Then comes reality, mocker of all best impulses, and the enthusiastic spirit finds itself bound in a surgery (say in Morocco city), finds work increasing, and his dreams of preaching to a crowd of dusky catechumens dressed in white, with flowers in their hair, and innocence in every heart, turned to Dead Sea Fruit, as with motives misunderstood, with caustic, mercury, sulphate of copper and the rest, he burns the fetid ulcer, or washes sores, and for reward can say after a term of years that he has made the people of the place look upon European clothes with less aversion than when first he came.
If the mere fact of getting accustomed to the sight of Europeans were a thing worthy of self-congratulation, then indeed missionaries in Morocco have achieved much. But as I see the matter Europeans are a curse throughout the East. What do they bring worth bringing, as a general rule?
Guns, gin, powder, and shoddy cloths, dishonest dealing only too frequently, and flimsy manufactures which displace the fabrics woven by the women; new wants, new ways, and discontent with what they know, and no attempt to teach a proper comprehension of what they introduce; these are the blessings Europeans take to Eastern lands. Example certainly they do set, for ask a native what he thinks of us, and if he has the chance to answer without fear, ’tis ten to one he says, Christian and cheat are terms synonymous. Who that has lived in Arab countries, and does not know that fear, and fear alone, makes the position of the Christian tolerable. Christ and Mohammed never will be friends; their teaching, lives, and the conditions of the different peoples amongst whom they preached make it impossible; even the truce they keep is from the teeth outwards, and their respective followers misunderstand each other quite as thoroughly as when a thousand years ago they came across each other’s path for the first time. But if the Arabs constitute a stony vineyard, the Jews are worse, and years ago when first the missionaries appeared in the coast towns of southern Barbary, they fleshed their maiden weapons on the Jews. It struck the chosen people that the best weapon to employ against their new tormentors was that of irony, and so they cast about to find a nickname calculated at the same time to ridicule and wound, and found it, made it stick and rankle, so that to-day every new missionary on landing has to accommodate his shoulders to the burden of a peculiarly comic cross.
Almost all Europeans in Morocco must of necessity be merchants, if not they must be consuls, for there is hardly any other industry open to them to choose. The missionaries bought and sold nothing, they were not consuls; still they ate and drank, lived in good houses, and though not rich, yet passed their lives in what the Jews called luxury. So they agreed to call them followers of Epicurus, for, as they said, “this Epicurus was a devil who did naught but eat and drink.” The nickname stuck, and changed into “Bikouros” by the Moors, who thought it was a title of respect, became the name throughout Morocco for a missionary. One asks as naturally for the house of Epicurus on coming to a town as one asks for the “Chequers” or the “Bells” in rural England. Are you “Bikouros”? says a Moor, and thinks he does you honour by the inquiry; but the recipients of the name are fit to burst when they reflect on their laborious days spent in the surgery, their sowing seed upon the marble quarries of the people’s hearts, and that the Jews in their malignity should charge upon them by this cursed name, that they live in Morocco to escape hard work, and pass their time in eating and in quaffing healths a thousand fathoms deep.
Often at night, awake and looking at the stars and trying to remember which was which, I have broken into laughter when I thought upon the name, and laughed until the Arabs all sat up alarmed, for he who laughs at night laughs at his hidden wickedness, or else because a devil has possessed his soul.
Cargo, of course, was not expected in the Rabat, and as by four o’clock in the afternoon the last few passengers had come aboard, it might have been expected that the ship would put to sea. Not so, the captain gave it as his opinion that it was best to wait till midnight so as to arrive in Mazagan by breakfast time; so for eight hours we waited in sight of Casa Blanca, swinging up and down, giddy and miserable, and in the intervals of misery tried to fish.
Next morning we were off Djedida (New Town), as the Arabs call Mazagan. A yellowish town, peopled by Jews, Moors, and innumerable yellow dogs. Camels blocked all the streets, and above the consul’s flag-staffs a single palm-tree reared its head, fluttering its feathers over the sandstone walls built by the Portuguese in the days when they were navigators, adventurers, and over-ran the world, after the fashion of the modern Englishman. The batteries built by the Moors or by the Portuguese are most ingeniously constructed to expose the gunners, and to batter down the town they are supposed to guard. Outside a street of beehive-looking huts of reeds, each with its little garden, its ten or twelve dogs, thirteen or fourteen children, three or four donkeys, and a score of mangy fowls, and with a bush or two of castor oil plants sticking up in the sand at every corner of the street, gives quite an air of equatorial Africa or Paraguay.
Right in the middle of the Plaza a squadron of some fifty Arab irregular soldiers guard about two hundred prisoners. These latter, heavily ironed and half-starved, were of the tribe of the Rahamna, who for the past twelve months had been in open rebellion against their liege lord the Sultan, Abdul Aziz, whom may God defend. The system in Morocco when a Sultan dies is for the tribes who think they may be strong enough, to refuse to pay all taxes, and then the Sultan is obliged to come in person with an army to discuss the matter, to fight, and if he wins send baskets full of heads to be stuck up on the chief cities’ gates, and squads of prisoners like the band I saw in Mazagan to rot in prison till death relieves them of their miserable lives. Every one of the prisoners in the Plaza must have known that any chance of his release was small, indeed, they knew they were going to be half-starved, either in a dark cellar-like prison, or in an open courtyard exposed to sun and cold, for the Morocco Government allows no rations to its prisoners, and those who have no friends soon die of hunger. [26] Still they were not apparently much put about. People stood talking to them, flies settled on their eyelids, dogs licked their sores, horses and camels jostled against them, the sun poured on their heads, and still they did not suffer in the way our prisoners suffer, for they were not cut off in sentiment from those, their brothers in Mohammed, who stood round and talked to them to pass the time. Pious old ladies, young philanthropists and novelists in search of “copy” who visit Tangier go into “visibilio,” as the Italians say, over the prisoners in the prison, with its flat horseshoe arches at the door, so similar in style to those at Toledo in the old synagogue, now turned into a church. [27]
All those good people and each journalist, all have their word about the darkness, chains, and the want of air; the misery, the crowding at the door to take the chocolate (which should have been tobacco) which the pious lady brings. Each tourist sends home his badly written paragraph to his favourite paper, and goes away lamenting over the barbarism of Mohammedans; and, if he is a “glorious empire” man, thinks of the time when, under the Union Jack, the Moorish prisoner shall have a number and a cell, tin pan to wash in, Bible to read, and all shall be apparelled in Queen Victoria’s livery, until they purge themselves of their contempt and promise to amend their naughty lives.
One thing they all forget when writing of a Moorish prison, that, in spite of dirt, of chains, of want of air, of herding all together in a den, they are happier than prisoners with us, for they can speak, exhale their misery in conversation; they still are men, and leave the prison men, instead of devils, hating all mankind like those who, under our inhuman silent plan, eat out their miserable “terms” cursing the fools who in their foolish kindness hit on a device to turn men into stone. [28] And so I leave the prisoners in the square, thinking as an old Arab says: “It looks as if the Sultan wished to finish with all the Mussulmen.” At any rate, since the last Sultan’s death, three years ago, thousands must have been killed in war, died by starvation, or rotted miserably to death in prisons underneath the ground.
It being a feast day of the Jews all stores were closed in Mazagan, for in Morocco all the retail business