as I brushed them from my forehead, of Abd el Majeed, the "dead" Sheikh. " Poor devil ! " I muttered. " The very next caged bird I see shall have the door of its prison opened if I can get near it." "The heads of mud began to snore before they had time to lie down," said Boaz, when, after about forty minutes, he returned and squatted down beside me. " What work is afoot ? " Boaz was growing elderly, but, like every other Arab who ever cried me " Peace ! " his appetite for strife and adventure was keen as a lad's. " Boaz," said I ; "a Sheikh of the hills is as good a man as any Kaid of the plains ! " " As any six of the plains," agreed Boaz, promptly. MY FRIEND THE SHEIKH 105 I knew, of course, that himself was of Sheshawanee, a hill-man to the last drop of blood in his veins. " Think ye that the assaseen will sleep soundly, Boaz ? " was my next question. " Not so soundly as they might if their stomachs tasted a mountain man's steel," answered Boaz, finger- ing the point of his dagger's sheath ; " but pigs and guards of the plains sleep ever more heavily than true men ; and when they wake phaa ! Thou hast seen how pigs are speared on the plain beyond Spartel ! " I had, and had even enjoyed a little sport with the lance myself; but I wanted no sticking done that night. After all, Raids and their guards are Raids and their guards ; and consuls in coast towns are not always upon the side of the adventurous of their colour. "Two of them have mules, Boaz," said I, "and so do not count. The two that have horses " " Phaa ! Thy horse, Sidi, would leave them standing like trees ; pass them, and leave them, as the wind passes a house." " Ah ! That is as I thought. And the city of Al Rsar el Rebeer, Boaz, it is well beyond the line of Raid Achmet's authority no ? " " Ay, by two days' march." " Good ! Then you will make my horse ready for the road, good Boaz. Then bring me my Winchester, and we will see further." The horse and the gun were duly brought, and together we crept down toward the tent of the Raid's guards. We could hear them snoring from a hundred yards distant. Fifty paces from the tent I paused. 106 MOROCCO , " You know exactly where the Sheikh lies, Boaz?" "As I know my father's house in Sheshawan." " Go there, on thy belly, cut the Sheikh clear, and bring him to me." "I go." I might have chosen this part of the affair myself, you think, since undoubtedly there was danger in it ? Well, yes ; but then, you see, I knew my man. Had I done this, and left Boaz as onlooker beside my horse, he would afterwards have despised me for a fool ; and as he was a very useful servant for travelling work in Morocco, I could not afford to face that contingency. Besides, my favourite Winchester rifle was in my hand, and I knew that, with absolute certainty, I could drop the first man who was foolish enough to attack Boaz ; or the first half-dozen, for that matter, though I had no notion of doing so if I could avoid it. No ; you must think what you please of it, but in the presence of my servants I could not afford to do myself "what Boaz was doing at this moment. Like a great lizard in the grass he slithered down the slope to where a slight bulge in the side of the tent told me the Sheikh lay. Arrived within the shadow of the tent, Boaz lay still for a few moments. Then (as I afterwards learned) *he murmured, very low, "Bal-ak!" Which is to say " Thy mind!" or " Attention !" Then, getting by way of response a slight movement from the recumbent figure within, Boaz very delicately slit the hanging lower edge of the tent by the Sheikh's head. In a moment the Sheikh's bound wrists faced him in the moonlight through the opening he had made. Boaz's dagger made short work of the wrist fastenings, and was then MY FRIEND THE SHEIKH 107 slipped into the Sheikh's outstretched right hand, for him to work his will upon the cord that held his feet. Two minutes later and the Sheikh crawled out upon the grass beside Boaz. Together they pressed a sod down upon the severed edges of the tent flap, and three minutes more brought them to my side. The Sheikh caught my right hand in both his own, and I felt his moustache brush my knuckles. It was not as embarrassing to me as it had been when I was new to the East and its ways. "Nay, 'tis nothing, Sheikh," I told him. " Mount thou the horse here, and get thee to Al Ksar. Give this card to the English Consul there, and bide ye within his gates without fail, within his gates till I come." It was not the time for conversation. His beard brushed my hand again, and without a sound he swung into the saddle, walking my horse gingerly to win clear of earshot, past which I knew he would try the beast's paces well enough, in the course of, say, three and a half days of hard riding. There are no telegraph wires, police-stations, railways, turnpikes, or anything of that sort in Sunset Land, and the heads of provinces have no extradition treaties one with another. Even in actual warfare the bloody quarrels of one village are ignored utterly by soldiers and civilians alike in a village half-a-dozen miles distant. In the course of time, if Sheikh Abd el Majeed chose to abide in one place, some gossip from that place who happened to pass through the Kaid Achmet's domain would mention the circumstance. Then, if the Sheikh were worth it, the Kaid might offer his colleague, who ruled in the place the Sheikh had 108 MOROCCO chosen to rest in, a share of the plunder if he would yield up the Sheikh's body. That Kaid would then approach the Sheikh and endeavour to bleed him privately. If the Sheikh bled satisfactorily, well and good. If he did not, and was suspected of possessing treasure somewhere, he might be seized and sent a prisoner to the first Kaid ; but enough has been said to show you that personal freedom is the main thing. " Put me upon a good horse with a gun in my hand, and you give me the key of the world and a passport to Paradise," says your Moor. And, in Sunset Land, he is in the right of it. Boaz and myself, we went quietly to bed. In the morning I woke early and smacked my lips. I had a zestful appetite for the new day. The discomfiture of our acquaintances is apt to be even more pleasing to us than the misfortunes of our friends. I thought of the probably still snoring guards, and I chuckled, and rolled a morning cigarette. I shouted to Boaz to make the tea, and was comfortably partaking of that beverage when the first awakening shout of the Raid's guards smote upon my ears, like the overture to a comic opera. Abdullah, the one-eyed captain of the guard the same garrulous rascal who had been spokesman during my visit to the tent came plunging up the slope, still drowsy, very much bewildered, and as wrathful as a bull on a hornet's nest. As a modest story-teller I would scorn to translate for you the mildest of the expressions which he expelled from him at intervals, as an engine getting under way expels steam. Interspersed among them I caught various not very respectful references to "Nazarenes " (the Christianity of a European is taken as a matter MY FRIEND THE SHEIKH 109 of course in Morocco, where national and other fine distinctions count for nothing), and I entertained no doubt but that he had his suspicions of the true state of the case. But suspicions without proof are not much to go upon in any event ; and as between a travelling Englishman and a soldier of the guard of a provincial Moorish Kaid they are less than nothing. I begged the one-eyed man to let me hear details of his trouble, and proffered him refreshment to sustain him in the telling withal. The good tea he waved from him, so to say, and proceeded, his face empurpling as he went, to pour abuse upon poor Boaz. The next act in the opera showed me one-eyed Abdullah flying bellowing down the green slope toward his own tent, followed closely by Boaz, who was thrashing him with a shwarri-rope as he ran, and cursing him for the fatherless jackal of a mangy Kaid, lacking the valour required to guard in safety a man tied hand and foot. I called Boaz to heel as soon as I could stop laughing, and we made preparations to strike camp. The guards went without breaking their fast, and the last glimpse I had of them showed them ambling hurriedly along the road to Tazigah, upon which it may be they hoped to overtake the Sheikh. As I knew the Sheikh must be cantering in a quite opposite direction, the picture did not disturb me ; and for the next few days I made myself com- fortable, perched like a Turk atop of one of the packs carried by a smooth-stepping mule, a really very restful method of progress if a shade less dignified than the ordinary. The pack beneath me was as broad as a small dining-table, and much softer ; the mule knew his business better than I did, and required 110 MOROCCO no guidance. I was no loser by the absence of my horse ; though of that animal itself the same could probably not have been said. I found the Sheikh in the English Consul's fandak at Al Ksar, with my horse. It seemed his feeling for me was still informed by a lively sense of gratitude, and when he heard that I was for Tangier, the Sheikh announced, in the most matter-of-course way, his intention of accompanying me. As it happened, I was further bound for England, home and creditors at the time ; and so, I thought, the Sheikh and myself would very soon be parting company in any case. But imperious Chance, who guides the feet of fools, and others, was minded otherwise, or these lines had never been written. I spent four days in infidel-afflicted Tangier, during which time the Sheikh hovered about me in a half-paternal, half-dependent manner which the veriest boor had found it hard to resent, assisting me in the task of getting together my various belongings, and as I discovered very much to my astonishment upon my last night in Tangier sleeping upon the mat at my bedroom door. Next morning I waited until the little steamer which was to convey me to Gibraltar had gotten up her steam and was ready for departure, and then sallied forth to the Custom-house, followed by the Sheikh, Boaz, and a line of laden donkeys. My baggage had all passed the drowsy eyes of the gorgeous magnates who sit in the place of fraud and peculation at Tangier, or I thought so, and a man came running to inform me that I had not a moment to spare if I was to catch the boat. Then an elderly dignitary in robes of orange and violet awoke abruptly from his doze and ordered a couple of porters to open MY FRIEND THE SHEIKH 111 a packing-case of books and curios and other odd- ments, which up till that moment I had overlooked. I made my salaams to the dignitary and assured him that the contents of the case were worthless. He waved me from him, as I had been a puff of cigarette smoke. The case was opened and my poor treasures scattered far and wide. " The Nazarene must wait till another day ; these matters must be looked into carefully," murmured the dignitary, with the air of one who felt that for him to speak at all was an act of ineffable condescension. I strayed from the path of wisdom and spoke sharply ; not abusively, you understand, but brusquely, and with reference to the catching of a boat in Gibraltar. It was more than enough to damn my case, it seemed. It may be the dignitary had taken an over-dose of the shameful (kief-smoke) on the pre- vious evening. At all events he turned his head aside languidly and muttered something to a colleague about the illegitimacy and pig-like nature of Christians in general, and of myself in particular. Unfortun- ately the Sheikh, who stood beside me, caught the words. " Dog, and thrice-damned son of a dog ! " he bellowed. And, as he bounded forward, I saw his eighteen - inch curved dagger flash out from its scabbard. A long, heavy table separated the officials from ourselves, the herd. I sprang at the Sheikh's fluttering garments to hold him back. A dozen porters leaped in his way as he growled out another withering curse upon the progeny and the ancestry of the portly administrator behind the table. " Hold that pig's son ! " spluttered the official. A colleague leaned over and whispered to him. "The 112 MOROCCO Kaid of Ain Sfroo will pay a hundred dollars for that dog's body. Hold him ! " he yelled. There was not much time for thought. I could not afford to lose my boat. It was certain death for the Sheikh to be left behind ; that I well knew, for who may oppose a Customs Administrator in the port of Tangier ? None of them would dare to lay hand upon me. " Come ! " I whispered, behind the Sheikh. " Run with me for your life ! " Trust in me and, I think, obedience to me had become an instinct with this man. He turned on the instant, and together we raced down the pier to where a small boat lay piled high with my baggage. We were followed hotly by at least fifty Moors. Down the steps we cluttered, after upsetting the elderly official who wished to collect toll from us at the pier-head. We had no time for paying toll. " Out oars and pull for your life ! " I shouted to the boatmen. " Five dollars for you if you catch the steamer ! " I could hear the cable creaking in the rusty hawse- pipe of the little steamer. The skipper was an old friend of mine. " Get under way, Cap'en!" said I, the moment we touched the steamer's deck. " The boat's moored alongside. They'll be able to pick up my baggage all right/' And he did it like a Briton ; and the small flotilla that had put out after us was a good mile astern when my last bag was thrown aboard. I gave those boat- men seven dollars ; and they could and would plead ignorance of the whole business when they returned to the shore and the Custom-house. BELOW THE SALT T) ROGRESSING downward from those castle- X dwelling feudal lords of Morocco, the governors of provinces, one finds every city with its Basha (from the Turkish bash dghd, or chief administrator), who is assisted by a lieutenant (khaleefa), who, again, looks to ijfour m'kaddams, or foremen, one of whom is re- sponsible for the supervision of each quarter of the own. The Basha holds open court each day, from ix or seven till nine or ten o'clock in the morning, and from three to six afternoon, with a Sabbath lalf-holiday on Fridays. His court may be held in he city kasbah, or under an awning before his door, or, as I have seen it in sundry lesser towns, in a miry stableyard. In either case, the Basha sits or reclines upon cushions, a taleb or scribe near by, and the )ropitiating gifts of litigants, from a loaf of sugar or packet of candles to a bag of dollars, ranged suggestively behind him. A few of his soldiers generally the most unashamed rascals in the town) are always within hail, for, in the midst of a heated argument, or when presents come in but poorly, the Basha is apt to order a general thwacking to be administered on the spot, or to bundle everyone concerned in the case before him off to prison, there to cool their heels and minds, and reflect upon the evils of litigiousness. No record is ever kept of punishments adminis- H 113 114 MOROCCO tered, and the judge rarely mentions any term in ordering a man to prison. His power is absolute and unquestioned, in all penalties save that of death, for which the Sultan's order has to be obtained. The Basha deals with all important cases in which bribing upon anything like a large scale will be in- volved ; whilst petty cases, street troubles and the like, in which defendants and plaintiffs are not ex- pected to make presents of many shillings in value, come before the Khaleefa's court. This is an even less ceremonious temple of injustice than the Basha's court, but its hours and methods are very similar. From careful observation in the courts of various Khaleefas, I have come to believe that the scales are held evenly enough, to this extent, that accused and accuser, plaintiff and defendant, occupy much the same positions, and run much the same risks in an average case tried before Basha or Khaleefa. The presents from both sides being equal in value, the plaintiff is at least as likely to go to gaol as is hisj opponent, and an even more probable contingency is that the pair of them will be bundled off together. Now, the suggestion thus conveyed, the moral urged is excellent : don't go to law ; and it is needed, for all Orientals are given over much to litigation. Seriously considered, however, one is bound to' admit that the Moorish courts are veritable sinks of chicanery, corruption and venal paltering with the country's curse of palm oil. When a Moor really desires justice in a vital matter, vengeance upon a^ murderer, or an adulterer, he sharpens his dagger,; primes his flint-lock, invokes God's blessing upon his errand, and sets out to combine the offices of judge and executioner in his own person by slaying the BELOW THE SALT 115 offender. His right to do this is recognised ; indeed, such a course is expected of him, though the accept- ance of blood-money is allowed at times to wipe out a blood feud. In every town there is one other court of a more formal sort, wherein a more life-like simulacrum of iustice obtains, and wakels or attorneys ply their vexatious craft. This is the Kadi's court, and the Kadi is by way of being a law lord and registrar- general rather than a criminal judge ; he is a more or less ecclesiastical civilian, and not a kaid, or militant power. Here all documents are drawn up by dul, or notaries ; there is a Kadi's fee attaching to every seal and signature, and the traffic in " presents " is com- paratively inconsiderable, and not open. A Kadi may not send a man to prison for more than three days without providing a written statement of his offence and sentence. He may not order fetters, flogging or torture, and his decisions must always be written. This is the theory. As a fact, any man of standing may have an unprotected Moor imprisoned for almost any length of time, or beaten, within safe limits, by means of communicating his desire, with material compliments, to the Basha. " I sent that rascal up to the kasbah to be flogged this morning. He had been tampering with . . . again." That is a remark which the present writer has heard more than once upon the lips of European residents in Moorish ports. There is a European consul in Morocco to-day who had his Moorish j servant well beaten, and kept (on the raw edge of starvation) in prison for exactly one year, as punish- ment for having plucked and eaten a ripe pear grow- 116 MOROCCO ing in an uncultivated garden that belonged to the consul. In this case the whole and sole ceremony of evidence, trial, sentence and the rest was crowded into one three-line note from Christian Consul to Muslim Basha :