R. B. Cunninghame Graham

“ We left Meskala early and in rain, which soon was over, and entering on a little bit of desert country, the Atlas range appeared like a great wall of limestone capped with white in the far distance.
For three hot hours we passed through a miniature Sahara, rocky and desolate, stones, stones, and still more stones and sand, a colocynth or two lying amongst the rocks, some orange-headed thistles, Ziziphus Lotus here and there, some sandarac bushes now and then; the horses stumbling on the stones, mules groaning in the sand, and no great rock in all the thirsty land to shelter under from the sun. ”

“ Literature, in the modern Moorish State, is confined but to the Koran, the sacred books, an occasional Arab poet, and the study of the one book known to be written in the Berber tongue, and called El Maziri, which deals exclusively with the ceremonial of the faith. Strange that a people like the Moors, still brave, so fine in type, ardent in faith, sober in habit, and apparently (if history lie not more than usually) so like to what they were externally, when they shook Europe, should have fallen into such absolute decay. Literature, art, science, everything is forgotten ”

“ If they forsake them, as in some measure the inhabitants of Morocco certainly have done, slavery, sure and certain, is their lot; and in the time to come our rule, or that of the French or Germans, will transform them into the semblance of the abject creatures who once were free as swallows, and who to-day lounge round the frontier towns in North America calling themselves Utes, Blackfeet, Apaches, or what not, ghosts of their former selves, sodden with whisky, blotched with the filthy ailments we have introduced, and living contradictions of the morality and the religion under which we live. ”

“ Even to-day the incursions of the fierce Zimouri, a Berber tribe, render a visit at times precarious. The walls of the town enclose a space of about a mile circumference; sheep, goats, and camels feed inside them, and a footpath leads from one deserted gate-house to the other, a shepherd boy or two play on their reeds, and though the sun beats fiercely on the open space, it looks forlorn and melancholy, and even the green lizards peering from the walls look about timidly, as if they feared to see a ghost. ”

“ The sufferer by famine, as in Morocco, suffers enough, God knows, stalks about like a skeleton, dies behind a saint’s tomb; but in the sun. He believes in Allah to the last, and dies a man, his eyesight not impaired by watching wheels whirr round to make a sweater rich, his hands not gnarled with useless toil (for what can be more useless than to work all through your life for some one else?) ”

“ Both a musician and a philosopher, but yet a moralist, and a fanatic preacher of the graces of Mohammed, but still a sceptic at the heart, and above all a traveller, “for by travelling a man, although his purse grows light, still lays up treasures on which to live when he is old. What is a Sultan, Kaid, Pasha, or Governor, compared to him who is the Sultan of the world, when where night catches him he rests and looks upon the stars?” ”

“ The Zowia itself seemed even more Eastern than most buildings of its kind, the walls merely baked mud, the towers but hardly overtopping them, and all the animals of a superior class to those raised by the ordinary Moors. The tribe ranks high for fighting qualities, as riders, shots, and swordsmen, and though small, can hold its own against all comers. The women, taller and thinner than the women of the Moors, were dressed in blue, after the desert fashion, and in procession walked to the well, with each one carrying an amphora upon her head. ”

“ Punctually at half-past two the Chamberlain, accompanied by a single follower, came for us, and we—that is, Lutaif, myself, Mohammed-el-Hosein, and Swani—walked as majestically as we could across the deserted Maidan, baking in the sun. We passed through several courts in which our friends the horses and the mules were tied, and I observed the wounded cream-coloured stallion of the Kaid tethered alone and guarded by a little boy who flapped the flies away with a green bough. ”

“ From the green gardens of the Aguedal the enormous stone-built pile of the Sultan’s palace, all ornamented with fine marbles brought from Italy and Spain, towered like a desert-built Gibraltar over the level plain. Across the sea-like surface of the steppe long trains of camels, mules, and men on foot crawled, looking like streams of ants converging on a giant ant-hill, whilst in the distance the huge wall-like Atlas towering up, walled the flat country in, as the volcanoes seem to cut off Mexico from the world outside. ”

“ The battle was memorable, for Abdel-Malik, King of Fez, died of exhaustion on the field, and Don Sebastian, rather than survive disgrace, plunged, as did Argentine at Bannockburn, into the thickest of the fight, and fell or disappeared, for though his faithful servant, Resende, claimed to have seen his body, so much doubt existed of his death that the strange sect known as Sebastianists arose in Portugal. Their tenet was that Don Sebastian was still alive, but kept in durance by the Moors, and in remote and old-world villages believers linger even to the present day. ”

“ I yet imagine that throughout the East the interest lies entirely in mankind, for nature, at least to judge by what is seen throughout Morocco, is as dominated by man as is the docile soil of England, which gives its crop year in year out, suffers and has endured a thousand years of ploughing, dunging, reaping, draining, and the like, and thinks as little of rebellion as does the mouthy Radical who on his cart thunders against the Queen, and slavers doggishly before a new created lord. ”

“ Blessed are those who rise, to them the world is pleasant and well ordered, all things are right, and virtue is rewarded (in themselves) ; thrice blessed are the pachydermatous of heart, the deaf of soul, the invertebrate, insensible, the unimaginative; nothing can injure, nothing wound them; nature’s injustice, man’s ineptitude, fortune’s black joking, leaves them as untouched as a blind cart-horse, who, in struggling up a hill, sets his sharp, calkered foot upon a mouse. ”

“ On mules and donkeys, on horseback and on foot, beggars, or travelling well attended, Berbers and Arabs, Jews, Negroes, Haratin, men from the Sahara, and from the mountains of the Riff, Syrians, and Levantines, outcast Europeans, and an occasional Hindu, with Turks and Greeks, and people from the utmost regions of the Oriental world, they all are there, and always on the move, travelling about as if some not too swiftly circulating quicksilver ran in their veins ”

“ No doubt no man in all Morocco is secure in the enjoyment of his property; but then in order to be amenable to tyranny one must be rich, and as most tribesmen own but a horse or two, a camel, perhaps a slave, some little patch of cultivated ground or olive garden, it is not generally on them the extortion of the Government descends, but on the chief Sheikh, Kaid, or Governor, who, if he happens to be rich, can never sleep secure a single day, for he knows well some time he will be brought to Fez or to Morocco, thrust in a dungeon underground, and made to give up all he has on earth. ”

“ Curious, in prison, or in a ship, or stuck alone in some wild hut on prairie, or on Pampa, to remark how long the time seems for the first few days, and then begins to race, so that before one is aware a month is past which at the first looked like eternity to face. And stranger still, how in a week or so, the newspapers and books, the so-called intellectual conversation, news of the outside world, the theatres, churches, politics, and the things which by their aggregated littleness, taken together, seem important, fall out of one’s life. ”

“ The Sherif having gone to the mosque for a brief interval, I walked into the courtyard to see my horse, and found him standing dejectedly and too worn out to eat; the mules exhausted, one of them lying down, with the men sitting beside them, too tired even to light a fire. Lutaif, who was not much accustomed to such trots, and who moreover had ridden a tired mule for most part of the day, had nearly fallen asleep during the tea and coffee and the long talk with the Sherif, now was a little rested, and strolled with me about the place. ”

“ All the attractions to be met with in the town do not detain me; what takes my fancy most is to see tribesmen from the country, armed to the teeth, and balancing a gun full six feet long upon their saddles, sit on their horses bargaining at shops in the same fashion I have seen the Gauchos at a camp-town in South America, their horses nodding their heads and looking half asleep, their owners seated with one leg passed round the pommel of the saddle, and passing hours seated as comfortably as in a chair. ”

“ The grateful spring, fruit trees, and shady little oasis where we rested rejoice in the name of Aguaydirt el Má, a compound of Arabic and Shillah, Má in Arabic meaning the water, and Aguaydirt, no doubt having some meaning of its own in the wild tongue it comes from.
As we ride through a bushy country with some straggling farms, we pass a Sheikh on a good horse, long gun across the saddle, and a tail of ragged followers on foot. ”

“ Lala Mamouna, the female saint who guards Larache from pestilence and famine, sudden death, and the few simple ailments which Arabs suffer from, has her white crenelated sanctuary on a hill which overlooks the sea, and to her tomb women who wish for children to carry on the misery of life, repair, and pray or chatter with each other, and no doubt the saint is just as tolerant of scandal as are the wise old men who sun their stomachs at the windows of a club. ”

“ Nine dollars and the horse? By Allah, seven; but the Shillah, who has not tried my horse, looks at his colt, and says: “I brought him up, fed him with camel’s milk, rode him to war, and he is six years old; nine dollars and the horse.” We shake our heads; and he, mounting his horse, yells like a Pampa Indian, and charging through the cane-brake bare-backed, and with nothing but a string on one side of his horse’s neck, rushes up a steep bank and disappears, riding like a Numidian. ”

“ We plunged into a wood, crossed a flooded stream, rode through a field of standing corn, and, crossing the maidan [141] before the castle, came to a horse-shoe arch. Assembled before the entrance was a crowd of armed retainers, loafers, herdsmen, travellers, and all the riff-raff who, in Morocco, haunt the dwellings of rich men. Boys, and more boys, oxen, and goats, and horses, all pressed into the gateway and the dark winding passage, to escape the storm. ”

“ At times when thinking upon other people’s travels (always so much more interesting than any of my own) , it comes before me how that, in desert places, mountain passes and the like, so many men must have been killed, and met their fate heroically, the situation so to speak thrown away, with no one there to see, record, to write about it, as if the poor, forlorn and wasted heroes were no more worth a thought than the fat man of business who snorts his life out on a feather-bed between a medicine bottle and a mumbling priest. ”

“ We rose at daylight, drank green tea and smoked, went down to bathe, came back and breakfasted, looked at the horses led to water, listened to the muezzin call to prayers, walked in the olive grove or watched the negroes in the corn field; engaged in conversation with some of the strange types, we read el Faredi, speculated on how long the “rekass” would tarry on the road from the Sultan’s camp, and wondered at the perpetual procession of people always arriving at the castle to beg for something, a horse, a mule, a gun, some money, or in some way or other to participate in the Kaid’s Baraka. ”

“ First, the father, a fine old Arab, gaunt, miserable, grey-headed, ragged, hollow-cheeked, without a turban, shoes, or waist-belt, and carrying a child which looked over his shoulder, with enormous black and starving eyes; the mother on foot, in rags and shoeless, and still holding between her teeth a ragged haik to veil her misery from the passer by, a baby at her back, and in her hand a branch torn from an olive-tree to switch off flies ”

“ Nestling into the gorges of the hills, and crowning eminences, were scattered villages of the true Atlas type, built all of mud, flat roofed, the houses rising one over the other like a succession of terraces or little castles, and being of so exactly the same shade as the denuded hills on which they stand as to be almost impossible to make out till you are right upon them. At times so like is village to hill, and hill to village, that I have taken an outstanding mound of earth to be a house, and many times have almost passed the village, not seeing it was there. ”

“ So, sadly, as if we had lost one we had known from youth, Lutaif and I wandered along the river; and by a stony beach, under some oleander bushes, came on a little tea-party, all seated on the ground. A little pleases Arabs, who in a measure are like children, easily pleased, and passing easily from good temper into rage, and nothing gives them greater satisfaction than when a stranger comes and joins their pleasure or their meals. So we advanced, and found they were three Sherifs from Taseruelt; Sherifs, but practically beggars, though white men of pure Arab blood and race. ”