And then comes evening, and the travellers, still kicking at their horses’ sides, straining their eyes, keep pushing forward, stumbling and objurgating on the trail.
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.
Gartmore, 1898.
CHAPTER I
South-south-west, a little westerly with a cloudy sky, and with long rollers setting into the harbour of Tangier, and the date October 1st in the last year of supposititious grace. The old white town, built round the bay with the Kasbah upon its hill, and the mosque tower just shining darkly against the electric light, for Tangier passed from darkness to electric light, no gas or oil lamps intervening, gave the effect as of a gleaming horse-shoe in the dark. Outside the harbour, moored twice as far away as the French ironclad, swung the Rabat at anchor, for the captain, a Catalan of the true Reus breed, was bound to supplement his lack of seamanship with extra caution. Towards her we made our way late in the evening in a boat manned by four strong-backed Jews, and seated silently, for it was the first stage of a journey concerning which each of our friends had added his wisest word of disencouragement. Nothing so spurs a man upon a journey as the cautions of his friends, “dangerous,” “impossible,” “when you get there nothing worth seeing,” and the like, all show you plainly that the thing is worth the venture, for you know the world is ever proud to greet the conqueror with praise and flowers, but he has to conquer first. And if he fails, the cautious kindly friend wags his wise head and shakes his moralising finger, thinks you a fool, says so behind your back, but cannot moralise away experience, that chiefest recompense of every traveller. So in the boat besides myself sat Hassan Suleiman Lutaif, a Syrian gentleman, who acted as interpreter, and Haj Mohammed es Swani, a Moor of the Riff pirate breed, short, strong, black-bearded, with a turned-up moustache, and speaking Spanish after the Arab fashion, that is without the particles, and substitution of the gerund for every portion of the verb. El Haj and I were old acquaintances, having made several journeys in Morocco, and being well accustomed to each other’s ways and idiosyncrasies upon the road.
Our bourne was Tarudant, a city in the province of the Sus, but rarely visited by Europeans, and of which no definite account exists by any traveller of repute. Only some hundred and fifty miles from Mogador, it yet continues almost untouched, the only Moorish city to which an air of mystery clings, and it remains the only place beyond the Atlas to the south in which the Sultan has a vestige of authority. [2]
Outside its walls the tribesmen live the old Arab life, all going armed, constantly fighting, each man’s hand against his neighbour, and, therefore, in a measure, raised against himself. And yet a land of vines, of orange gardens, olive yards, plantations of pomegranates, Roman remains, rich mines; but cursed “with too much powder,” as the Arabs say, and therefore doomed, up to the present day, to languish without pauperism, prostitution, and the modern vices which, in more favoured lands, have long replaced the old-world vices which man brought with him into the old world. Even my friends were all agreed that to reach Tarudant in European clothes was quite impossible. Thus a disguise became imperative. After a long discussion I determined to impersonate a Turkish doctor travelling with his “taleb” [3a]—that is, scribe—to see the world and write his travels in a book. [3b] God, the great doctor, but under Him His earthly vicegerents, practicants, practitioners, with or without diploma, throughout the east, enjoy considerable respect; they kill, they cure, and still God has the praise. No one asks where they studied, and if faith in his powers helps a doctor in his trade, the east of all lands should be most congenial to all those who live by lancet, purge, and human faith. My stock of medicines was of the most homeric type, quinine and mercury, some Seidlitz powders, eye wash for ophthalmia, almost, in fact, as simple as that of the old Scotch doctor who doctored with what he styled the two simples, that is, laudanum and calomel.
The multitudinous dialects of Arabic, the constant travelling, either upon the pilgrimage or for the love of travel, which seems inherent in the Arab, render it possible for a European occasionally to pass unrecognised, even although his stock of Arabic is as exiguous as was my own. Behold us, then, approaching the Rabat, a steamer of the Linea Tras-Atlantica Española, bound for Mogador, some five days’ journey below Tangier, the point at which I intended to put on Moorish clothes, buy mules and horses, engage a guide, and set out for Tarudant, the city where La Caba, Count Julian’s daughter (she whose beauty tempted Don Rodrigo, and to avenge whose honour her father sold Spain to the Moors), lies buried, though how she came to die there is to historians unknown. On board the ship there was no light, no look-out, and the accommodation ladder was triced up for the night, stewards were asleep, and the long narrow vessel dipped her nose into the rollers, rolling and heaving in the dark, whilst we in Spanish, English, Arabic, and Portuguese rang all the changes upon ship ahoy. At last a sulky, sleepy quartermaster deigned to let down the ladder, and we scrambled upon deck.
Next morning found us off Arzila, the Julia Constantia Zilis of the Romans, a small, walled town lost among orange gardens, and girt by walls built by the Portuguese. Over the gateway the half-obliterated arms of Portugal can still be seen, but mouldering to decay, as is the country that they represent. Close to the walls rises the tomb of the Saint of Arzila; the white dome springs from a dense thicket of palmetto, dwarf rhododendron, berberis, and aromatic shrubs, a tiny stream bordered by oleanders (bitter as is an oleander is a proverb in the land) runs past it; above the dome and red-tiled roof two palms keep watch, and whisper in the wind the secrets palm trees know, and tell each other of the East, and of the various changes, Arab and Berber, Moor and Portuguese, they have seen during the course of their slow growth and long extended days. Columbus visited the place; the battle of Trafalgar was fought a few leagues off, and an old shepherd, still living where he was born, above the lighthouse on Cape Spartel, remembers to have seen it as a boy when he lay out upon the hills tending his goats.
Inside the town decay and ruin, heaps of garbage, a palace falling here, a hovel there. A town almost entirely given up to Jews, who carry on their business fleecing the Moors, and still complaining when at last the cent. per cented victim turns and rends. The best-known citizen is Mr. Ben Chiton, an Israelite of the best type, old, and white bearded, and with round, beady eyes, like an old rat, consul of seven nations, with all the seven flag-staffs on his hospitable roof. Dressed in the Jewish gown girt round the waist, wearing his slippers over white cotton stocking’s, and the black cup badge of the servitude of all his race throughout Morocco. His house is neat and clean, almost beyond the power of endurance, Rahel and Mordejai labouring incessantly with broom and whitewash brush, and he himself talking incessantly in the Toledan [5] dialect and thick Jewish accent, of politics, of kings, ambassadors, and as to whether England and France will go to war over the question of the Niger and the like, whilst all the time he presses brandy on you in a lordly glass holding about a pint, which you must swallow no matter what the hour, the while he calls upon the God of Isaac to bear him witness that the house is yours, and shows you, with just pride, the chair on which he says the Prince of Wales once sat, although historians do not seem to chronicle his passage through the town. An Israelite of Israelites, a worthy Jew, come of the tribe of Judah as he says, one to whose house all travellers are welcome; loved by his family with veneration, as the heads of Jewish houses are. Long may he prosper, and may his roof grow broad as a phylactery, and become strong enough to bear the flag-staffs of all the nations upon earth, and his house long remain to show the curious what most probably a Jewish house in Spain was like before the Catholic Kings, in their consuming thirst for unity, expelled the Jews, sweeping at one fell blow commerce and usury out of their sacred land, and setting up a faith so uniform that to be saved by it was so easy that one wonders any one was lost. A few hours’ steaming brings us to Larache (El Areish), once a great stronghold of the Moorish pirates who infested the narrow straits, and who at times ran as far north as Plymouth, westward to Naples, and made the coasts of France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal their especial hunting grounds.
Three of their galleys still lie rotting in the Luccos, and at low tide their ribs can still be seen projecting from the sand. The city, painted red, white, and blue, and the whole scale of tints from brown to Naples yellow stands on a hill, and is to-day