Morocco

“ Unlike India and Tripolitania and Rhodesia and the Sudan, Morocco is a country which is admirably adapted for European colonisation, being blessed with every natural advantage that creation has to offer. Its only objectionable feature is its people. Lying at the western gateway of the Mediterranean, where the narrowed sea has so often proved a temptation to invasion, its Atlantic ports within striking distance of the great lanes of commerce between Europe and South America and South Africa, Morocco occupies a position of enormous strategic, political, and commercial importance. ”

“ To anybody who remembered history for a few years back, even with the general memory of the man in the street, to anybody who had read the controversies about the war, Morocco brought not puzzle, but enlightenment. For had not Morocco been really the starting point of the Years of Crisis—those years intermittent in excitement, but constant in anxiety? ”

“ There are lowly vales and verdant plains, as well as gigantic mountains. This great, this beautiful country—this corner of a mighty continent—almost touches Europe. One-half of our whole trade passes along it; yet it is sealed against us more effectually than China or Japan.
European enterprize, by lust of conquest, love of gain, or spirit of proselytism, has made the wide world its vineyard; and, combining its various engines, has, far and near, shattered thrones, and subjugated or extinguished races. How is it that Morocco stands unmoved and unassailed? ”

“ Morocco city struck me, and has always done so, for I have been there twice, as the best example of a purely African city I have seen. Fez has the mixture of Spanish blood in its inhabitants which the expulsed from Malaga, Granada, and from all the Andalos, brought and disseminated. In the high houses, which make the streets like sewers to walk in, you hear men play the lute, and women sing the Malagueña, Caña and the Rondeña as in mountain towns in Spain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Morocco is too curious, too beautiful, too rich in landscape and architecture, and above all too much of a novelty, not to attract one of the main streams of spring travel as soon as Mediterranean passenger traffic is resumed. Now that the war is over, only a few months' work on roads and railways divide it from the great torrent of "tourism"; and once that deluge is let loose, no eye will ever again see Moulay Idriss and Fez and Marrakech as I saw them. ”

“ In one of the small hamlets we bought bread and fed our horses, and once again pushed on, till about four o’clock, after winding up an interminable staircase of rock, all of a sudden the plain of Morocco burst upon us; the great city in the distance, and the Kutubieh standing like a lighthouse of Islam, to guide the wanderer home. ”

“ For that is the fashion in Morocco. There they build and make, and they do both things beautifully and well. But they seldom finish; in a house, dainty with fountains and arabesques and coloured tiles, you will still find a corner uncompleted, a pillar which lacks the delicate fluting of the other pillars, an embrasure for a clock half ornamented with gold filagree, and half left plain. And if they seldom finish, they never by any chance repair. ”

“ No railroads, no electric transportation, no telephones, no telegraph, the interior a wilderness, where even the sultan dare not go, and eight to ten millions of people are living in primitive style. Morocco has a choice climate, fine scenery, great wealth of earth and sky, vast supplies of precious metals, and the soil has never been more than scratched by the crude wooden plows of the people—a soil that will give them three crops a year. ”

“ Every detail of our trip from Tangier to Rabat had been carefully planned to keep us in unbroken contact with civilization. We were to "tub" in one European hotel, and to dine in another, with just enough picnicking between to give a touch of local colour. But let one little cog slip and the whole plan falls to bits, and we are alone in the old untamed Moghreb, as remote from Europe as any mediaeval adventurer. If one lose one's way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a Djinn. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To-day the craft of finely decorating arms is not forgotten in Morocco. “A silversmith advanced to show a half-completed silver-sheathed and hafted dagger, engraved with pious sentences, as, “God is our sufficiency and our best bulwark here on earth,” and running in and out between the texts a pattern of a rope with one of the strands left out, which pattern also ran round the cornice of the room we sat in, and round the door, as it runs round the doors in the Alhambra and the Alcazar, and in thousands of houses built by the Moors, and standing still, in Spain. ”

“ No young men stroll through the bazaar in bright caftans, with roses and jasmine behind their ears, no pedlars offer lemonade and sweetmeats and golden fritters, no flower-sellers pursue one with tight bunches of orange-blossom and little pink roses. The well-to-do ride by in white, and the rest of the population goes mournfully in earth-color.
But gradually one falls under the spell of another influence—the influence of the Atlas and the desert. Unknown Africa seems much nearer to Morocco than to the white towns of Tunis and the smiling oases of South Algeria. ”

“ Only a mule, an Iceland pony, or a horse bred in the mountain districts of Morocco could have coped with such a road, and, as it was, the efforts of the poor brutes were pitiable to see. Under our feet, at a great depth below, the Wad el N’fiss boiled furiously amongst the stones, winding and rewinding like a watch spring, and forcing us to cross it many times, when its swift current proved so formidable that, although not more than three feet deep, we had to enter altogether in a group to keep our feet. ”

“ Morocco as it is is a very fine place spoiled by civilization. Not nice civilization but the dregs of it, the broken down noblemen of Spain and cashiered captains of England and the R—— L——'s of America. They hunt and play cricket and gamble and do nothing to maintain what is best in the place or to help what is worst. I love the Moors and the way they hate the Christian and the scorn and pride they show. They seem to carry all the mystery and dignity of Africa and of foreign conquests about them, and they are wonderfully well made and fine looking and self-respecting. ”

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

“ The real Morocco is so lacking in all the conveniences that would commend it to wealthy travellers that the writer feels some apology is due for the appearance of his short story of an almost unknown country in so fine a setting. Surely a simple tale of Sunset Land was never seen in such splendid guise before, and will not be seen again until, with past redeemed and forgotten, future assured, and civilisation modernised, Morocco ceases to be what it is to-day. ”

“ But for my part there is no sentimental feeling for Morocco. That a government is old is no reason, for me, that it should be maintained. Because the Moors have always ridden horses, I see no reason why they should not ride in carriages or even in trains. In fact, I sympathise with the unfortunate beasts of burden and with the suffering Moors themselves. I was not affected, like the great French writer, more by the beauty and the romance of the country than by the horror and distress ”

“ But as we wander ever through the bazaars, meeting everywhere the same impassive, uncurious expressions on the uncovered faces of the men, we are inclined to believe that to the Moor, Morocco is the world,—that for him, outside its borders, geographically or intellectually, there is nothing worthy his consideration. ”

“ Morocco remained—the richest portion of the Northern Continent, a great and beautiful country which, with its favourable climatic conditions, its magnificent spinal column in the Atlas mountain chains, with their numerous rivers, varied elevations and fertile soil, can grow anything from ground nuts to tea, from wheat to Indian corn, contains valuable mineral deposits, produces the finest horses in the world, and could sustain innumerable flocks and herds. ”

“ The situation of Morocco city much resembles that of Mexico, which has a pseudo-Oriental look, the flat-roofed houses and the palm trees completing the effect.
A hot three hours, kicking our tired beasts along, brought us outside the city walls, and passing underneath the gate, which zig-zags like an old Scottish p. 264bridge, we emerged into the sandy lanes running between orange gardens, which form a kind of suburb of the town, and where the Soudanese, the men from Draa and the Wad Nun, do mostly congregate. ”

“ A visitor knowing Arabic and Shilha, and able to discount the stories properly, might have had a faithful picture of Morocco as its own people see it, had he been admitted to join the weather-worn, hardy traders who sat complacently eyeing their diminished store towards the close of day. Truth is nowhere highly esteemed in Morocco, [52] and the colouring superimposed upon most stories must have destroyed their original hue, but it served to please the Moors and Berbers who, like the men of other countries one knows, have small use for unadorned facts. ”

“ If we travelled, as we have lately imagined, on swift-footed dromedaries in a huge circuit from Timbuktu through the Sudan, the Libyan desert, and the land of the Tuaregs, we [Pg 305] should at last come to Morocco, "The Uttermost West," as this last independent Sultanate in Africa is called. Morocco is the restless corner of Africa, as the Balkan Peninsula is of Europe, Manchuria of Asia, and Mexico of North America—in South America all parts are unsettled. ”

“ Morocco, from political causes, is less civilized than any other part of the northern part of Africa; and it can be seen, and with it the southern cities of Spain and the Rock of Gibraltar, in five or six weeks, and at a cost of a very few hundred dollars. This was to me the most interesting part of the Mediterranean, chiefly, of course—for it possesses few of the beauties or monuments or historical values of the other shores of that sea—because it was unknown to tourists and guide-books. ”

“ One needs to dive beneath the surface, to live on the spot in touch with the people, to fathom the real Morocco, and in this it is doubtful whether any foreigners not connected by ties of creed or marriage ever completely succeed. ”

“ Not that I mean the various passengers whom I have named bulk largely in the population of Morocco, but they are there, and every now and then one feels how all the Oriental world is linked together by nomadic habits, from Bagdad to Wad Nun, and from Shiraz to the oases of the Sahara.
In Morocco the prevailing tone is greyish white; men’s clothes, and houses, towns, bushes, tall umbelliferæ, nodding like ghosts in autumn, all are white ”

“ While the real Morocco remains a half-known land to-day, this book does not take the traveller from the highroad. The mere idler, the wayfarer to whom Morocco is no more than one of many places of pilgrimage, must needs deal modestly with his task, even though modesty be an unfashionable virtue; and the painstaking folk who pass through this world pelting one another with hard facts will find here but little to add to their store of ammunition. ”

“ Here are to be found not only the silks [Pg 108] and pottery, the Jewish goldsmiths' work, the arms and embroidered saddlery which the city itself produces, but "morocco" from Marrakech, rugs, tent-hangings and matting from Rabat and Salé, grain baskets from Moulay Idriss, daggers from the Souss, and whatever European wares the native markets consume. One looks, on the plan of Fez, at the space covered by the bazaars; one breasts the swarms that pour through them from dawn to dusk—and one remains perplexed, disappointed. ”

“ In no part of Spain could one so readily imagine one's self in Morocco; indeed, it is hard to realize that one is not there till the new European streets are reached. In the palace grounds, apart from the fine carriage-drive, with its seats and lamp-posts, when out of sight of the big hotels and other modern erections, the delusion is complete. Even in the town the running water and the wayside fountains take one back to Fez; and the channels underneath the pavements with their plugs at intervals are only Moorish ones repaired. ”