Isabel Savory
In the Tail of the Peacock
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066209919
Table of Contents
MESSRS. HUTCHINSON & CO.'S
ON THE "POLAR STAR"
THE SAILOR KING
WARWICK CASTLE AND ITS EARLS.
THE LIFE OF THE
MARIE CORELLI
WILD FRUITS OF THE COUNTRY SIDE.
PREFACE
This book contains no thrilling adventures, chronicles, no days devoted to sport. It will probably interest only those minds which are content with "the C Major of this life," and which find in other than scenes of peril and excitement their hearts' desire.
Such as care to wander through its pages must have learnt to enjoy idleness, nor find weeks spent beneath the sun and stars too long—that is to say, the fascination of a wandering, irresponsible life should be known to them: waste and solitary places must not appal, nor trifling incident weary, while human natures remotely removed from their own, alternately delight and repel. Those who understand not these things, will find but a dull chronicle within the following pages.
If to live is to know more, and to know more only to love more, the least eventful day may possess a minimum of value, and even quiet monotones and grey vistas be found and lost in a glamour born of themselves.
In this loud and insistent world the silent places are often overlooked, and yet they are never empty.
ISABEL SAVORY.
Westfield Old Hall,
East Dereham.
February, 1903.
CHAPTER I
Tangier—Country People—The Pilgrimage to Mecca—Moorish Prisons—We Ride to Cape Spartel—Decide to Leave Tangier and Push Inland.
CHAPTER I
The vague and hazy ideals which the white light of an English upbringing relegates to dreamland and dismisses as idle fancies, rise up in the glare of African sunlight, alive, tangible, unashamed; the things that are, not the things that might be:—the vivid colouring, the hot crowding, the stately men and veiled women, the despotism and stoicism, the unchanging picturesqueness of the Thousand and One Nights, the dramatic inevitability of the Old Testament.—A. J. D.
There was no desert in Morocco.
If a country has not been "read up" beforehand, the imagination has free play and forms many false conclusions: yet though it suffer on the one hand rude awakenings, it is on the other compensated by certain new lights—indelible and unique impressions—which come only in the train of things inconnu. So though we found no desert, there are other things in Morocco.
It is one of the few countries in the world, and they grow fewer each year, which is still unexplored—unknown. Thousands of square miles in Morocco have never been crossed by a European, or at any rate none have returned to tell the tale: maps mark only blank spaces, and have no names for villages, no records of mountains or rivers: there are no roads, still less railways, in the country: the only means of transport along the wild, worn tracks is by camels, mules, and donkeys: he who will not ride perforce walks.
The bare fringe alone of Morocco, its coast towns, and the choice, let us say, of two roads connecting them with its capitals, Fez and Morocco City, are open to travellers; beyond these limits it is difficult and dangerous