OLD MOROCCO
AND THE FORBIDDEN ATLAS
MOORISH WOMAN PRAYING AT THE TOMB OP A MOSLEM
SAINT.
The devout come and sit beside the shrine, knock three
times, to wake the sleeping saint, and whisper their hopes
and needs. They pray for children, for love, for revenge,
or for deliverance from the spells of vexing djinns.
OLD
MOROCCO
And the Forbidden Atlas
BY
G. E, ANDREWS
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
GfflD!
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT^
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPAWTST
OLD MOROCCO AND THE FORBIDDEN ATLAS- I
THE UNITED STATES OB 1 AMERICA
To
JOSEPH CONRAD
PREFACE
What I love is a minaret, a mosque in the blue
moonlight, a white-domed saint's tomb sleeping in
the sun, an old fountain beautiful with broken bits
of faience, and beside it a Moslem girl muffled in
a white veil, except for her dark, deep eyes, filled
with the wonder of life and the sadness of the
world. I love to dream over the rich colours in old
carpets woven with the mysterious symbols of
strange human hearts, or to finger bizarre jewels
that have glistened in the hair of some once lovely
slave. I like to remember the glorious thrill of
my first glimpse of Asia, drowned in a dawn of rose
and gold, framed in the port-hole of a Roumanian
steamer; or the forests of masts against the sunset
in the Golden Horn, and the wild procession of
strange humanity always thronging over the
Galata Bridge; or the jangle of bargaining
tongues in five languages in the Jitni Pazar of
Monastir. I love the fascination of the old east,
its music and its sorceries and its dreams, its dim
memories of races that have gone, its peoples that
have grown old in living and have become a little
tired.
is
x PREFACE
One day, as I wandered along the left bank of
the Seine, longing for the sight of a minaret or the
sound of a tom-tom, I idly prowled among the
rubbishy old books and pictures and medals in the
stalls along the quay. I picked at random John
Speed's "Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of
the World, London, 1668," and in his description of
Africa read that "Fesse hath a City in it with seven
hundred Churches, and one of them a mile and a
half in compass: And in this country was our
English Stukely slain. And Morocho where the
chief Town of the same name hath a Church larger
than that of Fesse, and hath a Tower so high that
you may discern from the top of it the hills of Azasi
at an hundred and thirty miles distance. Here is
likewise a castle of great fame for their Globes of
pure gold that stand upon the top of it, and weigh-
ing 130,000 Barbary Duckets." Here was a place
to dream about as one sat in one's cafe on the
boulevard, sipping an apfratif. Just where was
this city of Morocho, and did anything remain to-
day of these glories? Or was the old geographer
a dreamer too? How wonderful it would be to go
and see! There would surely be minarets there
and probably tom-toms. And shortly afterward,
I passed a window with a large map of the Protec-
torat du Maroc, and there, something over a hun-
PREFACE xi
dred miles from the coast was the city of Mar-
rakesh.* This, of course, must have been John
Speed's Morocho. And it seemed so easy to go
there, for Morocco, the country, was just across
from Spain, and in a few days' journey one could
be within the shadow of a mosque, and hear the
muezzin's call float over a strange oriental city
filled with mystery and enchantment. In fact, the
advertisement in the window said that the trip
could be made by aeroplane from Toulouse to
Rabat in one short day. But this was annihilating
space and time too speedily. It seemed disrespect-
ful to the orient. It suggested Professor Einstein's
journeying by comet so fast that the traveller's
watch turns backward and he arrives before he
starts! For one loses eight hundred years in going
to Morocco, and a Tyrian trireme seems a more
fitting means of going there than an aeroplane.
And so I embarked from Bordeaux on one of the
triremes of the Compagnie Generate, and after
five perfect summer days on the Atlantic, sailing
past the dream dim mountains of Portugal,
landed at Casablanca, the newly built port of
French Morocco.
* When we studied geography in school we used to call it Morocco
City, but the native name Marrkesh (in French Marrak6ch) has
come to be used so that the name of the city will not be confused
with that of the whole state. The Moors call their country Maghreb
El Aksa, the Land of the Farthest Sunset
xii PREFACE
Casablanca like Tunis and Algiers is a meeting
place of Europe and Africa, where the new and the
old rub elbows and the active west jostles the indo-
lent east. For a few days it fascinates one to sit in
the very Parisian cafe of a splendid modern hotel
and watch the medley of life that passes across the
square, like Barnum's circus on a boulevard.
Smartly dressed women drive by in new carriages.
A touring car with a French banker and a sleek
Turkish merchant in a fez rolls past. French offi-
cers, their brilliant uniforms ablaze with medals,
dodge three or four comic little donkeys loaded
with huge panniers of grain, with barefoot Moors
riding atop. Wealthy, bearded Arabs in flowing
burnouses, sheishas, and turbans stroll by with dig-
nity, holding each other by the hand. Then come
three or four awkward moth-eaten camels, some-
times with a young foal toddling along behind his
mother. And in among this throng of French
colonials, Arabs, Berbers, and negroes, represent-
ing all degrees of smartness and of misery, are the
sweet-meat sellers, carpet vendors, hawkers of
hammered brass-ware, heavily loaded porters, and
wretched beggars, in swarming, seething activity,
And as you sit down, a dozen ragged dark-skinned
urchins rush to polish your boots, six boys to each
PREFACE xiii
foot, or to sell you French newspapers a week old.
They scramble and squabble underfoot, until the
chasseur of the cafe, a big hulking Arab boy, routs
them with squirts from a seltzer bottle.
All this colour and life makes a splendid pan-
orama, and one feels far away from Europe, but
not far enough yet. This is not the Morocco that I
have come to see. The Arab town is better, with
its fantastically crooked, crazy little streets and
alleys, courts, impasses, and market squares.
Everywhere are groups of strange men dignified
in graceful garments, or picturesque in tattered
rags, red sheishas, white turbans, long snowy
burnouses, or bright-coloured caftans, and innu-
merable bare legs and yellow slippers, dirty white
legs, light brown legs, chocolate coloured ones, and
midnight black ones. But even here there is some-
thing lacking. This native town is merely a de-
pendent part of the modern European city that has
grown up around it. The hearts of these people
are tame, and there is no shadow, no mystery,
merely the charm of quaintness, a flavour of the
orient.
And then in the dusk, at a turn in the street, I
found myself in the courtyard of a Moorish inn,
that smelt of camels and wood smoke and greasy
xiv PREFACE
supper. Half a dozen kneeling dromedaries were
chewing their cud, and around the fire sat five dark
men from the south country,, talking with quiet ges-
tures in a language that was not Arabic. One of the
men had a scar across his jaw, that showed plainly
in the firelight, and another had but one eye, and
their long poignards in battered brass scabbards
seemed meant for use. Here was a glimpse of the
real Morocco, the strange world that lay far inland
across the Bled, under the blue star twinkling in
the violet dusk of the eastern sky. Romance was
in those bulky bales of merchandise that had come
from across the desert to this inn-yard, and stirred
my imagination like the smell of sandalwood.
And I decided to set out the next day for the
oasis city of Marrakesh, the ancient capital, whose
mosques and palaces and gardens have been dream-
ing in the white desert sunlight for many centuries,
and whose people still live in their old ways of life
amid the ghost-haunted ruins of their old past.
C. E. A.
Marrahesh.,
Morocco*
NOTE
The translations of several of the Berber poems
scattered through the book first appeared in "Asia,
the American Magazine on the Orient" and are
reprinted through the courtesy of the Editors.
The original Berber texts of most of them will be
found in Captain Justinard's "'Manuel de Berbere
Maroccdn" (Dialect Chleuh).
The original text of a number of the Arabic
poems may be found in (the Cff No&Jiet-ElJiddi
Histoire de la Dynastie Saadienne au Marocf
and in Sonnek's ff Chansons de Maghreb" French
versions of others are published in A. Thalasso's
"Anthologie de I' Amour Adatique" Martino and
Khalek Bey Saroit's "Anfhologie de VAmour
Ardbe" L. Machuel's "Les Auteurs Arabes?
C. Houel's "Encyclop6die de I* Amour-Mar oc"
and H. Basset's "Esscd sur la lAtterature des Ber-
b&res."
The originals of all but two of the folk tales are
in Justinard; one is to be found in S. Boulifa's
"Teactes Berbdres en Dialecte de f Atlas Maro-
xvi NOTE
coin?* and a parallel version to the one in the last
chapter occurs in Basset.
The quatrains from Omar Khayyam are quoted
from York Powell's renderings or translated from
French versions. The Armenian poem is from
Archag Tchobanian's "Lies Trouveres Armerdens;"
CONTENTS
CHAPTER . PAGE
J AN OASIS CITY MARRAKESH 19
II "THE MEETING PLACE OF THE DEAD" ... 31
III AHMET ENTERTAINS SB
IV MINARETS AND PALACES 73
V THE THURSDAY MARKET 105
VI TOWARD THE GREAT ATLAS 131
VII FEUDAL LORDS AND SERFS 149
VIII ATI/AS SCENERY 181
IX THE FORBIDDEN Souss . . . 201
X PRISONERS AT AOULOUZ ....... 229
XI THE DAMSEL WITH A LUTE 251
XII THE RETURN . 273
ILLUSTRATIONS
MOORISH WOMAN PRAYING AT THE TOMB OP
A MOSLEM SAINT Frontispiece
PAGE
THE ANCIENT WALLS OF MARRAKESH 25
CROWD IN THE DJEMAA EL FNAA, MARRAKESH, AROUND
A SHELLUH DANCING BOY 41
A MODERN MOORISH INTERIOR, MARRAKESH .... 57
THE ROOFS OF MARRAKESH SEEN FROM THE PALACE OF
THE GRAND VIZIER 77
THE GARDEN OF THE PALACE OF THE GRAND VIZIER . 91
LITTLE KBIRA Ill
BRIDGE OVER THE OUED NFIS ON THE WAY TOWARD THE
GREAT ATLAS 139
OLD Si LHASSEN THE BERBER GUIDE ON THE ATLAS
TRAIL 155
IRRIGATED VALLEY IN THE ATLAS 183
NATIVE SALT MINE IN THE ATLAS 191
MARKET DAY 205
Soussi PEASANT TYPES 217
THE KASBA OF THE CAID LARBI ou DEHDOURI, AT
AOULOUZ 233
HOUSEHOLD SERVANTS IN THE COURTYARD OF THE KASBA
AT AOULOUZ 255
THE TRAIL THROUGH THE ATLAS 275
A HALT FOR LUNCH. THE ATLAS TRAIL 285
One
AN OASIS CITY MARRAKESH
Like the red eyeball of a lion
Dying of thirst in a wild land,
The fierce sun glares,
Glares upon the desert.
And the hot wind, hot as the breath of Chitane
Blows the sands in smoky whirls
And blinds my steed.
And I, blinded as I ride,
Long for the night to come,
The night with its garment of shadows
And eyes of stars.
EBN EL EOUMI.
OLD MOROCCO AND THE
FORBIDDEN ATLAS
One
AN OASIS CITY MARRAKESH
rinHE long straight road ahead is lost in a
JL shimmery white haze of heat that shuts in
close the monotonous blank horizon. There is not
a tree or a shrub in sight nothing but a brown,
baked sandy plain, here and there heaped into
mounds and hillocks, with sparse starved clumps of
withered grasses powdered with impalpable dust
and scorched with the incandescent glare. An in-
tensely dry torrid breath tans my face and burns
hot in my throat. Hours and hours pass. The
haze opens up a mile or two ahead and closes in a
mile or two behind on the monotonous landscape,
the monotonous glare, and the intolerable heat.
The car stops a moment; not a sound; the limitless
white silence of a July afternoon in the Bled. A
caravan of laden camels ambles by. The animals
19
20 OLD MOROCCO
awkwardly plant their soft felt-cushioned feet into
pools of dust which blows in choking clouds, and as
they pass, they turn their ill-natured faces toward
us and wrinkle their thick lips in scorn. Two white-
muffled drivers in ragged short burnouses prod
them with goads to keep them from bolting, and
shout, "Arrrl Zitf in excited falsetto.
The cazd's son in the front seat of our car is
silently enjoying his first automobile ride. He is
muffled in half a dozen soft-flowing garments, and
has retired into himself with the aloof dignity of an
eighteen-year-old Arab aristocrat. He is going
from his father's castle in the Chaouia province to
visit relatives at Marrakesh, the great metropolis
of southern Morocco. Beside me is my young
friend Ahmet Ben Abbes in a barbarically gor-
geous uniform of scarlet, gold, and blue. He is
coming home to Marrakesh on a three months'
vacation from the military school at Meknes, from
which he will graduate next year as a sous-lieuten-
ant He has less reserve with foreigners than the
caJd's son, and we converse desultorily in a mix-
ture of Arabic and French.
The car goes on into the heat over the smooth
white military road. The raging sun beats down
pitilessly on the withered brown world that lies
thirsty, parched, baked out, and dead. A land of
AN OASIS CITY MARRAKESH 21
dust, heat, and glare, and glare and heat and dust,
day after day, through the long summer suns.
Suddenly, over toward the low barren hills of
the Lesser Atlas appears the soft pale blue of
warm water in the sun. A turquoise lake, dream-
like and dim, smiles quietly at the burning sky,
and its vague grassy margin seems to creep closer
and closer toward us, reaching out in tempting
little bays and inlets. And now on the other side
appears another long thin line of shimmering water
that loses itself in the white hazy horizon. How
glorious it would be to go and lie in it, to splash
and plunge down out of the burning glare! Then,
in a moment the whole blue vision disappears, and
we are left thirsting in a land of sand and thorns.
The mirage I Mysterious, strange, incredible!
This is a land of enchantment and unreality,
where brilliant empires brief and beautiful as the
mirage have lighted their little hour or two and
gone, gone without leaving a trace, or at most but
a crumbling monument. For the history of Moroc-
co is a tale of turbulent dynasties that endured but
a decade, and reigns that have not outlasted the
roses in their new-built gardens. There is some-
thing illusory and transitory about this land; its
successive contacts with culture and occasional
periods of grandeur have marked it lightly, and the
22 OLD MOROCCO
people do not care even to remember them. And
this fleeting, unstable character seems inherent in
the country itself, for during a few weeks in the
spring, the desert bursts into flower and then until
the next year's rain, shrivels into the brown arid
waste of this July afternoon.
After we have endured another hour of the silent,
monotonous road, the caid's son shouts, "Mar-
rakesh!" And there ahead is a vast dark green
patch of palm trees, miles in extent, and in the
midst, the tall square minaret of the Koutoubia
mosque. Far beyond, to the south, loom dim
through the hazy air the lofty, jagged, snow-
crowned peaks of the Great Atlas. They are
vague, and shadowy, mysterious and lone. Per-
haps they too are exhalations of the desert, the
misty white landscape of a dream that will fade
like the turquoise lake and leave us in dumb amaze-
ment.
Soon we pass through groves of palms, growing
in graceful clumps on ridges and ravines or spring-
ing from the ruin of some old sun-baked wall. They
shoot up, thousands of them, straight and tall, mo-
tionless in the still air, and the slant sunlight makes
long sharp shadows and lacy outlines of fronds on
the red, baked earth. Now we reach the French
town of Gueliz and drive up the long avenue
AN OASIS CITY MARRAKESH 23
planted with eucalyptus and evergreens, and dot-
ted, as yet sparsely, with dazzling white, cleanly
plastered houses. The car stops for a sleepy little
French functionary to get the Casablanca mail.
He says nothing, for he is still taking his siesta.
JSTo one makes any comment on the heat for there
is nothing unusual about 115 degrees in the shade.
We go on past irrigated green gardens of palms,
olives, and spreading fig trees, and cross over a
wet ravine which is a tangled jungle of bamboo
and Barbary cacti, until we are up under the long
ancient walls of Marrakesh. Ahmet's dark brown
eyes glow as he recognises the familiar approach
to his own city, and the caid's son becomes ani-
mated and talkative. Ahmet describes the entry of
the French a few years ago, which he had watched
as a boy of twelve, squatting cross-legged on the
rampart over the west gate. For him the walls
have the simple intimate associations of home, but
for me they have the wonderful romance of the
mysterious orient. These two boys are at least
eight hundred years older than I am.
The lofty impressive walls, a part of which dates
back to the Almoravide founders of Marrakesh,
go seven miles round the city, flanked with two
hundred massive square towers and pierced with
ten gates, from which start the great highways
24 OLD MOROCCO
that reach to the provinces tributary to the me-
tropolis of the south. These old walls are crumbling
and broken, beaten by centuries of tropic rains
and worn by a thousand desert sand storms, until
their sun-baked clay has faded to the colour of dusty
withered rose petals that have lain untouched for
years. They suggest the pathos of power that is
gone, and fill the imagination with vague dreams
of far away and long ago. Their aspect is not
mediaeval. They call up an older and remoter life
than the glittering chivalry with which the fancy re-
peoples the walls of Aguesmortes and Carcasonne.
Here one dreams of the ancient world of the East
and sees along these ramparts the waving, stately
peacock fans of Semiramis and the haughty,
bearded profiles of Babylon.
How little has the European world known of
the great things done here long ago, and ill done.
Host after host has marched from the South, from
the Atlas, the Sahara, and Senegal, and pitched
their striped tents beneath these walls. Sultan after
Sultan has risen here, and here great dynasties
have disappeared from the face of the earth. The
Almoravides, the Almohades, the Merinides, the
Saadians reigned here in successive splendours.
Twenty times the city has been captured and re-
captured, five times it has been destroyed and re-
THE ANCIENT WALLS OF MABRAKESH.
The lofty impressive walls, a part of which dates back to
the Almoravide founders of Marrakesh, go seven miles
round the city, flanked with two hundred massive square
towers and pierced with ten gates, from which start the
great highways that reach to the provinces tributary to
the metropolis of the south.
AN OASIS CITY MARRAKESH 27
built. Six hundred years ago its walls heard the
fanatical preaching of the zealot Ibn Toumert,
and looked upon the slaughter of their inhabitants
by his terrible successor, Abd El Moumene, who,
with the thoroughness of barbaric conquerors,
carried out his vow to pass the city through a sieve.
From these gates marched the armies that subdued
Spain, and into them passed the triumphant host
of Abo.u El Abbas El Mansour, "The Golden,"
returning with the spoils of Timbuktu. Here for
months waited the first Filalien sultan, while his
besieging host ate dates from the stones of which
grew the hundred thousand palm trees beside the
red banks of the muddy Oued Tensift. And the
latest scene in the barbaric pageant happened but
eight years ago, when El Hibba, another fanatical
reformer of Islam, ended his three weeks' sultan-
ate and passed through this very gate, the Bab
Djedid, with his retreating rout of tribesmen and
camels and asses, all to be swallowed up in the lost
valleys and passes of the Great Atlas.
This afternoon the Bab Djedid sees only two
tall Senegalese washing horses in a pool. They
sing and shout and take a childish delight in splash-
ing the water over the nervous snorting animals.
The sunlight glistens on the wet naked group,
statues in shining black marble. As we pass
28 OLD MOROCCO
through the Bab Djedid the beautiful lofty min-
aret of the Koutoubia appears perfectly framed in
the graceful Moorish arch of the gateway. Over
the city manoeuvres a French aeroplane. The
deep humming makes everyone stare painfully up
into the dazzling sunlight. Ahmet and the cai'd's
son ask me in naive wonder by what kind of sorcery
the thing is done. I am at least one hundred years
older than those two boys.
Two
THE MEETING PLACE OF THE DEAD
Above thine head looms Heaven's Bull Parwfn;
Beneath thy feet a Bull bears Earth unseen;
Open the eyes of Knowledge and behold
This drove of Asses these two Bulls between,
OMAR KHAYYAM.
Two
THE MEETING PLACE OP THE DEAD
EVERY evening when the sun gilds the shining
top of the Koutoubia, and the heat of the day
is over, Marrakesh wakes up from its drowsy lan-
guor and comes out to be amused. All the inns are
full of a huge floating population that throngs in
and out of the city with trains of asses and mules
and camels from every quarter of the Bled, from
Fez, from the wild valleys in the Atlas, from the
southern plains of the Souss and the Draa, from
the rich eastern oasis of Tafilalelt, and once a
year from far, mysterious Timbuktu* Dark-
skinned Arabs from the cities of the coast, light
coloured, blue-eyed Berbers of the eastern moun-
tains, Algerians from the edge of the Desert, Shel-
luh Berbers of the South, fuzzy-haired Soudanese,
negro slaves with one big silver earring, and
bearded Jews in dirty black gaberdines all swarm
into Marrakesh and live in its thousand filthy
caravanserais. They all wander out in the early
evening into the great central square, the Djemaa
31
32 OLD MOROCCO
El Fnaa, "The Meeting Place of the Dead,"*
which becomes a blend of bizarre costumes and a
clash of uncouth dialects and remote languages.
The square itself is a great space paved only
with the sun-baked earth of the brown plain in
which the city was built. At one end are a few
European shops, a cafe, a post-office, and the sign
of a garage, jarring elements of western progress
that has begun to thrust in its ugliness and disturb
the mediaeval peace of old Marrakesh, mournful
among its crumbling monuments. From another
angle, one catches glimpses of the old walls, with
here and there a twisted palm tree reaching over
them, black against the gold of the sun. The
farther end of the square shows only the low roofs
of the city and the openings of one or two streets,
that plunge into a dark, covered labyrinth lined
with a thousand shops. From these mysterious
streets that in the daytime conceal so many hushed
mysteries, now pour forth streams of strange hu-
manity. Swirls of dust rise from the feet of the
asses and camels, and the crimson sunset light,
diffused through the yellow haze hovering above
the square, casts over the innumerable strange
faces the glamour of eastern romance that ghm-
MEETING PLACE OF THE DEAD 33
mers in old tales and in poets' dreams. The mag-
nificent minaret of the Koutoubia, severe with the
puritanism of ancient Islam, stretches its long
shadow over the frivolities of the square and the
passionate sins of the dark streets and close-shut
gardens.
This evening young Ahmet has doffed his uni-
form and appears in a pure white turban, a pea-
cock coloured, long caftan, which vaguely appears
under the finely woven white djellaba., the graceful
flowing outer garment of the Arabs ; his bare feet
are thrust into loose yellow leather babooches with
no heels. The caid's son, still wearing his travelling
djellaba of midnight blue, walks with us through
the crowd, haughtily disdainful of the noisy confu-
sion, and only suffering it because the sight may
amuse me, a stranger guest. My young guides
brusquely push aside the careless pressing throng
with the lofty air of two marquises of the Old Re-
gime, and angrily shout, "Balek! Bdlek!" * to the
driver of an ass that is backing his pannier of
prickly Barbary figs right into my stomach.
As circulation is difficult for the moment, we
stop at the edge of a circle of dusty brown and
black faces eagerly grouped around a famous
story-teller. He gesticulates dramatically, and
* Make way.
34 OLD MOROCCO
little rivulets stream down his comically distorted
face, as he singles out some sheepish, brown by-
stander, and roars directly at him the droll con-
clusion to the "Story of What Made the Sultana
Laugh." He wipes his face and catches his breath,
while a boy collects a few dirty paper bills from the
crowd which merrily chuckles its applause. Then
the boy rattles a very much blackened square tam-
bourine as a sign that another story is about to be-
gin and the teller of tales recounts,
THE STORY OF THE FOOLISH SULTAN
Once in the old time there was a sultan. He
had a very beautiful wife. Whenever she asked for
anything he gave it to her. She said to him: "Bring
me a covering for my couch." He brought her
one. "This is no good/ 3 she said. "What shall I
bring thee then?" "Bring me one of silk." He
brought her one of silk. She said, "No!" "Then
what wilt thou have ?" "Bring me one of feathers."
He said "I will."
2s r ow the sultan lived in the time when birds
could talk. He sent for all the birds in the world.
They came. He wished to pull out their feathers
to make a bed for his wife. Now the owl did not
come; she stayed away until sundown. The sultan
MEETING PLACE OF THE DEAD 35
said: "Why didn't you come this morning?" She
replied: "My Lord, I have been counting over the
men and the women, and I have been counting over
the days and the nights." Said the sultan: "Which
are more in number, the men or the women?" "The
women are more in number." "Which are more in
number, the days or the nights?" "The days are
more in number than the nights." Said the sultan :
"Why are there more days than nights? Tell me,
is there not one night for each day?" "My Lord,
the nights when there is a moon we count as days."
"And the men and the women? Tell me, doesn't
every man marry a woman?" "My Lord, the man
who follows the advice of a woman is a woman!"
The story-teller makes a great deal of this simple
folk tale. He acts it out with comic gestures and
grotesque expressions. He is evidently a great
favourite with the crowd, who follow every word
and movement with intense delight. Ahmet tells
me he has been a well-known figure on the square
for years, and has the reputation of having been
specially inspired by the djenowi * of story-tellers,
who haunt the great grotto of the Ida-Gounidif in
the far south country. The story is ended with
the consecrated formula : "That is the way I heard
* Plural of djmn* a spirit or devil
36 OLD MOROCCO
the tale from the great ones, and so I tell it to you !"
The formula relieves the ragged old narrator of the
responsibility of having invented something that
might not be true, and so incurring the wrath of the
powers of light and darkness.
The two boys with me are fascinated by the old
story-teller, but are a little ashamed of the pleasure
they take in him until they see how delighted I am
with the recitals; then they promise to tell me
dozens of very droll tales, oh, such droll ones !
We jostle on through the moving crowd, mostly
of humble ragged folk, negroes with piles of newly
woven baskets on their heads; old women half
veiled, balancing big earthern jars on one shoulder;
swarms of idle little ragamuffins with shaven polls;
swarthy young camel drivers from nomad desert
tribes, their eyes lusting for the joyous marvels of
the metropolis; and occasionally a lithe-bodied
Arab, fresh and white, riding a nervous horse
caparisoned with scarlet leather. Everywhere
there is a bobbing of white turbans, red sheishas,
and muffled hoods, and a flutter and wave of dusty
white and striped burnouses, amid the twinkle of
the bare brown legs of the very poor. And in the
early twilight innumerable faces flash by, some
scarred with wounds, or disease, some blind in one
eye, some pale with hashish dreams, some dark with
MEETING PLACE OF THE DEAD 37
strange wild desires, and some beautiful as princes
in the "Arabian Nights."
My two friends and I stop for a moment to
watch a small circle of humble and devout listeners,
mostly women smothered in dirty white veils, squat-
ting around a saintly story-teller. His blind eyes
roll their ghastly whites; he beats a rhythmical
accompaniment on his square tambourine; and
shaking his long crinkly hair with the vehemence of
his recital, he tells of the wonders that befell Joshua
and Moses on their journey to the land of the
Farthest Sunset, and of how Noah when his ark
had rested on the Moroccan mount, Djebel El
Goudi, founded the town of Sallee. The women
reverently clap their hands from time to time and
shout: "God is great!" as though they were at a
Methodist camp-meeting.
A larger group of spell-bound spectators stand
in mute wonder at the performance of a snake-
charmer from the Souss. He pours forth a wild
whirl of hoarse, frenzied words on the power of
Allah, the greatness of the Prophet, the ways of
holy saints, and the dire influences of afrits, demons,
ogres, and djenoun. Then, on a high-pitched,
wooden pipe he plays a strange weird ancient mel-
ody, beginning in solemn cadence like a dance
38 OLD MOROCCO
done before the altar of Isis and played by an
Egyptian vestal. The black cloths on the ground
begin to crawl and move, and one of them sticks
up, uncannily swaying to the tune. The rhythm
quickens with little starts and jerks. The magician
flicks off the cloths and reveals two dark, thick-
bodied coils, with swaying, wedge-shaped heads
that beat to the rhythm of the pipe and dart out
little tongues like forked flames. With the crowd
I am fascinated by the swaying reptiles, and held
by the deep-rooted racial fear of the serpent. We
are assisting at the incantation of some old dark
Haznitic religion or a terrible spell of Pharaoh's
sorcerers.
The haunted squealing music stops ; the uncanny
creatures settle down in flat, sinister coils, dull and
sluggish but for the darting apprehensive tongues.
The magician handles his familiars with careless
impunity, and with much high-pitched, excited talk
he scratches his arm with their teeth until the blood
runs, and horrifies the crowd by making one snake
draw blood on the ear of a boy bystander. Then,
as a climax to his performance, he thrusts the ter-
rible head into his own mouth. His eyes dilate
wildly; he stretches out the serpent's neck, and,
with the noise of a popping cork, pulls the head out
MEETING PLACE OF THE DEAD 39
of his mouth. Then he calls on the crowd to give
a prayer for Sidi Yahia,* and they obediently clap
their hands, raise them over their heads and chant
a brief prayer. And a small black boy takes up
the collection.
I turn away with a wondering smile and a shud-
der down in my spine. I suppose charming snakes
is a simple trick to the knowing, but it is an uncanny
thing to see here in the heart of an ancient land
where one is never sure of what is reality and what
illusion.
Another delighted circle is grouped around a
company of musicians and Shelluh dancing boys.
The players sit on a mat, two of them with curious
Moorish tom-toms, which are painted pottery vases
with taut sheep-skin bottoms, and two with two-
stringed African lutes of quaint plaintive tones.
The leader stands apart playing a strange, square-
shaped' viol with one string, over which he draws
a curved bow like those in the miniatures of a four-
teenth century Book of Hours. To the flat twik-
timk of the tom-tom and the discordant wail of
strings, he sings this Berber ballad:
* Sidi Yahia (St. John) seems to have been a great patron saint
of Morocco in the old days when Christianity flourished in north
Africa, For more than a thousand years he has been a Moslem
saint.
40 OLD MOROCCO
Once I went upon a journey.
The second day I came upon a sheaf of lavender,
Leaning over a spring of water.
"O thou who drawest water from the well,
For the love of God give me to drink"
"Come down, O stranger,
And drink from the hollow of thy hand."
"I am bridled by God; I cannot drink."
"Come with me to the house;
There will be wild honey
And mint-flavoured tea."
(The man of wiles went to the village;
Stayed there eight days.
The women bought him a jar full of wild honey.
He dipped a finger in it
But had no time to finish.
Came a warrior;
It was the woman's husband,
Mounted on a gray horse
Worth a hundred douros in hand.)
He struck me down, the traitor;
Here I am where I fell.
Carry me to the mosque,
And with a yard-stick measure my shroud.
Warm the water for washing my body,
And dig my grave, my friends.
Weep for me, my friends !
Oh mother dear,
My mother, who shall say to you,
"God keep thy son!"
Reply "Amen!"
(He was not stricken down in ambush.
He has not stolen cattle.
Dark eyes blue with antimony caused his fall.)
The leader sits down and three young Shelluh
boys, the eldest fifteen, take their places in the cen-
CROWD Iff THE DJEMAA EL FNAA, MABRAKESH, AROUND
A SHELLUH DANCING BOY.
They are bizarre little things, these dancers, Their heads
are shaven, they wear girls' clothes and embroidered girdles,
earrings, bracelets, and gaudy bead necklaces. They have
an amusing theatrical smile enhanced by cheeks streaked
with, paint and eyes darkened with kohl
41
MEETING PLACE OF THE DEAD 43
tre and dance. They axe bizarre little things. Their
heads are shaven hut for a short square bang, and
they wear girls' clothes and embroidered girdles,
and earrings, bracelets, and gaudy bead necklaces.
They have an amusing theatrical smile enhanced by
cheeks streaked with paint and eyes darkened with
kohl. The dance begins as a slow intricate pacing
of the three in and out, back and forth; then the
time of the music changes, and each standing still
or turning in a circle, makes rapid movements with
his feet, holding his bare arms balanced as he turns.
Then the eldest of the boys, without moving his
feet, twists his body in sensual, rhythmic undula-
tions that make the crowd shout with laughter.
After this somewhat questionable performance he
sings a charming Shelluh love lyric to a wild high-
pitched melody, barbaric in its strange intervals,
fittingly accompanied by the flat tmk-tunk of the
tom-toms.
0, my fair mistress, cry aloud with joy,
For, by Allah, the only God,
At the sound of thy voice
The rose-laurel of the river "will turn to a garden rose.
At the sound of thy voice
The sick man will sit up upon his mat
At the sound of thy voice
The old man will throw away his cane.
44 OLD MOROCCO
We move on through the crowd of pushing and
jostling idlers and buyers. At the edge of the
square, the old clothes sellers sit in front of their
patched and ragged little tents, squatting amid
piles of gaudy garments stained scarlet caftans,
long scarfs of crimson and yellow silk from Fez,
and costly embroidered girdles from Rabat. And
nearby are trinket sellers with strings of beads,
hair bangles, bracelets, and square silver brooches
things to bring back to the women in far oases
or hidden Atlas valleys. And then there are the
barbers at the edge of the crowd, working in the
open air with just a mat hung up to protect them
from the sun. The client squats on his heels while
the barber shaves Ms head, all but one long lock
behind the ear, reserved for Sidna Azrain, the
blind Angel of Death, when he snatches the faithful
Moslem up to Paradise,
In and out among the crowd wanders a crazy old
figure in a ridiculously tall, pointed brown fez,
his long crinkly hair falling into his eyes and ears.
He shouts, and twirls in the air an old Saracenic
gun banded with silver. He wears his hair long
like all saints, dervishes, and holy beggars. The
high pointed fez shows he belongs to the sect of
howling dervishes spread through all Islam, who
with long, rhythmic prayers and swaying, rhythmic
MEETING PLACE OF THE DEAX> 45
motions, work themselves up to piercing their flesh
with hideous skewers, licking red hot irons or inhal-
ing steam from a boiling kettle. But this old fellow
is content with howling and juggling his quaint
archaic gun, which I wish to steal. In his zig-zag
wanderings he is followed by a gaping crowd of
Berber and negro children who, walking backward,
tread on the mat of a mad old sorcerer, who growls
a curse at them.
The sorcerer's eyes look dark and fierce through
his long unkempt hair; his body, naked to the
waist, is almost black, and terribly shrivelled with
fasting and vigils, for he is one of the tribe who
gain their power over djinns and devils by prayers
to God. There are black sorcerers too who league
themselves directly with the forces of evil. Before
this old fellow, squat two women, closely swathed
in veils except for one eye. One of them asks for a
talisman to ward off sickness, which always comes
from one of the thousands of yellow and green
malignant devils ever swarming over the world.
The sorcerer closes his eyes and utters inaudible
things, and taking a scrap of dirty paper, painfully
inscribes the two interlaced triangles of Solomon's
seal, and under it two cabbalistic signs of an an-
cient occult alphabet,
46
OLD MOROCCO
A
the mystic initials of holy prophets of Islam. He
puts the paper into a bit of hollow reed and the
woman slips it in her bosom, and dropping a few
coins, fades away into the crowd. The other wo-
man moves closer and whispers something to the
strange old creature, whose eyes, as he listens, be-
comes two sharp little gleams in the growing dusk,
In a hollow, tremulous voice he tells her to go write
the mystic talismanic word, Badouh * seven times
J
* Tliis talisman is composed of the initials of four Arabic words
aifying foor of the attributes of God, The Eternal, The Durable,
s Ixmng, The Gentle.
MEETING PLACE OF THE DEAD 47
on the branch of a living tree, then cut off the
branch and write further, "This branch was cut off
to separate the heart of Yaccoub from the love of
Zulieka," and, finally, in the hour of shadows, to
bury the branch in the neglected tomb of some dead
man long forgotten. He shows her how to trace
the letters of the spell, but still the woman does
not go. She leans over and whispers again in his
ear. The weird old mage gathers up a handful of
small cowry shells and little coloured pebbles and
casts them before him, muttering hermetical words
whose meaning was obscure in Solomon's time,
He scans the shells and pebbles and waits for the
revelation. For all the events on earth are an-
nounced full forty days in advance by an angel who
cries them through the four heavens of God, and
guardian spirits reveal these things to seers. The
old man looks up and gazes long at the first bright
evening star behind the Koutoubia tower. Again
he looks down at the scattered shells and mourn*
fully shakes his head but will tell the woman noth-
ing.
Contact with Europeans has made Ahmet and
the caid's son feel that they should be superior
to such things, and they turn away, but with a ner-
vous laugh. It is not that they disbelieve, but that
they feel that Europeans know a kind of higher
48 OLD MOROCCO
sorcery that is expressed in automobiles and ma-
chine guns.
As the short twilight begins to come to an end,
the crowd thins out and the gleam of lanterns and
glow of hraziers light here and there little knots of
Moors around the sellers of broiled sausages and
mint tea. The camel drivers and wretchedly
ragged porters squat in circles about dirty old
women who ladle out steaming bowls of thin maize
gruel from brass cauldrons. This is the supper of
most of Morocco, which is too poor to buy the
doubtful smelling sausages or mutton stew cooked
with rancid argan oil. For dessert there are always
heaps of the prickly cactus fruit of Barbary figs.
My two young Arab friends are too fastidious to
enjoy the picturesqueness of the square in the eve-
ning and propose the French cafe, but I decline,
and we say "Besldma!" many times, and with
handshakes and kissing of hands, I leave them and
stroll about alone. White shadows flutter by me
in the dark, and wavering spots of lantern light
move vaguely here and there. My old friend, the
Algerian arabesque painter, whose whistling tooth
makes his guttural language one degree more un-
euphonious, has dropped the flap of his tent, but
through the slit I see him reading his Koran by
candle light, the book held three inches from his
MEETING PLACE OF THE DEAD 49
nose* The tea and date sellers sit Buddha-wise in
their stalls, drowsing over their long hashish pipes.
The uncanny music of tom-toms and lutes lures
me into a little Moorish cafe built of bamboo and
thatch. An acetylene flare throws a dazzling colour-
less light over the merrymakers and gives the effect
of a cinema picture in sharp blacks and whites. I
squat on the mat beside two Berber fellows
from the mountains, and we all drink sweet tea and
mint and listen to the nearly blind ballad singer's
wild recitals of barbaric love and revenge. Be-
tween the pauses, the tom-toms and the two-
stringed lutes make faster and more excited
rhythms, and the tea drinkers sway and clap their
hands in time. I try an experimental pipe of kief
and vaguely dream of the thousand strange faces
that have flashed past me, and the thousand strange
hearts full of wonder and fears and desires, and of
the throbbing hidden life of this old African city
shut within its dead broken walls. But mostly I
keep wondering what hidden doom the old sorcerer
saw in the shells and wouldn't tell the woman.
Three
AHMET ENTERTAINS
I cannot sufficiently describe the wonderful power
of this talisman of knowledge music. It sometimes
causes the beautiful creatures of the harem of the
heart to shine forth on the tongue and sometimes ap-
pears in solemn strains by means of the hand and the
chord. The melodies then enter through the window
of the ear and return to their former seat,, the heart,
bringing "with them thousands of presents. The
hearers^ according to their insight^ are moved to sor-
row or joy.
(The Book of Akbar.)
Three
AHMET ENTERTAINS
THE afternoon had been most trying. The
sirocco from the Sahara had blown a pitiless,
dry, burning blast of heat over the city. The win-
dows of hell were opened, as the Axabs say, and
God had not yet sent the grateful night breeze from
the gate of heaven, off beyond the sunset. The
acetylene flares in the withered garden of the Ho-
tel de France sputtered annoyingly and made chok-
ing smells. Madamoiselle was laying the table for
dinner. The patron, a round fat French colonial,
mopped his hot red face and bade me good evening.
He puffed and sat down just tangent to his chair,
and with deprecating shrugs apologised:
"You will have a dinner so bad, Monsieur, but
what would you? There is no salad to be had, the
good French wine is finished and the Algerian is
tellement mauvais! The mutton was good yester-
day, but there is no ice. In effect, it is a pig of a
country!" And then, his Arab house painters
would work only two or three days a week and then
63
54 OLD MOROCCO
loaf until they needed another handful of francs,
and they demanded twice as many paper francs as
silver ones, and there was no more silver. He was
vexed with Ms wife who had been expecting for
some time, and all the other hotel keepers' wives
had had their babies weeks ago; he was quite out-
classed. And his wife and he had just quarrelled
for the fortieth time over the naming of the children
'(for they were sure they would be twins) . He was
for Lyaute and Mangin, the two generals who are
the heroes of French Morocco, but Madame in-
sisted that the holy saints, Pierre and Paul, should
not to be slighted. If to add to his misfortune the
l)on Dieit should send that one child should be a
girl, she should of course be called Anne, after a
wealthy, but somewhat parsimonious Breton aunt.
"And if they are both girls?" I asked.
This was too much. He fled into the kitchen and
poured out a voluble blend of Franco-Arabic re-
marks on the kitchen boy. I reconciled myself to
the thought of the bad dinner, and mused longingly
on Paris and Foyot's and settled down to study the
perplexing ways of Arabic verbs. After dinner I
could sit on the housetop and watch the moon rise
behind the Koutoubia and listen to the faint
rhythms of distant tom-toms in the thousands of
Moorish courtyards, that would show far on toward
AHMET ENTERTAINS 55
morning a tantalising mysterious glow of lantern
light, and make me long to see from the inside the
baffling oriental life going on all around me.
Then came my charming young friend Ahmet
Ben Abbes, bringing another boy also on leave
from the military school, Mahommet Ben Mis-
saoud. With perfect Arab courtesy they each asked
me six times how I did, and kissed their hands that
had shaken mine. They had come to take me to
dinner at Ahmet's house. We walked through an
intricate maze of dark streets that twist and turn
between high mud walls. We pass innumerable
black doorways and I wonder what is behind them.
The outside of all the houses is the same in Marra-
kesh; a square low doorway in a high mud wall
may lead to a cloth bazaar, a bath, a palace, a
brothel, or a graveyard; and the passage leading in
always turns at right angles after a few feet so
that from the street one sees only a black mystery
behind which may be love, misery, piety, luxury, or
death.
One of the doors we pass is conspicuously barri-
caded from the outside and marked with the rudely
painted good-luck sign the five fingers of the
hand of Fatima. Ahmet tells me in an awed
whisper that the place belongs to a tribe of djinns.
Someone once fitted the house up as a public bath,
56 OLD MOROCCO
but a newly married girl was drowned in the pool
and her body could not be rescued ; so the place was
abandoned to the djinns and boarded up.
At length we turn into one of the doorways,
first to the right, then to the left. A heavy door
is opened by a slave with a lantern, who ushers us
in. We cross a dimly lighted court, go through
another passage; the slave lifts a heavy curtain, and
we pass into an inner court, Candles in glass Moor-
ish lanterns throw a soft light on old arabesque de-
signs on window blinds and doorways an intricate
geometric weaving of pale blue, rose, and green,
washed dim by years of strong sunlight. In one
corner is a charcoal brazier, and beside it, a brass
tea service glints through an embroidered veil cover-
ing. Thick mattresses and silk cushions are ar-
ranged invitingly on mats and gay carpets. Before
stepping on the mats the Arabs slip off their yellow
babooches, and I take off my shoes, and we recline
comfortably on the cushions. We wait, chatting
indolently, for a long time. Then the entertainers
arrive a man and two girls. The girls unwrap
two or three bundly outer garments, take off their
veils, and sit opposite us. They are gaily dressed,
one in yellow and one in bright magenta, and much
bedecked with silver ornaments. One has the usual
heavily sensual oriental beauty, too passively inex-
AHMET ENTERTAINS 59
pressive to be beauty to western eyes. The other is
slim and graceful, with a dark, disquieting loveli-
ness. Her eyes are deep brown pools with depths
very dark and very still, and they make you wonder
what they are like when they are troubled. Bui
you rarely see them, for she keeps them shadowed
with their black fringed lashes. Her little chin is
marked with thin blue lines of tattooing that adds
an exotic charm, like the fascinating artificiality of
Arabic art or the strangeness in African land-
scapes. She looks sad and a little tired as she
warms her tambourine before the glowing charcoal
in the brass perfume burner. A little slave throws
a handful of fragrant powder in the burner, and
the girl looks up and smiles across at me through
the thin smoke, and my heart feels a delightful
thrill.
^ The other guests arrive, two friends of Ahmet
and the caid's son who drove over with us the other
day. He has brought with him several servants
and an elderly relative, white-bearded and patri-
archal in dignity. With exquisite courtesy we ex-
change Salamaleks all round many times with kiss-
ing of hands, and the guests sit cross-legged on em-
broidered leather cushions or recline indolently on
mattresses arranged in a circle. There is no noisy
talk or the affected gaiety of an American party.
60 OLD MOROCCO
The guests talk or are silent as they choose; if one
prefers to say nothing there is no embarrassment.
The old patriarch sits quietly smoking his kief pipe,
and a boy beside him, heels in the air and chin on
hands, prattles on in a low tone.
It is now ten o'clock, the hour when Arabs
usually dine in summer. The night air is pleas-
antly cool and the perfume from the brass burner
fills the court with a vague eastern fragrance,
languorous and strange; and overhead, the sign of
Scorpio burns very bright. A black slave brings
the tea service over to Ahmet's cousin, who makes
the brew with much care and ceremony. He warms
the silver teapot and the glasses, puts in a generous
handful of tea and stuffs the pot full of fresh mint
and big lumps of sugar. He tastes the decoction
three times before he gets it to please him, and then
the little glasses are handed round until everyone
has drunk three. The man musician starts a
barbaric melody on a European violin which he
rests on his knee, and the girls strike an accompani-
ment on a tambourine and a pottery tom-tom. The
strange rhythms beat in my blood and the un-
familiar intervals of the melody emphasise the
sense of romantic diff erentness which is the alluring
charm of the orient. There is nothing so trans-
ports the imagination as barbaric eastern music,
AHMET ENTERTAINS 61
based on other scales than ours, leaping or sliding
in other intervals, and springing from unfamiliar
racial hearts. One knows the soul of Africa as
different from that of the western world.
The banquet begins. A servant brings round
a copper basin and pours rose water over our hands,
and we pass the towel from one to another. The
party is too large to eat from one dish and we break
into two circles, each grouped about a wooden tray
covered with a high peaked basket. The cover is
removed, and a rich steam from chickens roasted
with olives and lemon and peppery herbs keenly
delights the appetite. The host breaks the loaves
of bread and we all eagerly sop up the sauce, and
seven or eight hands reaching at once tear the
chickens apart. Conversation ceases and one hears
only the sticky working of jaws or a request for
water, the only beverage, which an attendant hands
from one to another, in a brass bowl. It is a mark of
courtesy for friends to put specially choice morsels
into one another's mouths, and I as a stranger
guest am continually crammed speechless.
Before the dish is half eaten, it is removed, and
more chickens brought in, this time cooked with a
white sauce of eggs, savoury and hot. Then follow
a mutton stew, which is a meal in itself, and a
kouskous, the national dish. This is a mixture of
62 OLD MOROCCO
unsuspected African vegetables hotted with a little
meat and served in a wall of steamed white maize.
I am painfully replete and my mouth is always full,
yet I am reproached for my lack of appetite. And
then comes a great roast of mutton flavoured with
argan oiL There is a hint of savagery about the
tearing asunder of a roast, that makes one shudder
if he is no longer hungry. But the guests do noble
work, and not more than half the dish is sent back
uneaten to the women who prepared the banquet
in some mysterious depth of the house. Finally,
for dessert there is a huge platter of red grapes,
A servant brings the rose water again and we per-
form thorough soapy ablutions of hands and mouth.
"May Allah be praised!" murmur the good Mos-
lems, and we sit back reclining on the cushions.
The music starts again, haunting strange
arabesques of sound, that begin nowhere and end
nowhere on some high note that leaves you ex-
pectant and unresolved. The melody pauses; the
tom-toin beats on; then the melody recommences at;
a frenzied pitch. The pattern is so interwoven and
intangible that the ear cannot grasp it, but the body
is seized with its moods and beats time to the pul-
sations of the tom-tom. The voices of the women
shrill to their highest notes and the rhythm beats
faster and faster, and the guests clap their hands
AHMET ENTERTAINS 63
in tune, and I find myself doing it too. There is
a sense of communion in this communal rhythm, a
fellowship of hearts that speech cannot so easily
induce, an enchantment of spirit through mystic
sorceries of sound.
In the intervals of pause we drink tea once more,
much tea. I soon lose count of the glasses. The man
with the yiolin sings an Arab love chant, at first
in slow complaining notes, then in a mood of yearn-
ing desire, and ends in a wailing falsetto of despair.
How lingering is my punishment;
Pain overcomes me;
Long hours of waiting wither me away.
(0 father mine, how sad u my fate!)
My woe is caused by the contrary ways
Of this gazelle.
O my f riendsj in the harems of the great
There is no beauty like that of this graceful creature.
Oh how it brings me pain this separation,
O thou with a melodious name.
It makes all other lovely things seem naught
And deprives me of reason and sense.
(0 father mine, how sad if my fate!)
Whoever sees her goes madj he wanders in his wit.
She is lovelier than the daughters of the ancient times,
Nor have the latter days seen her equal.
Thy eyelids are the colour of ink;
They are fashioned like the bowed letters which the judge
traces.
Thy eyes are languorous
And thy lashes like those of some dark Hindu.
64 OLD MOROCCO
Thy cheek is of roses and thy mouth like the jewel of a ring.
Thy voice ravishes my heart as the trilling of the nightingale.
(0 father mine, how sad is my fate!)
Thy lips are red as blood in a crystal chalice,
Or like the liquid kermess.
Thy face and thy brow, radiant white,
Shine with the brightness which streams from the heavens on
high.
I alone of all men have lost my happiness for Fatima.
He who has not loved
And who knows not the torment of passion
Has not tasted in this life the pain of ecstasy.
The whole world is busy with its affairs,
But I, alas, I have no thought
But of the eyes of a young gazelle.
The scholar gives his mind to his books
And busies himself with the turning of leaves ;
The horseman devotes himself to the breeds of horses.
But what troubles me is my lovely neighbour around the
corner.
(0 father mine, how sad is my fate!)
I have become like a madman
Wandering in the streets of the joyous city of Tlemcen.
During the music, a group of funny little black
children, the brood of the household slaves, have
slipped into the court and stare wide-eyed at the
festivities from a shadowed corner. The very little
ones are getting drowsy, but any attempt to coax
them to bed is met with loud wails, until at length
they are carried in fast asleep. The music subsides
for a while, the musicians chat among themselves,
AHMET ENTERTAINS 65
and the guests fall into conversation. The feasting
has made us all feel well acquainted, and they ask
me many questions:
How much did I pay for my watch; and how
much for my sun-helmet? Why do I wear glasses?
The cai'd's son wishes to know whether I have any
false teeth; he has two gold ones he is extremely
proud of. And I tell them something about Ameri-
can life, tall buildings, express trains, telephones,
and steamships. They ask me why so many people
are always moving about over the country? And
what is the use of piling fifty stories on top of one
another, instead of spreading them out over the
ground in one huge palace with courtyards and gar-
dens? These questions I found hard to answer.
But Mahommet Ben Mfssaoud who came from Fez
and had lived at Casablanca and had seen a great
deal of the French point of view, expressed scorn at
his friends' simplicity. He explained that the
Arabs of Fez were not so backward and understood
these matters better. There was, however, a point
he would like to ask: Was France a very rich and
fertile country, well-watered and beautiful as a
pasha's garden? "Well, then, why do the French
come here and take our poor barren country away
from us? Does the horse eating from his full crib
covet the home of the wild goat in the rocks?"
66 OLD MOROCCO
Here was another I couldn't answer! Then the
caicTs son asked whether it is true Americans have
but one wife. I admitted that that is the usual
number. "But they have many women and danc-
ing girls?" I said that this was not a universal
custom with us. "Are there no strong men among
you like the Arabs? Axe they "
I was relieved from replying by the crashing in
of the music which abruptly recommenced with the
strident tones and quick beating rhythms of an ex-
ulting chant. The Arabs lost all interest in talking
and fell under the intoxicating spell of their excit-
ing music, for music is to them what alcohol is to
the west, or narcotics to -the far east. The tam-
bourine and the tom-tom beat fast, the violin ex-
uberantly vibrated in rapid running mazes of intri-
cate sound patterns, and the girls' shrill voices
followed the intangible theme, repeated it a dozen
times, then lost it, found it, and repeated it again
and suddenly stopped as abruptly as they began.
Then to a slow religious chant, the lovely Zara
begins a stately dance. Her charming little bare
feet pace the court slowly to and fro, and as she
turns, her little heels, stained red with henna,
twinkle beneath her bright saffron caftan. Her face
is languidly immovable and her eyelids half closed,
but the yellow lantern light throws shadows over
AHMET ENTERTAINS 67
it as she moves, and makes it seem responsive to
emotions. The dance ended, she sings a song, one
of the gems of modern Arabic poetry, and as she
sings, her face, before so passive, becomes mobile
and changes with the fierce passion, the wild love-
hate of the song. And her eyes, before so quiet,
now lure one's heart and make it afraid.
The sun is setting, O Mahommed Ben-Soulouk,
The sun is setting and the shadows are lengthening over the
camp,
Like a mourning veil over the face of a widow.
The horseman unsaddles his nervous limbed steed;
The grooms and the tired hunting dogs
Lie down before the tent;
The flocks come to the fold;
And the mists begin to rise afar over the desert,
Like the smoke above an encampment.
Dost thou hear, O Mahommed,
Piercing the silence, the voice of the muezzin
Calling the son of the Prophet to prayer?
Bow thyself down; pour water over thy weary limbs
And turn thy face toward the place of sunrise,
Toward the holy place of pilgrimage.
But the voice of the muezzin calls in vain;
It is like a lute in the tent of a man whose ear is dead.
The shadows lengthen more and more! and I
my betrothed, O my lover,
1 am waiting for thee
Even as the tigress waits for her young one.
68 OLD MOROCCO
My heart is gnawed
Like the bones of those who die in the desert
Along the route of the caravans.
My tears fall like the flowers of the almond trees
When the sirocco blows from the desert.
come back my Mahommed, for I love thee.
1 yearn for thee with a longing as wild and mad
As the hyena who despoils tombs
To devour the flesh of bodies.
But thou hearest me not, thou turnest away thy head,
Even like the lion who passes by
Disdainful and haughty before a sleeping man.
Thy heart is taken captive;
Thy eyes that I adore are drawn to the eyes
Of* an" infidel,
Eyes as blue as the graven turquoises on the bridle of thy
steed.
And thy hands tremble with desire when thou thinkest of
her hair
Golden as the grains of ripe wheat.
Thou lovest a Christian, O Mahommed!
She has lured thee away from me, she has taken my life,
She has taken thee, thee whom I love.
Thee for whom I have stained my nails with henna
And my eyes with kohl.
For she uses neither henna nor kohl.
Her skin is white as the burnous of a sheik,
Her hand is cold
As the serpent coiled round the arm of a snake charmer.
And I feel my bosom swell
As in the spring time swells the torrent
That comes down from the mountains.
AHMET ENTERTAINS 69
I feel my hatred grow like the shadows when the sun is falling.
For I hate her, I hate her, this infidel
Who is no daughter of the Prophet and knows not Allah.
And I hope that she may suffer even as I suffer.
And J hope her spouse may be lured away from her,
And that her sons may die, slain by a blow from behind.
O that I might satisfy at once
All my love for thee
And all my hate for her.
O Mahommed, she must give me back the man that I love;
O that I might drink from thy lips
The blood of her heart!
The music kept on, the young Arab connoisseurs
completely under its spell. The party continued
all night long, the pauses in the music and the sing-
ing filled with indolent and casual conversation, but
by two o'clock I was sleepy and rose to go. The
leave-taking was long and ceremonious. Mahom-
met Ben Missaoud accompanied me through the
intricate tangle of lost black streets utter dark-
ness and mystery except for the wavering pool of
dim light which the lantern, carried by a little black
slave, cast just at pur feet". Once we came to a
huge barred timber gate that separated one quarter
of the city from another. Mahommet with a kick
or two wakes the gate-keeper, an ugly, half naked
one-eyed negro giant. The lantern light gleams on
his muscular back, as he strains over the Homeric
70 OLD MOROCCO
wooden bolt, and on the wall great grotesque shad-
ows of his moving arms swell and dwindle. It is
as though Rembrandt had painted Polyphemus
barring his cave, or Samson tearing the gates of
Gaza from their hinges. Our passage wakens a
holy beggar, asleep just outside the gate. The hor-
rible heap of rags blinks blindly and begins the
penetrating perpetual cry of his waking hours
"Allah Allah! Allah!" The cry pursues us up
the hollow black street, and long after we have
turned a corner we hear the mingled hope and de-
spair of this piercing blind voice "Allah! Allah!"
When I reach the hotel I go up on the housetop
to smoke a cigarette and think about the glimpse
that I have had of the Arab soul revealed in poetry,
music, and the fellowship of hospitality. The vast
inchoate city lies all around me in silent sleep ex-
cept for the faint beat of a single tom-tom some-
where far off in the vague night. Already the
first white glimmer of the "false dawn" makes the
pale stars fade, and the Milky Way, the "River of
the sky," dies in a dim faint haze*
Four
MINARETS AND PALACES
Though the rose faae, yet are -cue tuorns our IOT;
Though the light fall, yet is the ember hot;
Though Robe and Priest and Presence all are gone,
The empty Mosque at least we still have got.
OMAR KHAYYAM.
Four
MINARETS AND PALACES
fTIHE great square of Marrakesh, so strangely
1 caUed the "Meeting Place of the Dead/' has
been the center of life in the city ever since the
austere Almoravide sultan, Youssef Ben Tachefyn,
of the tribe of the Lemtouna (May Allah be merci-
ful to him!) came from "the Region of Fear,"*
and pitched his tent in the midst of the vast plain,
and joined with his own masons in the building of a
mosque, in the year of the Prophet 454, which is, in
the reckoning of us Nazarenes, 1062. For cen-
turies Marrakesh was the greatest city of western
Islam, the capital of the Moorish Empire, to which
war-like sultans returned after triumphant cam-
paigns in Tunis and Portugal and Andalusia, Al-
geria and Soudan. Toward the end of the twelfth
century, Yaccoub El Mansour, "The Victorious,"
built two great mosques with marvellous minarets,
a palace, and a fortified city, within the walls of
Marrakesh, and then had spent but a fifth of the
*i.e. The Sahara.
73
74 OLD MOROCCO
spoil from his victory in Spain. Ahmet El Man-
sour, the great Saadian sultan, brought precious
marbles from Carrara, paid for, pound for pound
in sugar from the Souss, artizans from Europe,
gems from the east, and so much gold from the de-
spoiled treasuries of Timbuktu that he was sur-
named "The Golden," and enriched his beautiful
capital. And then faineant princes who lived in
decadent times built themselves gorgeous palaces
and lived in barbaric dreams of opulence and splen-
did lusts.
The stories of all these wonderful things in the
old past of Marrakesh, the glories, the conquests,
the intrigues, and the eclipses, the comets and the
plagues, the Arab historians have told in books
with fascinating titles like, "The Chaplet of the
History of the Prophets, Caliphs, and "Kings,"
"The Garden of Stray Leaves," "The Recreation
of the Camel Driver." Even in the sixteenth cen-
tury, in the day of its decline, Leo the African mar-
velled at the grandeur of Marrakesh; he called it
"one of the greatest cities which there are on earth,
and one of the most noble in Africa," even in his
time a city of a hundred thousand homes.
And then its glory departed; Fez became the
capital of the shrunken empire, and the metropolis
of the south fell to decay. And now its gorgeous
MINARETS AND PALACES 75
palaces are dust, its great mosques are crumbling,
their precious treasures are gone, and there remain
but a few sadly beautiful minarets, old fountains,
lovely fragments of mosaic and enamel, and exquis-
ite forgotten tombs. If old ghosts of earthbound
lovers of life wander in lost streets and deserted
squares on these moonlit African nights, what
heart-breaking regrets must be theirs for the beauty
and action and glory and love that now are but
ruined memories in silent places.
With these thoughts the strange name of the
great square, "The Meeting Place of the Dead,"
takes a new significance. But in the morning hours
the square is the meeting place of living Morocco,
busy with picturesque commerce, a confusion of
graceful flowing garments, red sheishias, white tur-
bans, huge baskets on the heads of negro slaves,
little asses buried under mountain of precious fire-
wood, bundles of Moorish women swathed to the
eyes in dirty white cotton, and reaching over all
these heads, the long, bobbing necks of heavy-lid-
ded, ill-natured camels. Here emerges from the
crowd a dignified sheik in an immaculate long
djellabdj that falls in elegant lines over his crimson
saddle of carved leather; behind his white mule
trot two of his ragged black servants on foot. A
long train of pack asses loaded with sugar and tea
76 OLD MOROCCO
and cloth, headed patiently for the southern gate,
on their way toward the defiles of the Great Atlas
and the romantic regions beyond, meets another
caravan loaded with jars of oil and bags of salt
from the far-off Valley of the Souss.
This is the same commercial Morocco that in
the middle ages enriched great princes who loved
beauty and luxury, and made living itself a perfect
art. But the monuments they have left, crumble
and decay before the heedless eyes of modern
Morocco, which merely murmurs that these changes
are fated, that the glories of nations rise and fade
even as the lives of men, and that all things must
come to pass as they are written in the Book of
God. This was what Abdullah Ben Hoseyn, a
young Arab functionary in the employ of the Pro-
tectorate, said to me as we stood on the tower of
the government office, which is on the great square,
and looked out over the roofs of the city: "When
Fortune has brought great happiness, it is followed
by great sorrow; when a thing comes to be perfect,
it soon begins to fade."
This complete sense of resignation to fate which
is felt through all the pages of the Arab historians,
permeates the whole life of Morocco from pashas
and ca'ids to beggars and slaves, and contact with
Europe cannot change it. In fact, the fatalism of
flat house-tops
s of walls
k con I . fl 'ao
by ahar P
a of
MINARETS AND PALACES 79
the east throws its influence even over western
minds that live under its shadow.
This morning, as Abdullah and I step out on
top of the wooden tower, from the comfortable half-
gloom of the old Moorish house, we are drowned
in glorious white sunlight; it envelops us in a blind-
ing penetrating radiance; we seem to be breathing
pure light* The low-roofed city spreads out miles
in extent, huddled cubes of rose-brown mud-built
houses, a confusion of square flat house-tops and
parapets, broken by sharp black shadows of walls
and square doorways. Wedged here and there
are low octagonal domes of marabout shrines, very
white and very holy and mysterious; and every-
where in unexpected places are square minarets of
countless mosques. Scattered in various quarters
are six or seven large green patches, the famous
gardens that stretch their opulence of fruit trees
over great spaces of the city; and when a light wind
ruffles the leaves of the olive groves, silvery waves
sweep over their green sunny surfaces.
Dominating the whole city is the wonderful min-
aret of the Mosque of the Koutoubia, a superb
square tower of proportions so perfect as to suggest
an exact balance of solidity and graceful beauty.
Its richly decorative windows are different on dif-
ferent sides, and have the bold design of the Almo-
80 OLD MOROCCO
hade builders, in contrast with the subtle elabora-
tion of later Moorish art. Around the top, frag-
ments of a band of rich blue-green enamel glow in
the warm sunshine, a rare and exquisite green,
wonderful as the sunlit curve of a wave breaking.
On the lantern top flash four golden balls which an
old historian says are apples of solid gold, the
spoils of the victory of Alarcos.* The mosque
itself is very great in extent, but its green tiled
roofs, four pyramidal and three of them square,
seem crowded around the base of the great minaret.
Koutoubia means the "Mosque of the Booksellers,"
for once the illuminators and makers of manu-
scripts had their stalls around its doors, but to-day
the only bookseller in all Marrakesh is my friend
the old Algerian with a whistling tooth, who sells
wretched little printed leaflets of prayers.
One wonders what goes on in the great mosque,
for no Nazarene is permitted to enter. Here in the
past, the war against the infidel has been preached
a hundred times, the last one only eight years ago ;
and one wonders what is going this Friday morn-
ing. I ask Abdullah, who is standing beside me,
and his Semitic almond-shaped eyes smile vaguely
as he answers, "Just prayers." But I wonder. For
there is a mystery in the fanaticism of these puritan
* 119$ AJX
MINARETS AND PALACES 81
Moslems of Morocco, to us to whom religion mat-
ters so little that we boast of our tolerance.
Abdullah points out another great square min-
aret to the south. It is the Mosque of the Kasba, of
the same period as the Koutoubia. The enamel
around the top is a band of warm green turquoise,
more perfect and more lovely than that of the
larger minaret near us. Its colour is one that na-
ture reserves only for a few exquisite gems, but
which old Persian and Arab artists with princely
extravagance lavished over their marvellous pot-
teries, mosaics, and enamels. Abdullah tells me
that the name of the artist who dreamed this colour
and who planned the proportions of the Koutoubia
has not been recorded. "But/ 3 he adds, "it has
pleased Allah to preserve for us the names of the
sultan's ministers, judges, secretaries, and doctors,
and also the trivial fact that the sultan was ambi-
dextrous, and that his teeth were far apart. Truly
the ways of the Most Merciful are hard to under-
stand!"
Then Abdullah points out reverently the many
little sanctuaries of the city. They are lost among
the surrounding roofs or buried behind cypresses
and date palms, and I am never sure that I am
looking in the right place, but their names fascinate
me, El Tebba, Mimoun Es Sahraoui, Moulay
82 OLD MOROCCO
Ali Ech Shereef, holy men who led most austere
lives and who now doubtless enjoy the highest bliss
in the Paradise of the Prophet. As we talked of
them I could not help quoting the rubai of Omar,
They tell me houris throng in Paradise,
And wine makes glad our hearts within the skies;
Why then am I denied these joys on earth.
Since wine and damsels there shall be my prize?
Abdullah frowned at this impertinence and said:
"The Persians are not good Moslems; they are
worse than unbelievers. They shall have their re-
ward," and he went on pointing out shrines and
mosques, Ben Youssef, Sidi Abd El Aziz, Sidi
Ben Slimane El Djazouli. I onee peeped into one
of these little sanctuaries at Rabat; it was filled
with a hundred European clocks, the favourite
votive offering of Moorish Moslems, clocks of
every size and every imaginable shape, and each
one pointed to a different hour of the day.
Time, after all, is a purely relative manner, and
in Morocco it is no matter at all.
"And there," continued Abdullah indicating the
very northern extremity of the city, where the red-
brown roofs are lost in the green sea of palms
beyond the walls, "is the very holy mosque of
Sidi Bel Abbas. In that quarter live all the blind
beggars of the city, and beyond them live hundreds
MINARETS AND PALACES 83
of lepers and sufferers of terrible diseases, miser-
able outcasts, all companions in woe." And we
pass down the wooden stairway out of the heat and
glare of sunshine, stumbling and blinded, thinking
of the glories of Marrakesh in the past. And one
wonders what may be written in the Book con-
cerning the fate of our own cities when the new
world is old. Abdullah, whose ancestor three hun-
dred years ago, as vizir to a great sultan, had ruled
over this once splendid city, went quietly back to
his desk in the Bureau, and I went to sit in the
French cafe and watch the world go by. . .
To one who loves oriental life there is a never
wearying pleasure in wandering through the
strange, winding streets and byways of Marrakesh.
One passes a quarter of deserted, half-ruined
houses with gaping vacant doorways and with
withered grasses clinging to broken roofs ; and then
there are great desolate open spaces and rubbish
heaps, where perhaps a lone ass brays miserably,
and a very old and human-looking stork, perched
on one leg, looks down from the top of a broken
parapet and broods darkly on hidden mysteries.
And then, unexpectedly, you discover a charming
little mosque with a minaret built of glazed yellow
bricks and surmounted by gem-like enamels of the
84 OLD MOROCCO
Prophet's colour. While you are under the spell
of its charm a little black figure appears at the top,
and, breaking the white noon-day silence with his
beautiful high-quavering chant, proclaims 'the
greatness and oneness of God. There is a strange-
ness in the imam's call that seizes the imagination
like the romance of a distant light off an unknown
shore in some foreign sea. And the ragged blind
beggars, huddled in the few inches of shade under
the mosque wall, stand up and grope for a land-
mark by which to orient themselves, and turning
toward Mecca, they fall prostrate in prayer. Then
they go to sleep again, and I wander on alone down
the street, my footfalls smothered in the hot,
powdery dust. And the dark cypresses and great
gaunt palms stand uncannily immovable in burn-
ing sunshine, and though it is broad noon, the
world is as silent as midnight. The mood of
umisualness in the scene and the silence, brings a
momentary disquieting glimpse of one's self as
something remote and apart from this world of
the old east; the strangeness, after all, is in me!
These things belong here from eternity, while I
am but a part of the ephemeral present.
As one wanders through these quarters deserted
at midday, one never stops wondering what goes
on behind the high walls. To the foreigner, native
MINARETS AND PALACES 85
life must always be a mystery. Even to a Euro-
pean who spends years in the east, the inmost
oriental soul remains hidden behind walls and lat-
tices that permit only an occasional glimpse. But
even the external life has an infinite fascination,
and perhaps its very baffling suggestiveness consti-
^tutes its unwearying charm.
"t)ne morning I turned aside from the thronging
confusion of one of the busy little covered streets,
lined with hundreds of shops, and found myself in
the dim portico that leads to the Medersa of Sidi
Ben Youssef , a very ancient mosque that has been
turned into a Moslem college for training young
men. At the end of the long corridor sat a
guardian half asleep, occasionally exchanging a
word with two friends reclining on the mat beside
him. He rises with indolent dignity and ushers
me into a beautiful old courtyard, and leaves me
to enjoy it alone, in an atmosphere four hundred
years from the present and a thousand miles from
the noisy commerce of the little streets.
The cracked marble slabs of the pavement are
worn unevenly by years and years of pious feet in
shuffling slippers, and the curbing stones of the
long glassy pool for ablutions, where cooing doves
dip and admire, are chipped and broken, and their
old whiteness stained with patches of black moss*
86 OLD MOROCCO
The marred arabesques of the walls are but vague
hints of colour, and the carved patterns in plaster
and the honeycombed Moorish intricacies and clus-
tered stalactites pendant from corbels and false
arches, are all tinted in palest old rose, with the wan
delicacy of the cheeks of fading beauty. Huge
beams of ancient blackened cedar carved with
texts from the Holy Book support an upper gal-
lery where students lodge; and below this, on two
sides of the Medersa, are deep porticos carpeted
with mats of reeds. The portico facing the east
has an exquisitely carved prayer-niche; the other
is the lecture hall of the learned Moslem doctors.
This is the month following the fast of Ramadan,
when all the young aspirants to learning are away
on their vacation, and the college is deserted but
for the mourning doves that coo from the high
corbels and the spirit of beauty that never leaves
old loveliness. A place to sit and listen to the doves
and dream sad old tales and hear the tears of the
world falling.
But I am not alone in the Medersa. In a cor-
ner of the portico on one of the shabby mats is a
saintly figure reading. His rusty black djelldba
is gathered around his crossed legs, and his scant
turban forms a thin ragged halo about Ms shaven
MINARETS AND PALACES 87
head, bent over a very thumby book printed in
microscopic Arabic character. The book is an
anachronism, for such a figure should read only a
manuscript. As I walk under the portico to trace
the long bands of carved designs, I purposely pass
close to him, and as he looks up, I salute him with
deep respect. To my surprise he not only returns
my salute, but begins a conversation.
"My son, thou lingerest long in our old Medersa.
Thou dost well, for it has been said that he who
admires a beautiful thing pays a tribute to God.
We have few visitors here; we live apart. We see
little of the world, for a scholar has no time. One
of our wise men has said, 'He who seeks learning
without study will attain his end when the raven
becomes gray with age/ "
Then I asked the old man of the subjects of
study in the college.
"When they come to us they must know much of
the Holy Book by heart. Most of them are here
to become proficient in our law, and to these I ex-
pound the texts on which the law is based. It is a
long task and never ended."
I asked whether his students were eager and apt
to learn, and he shook his head sadly and his fur-
rowed parchment face remained impassive, but his
88 OLD MOROCCO
old eyes smiled as he remarked what I myself have
often observed :
"Verily, my son, God covers the hearts of the
young with a veil, and their ears are sharper to
catch the twanging of lute strings than to hear wise
words. The proverb is true which says that train-
ing youth is like chewing stones/'
Then I asked him whether he was working on at
his studies during the vacation period, and he re-
plied, patting his book,
"This is my recreation. When I am free from
expounding the law I have a little space to medi-
tate on the vexing passages in the Holy Book."
"And would it be a discourtesy, master, to in-
quire the subject of thy meditation this morning?"
"By no means, my son. I was considering
whom the Prophet might mean by the Mysterious
Stranger who built the wall of red hot iron and
molten brass for the people who could scarce un-
derstand what was said. He is written of in the
eighteenth chapter of the Koran."
I felt unable to continue the conversation in this
direction, for this is a subject on which I have abso-
lutely no opinion* And so I asked him to sum up
the qualifications of a good Moslem. He answered
by reciting this verse from the second chapter of
the Koran,
MINARETS AND PALACES 89
"It is not righteousness that ye turn your faces
in prayer toward the East and the West, but
righteousness is of him who helieveth in God and
the last day, and the angels and the scriptures,
and the prophets; who giveth money for God's
sake unto his kindred, and unto orphans, and the
needy, and the stranger, and those who ask, and
for redemption of captives; who is constant at
prayer and giveth alms ; and of those who perform
their covenant, when they have covenanted, and
who behave themselves patiently in adversity, and
hardships, and in time of violence: These are they
who are true and these are they who fear God."
I remarked that these were the qualities that we
are taught make a good Christian, but he did not
hear me. He seemed to have forgotten my pres-
ence; his eyes had the visionary gleam of one who
seeks the mysteries that lie beyond "the flaming
ramparts of the world." I bade him good-bye, and
as I turned to leave him, I was startled by a whirr
of wings behind me. I half expected to see the
Mysterious Stranger himself, but it was only a
brown dove fluttering down to drink from the old
pool. . .
When one reads in the ancient Arab historians
of the marvellous glory and luxury of the lives of
90 OIX) MOROCCO
Moorish princes in the past, he hopes that in one
corner may survive something more than a crum-
bling memorial of the days when these magic
dreams were real. One may wander at sunset
within the red crenelated walls that once enclosed
the gorgeous palace of El Mansour the Golden,
and find nothing to suggest the wonder of marble,
mosaic, and enamel, within which men lived amid
the luxuries of the Thousand and One Nights,
nothing but a waste of rubbish and withered reeds,
where a camel driver and an unveiled Berber girl
look into each other's animal eyes and make love
among the ruins.* But there is still a great modern
palace in Marrakesh, of an exquisite beauty, with
blends of rich colours and tones and moods to minis-
ter to a great Moor's love of sensuous life*
It was built, this harmonious beautiful dream,
some twenty-five years ago by the Grand Vizier
Ba Ahmet Ben Moussa, who at a dangerous time
concealed the death of his sultan, until by a clever
*The Palace of the Bed! was built in 1593. The author of the
most poetic of all histories, the Nozhet-Elhadi (Recreation of the
Camel Driver ),. quotes dozens of verses the sultanas poets made on
this marvel of beauty. One verse inscribed in glowing faience on its
walls, read, "When I was built, the full moon did obeisance and
prostrated herself before me; even now the disc of the sun is hut
as an earring in my earP But its glory was brief; a succeeding
conqueror destroyed it in 1610. And the "old historian, concludes his
account with: u Ever afterward the ground remained fallow as if it
had never been a precious spot, and became a pasture for cattle, a
refuge for dogs and owls. Thus we see of a truth that God raiseth
ap nothing upon the earth that he doth not afterward cast down."
TEE GARDEN OF THE PALACE OF THE GRAND VIZIER.
Off from this eastern garden where Scheherezade might
have woven her wild fantasies through perfumed languid
nights, there are great state chambers of solemn richness,
where sheiks and caids once thronged on high ceremonial
days.
91
MINARETS AND PALACES 93
stroke the young Abd El Aziz was proclaimed.
And during the minority of the foolish, worthless
prince, this vizir, the hybrid offspring of a negro
and a Jewess, grotesque, ugly, gross, barbarously
cruel and savagely ambitious, reigned here as the
real ruler of Morocco.
After the shrill white morning glare and the
flickering shadows of the street, the Palace of the
Bahia envelops one in a soft quiet light and an air
of luxury and restful solitude. Here, at last, is
the background of the Arabian Nights. It has no
plan; it is a delightfully casual assemblage of
courtyards, broad spaces, gardens, fountains, un-
expected vistas and dim, hushed chambers. I fol-
low the sleepy Arab attendant down a long green-
latticed cloister, across a courtyard paved with
white marble, and through narrow-arched passages
into a marvellous tropical garden. Here is a
luxuriant green profusion of tall, dark cypresses
and mighty banana trees, with drooping fringed
leaves that overshadow young almonds, lemons,
and oranges loaded with green fruit, here and
there a ripe one making a splash of colour, "Like
golden lamps in a green night"; and every-
where, waxy-leaved vines tangle and twine and
hang in festoons and strangle the trees like
strange, immovable serpents. Broad walks of
05 OLD MOROCCO
mosaic in bold, coloured stars and hexagons lead
to a little marble fountain in the center. Off
from this eastern garden where Scheherezade might
have woven her wild fantasies through perfumed
languid nights, there are great state chambers
of solemn richness, where sheiks and caids once
thronged on high ceremonial days. These rooms
have no furniture but carpets, for the Arabs have
no use for our cluttered confusion of tables, chairs,
bric-a-brac, and pictures. The finely blended
colours of beautiful modern rugs from Rabat and
Fez, with an occasional wild bit of weaving from
the mountains, are echoed in the arabesque designs
on painted ceilings and in resplendant tile mosaics
of cornices and portals. The eye revels in the
gorgeous colour rhythms that are the glory of east-
ern art, and the mind wonders at the infinitely
patient elaborateness and intricate symmetry.
We pass through more and more richly deco-
rated rooms, more courtyards, corridors and lofty
ornate doorways, till one is lost and bewildered
with a sense of too much luxury. Everywhere I
am amazed by marvellous, ever new patterns in
faience and mosaic, repeated lines and stars of a
hundred forms, and lozenges and polygons, all in
bright green and yellow, orange, and rose and
turquoise, balanced and blended in colour har-
MINARETS AND PALACES 95
monies. These wonderful geometric designs lure
and fascinate the eye and create moods of romantic
unreality, for this is an art quite remote from
nature and wholly dissociated from idea or senti-
ment.
In one of the smaller, more intimate rooms I
loiter for a while and lie on a divan heaped with
soft leather cushions and striped silk scarves from
Fez. The tall doors, painted in interlaced designs,
are open; and beyond the deep shaded portico, the
sunlight steeps the white paved court and the bril-
liant green tiles on the opposite roof. But the
light within the room filters through two wooden
screens delicately pierced with subtle designs,
giving them a pale translucence, and softens the
glowing colour in the Moorish carpets. I lie on my
back and listen to the jet of water that spatters
musically in the little basin meant for flowers, and
I trace the recurrence of a certain little blue star
in the repeated design of the high, painted ceiling.
And then I am led into the very heart of the
lovely labyrinth, and given a glimpse into the
apartments of the vizir's favourite, where in the
painting of the ceiling and the faience of the door-
way there is the highest, most perfect artistry of
the modern Moor. But all these lovely places are
hushed and empty; there is an atmosphere of dead
96 OLD MOROCCO
joy that has gone with the roses of yesterday. I
go through these beautiful vacant rooms like the
hero of the Second Kalendar's Tale wandering
through the great underground palace, and I look
about for the hidden prince whom I am fated to
slay.
And in this beautiful palace, as everywhere else
in Morocco, there are already signs of fading
beauty and decay. The gifted artizans who built
it are not yet dead, but the painted stucco has
begun to crumble, the marbles of some of the
fountains are cracked, and the fine designs on door-
ways and shutters have become a little pale and
washed; for the delicate beauties of Moorish art
have in them a fragile evanescence that cannot
withstand the wearing down of time. The Moslems
build, but they never repair.
There is no place in Marrakesh that so fills one
with this sense of the impermanence of Moorish
culture and the transitory greatness of the Moroc-
can empire as the long forgotten and neglected
mausoleum of the Saadian sultans. I visited it one
hot, indolent July morning with the grave young
philosopher Abdullah from the government office.
T^e sauntered slowly through the quiet sunny
streets, now grown so familiar with their rose-
MINARETS AND PALACES 97
brown walls, and rose-brown dust, a straggling
palm, the sleeping children, and the dreaming
beggars. "A land where all things always seemed
the same." And as we walked, Abdullah told me
terrible stories of these Saadian sultans who reigned
in the decadence of Morocco, from the middle of the
sixteenth century on, for a hundred bloody and tur-
bulent years. It was a tale of rivalries, jealousies,
harem intrigues, of poisoning, strangling, the
gouging out of eyes, wholesale murder, and ghastly
blood-madness; fearful deeds that had for their
setting the luxury of the old east, the wealth of
Ormus and of Ind. Every accession to the throne
meant a fresh civil war, rebellions of ambitious
factions, the slaughter of recalcitrant vizirs, the
murder of nephews and brothers. Some of these
princes wrote books of prayers, or dabbled in
poetry, or sought the hidden secrets of alchemy,
and some spent their lives in the wild joys of the
wine cup and the harem. One of them murdered
a rival relative, seized his throne, and married his
sister; and she, like Judith, stabbed him in his
drunken sleep, and then married his son. And so
the tale went,
"By Allah," said Abdullah, "the chroniclers had
to write fast in those days to get aH down! And
98 OLD MOROCCO
it was the will of Allah that these princes should
all die by the hand of violence, and here they are
hehind that old wall."
We had come into the part of the town called
the Kasba which was once a fortified imperial city
within the city. Beyond the clay wall rose the
square tower of the Mosque of Moulay Yazid with
its wonderful band of turquoise. Within the
mosque enclosure, hidden away in a walled deso-
lation of humble graves, amid heaps of debris and
gaunt dusty palms, is the loveliest gem of art in
all Morocco.
With no transition from the wretched ugliness
without, we pass through a ruined Moorish arch
immediately into a sombre twilight of sad mag-
nificence. Tall stained marble columns clustered
in threes and crowned with square capitals hold
up an arcade of great and small arches darkly over-
canopied by a high pyramidal roof j of ancient cedar.
Every surface of the marble capitals, of the arches
dripping with stalactites, and of the lofty, gloom-
shadowed walls, is covered with intricate lacy carv-
ings in regular designs like the million little hexa-
gons in honeycombs. Fragments of coloured mo-
saic squares are scattered over the floor or heaped
in corners; a band of arabesques of a thousand
MINARETS AND PALACES 99
coloured stars and triangles and polygons runs
around the lower wall; and high above, in the over-
glooming roof, gleam little specks of tarnished
gold. Half imbedded in the floor lie the long sar-
cophagi of old marble, yellow as aged ivories,
minutely carved and wrought like precious reli-
quaries. Over the walls and round the tombs, run
long legends of ancient Cufic letters intertwined
and marvellously interlaced, words woven into
strange patterns that blend into beautiful design.
And even the meaning of the inscriptions in
Moorish art is as purely romantic as the designs.
As we feel our way about in the soft sad light,
Abdullah reads me here and there a phrase which
he can decipher, and he smiles as he recalls the
things he told me about these sultans.
"Light of the Century, King of the Age, Most
Fortunate by the Grace of Allah!"
"The fire of his hospitality never went out; he
was the refuge of those in trouble, and came to the
aid of the doctors and saints."
"May the Most Highest crown him with rewards
in the Eternal Garden, in the midst of the most
beautiful houris!"
The minutely carved letters that cover the tomb
of the Golden El Mansour read,
100 OLD MOROCCO
Here is the resting place of one who made Glory itself to
be proud,
Ahmed, whose standards were ever victorious, and who knew
all the splendours of the world !
O Divine Pity, come roll thy waves over him forever,
Water this tomb with the rain of thy loving-kindness that
hath no end !
Perfume this earth with a balm as lasting as his memory.
At the very moment of his death these words were true:
Verily he rests in the bosom of the Almighty Lord of Earth
and Heaven.
Off from this central mausoleum are other cham-
bers, where one vaguely glimpses columns and dim-
lovely arches and more marble tombs of princes
and old kings. And some are the tombs of queens
whose beauty old poets have sung, and others of
young children, the ill-fated offspring of royalty,
murdered by jealous successors. And I peer
blindly into one great chamber utterly dark, dark
as the night of nothing, cold as the dreams of the
dead.
From the peace and the shadowed beauty of the
shrine we pass out again into the sunlit desolation
of walls and graves. And reluctantly I slip back
into present reality after an hour of dreaming in
the terrible and beautiful past called up by these
tombs, "silently expressing old mortality, the ruins
of forgotten times." Morocco no longer feels the
intense passion for life and power, and the joy of
creating beauty that was hers in the past. The
MINAHETS AND PALACES 101
Moors live on in their decadent present, and only
strangers remember their foijner greatness and
admire their old monuments. As it was written
in the Book of God, the cycle of their glory is over
and the fatal period of the nation has come. "They
trampled upon the flowers of the earth, the men
of old; the people of to-day, they live in the
autumn of time,"
Five
,THE [THURSDAY MARKET
A merchant shall hardly keep from, -wrong doing;
and a huckster shall not be acquitted of sin.
A nail will stick fast between the joinings of
stones; and sin will force itself in between buying
and selling.
E C CX.ESIASTI CTTS.
"It is naught; It Is naught,** saith the buyer, but
-when he hath gone his way then he boasteth.
PROVEBBS.
Five
THE THURSDAY MARKET
IF the idle visitor at Marrakesh, a little surfeited
with its faded charm and its strange mediseval-
ism, wishes to plunge back for an evening into
modern life, he has merely to go to the French
suburb of Gueliz. Here a little more than a mile
from the main gate of Marrakesh, he may find
curious colonial types, interesting drinks, and
American jazz music in an indiscreet and some-
what tawdry background. One may skip five hun-
dred years by an easy transition in an archaic hack,
driven by an ugly and venomous old Spaniard,
whose ruby nose is a precious jewel in the flaming
bonfire of his Bardolph face. The town is not a
half dozen years old, but neatly planned, laid out
in long avenues planted with eucalyptus and palms,
among which stand little scattered houses of plain
stucco, very white and clean.
We rattle on past unpretentious shops with a
scanty display of European hats and boots and
soap and finery, all very expensive and quite out
105
106 OLD MOROCCO
of place in the middle of the desert, but of a won-
derful fascination for the little Arab boys who peer
at these windows of puzzling mysteries. And then
there are windows with cheerful rows of bottles, a
pleasing sight after interminable participation in
tea and mint, with the abstemious Arabs. As the
two or three cafes we pass are not very lively, I
drive to the edge of town, dismiss my wicked driver
after some discussion conducted with the aid of the
more pregnant expletives in three languages and
two religions, and walk off into the sunset.
The vast plain glows with light from a gorgeous
crimson sky that fades upwards into delicate blend-
ings of pale rose and warm green, in which, like
a white, holy sanctuary lamp, hangs one great bril-
liant planet. The hill of Gueliz, behind which the
flaming sun has just dropped, stands out black and
sharp with its little square fortified kasba; and
nearby are two tall silhouetted date palms, lonely
and motionless, waiting for the evening wind from
the sea. Far off across the plain slowly passes a
caravan, a confusion of bobbing necks and twin-
kling legs, very black and clear-cut against the
vivid crimson. The warm air is luminous wifh
ruddy gleams and reflected splendours of a dream
world drowned in warm colours and alive with
fancies* From these glorious moods of the myste-
THE THURSDAY MARKET 107
rious desert were born the wild super-realities of
Arabian romance, the magic of which seems real in
this sunset world.
Down the long road which turns suddenly from
behind the little hill come three dark specks, three
galloping horsemen, perhaps three kings from
Cufa or princes from Ispahan, I am disappointed
to find them merely chasseurs dfAfrique, very
superior and smart in their brilliant red, yellow,
and blue, the dignity of their dark features en-
hanced by huge brown turbans and neck cloths
that flutter as they ride. I turn and follow the
retreating horsemen back to the town, now glowing
with rosy reflections from white houses among
darkened green eucalyptus leaves. At the end of
the long avenue that leads to Marrakesh the
Koutoubia stands sunset-flushed above the dark
palms, and overhead appear more stars in the
deepened azure of the evening zenith,
I am still dazed by the sunset; the people in the
cafes seem strangely unconscious of this daily
miracle of the desert. I choose a cafe that some-
times has ice for the aperatifs, and sit down among
these colonials, who have brought over with them
the French custom of spending their before dinner
hour chatting on the pleasant terrace of a cafe.
They are mostly types from the provinces, rougher
108 OLD MOROCCO
in appearance and with much more energy than the
folk one sees in the cafes of Tours or Toulouse;
more men than women, as one might expect, and
among the women a lack of smartness and chic,
French officers are gaily chatting at little tables,
groups of traders are playing cards over their
whiskey and soda, and the proprietors of the neat
little shops are enjoying their usual evening's ani-
mated discussion of the shortcomings of the gov-
ernment. One apoplectic little barber is endanger-
ing his life through the intense emotion aroused in
him by a speech of Lloyd George quoted in a
Parisian paper seven days old. Strolling quietly
past the cafe go two graceful young Arabs in clean
white djellabas and turbans, holding each other by
the hand and not speaking a word.
Presently, my friend Monsieur Louis Lapan-
dery drops into the cafe, greets a half dozen ac-
quaintances, and sits down at my table. He is a
big manly chap of about forty, with long black
moustaches and deep eyes that look straight at you.
He has spent ten years in the French colonies,
hunting big game in Nigeria, prospecting in Sene-
gal, and trading in Morocco. Last year he was five
months alone in the northern slopes of the Atlas
mapping the territory for the colonial government.
He is of the energetic and adventurous type of
THE THURSDAY MAHKET 109
colonist that has made the white race dominant
in Asia and Africa. A stout royalist, he reads
UAction Franfwse, and never refers to the
present government without sharp irony and a
contemptuous twirl of his moustaches.
"Look here, monsieur," he said in a tone of hurt
pride, pointing to an article in his beloved Action,
"a French officer is given Le Legion d'Honneur
for flying for twenty minutes over the mountain
behind Fez, but I, a mere colonial sergeant, am
sent to live five months among the wild mountain
Berbers and receive not so much as a merci Hen!
for my work!" Monsieur Lapandery's opinions
never go half way, and his decisions axe quickly
formed and resolute.
We talked for two hours in the warm twilight
over many glasses of Vermouth, or perhaps I
should say that he talked and I listened. Possibly
it was because I am a good listener that he invited
me to go along with him on an adventure he was
just planning. He talked of the rich forbidden
country of the Souss, south of the Great Atlas, a
region where the Shelluh Berbers for centuries
have maintained an independence only nominally
under the Sultan's control. No trading with
Europeans has been permitted there since the
Portuguese forced their way in in the fifteenth
110 OLD MOROCCO
century. In modern times it has been visited by
a half dozen travellers and by one or two trading
expeditions that came to grief. In 1914, Mr. Holt,
formerly American consul at Tangier, wrote of the
country as the "Unknown Souss," * a region less
explored than the very heart of Africa. Since the
French have extended the actual Protectorate to
the foot of the Atlas, a few prospectors, disguised
as Arabs, have ventured over the mountains, but
the mysterious plain is srtill as shut out from the
world as it was a hundred years ago.
Monsieur Lapandery was going into the Souss
with the idea of buying up as far as possible this
season's almond crop, or at least of making some
trading connections among the Soussi before tie
French Protectorate formally occupied the region
and opened it up to commerce. And there was
always the chance of adventure; there might be no
almonds, but there was fascinating native life to
see and there were sure to be difficult situations,
stubborn, grasping chieftains, and probably ban-
dits. Olives and almonds were nothing to me, but
unexplored mountain trails and an unknown coun-
try from whose bourn few travellers had returned
* "That portion of Southern Morocco known as Sus (South), with
fche exception of certain coast towns, is probably as little known as
any spot of similar size on the face of the earth." "Morocco the
Bizarre,'* p. 180.
Ill
THE THURSDAY MARKET 113
appealed strongly. I was a little tired of dreaming
over palaces and mosques, and during these long
afternoons when the thermometer stayed for hours
at a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade, the
snowy peak of Djebel Mskrin, gleaming through
the haze fifty miles away, seemed like the vision
of heaven to Dives. Nothing could be more allur-
ing than the thought of a trip into those dream-like
mountains. I at once accepted Monsieur Lapan-
dery's invitation and we went to his house to
dinner.
When we arrived about nine o'clock, his pretty
Berber wife had ready a most excellent meal of
duck, roasted native fashion with peppers and
herbs in a covered earthen dish, and also a salad
and a choice melon. Madame Lapandery was very
charming in her gay native costume and innumer-
able bangles and bracelets. She was Europeanized
to the extent of eating with her husband and his
friends, but she had the Moslem woman's modest
manner in the presence of the "superior" sex in
whose life she is merely a graceful and ornamental
recreation. Monsieur's attempts to make a French
woman of his wife were amusing. He blustered
and stormed to get her to eat with an unaccustomed
fork or to drink a glass of wine, and she quietly
smiled and in her soft musical voice, declined, or
OLD MOROCCO
perhaps, to please him she would take a tiny sip.
And the more he bullied, the more she adored him!
His lovely little eight-year-old stepdaughter,
Kbira, also ate with us. She was a full-blooded
Berber child brought up in a village on the slopes
of the Atlas until two years ago, when Monsieur
Lapandery began to train her in European man-
ners. As he soon saw the quickness and adapt-
ability with which she added little western courte-
sies to her innate oriental charm, the education of
this fascinating child became the chief interest of
his life. She has an instinctive fineness of manner
and a winning childish way, and talks French like
a little Parisienne. Her eyes sparkled gleefully
over'Monsieur Lapandery's jokes, and she accepted
his blustering reproofs with roguish attempts to be
serious.
The Lapandery household was very numerous;
in fact, it was a whole clan. The two-roomed cot-
tage was only large enough for him, his wife, and
Kbira and the three dogs, who quarrelled over the
bones under the table; but the back yard was
thickly populated with relatives. There was
Si Lhassen, the silent patriarchal father-in-law, his
incredibly old and wrinkled wife, a second rather
pretty daughter, and the daughter's shiftless young
husband, who deserted her from time to time and
THE THURSDAY MARKET 115
came back when hunger drove him to fidelity and
to his brother-in-law's hospitality. Then there was
Lhassen, the younger, a useless young oaf of four-
teen, and an amusing brown baby that rolled
around naked over the mats and was constantly
smothered with noisy kisses by the three women*
And finally there was Kino, the horse, and a mule
or two- That is all the household I recall.
The plans for the trip were simple. We should
merely buy two or three pack mules at next Thurs-
day's market, stock up with a few provisions, and
try to get formal permission from the Bureau de
Renseignments. If the Bureau, as was very prob-
able, would not grant us permission, we should slip
away without it. As old Si Lhassen was himself a
Shelluh Berber from the Souss, he would be our
guide and would doubtless be useful in helping us
get on with his tribesmen among whom he was held
in respect for his great age and for his experience
as a far traveller. Little Kbira would go with us
as the interpreter and diplomat of the party when
we reached the mountains, where Arabic is no bet-
ter understood than French. Si Lhassen did not
know a word of any language but his native
Shelluh dialect, except his five daily prayers in
Arabic, which he repeated as so many mystic, in-
118 OLD MOROCCO
prods two ungainly beasts along toward the mar-
ket; and asses with panniers bulging with curious
long cucumbers, vivid green squashes, and purple
egg-plants, squeeze their way doggedly through the
throng. Both sides of these streets are lined with
thousands of little stalls where the proprietors
squat in the midst of their wares, some of them
busily plying their craft, others shouting for cus-
tom, and others quietly waiting for what business
Allah may be pleased 'to send. The leather work-
ers are surrounded with beautiful soft skins of
bright yellow and crimson and green; their stalls
are lined with rows of gay little slippers, exqui*
sitely embroidered in gold thread, with cushions of
leather carved in intricate designs, and with
pouches made to hang from the wearer's shoulder
by long crimson cords. And down in the dirt be-
fore these shops, goat skins are spread out to be
made soft and supple by the tread of a thousand
passing feet* Here are wood-workers making little
boxes and Moorish trunks covered with coloured
paper, and embroiderers of silk caftans working in
semi-darkness, and spinners of cotton surrounded
by three or four naked children who hold big skeins
of cord*
The grocers have their wares heaped up in bas-
kets ranged in rows sloping up to the back of the
THE THURSDAY MARKET 119
stalls, where the shopkeepers sit lazily with their
knees drawn up; and when a buyer conies they
reach down with long-handled ladles and scoop up
a measure of ripe olives, dates, tea, or dried pep-
pers, and empty them into his leather pouch. Then
there are stalls that display cauldrons of tar,
grease, and liquid soap; and butchers' shops hung
about with very uninviting strings of viscera and
gory sheeps' heads with big corkscrew horns.
Down one street are rows of blacksmiths shoeing
nervous horses or ill-tempered mules with three
legs carefully tied to pegs in the ground; and in
the black interiors of these sheds the shooting white
sparks from the pounded iron light up in flashes
the strained faces of two or three wretched boys
pumping at primitive bellows. And here and there
in the gloom of the shops are lonely white faces of
kief smokers, half awake to sad delusion, dumbly
yearning for their forgotten dreams.
I stop for a moment to look into a cloth bazaar,
a long lofty hall with merchants' booths all around.
They are hung with silk caftans of gorgeous
colours and women's girdles of native silk in crim-
son and yellow. In one corner sits a perfume seller
with his handful of strange shaped vials of precious
exotic scents, attar of roses gathered in pashas'
gardens, amber, incense, and gums brought from
116 OLD MOROCCO
comprehensible sounds, and Monsieur Lapandery
was but imperfectly acquainted with Shelluh.
The fearful heat of July and August is, of
course, a terrible handicap in exploring Morocco
in the summer, but for a journey through the Atlas
this is really the best time. In the winter, the
snows make the higher mountain passes dangerous,
and in the spring, floods make the rivers often un-
f ordable for weeks. And then the question of food
for the animals is important. As the cai'ds sell all
their surplus grain supply shortly after it is har-
vested, the peasant population have barely enough
through the year for their own needs. We were
undertaking our journey right in the middle of
harvest time, when we could count on supplies
along the way.
We discussed all the details of the trip until
after midnight, over our coif ee and wine, and ar-
ranged to meet at the Souk El Khemis early next
Thursday morning to buy mules, panniers, and
trappings. I hailed a sleepy hack jingling by
toward the city, and drove down the moonlit ave-
nues of mysterious shadows back to the hotel. The
jazz music and noisy laughter from two or three
French cafes jarred with crude incongruity, for I
was dreaming of wild Atlas scenery and possible
THE THURSDAY MARKET 117
adventure in the strange, remote life of the un-
known Souss, . ,
The following Thursday morning, the day of the
great market at Marrakesh, I was up with the sun
and off for the Bab El Khemis, the extreme north-
ern gate of the city, just outside of which the buy-
ers and sellers of camels, horses, mules, asses, goats,
and sheep meet and bargain on market days.
Thursday morning is the time to see Marrakesh;
from dawn till hot noon the crooked maze of streets
in the heart of the city is thronged with thousands
of busy buyers from all central Morocco.
I cross the square of the Djemaa El Fnaa, and
plunge into the labyrinth through which I eventu-
ally hope to emerge in the region of the Souk El
Khemis. These streets are protected rom .the
sun by flimsy roofs of poles, thatched meagrely
with dried palm branches which permit the sun-
light to stream through in checkered spots, and
these sharp lights and shadows, broken by the in-
numerable faces and garments of the rapidly mov-
ing crowds, constantly give the effect of flickering
cinema pictures from old scratched films. The
throng is closely packed in the narrow ways and I
can progress no faster than they wish to move. A
camel driver, always shouting, "Balek! Balek!"
118 OLD MOROCCO
prods iiwo ungainly beasts along toward the mar-
ket; and asses with panniers bulging with curious
long cucumbers, vivid green squashes, and purple
egg-plants, squeeze their way doggedly through the
throng. Both sides of these streets are lined with
thousands of little stalls where the proprietors
squat in the midsii of their wares, some of them
busily plying their craft, others shouting for cus-
tom, and others quietly waiting for what business
Allah may be pleased to send. The leather work-
ers are surrounded with beautiful soft skins of
bright yellow and crimson and green; their stalls
are lined with rows of gay little slippers, exqui-
sitely embroidered in gold thread, with cushions of
leather carved in intricate designs, and with
pouches made to hang from the wearer's shoulder
by long crimson cords. And down in the dirt be-
fore these shops, goat skins are spread out to be
made soft and supple by the tread of a thousand
passing feet. Here are wood-workers making little
boxes and Moorish trunks covered with coloured
paper, and embroiderers of silk caftans working in
semi-darkness, and spinners of cotton surrounded
by three or four naked children who hold big skeins
of cord.
The grocers have their wares heaped up in bas-
kets ranged IB rows sloping up to the back of the
THE THURSDAY MARKET 119
stalls, where the shopkeepers sit lazily with their
knees drawn up; and when a buyer comes they
reach down with long-handled ladles and scoop up
a measure of ripe olives, dates, tea, or dried pep-
pers, and empty them into his leather pouch. Then
there are stalls that display cauldrons of tar,
grease, and liquid soap; and butchers' shops hung
about with very uninviting strings of viscera and
gory sheeps' heads with big corkscrew horns.
Down one street are rows of blacksmiths shoeing
nervous horses or ill-tempered mules with three
legs carefully tied to pegs in the ground; and in
the black interiors of these sheds the shooting white
sparks from the pounded iron light up in flashes
the strained faces of two or three wretched boys
pumping at primitive bellows. And here and there
in the gloom of the shops are lonely white faces of
kief smokers, half awake to sad delusion, dumbly
yearning for their forgotten dreams.
I stop for a moment to look into a cloth bazaar,
a long lofty hall with merchants' booths all around.
They are hung with silk caftans of gorgeous
colours and women's girdles of native silk in crim-
son and yellow. In one corner sits a perfume seller
with his handful of strange shaped vials of precious
exotic scents, attar of roses gathered in pashas*
gardens, attt>er, incense, and gums brought from
120 OLD MOROCCO
beyond the Sahara. Through the crowd rushes
an old clothes seller holding over his head a ma-
genta and gold caftan, and shouting his price in a
voice that can be heard above the hubbub and noise.
In one corner a story-teller begins to recite, and
bearded merchants drop their affairs and mingle
with the listening circle of idlers. Among them are
three or four closely veiled women evidently of the
better class, who have come to buy finery, and in
the front of the circle are several young Berber
boys who are fascinated by the story-teller, though
they can understand but little of his Arabic tale*
He is reciting extracts from the famous epic of
Antar, which for eight hundred years has been the
delight of the Arabs from Bagdad to Spain. One
may hear it to-day from the children of Cairo and
Algiers, When he comes to the lyric passages the
story-teller sings in a high chant. Here is a famous
place, the complaint of Antar who has been cruelly
separated from his beloved Ablla:
Best has fled from my eyes and tears stream down my cheeks.
Ablla has borne away with her all my happiness and my
sleep.
My pain is as great as the time was short
When I saw her heart shining in her eyes.
Alas! how these farewells lived over and over again.
And these endless separations,
Tear my very sonl.
tribe of Beni-Abess, how I long for thy tents
THE THURSDAY MARKET 121
Where my eyes saw her smile,
So soon to vanish!
What tears have I vainly shed for the exile of my beloved!
To make me live and to die happy
I only ask for one fleeting moment,
Such as a miser might grant
To the eye of a stranger admiring his treasure.
The story-teller ends his episode, collects a few
coins from his pleased listeners, and moves off; the
merchants go back to their bargaining.
A little farther on is a marabout's shrine, within
which two or three women, muffled in white, are
crouched before a tomb covered with a black pall.
They are praying for children, for love, for re-
venge, for deliverance from all baleful spells of
vexing djinns; and all around them sounds a com-
plex ticking chorus of votive clocks. The super-
natural is always closely interwoven in the texture
of this oriental life; its presence is hinted every-
where, in phrases, in gestures, in talismans, and
signs, in the very form of the hinges of the great
studded doors you pass in the streets. Even while
I reflect on this, I hear a low monotonous chant
growing louder as it nears. Six thin-faced pil-
grims in rusty black garments and dirty turbans
come swinging along, staff in hand, chanting
a strange song. They have come on foot from some
far northern town, across the burning Bled to pray
122 OLD MOEOCCO
in Marrakesh at her hundred shrines. They seem
very happy, and, I fancy, it is not only with the
peace of mystic promises in their hearts, but also
with the joy of romantic wanderers whom the lure
of otherwhere leads on, and the delight of seeing
distant cities and strange lands.
And I, joyful as the pilgrims, go on along the
winding streets, peering into barbers' shops, busy
grain markets, inn-courtyards full of loaded camels
making hideous noises; and then at a turn in the
street I come upon a great fountain. It is divided
into three arched bays of carved and painted plas-
ter in subtle designs faded and old, and over an
arch is written, "Drink and admire!" Groups of
veiled women, with round earthenware jugs bal-
anced on their shoulders, stand gossiping by the
dark pools, and ragged water-carriers are filling
hairy goat-skin bottles, and half a dozen boys are
splashing one another and laughing.
This is very charming to look at, but I realise
that I have lost my way. I persuade a funny little
urchin to take his feet out of the fountain and guide
me to the Souk El Khemis. He trots on ahead,
and with him go four more little imps in case he
should lose his way. In about a half hour I and my
tattered retinue reach the northern gate beyond
which the market is already assembling.
THE THURSDAY MARKET 123
The red-brown, sun-steeped walls, crumbling
and old, shut the city in, and leave a desolate waste
without. A few wretched palms grow sparsely at
the edge of a dry gully half filled with refuse*
Four ghastly beggars, all blind, squat on a mound
near the gate. They are a holy confraternity.
Their leader, gaunt, long-haired, majestic in his
rags, has about him something of the nobility of
Job sitting on the ash-heap outside the city of Uz.
His seared, sightless face is lifted above the world,
and his hollow voice, calling on sacred names,
vibrates in the ear like a prophetic warning. His
followers sit motionless and dumb, with the
supreme resignation of Islam. Over the whole
place and over the plain beyond rises a reddish dust
from the feet of the moving crowd and the hoofs of
a thousand animals. And through this haze, over
the city to the far south, looms, dim and half seen,
the jagged line of the great Atlas.
In the shade of a huge sycamore beside a muddy
little stream, a group of natives are sipping coffee,.
Here Monsieur Lapandery is waiting for me. We
stand a while and watch the drovers herd hundreds
of black goats and thick-fleeced sheep in one part
of the market space. Toward another quarter,
near the old walls, the traders with asses to sell,
drive their patient and sometimes ridiculously
124 OLD MOROCCO
stubborn little beasts. From two directions, off
across the brown plain, come two very large herds
of camels at an ungainly, clumsy trot. They meet
in the centre of the market in an awkward confu-
sion of legs and necks, with much beating and
angry shouting on the part of the drivers. And
in and out of the groups of animals and bargainers
ride little knots of Arab horsemen showing off
their fine steeds.
They all draw off toward one point, and the
crowd divides and leaves a broad lane for these
splendidly picturesque cavaliers to pass through,
one after another. Down the long lane they charge
at top gallop, hands and reins held high over their
heads, riding whips stuck in their teeth, shouting
wild Bedouin cries. One by one these magnificent
children of the desert rush by like meteors, and
I catch a fierce glance, a flash of white eye-balls
and gleaming teeth; and their long striped bur-
nouses stream and flutter in the wind, and the
pounding hoof beats re-echo over the plain. Now
a group of riders engage in a loud dispute, and
their horses, feeling the excitement, nervously toss
their heads and caracole restlessly. To decide the
point, two prepare for a race, and draw apart with
a third as starter. One Arab rides a finely built
iron grey, marked with an enormous ugly brand;
THE THURSDAY MARKET 125
the other has a superb white mare that walks as
though she loathed touching the ground. At a
shout, they start and rush gloriously down toward
the goal, yelling barbarieally, their faces in a wild
fury fitting to a Moslem host charging the infidel.
The white mare comes in ahead and the dispute is
settled.
Monsieur Lapandery and I go over to a busy
crowd buying and selling mules. We engage the
services of a broker to help us select and to do the
bargaining for us. Mahommed assures us that he
knows this morning's market thoroughly and that
he is a rare bargainer. One glance at his villainous
eye, for he has but one, is enough to convince me of
the truth of his last statement. Mule after mule
comes by, pushed or tugged or otherwise per-
suaded; some smart and young but with evil in
their hearts, others declining sadly in the vale of
years, but most are already in the sere and yellow
leaf, and time has dealt ill with them. The owner
of each shouts out his price, and occasionally a
buyer offers two-thirds of this; then follows a tor-
rent of praises, of disparagements, of haggling,
until at length a bargain may be struck.
"It is a pearl among mules and can keep pace
all day with a horse and eat less than doth a fly!'*
126 OLD MOROCCO
"Belike, belike, but he seems to me to go halt-
ingly in his hind legs."
"Xo, by Allah! O Prince of Merchants, do but
try him."
So the Prince of Merchants attempts to leap
astride the big pack-saddle, but is promptly kicked
in the stomach. The bystanders roar and the bar-
gain is off. Another ragged old trader is exclaim-
ing.
"The price is not a tithe of his value, but I am a
poor man and Allah has visited me with misfortune
and I lack money."
"But a hundred and thirty douros is a very great
price to pay for a mere carcass." And so they
wrangle.
"N Meanwhile, Monsieur Lapandery with the aid of
Mahommed the broker has bought two pack mules,
and the money is paid and the sale duly recorded
by the scribe sitting under the sycamore tree.
Then after much search among the animals for
sale, (Hie is found for me to ride. She is a beautiful
creature, verily a pearl among mules; her eyes are
deep as the wells of Bou Aza; her mouse-coloured
flanks are soft as silk woven by the girls of Fez;
and her velvet ears are long and pointed like the
leaves of the rose-laurels that bloom in the valleys!
As for her disposition, I have owned her five min-
THE THURSDAY MARKET 127
utes and she has neither bitten nor kicked; so I
have named her Aziza, which among the Shelluh
Berbers means "ma cherie." I also buy a crimson
saddle such as a pasha may ride, with elegant trap-
pings and stirrups inlaid with silver, worthy of the
beautiful and, I hope, gentle Aziza. I am very
eager to mount my prize and ride grandly away
with her, but prudence suggests it were better to
wait till there are not so many spectators.
Six
TOWARD THE GREAT ATLAS
As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert, Lo yon, there,
That hillock burning with a brazen glare;
Those myriad dusky flames -with points aglow
Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro;
A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell
For OeviTs roll-call and some fete of HelL
THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT.
T
A
Six
TOWARD THE GREAT ATLAS
next morning, with a wild crimson dawn
for a background, and Monsieur Lapan-
dery's numerous household for spectators, I made
the acquaintance of my she-mule, Aziza. She
began by very deftly kicking me off twice, and then
she tried bucking, with considerable success. She
was a temperamental lady, but by a judicious com-
bination of patting on the nose and kicking in the
ribs with my inlaid silver stirrups, we came to an
amicable understanding, and eventually she proved
to be "a gentle beast and of a good conscience/*
The Bureau de Renseignments had refused to
give us permission to go beyond the limit of the
actual Protectorate which extends at present only
to the northern foothills of the Great Atlas. They
informed Monsieur Lapandery that the country
beyond was not safe for Europeans, and that until
the military occupation was extended, all permis-
sion to prospectors and traders would be refused,
because some difficulty with the natives might force
131
132 OLD MOROCCO
the government to premature military action.
This decision did not deter us; we had expected it.
We were going without permission.
We set out from Gueliz at about six o'clock, just
as the African pipes were skirling and the big
drums were booming for the daily morning con-
cert of the Spaliis. With these barbaric martial
rhythms vibrating in our ears we rode down a
newly planted avenue of young eucalyptus trees,
past the straggling houses on the outskirts of the
French town, the last we should see of western
civilization, and started southward across the great
arid Bled. Aziza took the trail and fell into a
good steady pace. When she heard her eccentric
rider bursting forth into
Xon eget Mauris jaculis nee arcu,
she showed a genteel surprise, and, like her Words-
worthian relative,
with motion dull
Turned on the pivot of her skull
Her long left ear,
but she soon became reconciled even to my singing
and decided to bear it with Moslem resignation.
A few clouds that had blown over during the night
from the sea, which is only about one hundred and
thirty miles away, kept off the heat and glare for
the first few hours of the journey.
TOWARD THE GREAT ATLAS 133
Old Si Lhassen led the way, riding a tough wiry
little mule that did not seem at all troubled by the
weight of two bulging chouari bags between which
the old man sat, his shrunken bare legs hanging
over one side, and his old babooches dangling from
the tips of his toes. Then came little Kbira perched
between the panniers of another mule. The trip
was a lark for her; her eyes were always laughing
as she hummed French nursery tunes her step-
father had taught her. From time to time she
shrilled "Arrr Zit!" to the mule and poked his
neck with a stick to make him keep pace with her
grandfather's mount. Beside her walked the
young Lhassen, her fourteen-year-old cousin,
stupid and useless, but always ready to show his
white teeth in a smile. Now and then, as we passed
a clump of cacti, he would pluck some yellow ripe
Barbary figs, roll the prickers off in the dust with
his calloused bare feet and hand the sweetish seedy
fruit up to us as we rode. They were not very good
but they served to moisten our dry throats when
the hot sun began to tell. Monsieur Lapandery
and I rode side by side, he astride of Kino, his
much prized horse. At first we chatted idly in the
gay mood in which one begins an adventure, occa-
sionally bursting into snatches of old songs, or
halting a moment for a cigarette. But old
134 OLD MOROCCO
Si Lhassen rode steadily on, never turning his
wrinkled and gravely patriarchal face from the
looming outline of the Great Atlas range,
We left behind, the brown, towered walls of
Marrakesh, the confusion of huddled flat house-
tops, the Koutoubia tower, and the turquoise-
tipped minaret of the Kasba mosque. As we look
back, the city is swallowed up in the great green
oasis of palms bathed in painful white sunlight.
We pass numbers of wide mouthed wells, which
tap the vast system of underground conduits that
bring water from the hills to feed the fountains
and garden reservoirs of Marrakesh. In some of
these, which go down very deep, there are natives
digging, and we hear the hollow voices of djinns
reverberating down underground. In one place a
conduit breaks forth into a clear stream through
a deep ravine, and here we dismount to water the
animals. A flock of black goats are watering here
too, and a half dozen nearly naked children squat
about and wonder.
From time to time we pass groups of Moors in
great peaked straw hats, one or two carelessly
hanging ragged garments, bare brown arms and
feet. They are driving troops of little asses over-
loaded with straw or pottery, or sun-baked bricks,
or melons and quaint vegetables. They stare
TOWARD THE GREAT ATLAS 135
curiously and raise their open right hands in sign
of greeting. In one place, where a broken conduit
breaks out and moistens the clayey soil, are slaves
making bricks with slow African indolence, even
as the Children of Israel made them for Pharoah
millenniums ago. Here is a small field of scanty
barley stubble wastefully reaped, and in the middle,
a threshing floor, where a heap of grain is being
winnowed by the wind blowing the chaff from each
scattered shovelful. One remembers scriptural
parables.
We begin to feel the sun. The barren Bled
shimmers, parched, brown, and arid, broken by
dry gullies cut by winter rains. Beside some rare
well an olive clump or a single date palm varies
the brown monotony. Ali Baba passes us with
eight donkeys each loaded with two oil jars big
enough to hold a robber. In the distance, the legs
of a dozen camels in a caravan twinkle on the
horizon. Rarely we pass a large or a small oasis,
where a supply of wells supports rich green palm-
eries and olive groves. Once we go past a very
large one surrounded by crumbling, low barriers
of clay a dead, deserted city inhabited only by
hyenas. The rain-melted ruins suggest Sumer or
Akkad, and the imagination dreams of the courts
where Jamshid gloried and drank deep.
136 OLD MOROCCO
The sun is high now; the Bled becomes intensely
hot; the glare is frightful. Poor Lulu the hound
scratches the burning soil for a possible place to
rest and pant a moment without scorching. The
poor beastie is tired, for he goes zigzagging six
miles to our one, stopping to roll in the dust, or
to snap at a scorpion, or make ugly noises at a
rough, black, desert cur that is sniffing at a sun*
baked carcass. The faint, hot breeze dies out; and
now and then revives in tiny spinning cyclones of
dust, that whirl over the hot ground, filling our
mouths and eyes. The heat becomes terrific,
merciless; the air "Through which the sun walks
burning without beams," makes shimmering distor-
tions over the road ahead, like the halo of refraction
around white-hot iron.
By half past eleven we reach the edge of the
oasis of Tameslout. We hoped to spend the siesta
time with the sheik of the village, a mile or so
farther on, but the animals are exhausted, and we
decide to camp for lunch here on the outskirts
in the scraggy shade of an olive grove. Three
men who have been threshing a vast mound of
barley are resting, stretched out under a straw hut.
One of them brings us water in a tall, round-bot-
tomed amphora that suggests ancient Egypt. The
porous jar has kept the water surprisingly and
TOWAUD THE GREAT ATLAS 137
gratefully cool. We lunch on cold chicken and
Dutch cheese and drink a tin cup full of Si Lhas-
sen's boiling tea which, strangely enough, is re-
freshing.
We tried to sleep for a few hours until the sun
should get lower, but the heat made sleep impos-
sible. There was nothing to do but endure life for
five hours with what comfort might be derived from
tobacco and stoicism. Out in the sun, which beat
about us and invaded every possible opening in our
sparse shade, the temperature was over 150 de-
grees. The breeze that spasmodically blew over
the burning ground was like the hot breath of some
terrible animal breathing close to one's face. It
burnt our lips black and scorched our eyes, pained
by constant squinting from the white glare. To
add to our torture, we could vaguely see cool
patches of white snow streaking the lofty peak of
Djebel Mskrin forty miles away through the hazy
air.
Our jar of water was soon empty; the men had
gone away, and we did not know where to find
more. One's throat felt thick and clotted; the
whole body cried for water. I thought of the tale
a gaunt, worn Frenchman told me a few days be-
fore in the cafe. He had spent nineteen years in
Africa. On one trip he had been a hundred and
138 OLD MOROCCO
fifty days in the Sahara on a geographical expedi-
tion. Once the party went fifty days without find-
ing water. In parts of the Sahara it is possible to
find water at a depth of six feet, but in the region
he was exploring they went for five days in one
direction, returned, and started five days in an-
other, and so on, for fifty days. Fifty days with
no water but what they robbed from the neck vein
of a camel! They set out with fifteen hundred
camels and came back with one hundred and
twenty-five, and lost three quarters of their men.
It was a fearful tale of horror and heat and thirst
and tenacity to life. And then he told of Timbuk-
tu, the great mysterious black city three months
journey across the desert, a ruined and wretched
place, once a great centre of civilisation, but now
swarming with a miserable population whose ears
and lips are perforated with pieces of native gold.
There was nothing for us but to endure the heat,
to look out over the shimmering Bled, and wait with
oriental patience for the sun's rage to calm a little.
Our Berbers, of course, did not suffer from the
heat and did not mind waiting. Waiting quietly
in the shade is their ideal of the perfect life. The
old man slept for a while with the complete relaxa-
tion of an animal or a young child, and then sat
up cross-legged and meditatively retired into him-
189
TOWARD THE GREAT ATLAS
self. The young Lhassen spent most of the time
observing me as though I were some curious variety
of beetle, and his expression seemed to say, "Isn't
nature wonderful!" He was a most amusing oaf,
good-natured and quite useless, with no interest in
anything but food. He was very small, but had
the largest feet ever known, so large, in fact, that
he felt that something ought to be done about them.
He once consulted a sorcerer, he told me later
when we had become better acquainted, about hav-
ing them reduced by some charm or apothecary's
potion, but even the sorcerer could hold out no
hope. He reminded me of the folk that old Sir
John Mandeville says inhabit Ethiopia, and have
one huge foot "so large that it schadowethe alle the
body agen the sonne whanne thei wole lye and reste
hem." I spent my time smoking and learning a
few words in Lhassen's Shelluh dialect.
About half past four we set out again, trying
to become interested in other things than the thirst
that tormented us. We soon reached a threshing
floor where half a dozen Moors were winnowing
grain. A sheik squatting in the door of a tent,
watching the work, filled for us an earthen bowl
full of muddy water which we emptied many times.
The bowl tasted of rancid cooking oil, but our wish
142 OLD MOROCCO
that Allah might reward the giver ("Barak alla-
haufik!") came from the heart.
We rode on after sunset, past many Berber
strongholds, all built alike with square, mud walls
flanked by four square towers, past threshing floors
and stubble fields and wells that tap great water
conduits from the mountains. The mountains
begin to get nearer. We climb low rolling foot-
hills, barren but at least a relief after the monotony
of the Bled. Higher up we cross innumerable small
tablelands cut with ravines and dry river beds,
the sides of which are deeply scarred with erosions.
Sometimes beside shrunken streams hidden in little
protecting valleys, rose-laurels bloom in profusion,
and the scent of honeysuckle blows across the twi-
lit trail. Olives and clumps of prickly cacti still
occasionally appear, but we have left behind the
palms of the oases in the plain.
After riding on for an hour after the moon came
up, we selected a place to camp for the night. We
spread out blankets on a sandy beach beside the
Oued Xfis, a shallow and rapid river that flows
northward out of a long valley that splits the Great
Atlas range. High above us, built on the very
verge of the abrupt cliff, is a large Berber house
where several families or rather, several households
of one family, unite in a community. Si Lhassen
TOWARD THE GREAT ATLAS 143
bargains with the men to get something for our
supper. We exchange cigarettes for a dish of sour
ewe's milk, a handful of black tea for some eggs,
and pay three francs apiece for rather sinewy
chickens. While supper is being prepared, Mon-
sieur Lapandery and I enjoy a moonlight bath
in a pool of cold black water below a big rock,
around which the stream splashes and gurgles,
tangling the white moonbeams and whipping them
into silver foam. How far off seems the terrific
tropic heat of our noonday halt at Tameslout!
After supper I roll in a blanket, for the night
falls cool. Two storks that have a big straggling
nest up on the housetop resent our intruding pres-
ence with an amusing, laugh-like clatter of bills,
and volplane down over our heads, making sinister
black shadows of great wings across the moonlight
Kbira, who is sleepy and perhaps a little homesick,
is snuggled up to her grandfather, who tells her a
quaint folk-tale. His voice was very low and I
could not make much out of his language, but the
next day I got it down with the help of Kbira.
THE TALE OF THE STORK
The he- and she-stork in the early days were
two human beings. Then they lived in great ease
and possessed much goods. They owned flocks and
144 OLD MOROCCO
much wheat. One year came a great famine.
Many suffered and died of hunger.
These two people had a maidservant brought up
in their house. One day the man went out into the
market place and called folk about him: "Come all
ye who wish to buy grain. Come to my house and
bring only half as much money as they ask you in
the grain market. I live at such and such a place. 5 '
When he had finished speaking he went back to
his house; he called his maidservant; he said to her:
"Go make ready much soap and pieces of glass.
When these folk arrive let them all come up to
where I am. Then shut the door of the house, and
upon the stairs from the top step down, smear
layers of soap and stick the pieces of glass on it.
Do so from the top step even unto the very bot-
tom." "It shall be done, my master/' she replied.
And the servant rose and took glass broken in
small pieces, and much soap, and she tied up each
in woolen rags. And behold the folk who would
buy grain came to the door of the house. And
when they knocked at the door, the maidservant
opened. When they were all in, the servant
showed them the way saying, "Go up," and one
after another they went up. And the maidservant
closed the outer door, and, taking the woolen rags
full of glass and of soap, she went to the top step,
TOWARD THE GREAT ATLAS 145
holding the soap in her left hand and the glass in
her right. And when she came to the stop step of
the stair she began to smear all the steps with the
soap stuck full of glass, and upon the steps she
applied this many times from the top to the bottom.
When the thing was done she opened the outer
door and fled away.
The man sold his grain and received the price
agreed upon. He said to them: "Come now, get
ye all down stairs and go!" He seized a stick and
began to lay about him sorely, shouting, "Come,
get ye down, get ye down!" Then the people
started to go in a great hurry. When the foremost
reached the top step and put his foot upon it, he
slipped on the soap and rolled to the bottom. He
had no time to pick himself up. Another fell
tumbling on top of him. While the people were
rolling and tumbling one over the other, the master
of the house and his wife roared with laughter.
Then God changed them into storks who make a
clacking noise as if they were laughing.
That is the reason the man and his wife were
changed to storks way back in those old times,
Just as we were falling asleep we saw what
looked like half a dozen burning red fire-flies
flitting slowly down the face of the cliff. They
146 OLD MOROCCO
were our Berber friends coming to visit us, each
lighting his way by holding a stick with a glowing
ember end. These little torches moved down the
cliff path making bright circles and figure eights
like spent Roman candles. Our friendly visitors
brought us a present of thick barley pancakes and
butter, and Si Lhassen made tea and gossiped
pleasantly for an hour.
The first night in camp one does not sleep well.
I woke up before the moon had set and lay watch-
ing the great, pale constellations wheel over the
looming shadow of the house roof. The moon
shone very white on the strangely still, sleeping
forms beside me, and made fearful shadows under
the bushy cacti along the river bed. Lulu the
hound whimpered in his sleep. The river sang
strange, unfamiliar, quiet things; bullfrogs croaked
like deep-throbbing bass viols in a sad sym-
phony. A dog up on the cliff barked sharply, and
another one bayed his answer somewhere far off
over the ghostly white hills. From time to time, a
guttural Berber voice startled me from the shadow
of the house above us.
Seven
FEUDAL LORDS AND SERFS
The sultan demands one measure,
The cai'd asks for "two/*
The sheik of the Tillage says, "three";
And so the troubles p2e up.
I have seen a thing so sad that I weep:
Sad as the orphan without father or mother
Is the serf who toils but gains nothing.
THE WOHDS OF SIDI HAMMOU.
Seven
FEUDAL LORDS AND SERFS
morning of the second day we follow the
A wild green valley of the Oued Xfis, thickly
bordered with rose-laurels in flower and luxuriant
tropical clusters of Barbary fig cacti. We cross a
picturesque old bridge and begin to climb into the
low, barren hills. The morning sun is hot but
not uncomfortable until we descend into broad
valleys, dry and breathless, shut in by surrounding
mountains. The only watering place for the
thirsty animals is a buried stone reservoir half full
of stale, warm water alive with wriggling things.
In the wet season this is patiently filled from dis-
tant wells, which later dry up. We give each mule
a meagre allowance of water dipped up in the
wash basin. At the miserable vilage of Iggouder,
where we rest for two scorching hours in the
scraggy shade of a few olive trees, we are beset
by a swarm of half a hundred children, almost all
little girls. The nearly naked brats grin at us
from all sides, half frightened but fascinated by
149
150 OLD MOROCCO
curiosity. Gaining confidence in numbers, they
press in a close circle around us until, at a shout
from old Si Lhassen, they scatter in fifty direc-
tions and completely clear the landscape. But in
two minutes, dozens of little shaven heads and
chocolate coloured faces peer around every cactus
clump and olive bole, and soon they are fingering
mule trappings and trying to dive into chouari
bags*
In the afternoon we pass through scorching hot,
new-reaped wheat fields in a rich region made fer-
tile by irrigation. We are approaching the upland
valley of Amizmiz. The water of a large stream,
which flows from the snow-capped Atlas range, is
diverted into innumerable canals and ditches, which
wind through flourishing groves of olives and figs
and periodicaly inundate small terraced patches of
maize and melons.
Here and there are mysterious little white-domed
marabouts, the shrines of venerated local saints.
They shine dazzling white in the brilliant sunlight,
and they seem to be surrounded with a feeling of
religious aloofness and sacrosanctity. The great
peaks of the Atlas loom near on two sides of us,
barren but for stunted green oaks, and gouged
and gullied with old erosions. And high and far
beyond them all, Djebel Mskrin towers to fourteen
FEUDAL LORDS AXD SERFS 151
thousand feet, its white snowy summit gleaming
coldly while we suffocate in the heat beside the
equally aloof white marabouts' shrine.
In the late afternoon we meet Mahommed
Laoussine, the calipha of Amizmiz, riding by in
state on a beautiful white mule, and surrounded
by half a dozen mounted retainers and three or four
slaves running beside to keep abreast. The calipha
greets us cordially and invites us to his kasba for
the night. He and Monsieur Lapandery are old
friends. He sends back with us a tall black sene-
schal dressed in a striped djellaba. A beautiful
silver-hilted poignard hangs from a crimson cord
over his shoulder, and he wears one silver earring
large as an anklet, a sign of slavery; its size indi-
cates the importance of his position.
We ride on to the gate of the battered old, mud-
built kasba, the feudal stronghold of the calipha.
Mats are spread for us out of doors in the shade of
a square tower, for sleeping in the open will be
more comfortable than inside the kasba which the
sun has baked all day. A quarter of a mile behind
the castle is the town, a huddled group of square
mud houses built beside the ruin of an older kasba,
the castle of a former holder of the fief, whose
power and lordship the present calipha seized by
force many years ago.
152 OLD MOROCCO
The calipha holds exactly the position of the
mediaeval baron. He is under the suzerainty of
a powerful over-lord, and, in turn, he has the power
of life and death over his retainers. Amizmiz is a
rich fief of the great Cai'd Goundafi, one of the
three great over-lords of the southern Atlas. These
mighty dukes, the Glaoui, the Mtouggi, and the
Goundafi, gained their power by force and guile
during turbulent sultanates of the last century, and
rule with an almost absolute sway, which acknowl-
edges but nominally the control of the sultan. The
last Glaoui, in fact, was for years the Warwick of
Morocco, who made and unmade sultans, and de-
clared for and really preserved the French protec-
torate in the south when in 1914 two-thirds of the
troops had to be withdrawn. The ancestral castles
of these over-lords are in the heart of the Atlas,
but they depute their power to some resident rela-
tive, while they themselves live in great palaces in
Marrakesh and spend their time in diplomacy and
higher politics. They hold many great fiefs in the
cultivated mountain valleys and rich fertile plains
to the south and west, and exact large tribute and
military support from scores of under-ca'ids and
caliphas. The caliphas, or barons, in turn demand
heavy imposts from the sheiks, or heads of villages,
who grievously grind the faces of the poor tribes-
FEUDAL LORDS AXD SERFS 153
men on whom the whole feudal burden rests. The
cai'ds or caliphas seize the best of everything. The
tribesman who cultivates the soil or raises flocks is
merely a serf who receives but one-fifth of what his
labour produces; the sheik, the calipha, the great
caid and the sultan get the rest. The whole polit-
ical and economic system of Morocco is very like
that of the greater part of Europe in the twelfth
century. And the parallel is carried out further in
the relation .of the calipha-barons among them-
selves, for they are at constant war with one an-
other. The normal life of southern Morocco has
been a sequence of feuds, with destruction and pil-
lage, burning of villages and sacking of kasbas.
The fighting is done by the body of personal re-
tainers, who in the moments of peace live indolently
in their lord's stronghold, their only duty being to
kiss his shoulder in fealty, whenever he crosses his
own outer courtyard.*
At Amizmiz time turns back hundreds of years
and one can see mediaeval life as it is still lived,
* The French, who are wise and tactful colonizers, have not Inter-
fered with this feudal system. They have taken control of the min-
eral resources, established titles to lands stimulated the native arts
and industries, and in the occupied regions have forcibly maintained
peace. They have somewhat curbed the greed of the caTds, and
where their power extends, have tried to make justice depend upon
justness rather than upon bribery, but they have wisely avoided
interfering with the religions and social life, and old established
institutions they have left untouched.
154 OLD MOROCCO
and lose all sense of the reality of modern Europe,
which is but little more than a week's journey away.
As we sit here on mats of woven rushes spread on
the stone roof of a huge cistern, and look through
the archway of the kasba gate, which frames a pic-
turesque group of idle Moors in graceful garments,
Paris must be some place we dreamed of once
and America cannot have been discovered. The
sun has dropped behind the near mountain peaks
and the grain fields and watered gardens glow in
soft golden light. A group of serfs, at a signal
from their taskmaster, leave off with a faint shout
their lazy winnowing of the calipha's wheat and
stroll toward the little mud huts. A prisoner in
a single rag caught up over one shoulder and a hor-
rible leg fetter, two ankle rings connected by a
straight iron bar, waddles like a duck, as he makes
many painfully hobbled journeys to fill his big
earthen water jar at the cistern over which we are
sitting.
A comic little negro slave, clad mostly in slippers
like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing, pours water
over my hands and grins at the contrast of their
dark bronze with the absurd whiteness of my bare
forearms. I solemnly quote at him,
Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadow'd livery of the burnished sun,
CU> SI LHASSENT, THE SESfiOt GUIDE ON" THE ATLAS TRAIL.
The withered old patriareli rode on day after day, scarcer
ercr ^xafanf a word except to say hit five daily prayers
or to matter some occult incantation.
155
FEUDAL LORDS AND SERFS 157
but the very sound of Shakespeare awes him and he
keeps a frightened eye on me as he brings the basin
and kettle to Monsieur Lapandery. The tall black
seneschal serves us little glasses of smoking coffee,
and then a hot kouskous made of boiled cucumbers,
egg-plant, peppers, carrots, and marrow, walled
in with steamed white millet. The little slave
stands beside us, brushing the flies away with a
palm branch. Somewhere over the wall a donkey
hee-haws. And from the little slits of windows in
the tower over our heads floats the high rippling
laughter of the women of the calipha's household;
they are telling one another questionable stories!
And then the calipha arrives; fat, pleasant, sixty,
with the self-confidence of a great personage. He
drops his slippers, sits down on the mat with us
and fondles his bare pink heels. The charming
little Kbira sits between him and Monsieur Lapan-
dery and interprets the conversation, for the
calipha talks the Shelluh Berber dialect and talks it
very fast and deep in his beard. Kbira, who was
born a diplomat, cuddles up to the old man and
exercises the winning fascination of her eight-year-
old charm. The conversation turns on the price of
sheep in Marrakesh and the probable state of the
almond crop in the Souss, and the high cost of
living, Amizmiz is the limit of the French pro-
158 OLD MOROCCO
tected zone, and as the dangerous part of our jour-
ney begins here, the calipha offers us an armed
escort. We decline the offer, because soldiers have
expensive appetites and large ideas of expected
generosity. The calipha says we shall be safe from
the tribesmen, for the great Goundafi has ordered
them not to get into any trouble with foreigners,
for that will mean the sending of machine guns.
Our only danger is from lawless bandits, and he
warns us specially against the wild Ait Semmeg,
through whose country we must pass. And there is
also a chance of our being sent back when we get
to the kasba of the Goundafi, in the valley at Talat
N' Yaccoub, for the calipha in charge does not like
to have foreigners wandering around his domain.
Our conversation was interrupted from time to
time by servants and functionaries who came to
receive orders or beg requests, for the calipha is on
familiar terms with his vassals and acts as a patri-
archal chief, adviser, judge, leader, and ruler. Two
soldiers bring in a handsome young fellow accused
of stealing two French francs. He is ragged and
unkempt, for he has lain all day in jail & dark
pit with a big stone over it but has the attractive
frank features and intelligent eyes that mark the
best of the Berber peasants. The soldiers present
the evidence against him and several witnesses are
FEUDAL LORDS AND SERFS 159
heard. Then the accused advances to the mat,
drops off his slippers, kneels, and kisses the
calipha's fat hand, and, standing up, makes a ve-
hement and dramatic protestation of his innocence.
Then the soldiers and the accused and the witnesses
all give accusation and evidence and denial at the
same time, with much hubbub and gesticulation.
The calipha quietly listens to the wild gabble of
voices, thoughtfully scratching his nose and tugging
at his beard. At a sign from him, the crowd be-
comes silent and, standing barefoot, facing Mecca
with uplifted hands, they pray to the Most Merci-
ful. The calipha then solemnly adjudges the fel-
low guilty and orders him to be given one stroke of
the bastinado. The prisoner is led aside and
thrown to the ground, his bare feet in the air; and
the executioner, a big muscular chap, having but
one blow to deliver, makes it a mighty one. The
culprit lies on the ground a long time before he
can get up and go away.
In the evening, after a dinner of deliciously
roasted chickens followed by the usual kouskous,
as we sit drinking mint-flavoured tea and chatting
with the servants grouped around the yellow glow
of the lantern, we hear over in the village a wild
confusion of tom-toms, lutes, and viols beating fast,
joyous rhythms. And this is intermingled with
160 OLD MOROCCO
strange shrill you-you's^ the cries of joy with which
the women greet a conqueror or an honoured guest.
And in the midst of this a sudden gunshot cracks.
There is a wedding in the village and the shot is the
bridegroom's announcement of his arrival outside
the house of the bride. The music and the cries
cease, while the newly married are left alone to-
gether, and the guests devote their attention to the
feast which is served out of doors. Laughter and
loud merry talk float over to us as we lie back on
our blankets smoking and looking up at the warm
stars. In a little while, when the distant merry-
making has become a vague humming in my drowsy
ears, a second loud gunshot wakes me. This is the
bridegroom's signal that the marriage is consum-
mated. The you-yovfs recommence, and in the
midst of the shouting and crying, women's voices
sing a marriage song. I cannot hear the words, but
old Si Lhassen knows them and with little Kbira's
help I get them down:
Gracefully she comes down from the mountains,
Kobed all in white,
And all lovely with her golden hair
Her hair which falls in long beautiful tresses.
And her brow is fair as the crescent moon
In the month of Shaaban.
Ee a la la Ee a la li.
Her eyebrows are delicately traced as with a pencil;
Her eyes are the eyes of a young gazelle.
FEUDAL LORDS AJSD SERFS 161
Her little nose is fair as a rosy medlar,
And her cheeks are full like rounded apples.
Ee a la la Ee a la li.
One would think her teeth a string of pearls;
Her mouth is like King Solomon's ring;
Her wet lips are sweet as sugar much refined.
Ee a la la Ee a la li.
O coral lips! O neck that gleams like a silver vase!
O bosom white and firm
As the pure marble of a Sultan's bath!
A swelling bosom round as two ripe pomegranates!
O! lovely maid, a green pasture for thy husband,
And for the ears of those who hear me!
Ee a la la Ee a la li.
The noise of the laughter and shouting and the
beating of the tom-toms kept up far into the night.
I woke again some time long before morning, when
every star of the Great Bear was completely hidden
below the northerly horizon and Arcturus and his
Sons had long gone to rest, but a single tom-tom
was still beating its haunting, empty monotony,
the expression of the strange old mournful heart of
Africa with its undertone of sadness even in mo-
ments of joy. The rest of the party were asleep,
breathing quietly beside me, and in the corner of
the wall shadowed from the star-shine, loomed the
figure of the Ethiopian slave, uncannily tall and
motionless, keeping watch over us through the
night.
162 OLD MOROCCO
The next morning very early, before the sun
had driven us out of our blankets, the calipha paid
us a visit. We jumped into our clothes to receive
our dignified host, who was on his way to begin
the daily round of overseeing his feudal domain.
He ceremoniously wished us a good journey and
commended us to Allah. And then we drank a
cup of Si Lhassen's coffee, delicious, aromatic,
and inspiring; and eager for any event, we set out
on the trail through the mountains.
The first day we passed no villages and met but
few natives on the road. We went over two high
ranges with gorgeous mountain scenery, along
difficult steep passages and fascinating changes in
vegetation. The first adventure in the dangerous,
forbidden zone was the cordial, hospitable reception
of a mountaineer. He had fought through the war
in a Moroccan regiment, and his Croix de Gruerre
was still pinned to his tattered blue tunic. He fol-
lowed us two miles trying to persuade us to be his
guests in his mountain hut long enough to eat a
kouskous, which the women would shortly prepare.
We were pressed for time, but compromised by
halting for a half hour's rest and tea.
The hut was a very crude affair built of mud and
roughly shaped wooden beams, the roof of baked
mud, plastered thickly on sticks and poles. The
FEUDAL LORDS AJST3 SERFS 163
animal-like simplicity of the structure suggested a
robin's nest or a beaver-dam. In the little court,
around which three shed-like rooms were arranged,
were a small hand-mill for grinding corn, an oven, a
clay stove, a copper tea kettle, and two or three
terra cotta dishes for preparing kauskous and gruel.
Two black goats were tethered in a little sty in one
corner. Our host lived in this home with his father,
mother, brother, and sister-in-law, and half a dozen
children, all grown girls.
Two of the girls were very pretty, with liquid
brown eyes and a shy half -frightened manner. In
Berber poems women are always called gazelles.
I persuaded these two gazelles to leave the primi-
tive loom at which they were weaving a white
woolen blanket, and approach near enough to eat
lumps of sugar from my hand. Their father smiled
at their shyness and made several rather broad re-
marks, which, instead of embarrassing the lovely
animals, amused them extremely.
It is only among these simple mountaineers that
a stranger is allowed to talk to Berber women. It
is true that they are not kept in the strict seclusion
of Arab women, but there is none of the familiar
mingling of the sexes in work and play that is usual
among European peasants. Berber women have
much to say in the conduct of the family, and no
164 OLD MOROCCO
man may marry without his mother's consent, but,
as among all Moslems, a wife is the husband's
property, very jealously guarded. A stranger
among the Berbers must be very circumspect in his
admiration, for their long curved poignards are
very sharp. Berber women are not veiled, except
those in Marrakesh who have imitated the Arab
custom, but in the presence of a stranger they hold
one hand vaguely over the lower part of their faces.
I have noticed, however, that the old and unattrac-
tive ones make a more strict show of Moslem
modesty than the young charmers. In the present
instance the two girls shyly looked at me through
two fingers when they approached closely, but they
were quite content to be fully admired from across
the courtyard.
This little family group was extremely poor.
The greater part of the produce from their pitiful,
struggling patches of Indian corn and vegetables
must be handed over to the sheik of the nearest vil-
lage. They had but a handful of tea and a little
sugar, but the cordiality and gracious courtesy of
our host was the most complete in the world. Hos-
pitality among these simple folk is the first of the
cardinal virtues. To illustrate this point, our host,
while we were sipping his sweet mint-flavoured tea,
FEUDAL LORDS AXD SERFS 165
told us a story of the Brigand and the Guest of
God:
There was once a man who was a brigand and he
went to a place in the desert and lived alone. He
had killed a hundred men less one. One day,
came a man passing by this road. Sunset overtook
him. He said to himself, "Where shall I pass the
night?" He saw the house of the brigand beside
the road. He said, "I will go pass the night here."
He went, arrived at the house, and the wife of the
brigand came out.
"The guest of God!" * he said.
But the woman replied: "Friend, what shall I
do with thee? My husband slays men."
He replied: "Yes, I shall pass the night here
until morning."
The woman said: "If thou wilt, I will put thee
in the silo so that my husband cannot see thee when
he comes,"
"Very well," said he. She led him to the place,
let him down, and left him there. The husband
returned.
The woman said: "Husband, there is a man in
this place."
"What is he doing here?"
* Anebgi n Rabbi, the formula for claiming hospitality.
166 OLD MOROCCO
"He claimed the hospitality of God. I said 'I
will put thee in the silo,' He said: 'Very well/ "
The man said: "Go bring him out." The woman
went and pulled up the stranger.
"Come, talk to him." The stranger went with
her into the room where the master of the house
was sitting. The stranger greeted him and the
master of the house said:
"Welcome! Whence comest thou?"
"I come from my own abode."
"Whither goest?"
"I go to the house of God."
The master of the house said: "Friend, a strange
thing has happened/'
"What has happened?"
"I am a brigand. A hundred men less one have
I slain. When thou shaft come to the house of
God, question Him and say: *I have a friend who
has slain a hundred men less one.' What will He
say to thee? Shall I go to paradise or to punish-
ment?"
The stranger went until he came to the house of
God. He said: "Lord God, I wish to ask you
about a friend of mine who hath slain a hundred
men less one."
The Lord God replied: "Why hath he not slain
thee when thou didst pass the night there?"
FEUDAL LORDS AND SERFS 167
"Lord, he did not slay me,"
"What didst thou say?"
"Lord, I said: The guest of God/ "
"What did he give you for supper?"
"Lord, he was very good to me."
Then said the Lord God: "Go tell him I have
added a hundred years to his life. His abode shall
be in paradise because he hath given hospitality to
a guest of God."
The next day our journey through rough passes
and deep ravines and over high ranges was broken
by another glimpse of mountain life. We stopped
to rest at the agadir of the Sheik of Tadirt X'
Bourd, a quaint old mud stronghold, strategically
placed in a narrow part of the gorges of the Oued
Nfis. The agadir looks like several smooth-sided,
cubical mud blocks piled rudely and irregularly
against a steep barren hillside. In front, far be-
low the pass, the Oued Xfis roars along its pebbly
bottom. On the big rough-hewn beam of the
square, low doorway are cut a dozen mystic sym-
bols, square and angular characters potent against
the power of djinns. After a few minutes* wait-
ing we are led in to the sheik. The interior of the
agacKr is very rough and primitive; no evidence of
even simple art or of luxury. The sheik lives in
168 OLD MOROCCO
much the same manner as our poor mountain host
of yesterday, except that he has a much larger
house, and plenty of food, and does not have to toil
for these advantages. The rather fat and infirm
old man, sitting on a mat of rushes, receives us with
a faint smile of welcome and a courteous hand. We
sit beside him on the mat and a half dozen of his
retainers come up to greet us. A dish of rich wild
honey and melted butter is brought in; we all sit
around and sop up sweet sticky mouthfuls with
pieces of thick pancakes.
Little Kbira, as before, sits beside the old sheik
stroking his white beard, and asking questions in a
low, childish whisper. We undoubtedly owe our
safety on the trip to the charm of Kbira, as well
as to the tact of Monsieur Lapandery, who under-
stands the ways of these native chieftains. The
sheik assures us that we may pass freely through his
territory, for his brave retainers have quite put
down all bands of wandering brigands, and that
thanks to him the valley of the Oued Nfis is as safe
as the sanctuary of a mosque. He did not tell
us, however, that his own noble followers them-
selves turned brigands whenever the probable
booty seemed worth the risk of incurring the dis-
pleasure of the cai'd. Nor did we think it tactful
to ask him whether the two European rings on his
FEUDAL LORDS AXD SERFS 109
fat little finger had not been slipped from the
hands of dead French soldiers.
A keen eyed, supple-limbed, young Berber comes
over and sits beside me, and with courteous ges-
tures tliat help 'along my as yet hazy notion of the
Shelluh dialect, makes me understand that he
wishes to have an American for his friend. There
is nothing of his that he will not gladly share with
me. Then he admires my amber sun glasses and
tries them on with great delight; he would like to
see the world as I do! Kbira here comes to my
rescue and suggests that when he visits us at Mar-
rakesh we shall find him a pair.
We ride on all day through valleys and over
water courses and in the midst of lurid volcanic
scenery. The villagers we pass are never un-
friendly, but they are not hospitable, and will
neither give nor sell us any food. For ourselves,
we can get on with our store of ham and sardines,
but the essential thing is to find oats and straw for
the animals* One does not feel safe riding along
the verge of an abrupt canon on the back of a mule
that has not eaten in twelve hours. The reason
for the attitude of the natives is not a hostile feel-
ing toward us as foreigners, but their own necessity
for conservation of resources. We are now on one
of the two great caravan trails between Marrakesh
170 OLD MOROCCO
and the Souss ; for hundreds of years commerce in
oil, almonds, and grain has been carried on by trains
of mules and asses that pass daily through these
narrow and precarious defiles. By bitter ex-
perience the valley villagers have learned that hos-
pitality may go beyond the point of being a virtue,
and that a winter food supply is better than a few
silver douros. The cai'd exacts his four-fifths and
the remainder is barely enough to keep the wretched
peasant alive.
We sometimes send old Si Lhassen on alone to
a village, for his patriarchal aspect and the reputed
knowledge of secret things and occult necromoncies
that always attaches to the very old, can often pro-
cure food when the offer of money alone can not.
One day I saw him practising his white magic. We
were halting for a hungry noonday rest in a breath-
less valley beside a shrunken stream. The only
shade was a clump of rose-laurels covered with
pink blooms like flowering oleanders. The bushes
were too thick to creep into, and as the sun was di-
rectly overhead we hugged the few inches of shadow
around the edges. A poor tribesman came over
from a group of huts steeply terraced on a bare hill-
slope. He and Si Lhassen conferred long to-
gether, the old grandfather assuming his most
saintly air. Presently the man went away, and
FEUDAL LORDS AXD SERFS 171
shortly returned with two women bringing a naked
idiot child of about five years, whom they placed
before Si Lhassen. They then counted out nine
hen's eggs, which the old man boiled in a pan over a
little fire, and while they were cooking he selected
a handful of little clear, coloured pebbles. When
the eggs had cooked, he took them out and put
them aside as the sorcerer's prerequisite, and, tak-
ing the pan of water from the fire, poured into it a
handful of pinkish salt. The idiot child stared and
blinked and feebly moved his little arms. The per-
fect childlike calm of Si Lhassen's wrinkled old
*
face lapsed into a blank beatitude; he seemed to
shrink into his reverend self with an aloof other-
worldliness. He slowly dissolved the salt, stirring
with one finger, and counted the pebbles *Iike beads
in a rosary, muttering inaudible prayers. When he
had told over all the little pebbles, he wetted the
face of the idiot child who whimpered witlessly.
The ceremony over, the Berbers took the child
away. The rite may well be the remnant of Chris-
tian baptism, preserved as a superstition for twelve
hundred years, from the ante-Islamic time when
Christianity flourished in Mauretania Tingitane,
preserved like the sign of the Cross woven in rugs
and cut in the beams of doorways. The use of salt
in the water is a pagan touch, for the seven kinds
172 OLD MOROCCO
of malignant djinns that pester the world abhor
salt.
A sequel must be added to this incident. When
we came to eat the eggs we found them all bad!
Si Lhassen was piqued and muttered that no good
would come to men who sought God's blessing by
deception.
At the end of the fourth day out from Marra-
kesh we enjoyed the pleasant surprise of meeting
two Frenchmen prospecting along the trail. They
led us down a difficult, twisting descent to the valley
of the Oued, a thousand feet below, to their com-
fortable little camp where we spent the night, both
of our parties sharing our scanty supplies. They
assured us the villages would sell them nothing
had nothing, in fact, to sell, but Si Lhassen came
from the village by nine o'clock with a chicken
which no human teeth could penetrate. It suffered
us, however, to enjoy the communal pleasure of
hungry people loudly inhaling hot soup.
The Frenchmen advise us to turn back. They
tell us that we shall be stopped at the next valley,
where the Kasba of the Goundafi is situated. They
have tried for six months to pass over the next
great range to get down to the Souss. They say
that the calipha will come out with fifty followers
and bar our way, as soon as news^comes to hirn that
FEUDAL LORDS AXD SERFS 173
we are in the valley. We can shoot two or three,
but what then? Better not risk the meeting. But
Monsieur Lapandery and I are for trying to get
-through.
The next morning we set out for the Talat X 5
Yaccoub, riding our hungry animals. Si Lhassen
succeeds in finding a little straw for them on the
way, and we make an early halt for luncheon. We
decide to ride on through the heat of the day so
that we shall encounter fewer people on the trail.
The Talat X' Yaccoub is a vast valley in the very
heart of the Atlas, surrounded on four sides by
giant peaks with sharp, precipitate slopes. We
enter it from the north by the deep-cut valley of
the Oued Xfis, along which we have been travelling.
The entrance is at the confluence of the Oued Xfis
with the Oued Agoundis, two mountain streams
which the melting winter snows swell to great rivers
for a few months of every year. In summer they
are shallow brooks fordable almost anywhere. Out
of the great valley are two difficult passes both
leading into the Souss, one over the Tizi X 5 Test
which reaches a height of sixty-one hundred feet,
the other over Tizi Ouicheddan, almost nine thou-
sand feet. The valley is therefore the key to the
Atlas. The possession of it has made the caids of
Goundafi for centuries the lords of the mountains,
174 OLD MOROCCO
and they have lived on the tolls demanded from
richly laden caravans. The clan of the Goundafi
are descended from the mighty tribe of the Mas-
mouda who, during the twelfth century, led by the
mystic reformer Ibn Toumert, swept in wild hordes
up from these valleys and founded the great dy-
nasty of the Almohades, conquerors of all Barbary
and lords of Spain. It was here that the power of
the latest pretender, El Hibba, dissolved when in
his flight from Marrakesh a few years ago, he ar-
rived with five thousand asses and camels. The
Goundafi allowed him to pass, but on condition
that he hand over the whole great train!
As the trail over the Tizi N' Test leads directly
by the Kasba of Goundafi, we took the other,
more difficult, way over Tizi Ouicheddan. And
strangely enough, we got through in spite of the
Frenchmen's prophecies. As we passed two or
three wretched mud villages, partly melted into
ruins, groups of natives stared curiously at us but
did not offer to stop us. We did not carry our
arms openly for fear of seeming suspicious, but
Kbira sat on the two automatics in the chouari
bag, and we rode close to her mule, ready to close
up if necessary. We learned afterward that the
reason for our not being molested was that the
calipha of the cai'd Goundafi had gone off into the
FEUDAL LORDS AXD SERFS 175
mountains with his retainers on a hunting expedi-
tion, and there was no one left to arrest us but the
peasants, who are too timid to interfere with Euro-
peans.
We toiled all the afternoon over the savage and
rugged pass and descended again to inhabited val-
leys on the other side. Toward nightfall we ran
into an adventure which came near bringing the
expedition to a sudden and fatal end. By some
such mistake as we made, through an imperfect
knowledge of native customs, many a European
has left his bones to lie in waste places, whitening in
the winter rains and African sunlight. We had
sent Si Lhassen on ahead to try his luck or his sor-
cery at getting a little oats or straw for the mules,
and so we did not for the moment have the ad-
vantage of his knowledge and advice. At a turn in
the trail we spied a little knoll not far off, with
what seemed the ruin of a little roofless stone hut
on top, and beside it a large pile of new straw shin-
ing yellow in the sunlight. On the principle that
necessity need not be overscrupulous, we decided
to halt here long enough for the animals to "bor-
row" a meal, and then go on and see what luck Si
Lhassen may have had.
We lifted the chouari bags off the mules, un-
bridled Kino and Aziza, and left them to the enjoy-
176 OLD MOROCCO
ment of their stolen meal. I settled down to the
complete satisfaction of a restful pipe, and Mon-
sieur Lapandery, with the awkward tenderness of
a man, began combing little Kbira's curly hair.
We were too keenly elated over our success in
slipping by the Goundafi to think much about the
fact that we had reached the country of the Ait
Semmeg, the bandit tribe against whom the calipha
of Amizmiz had warned us. Monsieur Lapandery
was making scornful remarks about the action of
the French authorities with their fear of native
hostility, and he felt that the two French prospec-
tors had reasons of their own for trying to keep
us out of the country. And just at this moment,
a very ugly head with a savage scar over the jaw
popped up in front of us. In a minute two more
heads appeared and shortly the knoll was com-
pletely surrounded by eight Berbers armed with
rifles and long, brass-sheathed poignards. They
closed about us in an angry circle, all hoarsely
shouting at once and gesticulating with clenched
fists. One small, active chap thrust his face up to
mine and sullenly glowered, and as he turned away
to kick the mules from the straw, he vehemently
spat on the ground, the fanatic Moslem's gesture
of contempt at contact with a Christian dog. The
natives were so excited and rapid in their talk that
FEUDAL LORDS AXD SERFS *177
it was impossible to catch what they were saying.
Little Kbira was frightened and clung close to
Monsieur Lapandery, who tried to calm her so that
she could tell what the trouble was about. The con-
fused excitement did not seem to indicate an attack
of brigands, who might be expected to proceed at
once to the securing of our persons while they
robbed our baggage. But evidently we were in a
predicament.
Before anything more than a frenzy of talk had
occurred, a fine looking young Berber, who proved
to be the son of a sheik, strode quickly up the hill,
pushed the men aside, and calmly took command
of the situation. "Why," he exclaimed with a fierce
directness, while Kbira timidly translated, "do you
Europeans come into our country, make a law for
yourselves and violate this shrine of a holy saint?
Xo one but a Christian would turn pack animals
loose in a sacred place and give them straw that
is under the protection of a marabout." The little
ruined hut was a marabout's tomb, and the vil-
lagers, lacking any granary to store their surplus
straw, piled it here where it would be safe under the
protection of the venerated shrine. We had com-
mitted the unpardonable sin of sacrilege.
Monsieur Lapandery's tact came to our rescue.
He explained, mostly with Kbijra's help, that our
178 OLD MOROCCO
fault was through ignorance. The marabouts*
shrines in the Bled we could tell, but here we were
in a strange country and did not know them. We
were at heart, though Christians, religious men with
deep respect for sacred places. We should not
knowingly have done this thing and would make
reparation. The dignified boy accepted our ex-
planatton and the men reluctantly acquiesced,
though with longing looks at our fat chouari bags.
They accepted a few silver douros by way of tan-
gible apology. The sheik's son shook hands with
us graciously and they helped us load the mules
and go on our way.
And that night as we were camping by a well
outside a village, and, sleepy and fatigued, were
trying to get our teeth into another of Si Lhassen's
chickens, a man arrived and presented me with a
small jar of wild honey as a present from the
sheik's son.
Eight
ATLAS SCENERY
The heaven says to the earth: "I am greater than thou,
For the many coloured stars all have their being in me."
The earth says "to the heaven: "The mercy of God is greater
than all ;
The flowers of a thousand hues are all born from my bosom."
The heaven says to the earth: "I am greater than thou,
For if I did not shed my dew upon thee_, how should thy
flowers find their glorious colours?"
The earth says to the heaven: "The mercy of God is greater
than all;
Thou drawest the dew from the sea^ and the springs of the
sea are mine;
If I hold fast these springs within me, whence canst thou
draw thy dews?"
The heaven says to the earth: "I am greater than thou,
For I send down the rays of a burning sun; I smite thy
flowers and they wither away."
The earth says to the heaven: "The mercy of God is greater
than all,
From the hidden depths I draw forth water to make my
flowers blossom forth again."
NERSES THE ARCHIMANDRITE.
Eight
ATLAS SCENERY
DAY after day of changing light and moods,
of painful fatigues and wonderful refresh-
ing moments of rest, of fascinating glimpses of re-
mote lives, and baffling, fleeting glances into won-
dering faces that greet us along our way, we jour-
ney on toward the blank white places at the bottom
of the map labelled Souss. Day after day the
marvellous scenery changes, and each day pano-
rama seems more splendid than the last. We spend
a morning climbing through rocky gorges, difficult
and steep, where the mule's hoofs clatter up a giant
stairway of chunky cubes of grey basalt, irregular,
sharp, and slippery. Here the vegetation is thin
and dwarfed like the quaint green things gro-
tesquely old that grow in miniature Chinese rock
gardens. Soft, green, twisting junipers and clumps
of little firs, for all the world the same as those
my father lovingly plants in his lawn and waters
with his tears, grow easily here where the thin
earth is baked in the crevices and seems never to
181
182 OLD MOROCCO
have known moisture, and the wind blows dry.
And the strangely incongruous cabbage palms,
dwarfed and shrivelled, grow in between the ever-
greens like weeds. Big argan trees, gnarled and
spiny, loaded with green olive-like nuts, a harshly
exotic tree which grows nowhere else in the world,
cast a scrubby shade here and there over the rocky
trail; and Aziza, my lady mule, when seized with
a temperamental mood, dives straight into the stiff,
prickly, lower branches. And though I clutch her
velvet neck and madly kick her flanks, my sun hel-
met is hopelessly entangled in the spines and I
am left in the plight of the young man Absalom,
while Kbira shouts with glee.
Then we reach some nameless barren height, and
look back over the rugged tortuous way by which
we have climbed, and the distance seems a poor ac-
complishment after so much effort. Five hours of
winding and climbing and toiling have gained us
scarce six straight miles toward our goal. These
vast mountains piled in wild confusion and heaped
like the wreckage of a shattered planet, mountains
battered and barren, flooded with white tropic sun-
shine, grey, craggy steeps dotted with flecks of
green, and distant blue ranges holding up the sky,
drown all thought and subdue the mind to a real
humility, a sense of one's own pitiful insignificance
IRRIGATED VALLEY IX THE ATLAS*
In tie midst of iohospitable barren mountains the natives
fcsve constructed systems ot irrigation that make possible
Loanstung gardens of olives* aimoaJs* maize and vegetables.
183
ATLAS SCEXERY 185
beside this awful vastitude. And just at this won-
derful moment old Si Lhassen, who has ridden
silently on, all the morning, goes to the edge of
a great flat rock which reaches out over an abyss;
he thrusts himself into the gorgeous panorama,
and, shuffling off his worn old slippers, and lifting
his shrivelled old hands, he faces the horizon beyond
which Mecca lies, and says the prayer that begins,
"God is most great! God is most great! There is
no god but God!"
We begin the descent into the next valley. The
narrow rocky way winds along the verge of preci-
pices almost sheer, where a falling stone will roll
and leap and rebound and echo up from a cav-
ernous dry stream bed far below. The sure-footed
Aziza takes her own pace, twists her supple little
body this way and that, as she picks the safest foot-
ing, now dodging a big boulder in the path, now
bunching her fore feet for a leap or a drop, and
now sliding half on her haunches down a loose
pebbly slope, as the trail zigzags and climbs and
descends and redoubles. Miles off ahead, where it
makes a long turn to the left, we see the white
cut across the side of some great grey mountain,
and perhaps a flock of sheep, miniature in per-
spective, or a train of laden pack asses crawling
with a painful pace.
186 OLD MOROCCO
Often in the narrow pass along the cliff's edge
we meet these caravans of mules or asses. Then
follows such a shouting and scrambling and crowd-
ing for room to get by, for there are few places on
these trails where two animals with bulging side
panniers can squeeze comfortably past. Or on a
sudden turn we run abruptly into the bulk of a
solitary camel, who makes the hideous noises of
his kind, as his driver pounds his stubborn head
up against the rock to make him give us a few
inches of space between himself and a sheer descent
of four hundred feet.
For a large part of the way from Amizmiz, at the
foot of the Atlas, to the great vaUey of Talat N'
Yaccoub, the Goundafi stronghold in the heart of
the mountains, we followed up the course of the
Oued Nfis. This flows out from the valley through
a great cut in the surrounding wall of mountains,
and winds on through a vast steep-sided canon
which it has cut through past aeons of time. The
Oued Nfis, in the spring, is a great turbulent flood
of melted snows, that tears out new courses for
itself, as it rushes along the rocky bottom of its
wide valley, and gouges fresh scars in the face of
the canon wall with the loose stones it drags along
in its impetuous, steep descent. In July and
August, the Oued is a noisy shallow stream, easily
ATLAS SCENERY 187
fordable almost anywhere, except when swollen by
a sudden rain, and so roiled with red clay that the
mules are afraid to attempt it. Once on the return
trip, when we forded one of its nameless tributary
streams, just as we reached the opposite bank, a
two-foot wave of roaring, red-brown water, the re-
sult of some distant cloudburst far away in the
mountains, came tearing down the stream bed.
Had we reached the spot three minutes later we
should have had to camp for hours, waiting for the
water to drop again to a fordable depth.
The trail to the Souss follows the Oued Xfis,
sometimes along the top of the cliff, sometimes
hanging midway on a precarious footing of flat
stones built up on roots and sticks thrust into fis-
sures, or on some natural ledge just wide enough
for a single mule, and sometimes the trail goes far
inland over a lofty peak, and we lose the river for
hours. And then we go through narrow defiles,
worn ten feet into the soft rock by the hoofs of cen-
turies of mule caravans; and down narrow brooks,
under arched bowers of perfumed honeysuckle and
festoons of white-blooming clematis, cloyingly
sweet, mingled with blackberry brambles in
chevaux de-frises, that wickedly gouge and tear us.
We emerge again at the brink of the cliff, where the
canon makes an elbow through scarred, red-brown
188 OLD MOROCCO
shale, or through grey rock seamed with broad
bands of milk-white chalk. We look down sheer to
the river bed which almost encircles some toy mud
village, with bright green irrigated cornfields and
Noah's ark cattle drinking knee deep in a green
pool. Then the trail zigzags a cramped descent
to the dry pebbly valley bottom, and crosses and re-
crosses the river eight times of an afternoon. The
banks are vividly green for miles, with waxy rose-
laurels dotted with a profusion of delicate pink,
poison blossoms, and everywhere are clumps of
prickly cacti ten feet high, covered with mellow,
over-ripe Barbary figs, tropical, sickly and un-
wholesome-looking. Sometimes as we pass through
this breezeless valley, light showery clouds make
the day comfortable, but again, for hours the sun
sizzles from a clear hot sky with an intensity that
is torrid and African.
Once for several hours, as we skirted the river
along an easy trail, in the early morning before the
sun had found the bottom of the valley, we rode
with two Shelluh boys, who jogged along on little
pack asses loaded with chunks of gypsum to make
plaster to whiten the courtyard of some cai'd's
harem. They sat perched on the bulky chouan
bags, and kept up a rhythmical drumming with
ATLAS SCENERY 189
their bare heels on the asses' necks, for this tapping
rhythm makes the little animals keep up their pace.
And across the Oued, three girls with loads of fag-
gots on their backs were following a mountain path
to their village. One of the boys begins a yodel,
high pitched and strangely beautiful, in minor ca-
dences that fall and catch themselves and fall again,
like thin streams breaking down the face of a
cliff. And when the yodel stops, the craggy moun-
tain looming over us echoes back the last phrase,
and faintly and far away another echo comes, and
then one more that fades and dies like the amber
light of dawn in the valley. The tune is so elusive
that I can never quite remember it, but it haunts me
like the memory of things that might have been and
dreams that have not come true.
Then a girl from across the river calls back an
answering melody, clear and delicate, full of wild
sweetness and the frank longing of natural hearts.
And the other boy, after a brief pause, in which he
makes up another short stanza, sings it to the same
yodel tune; and another girl in turn wafts back her
little song, that echoes over the water and dies
away. And here are the words of some of the
Mans they are exchanging to while away the lovely
morning:
190 OLD MOROCCO
A boy sings,
Love has stolen away my heart and destroyed it;
It is as though my bones were brayed in a mortar with a
heavy pestle.
And a girl sings,
Love is like a young she-goat;
When you wish to conceal her then she bleats loudest.
A boy sings,
When the water shall run backward up the mountain slopes,
When the jackal shall keep the shepherd's flock,
Then only shall I forget my best-beloved.
And a girl replies,
My love is like a bunch of grapes;
I would fain eat him all to quench the fire which burns my
heart.
And sometimes they become ironic,
The love of to-day, with what shall I compare it?,
It is like taking a stroll upon a house-top;
Whoever walks there may take seven paces,
But at the eighth there is no place for his foot.
To this a girl replies,
The love of to-day, with what shall I compare it?
It is like a piece of bread in water,
As soon as you try to grasp it in your hand,
It dissolves in little bits.
And so they go on framing little poems to the
lovely echoing call, for more than half an hour,
while we are riding along beside them, and long
SALT im^E W THE ATLAS.
Salt water pumped up from wells is evaporated in shallow
pools. The whole valley sparkles with white crystals as
though covered with snow, and all round are volcaitie comes
of red-purple tuff.
191
ATLAS SCENEKY 193
after we have passed on up the valley we still hear
the haunting, fading cadences that die into the
distant murmur of a singing stream.
Such fascinating moments as this were the charm
of the journey, and these are the moments that
linger in memory, these fleeting human contacts.
For background there was always the glory of
the mountain peaks, or the quiet loveliness of hid-
den valleys, and the romance of wild gorges and
rushing water courses. For unearthly romance
there were the volcanic regions, wildly wonderful,
incredibly strange.
One morning we toiled up the side of a great
rugged mountain through a confusion of shapeless,
jagged rocks banded with volcanic sulphurous
streaks of pale yellow, and burnt-out, honeycombed
slag, and here and there grotesque, animal-like
lumps of stone, painfully distorted and squeezed
by awful, unimaginable forces in some old past
period of time. We reach the summit and descend
the opposite slope into a landscape lurid with red
and deep purple rocks dotted with bright specks
of sparse evergreen shrubs. The winding pass
zigzags down a vast red cone of soft volcanic
tuff, where the track from above looks like the trace
of a terrific serpent of another age. We skirt the
194 OLD MOROCCO
edge of dry ravines, where spring freshets have
made deep gullies in the soft earth and left, here
and there, strange stalagmites crowned with pre-
cariously balanced boulders.
The scene is on a gigantic scale, uncanny as some
landscape in the moon. The day is cloudy; rain
and mist shroud the huge peaks that seem to loom
near and towering. Through rifts in the clouds
golden ladders of sunlight stream on the half-
shadowed hills, and play with an amber, elfin sheen
on the streaked and particoloured sides of ancient
cones and landslides of purple tuff.
For one whole day on the journey back, we were
led by a short-cut trail through an uncharted wil-
derness, so holy and enchanted that most natives
fear to go that way, a region fitted for the abode of
demons or for the ghastly magic rites of wizard
sorceries. Twice we climb up the abrupt sides and
down into the beds of vast, old burnt-out craters,
where the innumerably piled volcanic rocks and
heaped-up cones of sediment are covered for miles
with a greenish blue dust, and spotted thinly with
little evergreen argan trees. The panoramas from
the heights were like magnified magic unrealities
seen in some monstrous Easter-egg. As we pass
over the crest into the next crater valley, the light
grows strange, and distant thunder rolls; a rare
ATLAS SCENERY 195
mountain storm is approaching. Half way up the
slope, surrounded by a rugged confusion of stone,
is an enormous rough cube of porous slag, seamed
with black streaks of shiny obsidian; and in the cen-
ter is the door of a cave, the home of the djinn of
the mountain, who roars and growls from peak
to peak. The Shelluh soldier who is our guide
never for a moment takes his eye from the black
doorway; in an awed whisper he tells us that a
giant black man stands always within the cavern
mouth, holding a great curved poignard in his hand.
I catch a sideways glimpse of old Si Lhassen's
face, always impassive with the calm, patriarchal
beauty of age; he looks straight ahead but his thin
blue lips are muttering prayers.
A cool, strong wind blows in our faces, rain
falls in big drenching drops, the resinous scent of
wet juniper fills the air. Every now and then
we pass cairns of stones piled by frightened travel-
lers who have dared the way before, each stone in
memory of a prayer against the power of the djinn
who haunts the strange valley. Most of the
stones are small ones placed by trembling religious
hands, but occasionally a cairn is topped by a
heavy boulder, an amusing monument of human
ostentation even before God and the Devil. The
196 OLD MOROCCO
storm soon blew over and our drenched clothes
dried in a few minutes in the clear washed air.
We spent a week of long hard days going
through the mountains, with scenery and tempera-
ture ever varying as we passed from peaks to warm
green valleys and from valleys to precipitous peaks.
Our highest point was nearly nine thousand feet,
on Tizi Ouicheddan, along whose eagle-baffling
sides black, bare, pointed rocks stand out in clusters
at sharp angles, like great calibred howitzers, and
the path is so steep that if an animal should miss his
footing, he and the rider might roll a hundred feet
before some craggy ledge could stop them. In an
afternon's climb, we go from the laurels and cacti
and cornfields of the suffocating valley, to heights
covered with scraggy olive trees ; then on to a region
of starved, struggling evergreens; and finally reach
the barren, desolate summit, where nothing lives
but hard, mossy, yellow everlastings and the great
white hawks that wheel above us, and veer and
swoop through the wind that blows between the
worlds, a fitting place to stage "Prometheus Un-
bound."
When we had descended the other slope of Tizi
Ouicheddan the difficult part of the way was over;
the rest was a long, gradual descent to the plain.
ATLAS SCENERY 197
On the morning of the last day, from one of the last
heights, we gain our first view of the great, mys-
terious Souss, miles and miles of a vast extended
plain shrouded in a vague haze of heat, the un-
known, rich country visited only by a few travellers,
an ancient center of Berber life, the prize of old
conquests and the pride of long dead sultans.
Nine
THE FORBIDDEN SOUSS
Live satisfied with little and thou slhalt be a king.
ARAB PROVERB.
Nine
THE FORBIDDEN SOUSS
THE last day of our descent down the long
southern slope of the Atlas, we met with the
burning breezes that blow westward from the terri-
ble Sahara through the long African summer, dry-
ing up the rivers and streams that water the broad,
rich plain, and parching the earth like the hot breath
from an oven. Even under the scraggy shade of
our noonday halting-place, sticks and tree trunks
were painfully hot to the touch. The muddy water
from an underground stone reservoir, strained
through a corner of Lhassen's woolen djellaba,
gave little relief to the burning thirst that made
one's throat thick. The slope was occasionally
broken by steep descents through twisted, woody
trails, wild and difficult, or through thorny forests
of argan trees, and down dangerous rocky stair-
ways of loose stone. Except in these wild places,
the region is populated with humble villages,
stacked and terraced against the mountain-side,
above little fertile table-lands, where irrigation
201
202 OLD MOROCCO
gives rich crops of figs, grapes, and watermelons,
besides the staple products, barley, millet, and In-
dian, corn.
As we passed through these little places with
strange Shelluh names, almost always beginning
with T, Taouirt, Temsemlal, Tedaret, Touloua
and Tfl.Tntemmft7.er, the natives greeted us good-
naturedly; the women shyly gave Kbira a handful
of green almonds or a bowl of goat's milk, and the
men, with a hospitable word, handed us bunches of
excellent Malaga grapes when we rode through
their vineyards. We were on a little frequented
trail; the people, not so accustomed to passing cara-
vans, were more courteous to strangers than some
of the tribes in the starved mountain valleys, and,
having fuller crops, could afford to be generous.
The rumoured hostility of the "fierce Soussi," the
population of cutthroats and bandits, we did not
find. The commands of the great over-lords not
to molest Europeans, were apparently, effective,
and the probability of much booty in our little
caravan was too small to risk the punishment that
might ensue.
Some of these villages were named from their
marabout's shrine, Sidi Bou Naga, Sidi Bou
Aziz, groups of huts huddled near a crudely built
saint's tomb. Holy men, both living and dead, are
THE FOKBIDDEX SOUSS 203
of the greatest importance in the life of Morocco.
The cult of the marabouts is the real religion of the
Berber -village folk. There are mosques only in the
larger towns, and the muezzin's call is not heard
in the remote, secluded places. Thoughtful souls,
mindful of the faithful [Moslem's duty, may say
their five daily prayers to the AH Compassionate,
and their lips, uttering a strange tongue, may pro-
claim and reiterate the Oneness of God, but their
simple hearts turn toward the hundred tombs of
old saints, whose sympathetic spirit-ears may un-
derstand their homely language and human yearn-
ings better than the Great Arbiter of Destinies
aloof in his golden grandeur. These saints were
withered old men, living in desolate graveyards or
under some hallowed tree, subsisting by alms of the
charitable, wrapping their hearts ever in holy
dreams, as they spent their years counting over on
old black rosaries the ninety-nine Excellent Names
of God. And when they died, the villagers built
them humble little tombs on the hillside, bare and
crude like their own dwellings ; and here the devout
will come and sit beside the coffin, knock three times
to wake the sleeping saint, and whisper their hopes
and needs. Then they go away, leaving some part
of their garments as an offering, or perhaps a pres-
ent of food for some younger living saint who
204 OLD MOROCCO
guards the shrine, and who, in his turn, may one
day be translated into a local divinity.
Many of these marabouts' tombs have more than
a local sanctity; pilgrims journey far to pay re-
spect to a shrine whose holy renown has reached
from valley to valley, and in certain seasons the
ways that lead to sacred wells and mysterious cav-
erns are thronged with folk who come with afflicted
bodies and troubled hearts. And there are wild
places in the rugged Atlas slopes around which
cling some vague shadow of a sanctity the origin
of which is long forgotten, but pious wayfarers
breathe a prayer in passing and add a small stone
to the memorial pile. On one of these hillsides
descending to the Souss, each traveller places a
stone in a forked branch of one of the gnarled
dwarf evergreens through which the trail descends.
The trees of the region are loaded with thousands
of stones, but no one could tell me why. Perhaps,
hundreds of years ago, an evil djinn had killed a
man here, or some saint on a pilgrimage may have
told his rosary here for the last time. The dead
seem very near to the living in these Moroccan
wildernesses, and the spirit world, with its sad old
mystery and its grotesque terror, is an omnipresent
reality. The worship of saints, the use of charms,
the appeasing of devils and djinns are contrary to
BAY,
There are towns, named after the days of tie T?eek, that
hare practically no existence except oo market day. Then
from dawn till sunset they are thronging centers of life
and bewildering: activity.
THE FOR3IDDEX SOUSS 207
the pure religion of the Prophet, "but they are older
than Islam, and in spite of the zealous fury of
puritan reformers the soul of Africa has remained
pagan.
These humble -villages with their little orchards,
terraced gardens, and local shrines, stretch along
the southern Atlas slope between the market
towns. The markets are named for the days of the
week, El Arba ? Wednesday, or El Khemis, Thurs-
day, towns that have practically no existence ex-
cept on market days. Then from dawn till sunset
these souks are thronging centres of life and be-
wildering activity. Butchers, grain dealers, sellers
of olives, oil, spices, and vegetables, donkey traders,
camel merchants, pottery makers, and Jews who
sell cloth and jewelry, all come once a week to
supply the needs of the peasant villagers, and to
trade their wares for the produce the villagers may
bring in, For one day there is picturesque move-
ment and fascinating local colour absolutely black
negro slaves in short ragged burnouses, brown
Shelluh Berbers in striped djellabas, and dignified,
canny Arab merchants in spotless white. Then
toward sunset the crowd thins out, the vilkgers
trot home on their little donkeys, the merchants
camp in the fondak for the night, and the town is
empty and deserted for another week.
208 OLD MOROCCO
We reached one of these towns in the plains, the
Souk El Khemis, just at nightfall when the mar-
ket was breaking up. While Monsieur Lapandery
and Si Lhassen bought half a sheep and a quantity
of grapes for our dinner, Kbira and I enjoyed the
admiration of a hundred gaping peasants and a
vast drove of almost naked little imps, who blinked
and stared or danced around us, sticking out their
tongues and twisting their comic -little faces into
fantastic grotesques. Kbira sat demurely on her
mule enjoying the situation, for only two years
before she had been one of these funny little crea-
tures herself.
The common people here in the plains are poor,
for, though the soil is very rich and by means of
irrigation can be made highly productive, the un-
settled lawless state of the region in recent years,
through continuous local feuds, has kept it deso-
late. And the lot of the lower orders in Morocco
is wretched at best. The bandit tribesmen of the
mountains leading a wild and dangerous life out-
side the pale are happier than the peace-loving
valley folk whose lords and chiefs allow them no
peace. But the people we met here at El Khemis
on market day were pleasant and cheerful with a
simple sense of fun. When I tried to photograph
them they laughingly thrust forward a hideously
THE FORBIDDEN SOUSS 209
old negro into a prominent place, to his great rage
and confusion.
By eight in the evening, very sore and weary
from the last long day of riding through the unre-
lieved heat, we arrived at the house of two of
Si Lhassen's sons-in-law, for this country of the
Souss is our old Shelluh guide's native land. We
waited long at the door for the house to be pre-
pared to receive our unexpected visit. The little
court, where the family principally live, must be
cleared of goats and chickens and children, and the
dirt floor carefully swept, and the women must
have time to put on their best caftans. Our hosts
were two young Shelluhs, stupidly pleasant with
very dark brown eyes. They welcomed us with
simple expressions of hospitality, offering all their
means afforded to make us comfortable.
We pass into the little court, climb the notched
beam which serves as a ladder, and install ourselves
on the roof. The evening air is a joyous relief, and
fragrant whiffs of excellent cookery steam up from
the court below us, where the women, helped by
chattering neighbours, are preparing a feast. I lie,
pipe in mouth, chin on hand, looking down upon
the busy groups about two round clay stoves. The
ruddy charcoal flames throw bright reflections over
their faces, as they ply the bellows, or lean over
210 OLD MOROCCO
the savoury smoMng cooking-bowls. In one corner
of the court, the light from a Moorish lantern falls
upon quaintly shaped water jars and earthern
platters, and in the midst, sits white bearded old
Si Lhassen, enjoying his long kief pipe with inex-
pressible placidity. His younger daughter smiles
indulgently at him from time to time, showing her
perfect, white teeth. She sits peeling some curious
long-necked vegetables with a curved dagger, and
as she works, sings this Berber peasant song:
I have wandered everywhere in the whole world,
I have travelled in every direction;
I have seen there is nothing better in life for a man
Than to rest in his own house,
With wife and children beside him;
Though there is only a single mat, simple and bare,
Which he may lie upon when he has supped.
By half past ten, after the usual oriental ablutions
and several glasses of mint-flavoured tea, a platter
of excellent ftiutton stew is brought up to us,
steaming hot and very peppery. We dip in with
our hosts, who have the advantage of us in that
their long practised fingers are less sensitive to hot
handfuls of food, and I feel some regret as the
clean platter is handed down the ladder. But the
next course is a great roast, sufficient to satisfy
more appetites than ours. And then comes the
usual kouskous of steamed white millet walling in
THE FORBIDDEN SOUSS 211
a richly delicious mess of vegetables. And after
grapes for dessert and many more glasses of tea,
we stretch out in indolent ease and enjoy the sense
of having achieved a quest. We have reached the
forbidden Souss. And now what kind of life shall
we find here, and what possible adventures are in
store?
The full moon shines on a few deserted mud
houses with gaping black holes in the roofs, and
on a ghostly ruined kasba, destroyed long ago in
some savage baronial feud. The broad rocky bed
of the dry Oued Souss stretches for miles through
the plain, which seems as white, desolate, and dead
as the moon seen through a telescope* One fears
to go to sleep in this intense inhuman silence, and
longs for the cry of an owl or bark of a dog to give
a hint that the world is still alive.
Early the next morning, Si Lhassen woke us,
bringing generous cups of excellently brewed cof-
fee with a rare aroma which only the orientals can
produce. We lay back deliriously lazy on the rush
mats spread out on the housetop, and sipped our
coffee, and watched the rosy dawn-light flood the
brown plains, the red-brown ruins, the rich green
clumps of cacti and laurel that fringed the dry river
bed, and the endless Atlas range that now loomed
behind us to the north. Soon the coolness of the
212 OLD MOROCCO
night was over, and the sun drove us down into tfye
house to find the most comfortable place to spend
the day resting. We moved our mats to a dark-
ened passage-way that opened on the court and
caught whatever hreath of air might be stirring;
and I passed the time a very hot and scorching
time sprinkling myself with native rose water,
eating rich ripe grapes, smoking my oldest, sweet-
est pipe, and watching the women at their house-
hold tasks in the little courtyard.
Off from the court, opened two or three rooms
and a passage-way which, in turn, led to several
more. The only furniture was a few floor mats,
which were carefully rolled up when not used to
sit on. In one room was a loom with a half -woven
woolen burnous in it, and in another dark hole,
a huge mud oven. There were two quite primitive
hand mills, one for grinding barley for bread, and
the other for making cooking oil of argan nuts.
One of the women sat in the shadow of the wall,
making bread. She picked over a few handfuls of
barley, blowing away the chaff that was still mixed
with it after the simple winnowing in the field.
The mill in which she ground the grain consisted
merely of two round flat stones held in a baked
mud casing which permitted the upper stone, which
was fitted with a handle, to be turned round.
THE FORBIDDEN SOUSS 213
Where there are swift-flowing streams in Morocco
there are water-mills, but these are for the rich;
the humbler folk must grind their handful of grain
wherever they prepare a meal. The woman smiled
as she saw my interest in her simple housework,
and as she turned the stone she sang the Shelluh
song of
THE TWO MILLS
Said the water-mill to the hand mill: "Go to sleep!
For, when the water rushes through the flume,
Many a measure of grain will I grind,"
But the hand-mill in the house, answering replied:
"I envy not your solitude of streams and gardens;
It is with the tribe of fair charmers that I have my home,
I am turned by the hands that bring soft caresses."
When the flour was ground it was kneaded into
little round loaves and baked in the blackened oven,
which had been heated with charcoal embers. When
bread is wanted quickly, as it was the night of our
unexpected arrival, it is baked in thin pancakes in
a flat red earthen platter over the little clay stove.
The household duties were performed by the
women in a very leisurely way. Life in the Souss
is so free from complication that there is not much
to worry about. Time has no value, and these
people are too "uncivilised" to worship efficiency
for its own sake. Their homes are simple, their
214 OLD MOROCCO
possessions very few, and their cookery always the
same. The women have no beds to make, for their
bed is a mat which is rolled up in the daytime;
their daily cookery is usually limited to one dish
for a meal; the dish-washing merely requires 'dip-
ping the tea glasses in hot water and pouring the
contents of the kettle over a single platter; their
weaving does not keep them very busy, for the
household wears but few clothes and wears them
out; washing, a task not often thought necessary,
consists in rubbing the garments on a flat stone in a
running stream and hanging them on a bush to dry.
And none of the duties in this simple existence are
carried out with much expenditure of energy*
There is always leisure for gossip or story-telling
or singing, as the women sit together husking corn
or washing in the river. And through the long
lazy afternoons one sleeps. The occidental mind
to be happy must be doing something, expending
energy even to enjoy itself, but the oriental finds
perfect happiness in doing nothing, and values
sleep as one of the highest goods. An eastern
proverb says:
It is better to stand still than to run;
It is better to sit than to stand;
It is better to lie down than to sit;
It is better to sleep than to wake.
THE FORBIDDEX SOUSS 215
The news of our arrival had reached the great
Shereefa Moulay All, a descendant of the Prophet
and an important chief in this part of the Souss.
He sent word that he would come to pay us a visit
and conduct us to his own kasba where he hoped
we should remain for some time as his guests. In
the hottest part of the hot afternoon he arrived, a
very simple and affable, white-bearded old gentle-
man in a patched white dejellaba and very old
slippers, but a large and spotless turban. He has
the dignity of a patriarch, and the sureness of his
social position as a member of a Shereefian family
makes him simply and naturally democratic. He
comes bobbing along seated sideways on the croup
of a very small donkey, like one of his humblest
retainers, his old babooches dangling from the tips
of his toes. At the low doorway of the house he
slides off bis comic mount, and is respectfully
greeted by the male householders with whom he
familiarly shakes hands. We go through the elabo-
rate formalities of Arab courtesy, ''Peace be with
thee!" "Safety be with thee!" "Allah's blessing
upon thee!" "May he prolong thy days!" "May
he protect thy house!" "May he increase thy
goods!"
There is a kindly and pleasant twinkle in the old
Shereefa's small eyes as we sit down together on
216 OLD MOROCCO
the mat. His cordiality is sincere, for our visit
will relieve the lotus-eating monotony of his serene,
patriarchal life. Hospitality to the oriental is not
only a sacred duty, but a pleasant opportunity of
contact with the world, and a chance for gossip
and the exchange of ideas. We converse in Arabic,
and Si Lhassen and his sons-in-law sit in respect-
ful silence not understanding a word. The old
Shereefa has travelled about Morocco and often
makes visits to Marrakesh. He has a canny knowl-
edge of the world and a genuine liking for the
French. His son, in fact, who to our disappoint-
ment is not at home, has even visited France.
Monsieur Lapandery finds it somewhat difficult
to explain to the Shereefa just what my occupation
is, for a university professor in a Moslem country
must of course be a religious person, an Alcoranic
doctor living in holy sanctity and steeped in sacred
thought. This does not accurately describe me.
And so Monsieur Lapandery introduces me as a
writing master who teaches boys their A. B. C.
Moulay Ali is much amused at meeting this sort
of a Nazarene, and merrily recalls the stinging
switch that his writing master found an aid to in-
struction in calligraphy.
After the usual three glasses of mint-flavoured
tea and a half hour's talk, we bid farewell to our
SOU5SI PEASANT TYPES.
They are simple good-natured folk, shepherds and agricul-
turists. They showed no hostility to foreigners, but were
usually difficult to photograph because they had EO notion of
cameras.
217
THE FORBIDDEN SOUSS 219
hosts and ride across the dry river bed and burning
dry plain to the kasba of Moulay Ali. The little
group around the doorway wave us good-bye, and
then sit down to discuss the visit of the great
Shereefa and congratulate the hosts on the honour
that has come upon their house.
The Shereefian families, to one of which Moulay
Ali belongs, are very numerous in Morocco. Their
descent from the Prophet gives them a specially
sanctified character, although they are not neces-
sarily religious men, and a social prestige far
greater than that which wealth alone may give.
In fact, many of these Shereefs are gentle loafers
with no other means of support than their reputed
ancestry. They attach themselves to some sheik or
wealthy townsman and become one of his numerous
hangers-on. How pure blooded Berbers like
Moulay Ali can pretend to a descent in the male
line from the daughter of the Prophet is not very
clear. Possibly he may claim it through some dis-
tant Almohade ancestor, for the founder of that
Berber dynasty successfully established his long
and imposing genealogy of saintly names begin-
ning with the Prophet himself.
After a half hour's ride through the white hazy
air of three o'clock in the afternoon, we reach the
k new mud-built kasba of Moulay Ali, a rudely im-
220 OLD MOROCCO
posing stronghold in the pasture land south of the
Oued Souss, We cross two great outer court-
yards, where the flocks are kept at night, and go
through several dark, roughly beamed passage-
ways, that lead to a small inner court, A narrow
stairway goes up to a corridor with three Moorish
arches made in sun-baked clay; and off this, opens
our apartment, a dark, very plain room with three
little latticed windows that pierce the thick walls,
and admit slant, narrow shafts of burning sunlight,
that fall in little spotted lozenges on the floor.
Everything in the castle is so plain as to give a
sense of emptiness. The three clay arches are the
only approach to art or decoration. There are no
pavements, no tiles or mosaics, not even plaster.
Everything is stark in its simplicity. Our room is
furnished with two barbarically gorgeous carpets
woven in banded designs of brilliant colour, a star-
tling contrast to the brown monotony of everything
else in the kasba.
Moulay Ali's life is no more complex than that
of the peasant folk we have just visited. Although
he is wealthy and powerful, his ideal of life is not
the gathering together of "things." His wealth
consists in hundreds of fat sheep, sleek goats, and
a huge troop of asses and camels, all of which are
tended during the day by a dozen or so of children
THE FORBIDDEN SOUSS 221
and a few drivers. At night the flocks and troops
are driven into the courtyards of the stronghold,
and the vast wooden gates are barred at sunset,
just as the Shereefa is saying his evening prayer.
This is life in the patriarchal age. Moulay Ali is
only one degree removed in his way of living from
the nomadic Abraham and Esau.
Our host ushers us into our apartment, and a
slave pours water over our hands and brings the
charcoal brazier and the kettle for tea. The
Shereefa is most oriental in the cordiality of his
welcome. With smiling eyes and genial manner he
tells us we are as members of his own family and
safer than his own life. To be hospitable to
strangers is his greatest pleasure. If we will stay
a month with him as his guests, he will kill a sheep
every day! In his hand he always carries two
massive keys ten inches long, like St. Peter, and I
wonder what they may open. With his benignant
patriarchal smile and his flowing robes he would
make a wonderful model for an old Italian painter.
Funny little black boys scantily clothed in a
rag each, come staggering in, embracing huge
watermelons that have been picked before dawn
and kept in a dark closet. St. Peter lays aside his
keys, draws his long poignard from its richly orna-
mented sheath, and severs three melons one after
222 OLD MOROCCO
the other at a blow, until he finds one perfect
.enough for his guests. He continues chatting
merrily, and brandishes the wicked looking
poignard as he gesticulates. As I watch the
flashing arcs of the blade the thought occurs to me
that it has not always been used to slice melons.
Moulay Ali professes the greatest admiration for
the French. The victory of the Allies in the War
has made a profound impression on the Soussi and
the tribes in other unsubdued regions of Morocco.
Success in war means a kind of superiority which
they can understand and appreciate. They accept
the eventual French occupation as the inevitable
will of Allah. During the War, German agents
tried to stir them up, and, it is rumoured, made
considerable headway in this very region with
Moulay Ali's over-lord, the caid at Aoulouz, but
Moulay Ali leaned always on the side of the
French. He also professes an admiration for
America, which he has heard of in a vague way
as strong in wealth and military power. And
though he knows me only as an American "writing-
master" he many times expresses the hope that we
should be friends forever. During our talk we
shake hands in the bonds of an eternal guest-friend-
ship.
As we sit chatting and drinking tea in this upper
THE FORBIDDEX SOUSS 223
chamber, we are startled by fearful sounds coming
through the window that looks on the outer court,
sounds as of the slaughtering of a whole zoo. It
proves to be nothing but the bellowings and snort-
ings of three or four camels that are being loaded.
The ill-natured beasts groan and snarl and try to
bite, although almost nothing is being packed on
their backs, but this is the usual habit of these
creatures, the most evil tempered of all domestic
animals. They twist their long necks around,
showing their ugly faces, their heavy eyelids and
cynical mouths, disgruntled with life and ever
scornful of the world* But these are not the ordi-
nary camels of the Moroccan Bled; they are white
dromedaries, tall, magnificently built animals that
thrive only in the intense heat of the Great Sahara
itself, the true "ships of the desert."
The dromedaries belong to some strange, strik-
ing fellows, evidently of another race than the
Shelluh Berbers. These men are graceful as Greek
statues, supple in their movements as wild animals,
finely handsome with perfect white teeth, very dark
skins, and long black hair to their shoulders, and
their eyes have the superb haughty freedom of men
who dwell in the Great Desert. Moulay Ali tells
us they are a party of distant tribesmen, his espe-
cial friends, who live eight days* journey by camd,
224 OLD MOROCCO
to the southeast, over the distant ranges of the
Middle Atlas, in the land of Mauretania. He goes
down to the court and invites two of the men to
drink tea with us before they set out for home.
They wear long baggy white breeches and light
flowing loose robes of dark blue, and dark blue
turbans. One of them comes in ready for his long
ride, his face swathed like a Moslem woman in a
blue veil to protect him from the heat and dust,
only his deep eyes showing, like wells in the twi-
light. He unwinds the veil and sits with us on the
mat an Antinoiis carved in dark marble.
These Mauretanians have ever been a wild free
people, nomads roaming over the western desert,
owing allegiance to none but their tribal Chief,
except when stirred and united by some fanatical
reformer of Isham, when they have carried the
Holy War to Marrakesh itself. Their language is
Arabic, and they have little in common with the
sedentary Shelluh of the Souss. Antinoiis with
graphic gestures describes their country. It is a
land of sand, sand, sand, with never a palm tree.
The only things that grow are scrubby bushes and
short grasses on which their camels and flocks feed.
Their food is milk and goat's flesh. Water they
carry from distant wells and store in reservoirs.
Theirs is a land of burning sun and cloudless skies,
THE FORBIDDEX SOUSS 225
with rarely a drop of rain. They are a roaming
free people who dwell under the tent, and despise
those who live in houses and pay taxes.
Soon the Mauretanians mount their magnificent
dromedaries and ride off toward the southern
mountains, their heads held high and their dark
blue garments fluttering in the wind. And my
heart yearns to go with them to see the barren land
that produces such men. In truth these must be
the "blameless men" with whom the gods of Homer
were wont to dine in the Land of ^Ethiopia.
Strange, that romance should be always some-
where else! Two weeks ago it was here in the
heart of the forbidden Souss, but now it lies in the
wild barren land of the blue Mauretanians down
toward the fabulous Mountains of the Moon,
Ten
PRISONERS AT AOELOUZ
How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
V^ith half -shut eyes ever to seem
[Falling asleep in a half-dream !
To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,
Which \vill not leave the myrrh bush on the height;
To hear each other's whispered speech;
Eating the JLotus day by day.
Ten
PRISONERS AT AOULOrZ
WE had scarcely been a day in the castle of
the hospitable patriarch when the news of
a party of Roumi* having arrived in the Souss
reached the lord of our division of the province,
Si Larbi Ou Derdouri, ca'id of Ras El Oued, who
is the son-in-law of the powerful over-lord, the
Goundafi. He sent one of his personal body-
guard, a cross-eyed soldier with a long muzzle-
loading gun, to escort us to his vast castle at
Aoulouz ("Land of Almonds"), a few hours' ride
up the valley of the Souss.
In the morning we set out after cordial farewells
with hospitable good-feeling from Moulay Ali, and
a blessing from the marabout who always sits with
him at meals, muttering prayers and doing pros-
trations all through the conversation. We look
back as the road turns, and catch a glimpse of our
patriarchal host still waving at us and still clutch-
ing in one hand the great keys of St. Peter* TJie
* .RotMiu, "Romans, 9 * te., ''Foreigners."
229
230 OLD MOROCCO
plain, a stony, barren extent cut by dry stream
beds, is already burning and torrid. Even the
Barbary fig cacti have shrivelled up into sickly
yellow clumps and the wild olives are twisted and
tortured with thirst. Innumerable flocks of sheep
are finding nourishment on dry, woody weeds and
thistles and the withered stubble of straw in the
reaped barley fields. This is the aspect in August
of a land, which the natives tell me is a luxuriant
garden in the spring. There are still two or three
green oases where a perpetual water supply per-
mits irrigation. The irrigation systems are elab-
orate networks of canals ; each region is flooded in
turn on successive days.
We stop at one of these oases to rest, and the
cross-eyed soldier hunts out a melon that has been
protected from the sun in a thick field of maize.
We drink from any canal that is not too muddy;
if there are crawling things in the water, one strains
it through a handkerchief or the corner of a
burnous. Long ago we decided that germs are
more tolerable than thirst.
By noon we reach the great castle of Aoulouz.
As the Cai'd Si Larbi is away on a visit, we are
received at the outer gate by his brother, the
Calipha Haj Abderrahman ("Slave of the Com-
passionate"), a sleek, well-fed person with an un-
PRISONERS AT AOULOUZ 231
pleasant eye. His pilgrimage to Mecca, which
gives him the title of Haj, does not seem to have
broadened his horizon very much; he speaks only
his own Shelluh dialect. He receives us coldly and
gives us in charge of a black major-domo, a con-
fidential family slave. We are led into a white
plastered court with a little jet of water in the
centre, spattering into a small basin with orange
and almond trees grouped about it. Off from the
court are three large rooms with tall painted doors,
and windows grilled with twisted iron gratings.
The shutters and the arched ceilings are decorated
with arabesques in blue, red, and green. The
floors are covered with beautiful thick Moorish
carpets woven at Marrakesh, and one chamber has
the walls covered with a single huge silk hanging,
embroidered in panelled Moorish arches of bril-
liant colours.
Black boys bring water for washing our hands,
then coffee and a kouskous of mutton stewed with
yellow tomatoes and wild pears. When tea is
served the fat calipha comes in, and a long conver-
sation ensues. We have come without permission.
The country is not open to foreigners. We cannot
be allowed to roam around at will. We shall have
to remain here as the caid's "guests" until he de-
cides what to do with us! We shall have good
232 OLD MOROCCO
treatment, but we must stay under guard in the
vicinity of the castle.
The calipha leaves us, and we settle down to
reconcile ourselves to captivity in this luxurious
prison. The fact of the case seems to be that Haj
Abderrhaman is embarrassed by our presence. He
knows that the French Protectorate does not con-
sider it safe for Europeans to wander at large in
the Souss and that it forbids their coming. The
Soussi do not seem to object to our presence, for
we have met with no expressions of ill-will or sus-
picion, but Haj Abderrhaman probably fears that
should we be murdered by bandits, complications
with the French might ensue and he and his brother
the caid would be held responsible. They have no
wish to give occasion for the sending of machine
guns and hated Senegalese troops. Later, the
calipha decides to send a messenger to Taroudant,
the most important city of the Souss, some fifty
miles west of here, where there is a mission of two
or three French information officers, who keep an
eye on native affairs. Meanwhile, here we are as
prisoners, with nothing to do but lie about on silk
mattresses and embroidered cushions, and watch
the shadows lengthen through the long, blazing
afternoon.
Our siesta is disturbed by various of the caid's
THE KASBA OF THE OID LASBI OU 8ERDK7IZ, AT AOULOU1
These square, mud-walled castles are the characteristic archi-
tecture of southern Morocco. These are the strongholds of
the feudal barons who are constantly at war with one an-
other.
233
PRISONERS AT AOULOUZ 235
retainers, who are moved by curiosity to come in to
visit us and get the latest news of the world, which
means Marrakesh to them, for their imaginations
do not go much farther. Among them comes
Si Ta'ib, another brother of the cai'd, a villainous
looking chap in the twenties. The big ugly scar
down one side of his face gives him a savage ap-
pearance, but he is really very mild and stupid,
with a dull curiosity about foreigners. He has a
weakness which frequently obsesses very ugly peo-
ple, for having his picture taken, and to satisfy his
vanity I snap Mm in a half dozen poses with an
empty camera. When we begin to be bored by the
very personal interest of these various idle gentle-
men, the call of the muezzin takes them off to
prayer and we are left in peace.
Little Kbira and the younger Lhassen play
about the court and get each other very wet splash-
ing in the fountain. The doves moan from the high
roofs. The flat twang of an African lute and the
lazy laughter of women come through a mysterious
locked door in a white arched passage-way that
leads to the women's apartments. Kbira peeps
through the keyhole and runs away bubbling with
amusement; what she saw was another inquiring
eye!
In the evening, we sit about on the rich carpet,
236 OLD MOROCCO
the curtain over the doorway caught up to let in
any wandering breath of air the night may bring.
The candle, twisted by the heat, stuck in a huge
brazen candlestick in the middle of the floor, casts
yellow gleams on the faces of us prisoners lying
lazy and hot on the silk cushions; it softens the
crude arabesques of the arched ceiling and makes
mysterious darknesses in the deep window case-
ments, where lizards may sleep and scorpions lurk.
Out in the court, the full moon silvers the almond
trees and throws wonderful black shadows on the
strangely blue-white walls and carved plaster
arches. The muezzin calls the night prayer in his
uncanny falsetto wail which echoes in the court-
yard and dies into mournful silence. Old Si
Lhassen, who is squatting against the wall, rises
for the invocation and then makes the threefold
prostration before the name of God. He groans
and mumbles his prayers in his beard, and brings
a childhood recollection of my old grandfather ask-
ing the blessing at table.
Monsieur Lapandery walks up and down the
chamber singing in his magnificent baritone the
songs of old France, fine old peasant songs, gen-
erations old. He twirls his heavy moustaches,
gesticulates in the manner of old-fashioned opera,
and lets his voice out to the full, and the sombre
PRISONERS AT AOULOUZ 237
African night is startled by these far-away songs
heard here for the first time:
Et pourtant je regrette
Les j oils yens blens de seize ans !
At ten o'clock the Ethiopian major-domo leads
in two slaves bearing on their heads trays, covered
with peaked straw cones. I eat ravenously of the
tajine^ or stew, and the vegetable kouskous, and
roll over on my mattress in the court, and fall
asleep under the twinkling stars, to the thin strains
of Moorish music and the faint throb of a tom-tom
in some distant part of the palace.
Our prison life is a monotonously luxurious eat-
ing of the lotus day by day. I am awakened in the
cool fresh morning by a cup of Si Lhassen's excel-
lent coffee, just as the sun touches the tops of the
orange and almond trees, in which dozens of birds
are making a delightfully discordant rivalry. As
there is nothing to get up for, I smoke a cigarette
and sleep again, lulled by the mourning doves that
moan from the square kasba tower just above us.
Then I am awakened again to eat a bowl of vermi-
celli and a platter of grapes and ripe figs. After
that, of course, there is tea. About eleven o'clock
we go into another court where a swift-flowing ice-
cold stream, which has run for miles through an
238 OLD MOROCCO
underground conduit, breaks forth into a square
basin, which with its lining of soft green moss,
makes a delightful bathtub. At noon come in two
dishes of houmous, and an hour later, coffee and
mint tea. I spend the afternoon lying on the gay
carpets and cushions in the great darkened state
chamber and shout for young Lhassen whenever
my pipe needs refilling. My only use for a brain
is the assistance it gives in adding a few words to
iny vocabulary of Berber. At half past four, we
drink an aperatif of rum and water and have an-
other meal of kouskous to stay our hunger till
dinner, which comes at ten at night.
One great surprise was to find that the cai'd has
an automobile, an old French machine he bought
at Mogador on the coast, some hundred miles away.
A French chauffeur brought it over the bumpy
camel trail to Taroudant, and from there the cai'd
has by a little scraping and raking made a kind of
road through the plain to Aoulouz. The chauffeur
is an amusing character who has been in Morocco
four months without learning a single word of
Arabic, and did not even know that the language
spoken around him is Berber. He leads a life of
infinite laziness and loneliness. He passes the
time scrawling rude pictures on the white walls of
his room, innumerable hearts pierced with arrows,
PRISONERS AT AOULOUZ 239
very decollete ladies with Cimabue faces all labelled
"Ninette/' and an expressionless side elevation of
a "Madeleine-Bastille" autobus with a portrait of
himself at the wheel. The drawings show more
sentiment than perspective. Strange, self-exiled
soul, thinking of his beloved boulevard,
He has brought with him as interpreter, a hand-
some little eleven-year-old Arab named Omar, who
has learned some French in the Franco-Arab
school at Mogador. Omar is marvellously pic-
turesque in his long robe of exquisite peacock blue,
and he has the face of angel infancy, but he is
^really descended from Chitane, the Father of Lies.
Under the pretext of translation he makes the
chauffeur say the most absurd things to the cai'd
and the calipha, and is constantly the cause of
the most amusing misunderstandings. These are
partly due to Omar's lack of knowledge of the
language he pretends to translate and partly to
his impish nature. Half the chauffeur's time is
spent chasing Omar around the palace in attempts
to administer well merited chastisement, hurling
all the slippers in sight at the flying peacock robe,
to the joyous delight of the dignified owners of the
slippers.
The chauffeur has an ancient copy of La Vie
Paridenne, which we take turns at reading aloud.
240 OLD MOROCCO
The natives stare at the bizarre pictures in vague
wonder, for images and pictures are absolutely out
of the lives of these strict Moslems of Morocco.
They solemnly whisper as they turn the pages and
seem very much mystified. The alluringly indis-
creet high-stepping damsel on the cover, gaily
driving a pair of very red lobsters harnessed with
blue ribbons, can hardly seem to their placid imagi-
nations the representation of anything in heaven
above or the earth beneath or the waters under the
earth.
Everything moves slowly here. As the chauf-
feur puts it, life runs on second speed. There are
numberless retainers and slaves, but nobody seems
to be working. A meal is brought in; we wait
twenty minutes for the ewer and basin for washing;
we wait fifteen more for fresh water to drink. If
there are several courses we wait long between
each, and we wait sometimes an hour afterward for
the tea service to come. Time means nothing in
Morocco; except for pashas and caids it is a world
without energy or ambition. If it is written in
the Book of God that you are to be a serf or a
prince, nothing can change that decree. So why
struggle? No activity is ever apparent here but
the slow carrying of water jars or covered dishes,
or the indolent labour of a few workmen in the
PRISONERS AT AOULOUZ 241
eai'd's new-built garden. Sleeping in the shade of a
wall or quietly chatting by lantern light are the
most apparent occupations in the palace.
The life of these great Berber lords in the Souss
is a life of indolence rather than of what we should
call luxury. It is a life of large patriarchal plenty,
simple, easy, and monotonous. There is very
little art in it, nothing subtle in architecture. The
great palace-castles like this of our caid have a
certain impressive Babylonian massiveness, but the
detail of the iron-work, wood-work, and arabesque
painting is crude and quaint. There are embroid-
eries and carpets, it is true, but they do not have
the sophisticated elegance of Persian, Arabic, and
Turkish textiles. This is not a decadent civilisation
like that of the northern cities, Rabat and Fez, but
a patriarchal life which has remained the same for
at least two thousand years. The Saracenic civili-
sation has only touched the Berbers on the surface.
The marvels of art achieved in Spain, in Fez, and
in old Marrakesh, though built by Berber sultans,
were wholly of Arab inspiration.
The calipha Haj Abderrhaman is very proud of
his single diamond set in a silver ring. (For good
Moslems do not wear gold.) He also showed us
a small agate and a carnelian he carries in his purse,
but there are no Aladdin dreams of jewels and
242 OLD MOROCCO
wealth here. The wealth is in flocks, corn, and oil.
And the rich lord does not spend his riches on art
or on expensive amusements. His satisfaction is
in the power his wealth and place give him. The
democracy of these absolute chieftains is another
thing surprising to us who live in so-called demo-
cratic countries. The calipha invites not only his
sheiks and vassal barons to eat from the same dish
with him, but even personal attendants and soldiers.
The lazy days of our captivity are relieved by
very few incidents. The calipha and Monsieur
Lapandery sometimes have long conversations on
commercial matters, the selling of oil, almonds, and
sheep. An agreement is hard to reach. The fat
calipha is suave but very firm. He must have all
the money in advance, and then, if Allah be willing,
promises to deliver the oil in six months. As there
is no power but Allah to hold him to his agreement,
trade conditions are not easy; perhaps it is written
that the oil shall not be delivered. And so they
argue, with much good nature on both sides and
with many cups of tea.
One night Lulu the hound, who is very much
bored by this life in an ultra-Mohammedan com-
munity, where there are no other dogs to fight
with, arranged a battle to the death with a very
PRISONERS AT AOULOUZ 243
savage black cat. The uproar of yowls and barks,
together with the encouraging shouts of Kbira and
the hurling of properties by Lapandery and me,
roused the whole palace guard, who are usually to
be found fast asleep at their respective posts, and
actually gave us a thrill of excitement for a few
midnight minutes. On another evening, when
Tai'b, the caid's younger brother, was taking tea
with us, he observed that we put a drop of rum in
ours, and expressed the desire to taste the drink
that is forbidden by the Prophet* He took a few
sips and sneezed, but decided that rum might be
productive of some amusement if he could get
enough of it. After he left us, he sent a servant
back to ask for a small cupful on the plea that his
wife was ill. We grudgingly gave it, and then he
sent again for a second supply. What he did with
it was not to drink it himself, as we imagined, but
give it to three soldiers, who not accustomed to
spirits, ran wild. They tore about the great court,
yelling and brandishing their poignards and pound-
ing their heads against the wall. One of them tried
to slice off the ears of everybody within reach.
With some difficulty he was captured and put in a
pit with a stone over the mouth, and he howled
there for several hours*
A lif e of nothing but eating I find is dull. The
244 OLD MOROCCO
monotony of patriarchal civilisation is oppressive.
I am beginning to suspect that the disillusioned
Philistine who said, "Toute 1'orient, c'est une
blague!" was perhaps right. I used to wonder
what profound mysteries, what deep truths of life
old bearded Arabs pondered as they sat for hours,
their backs against a wall and their eyes turned
inward. I suspect now that they think of nothing.
And I have become just like them. Life is merely
a succession of faintly perceived sounds and
shadows, and now and then comes kouskous and
tea. That is all! But the philosopher will say that
that is all life is anyway, and so perhaps I have
come to a true understanding of it, and perhaps
the orientals are right in just letting it float by.
At any rate, the life here is picturesque, filled
with strange little groups and bits of composition,
which the camera can rarely seize without creating
a self -consciousness in the subjects. I go and sit
in the outer gateway of the great court with half a
dozen other loafers and ten coal black pickaninnies,
and wait for something to turn up. An old slave
comes by clothed in half a rag, carrying two big
earthen platters, one balanced on his head and one
on his upstretched arm. A naked black boy who
has been pounding gypsum for plaster, passes like
a white Greek statue come to life. A negress
PRISONERS AT AOULOUZ 245
loaded with bangles and bead necklaces balances a
huge water jar on her shoulder, and glances scorn-
fully at the impudent soldiers on guard. Old
Yaccoub, a bearded peddler in black Jewish skull-
cap and gaberdine, strolls past with an armful of
scarves from Fez, woven in crimson and yellow
silk.
In the early evening, the glamour of twilight
changes the aspect of these scenes from the pic-
turesqueness of a photograph to the deep romantic
mood of a sombre etching, always strangely beau-
tiful and always a little sad. The white clad figures
moving homeward in the dusk, the inevitable beg-
gar crying at the gate, and the groups of laughing
dark-faced idlers round a gleaming lantern, become
shadowy symbols of the toil and tears and rest of
the world. The eternal nimble of the river of
Time is heard in the hollow sound of the impris-
oned stream that rushes under the stone pavement
of the great courtyard, and the sad hope of Reli-
gion is in the prolonged, solemn chaunting that
comes up every afternoon from the school for
saints, and fills the soft night with monotonous
peace and dies away. I catch a glimpse of the little
sanctuary lamps quietly glowing before the prayer
niche in the tiny mosque. The young neophytes on
the roof stop their chaunting as I pass, and look
246 OLD MOROCCO
down on me with an admiration mingled with
contempt,
If the early evening is cool enough, we stroll out
at sunset time in the fields and olive groves around
the palace. Two tall blacks armed with curved
poignards in beautiful brass scabbards swung from
crimson shoulder cords, follow on either side as
escorts. There is a huge threshing floor where
two teams of little oxen and asses, fifteen abreast,
are driven in a perpetual circle, as they tread out
heaps of barley straw; and the fat animals are re-
joicing in the Levitical command which sayeth,
"Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out;
the corn." Nearby, thirty or forty serfs and slaves,
helped by the evening breeze, are languidly win-
nowing a vast pyramid of grain. Squatting near
a brushwood hut, a dozen women are husking corn,
chattering and singing as they work. The sun
goes down. The overseer gives a sign, and serfs
and slaves send up three feeble shouts. The day's
labor is done, and they all saunter slowly away,
some to sit grouped under an olive tree and drink
tea. Thousands of sheep and black goats are
filing down the paths of the scraggy hillsides,
driven by languid shepherd boys; a dozen fine big
dromedaries stride homeward with lazy awkward-
ness, cropping olive branches as they come. A cool
PRISONERS AT AOULOUZ 247
breeze springs up and brings across the plain
snatches of Shelluh songs and the faint rhythm
of a tom-tom, which seems to express the sad
monotony of the soul of Africa.
The great kasba, like an Assyrian city, with its
four castellated towers and its walls within walls,
stands out clear against the sunset; the jagged line
of western mountains radiates a million golden
filaments like the glow of boreal lights, and the air
is filled with a strange, green, luminous haze which
blends into the pale rose of mother of pearl To
the north, dark and forbidding, lofty and vast, like
Ossa piled on Pelion, with broken, black, tusky
peaks on the sky line, stands planted the Great
Southern Atlas, the barriers that have kept back
the Phoenicians, the Romans, and the Arabs, and
preserved the primitive life and language of the
Berbers for two thousand years. Overhead, two
black hawks sail and swoop from the deep tur-
quoise zenith. From the square squat minaret of
the kasba mosque the muezzin intones, "Allah
aklarl AUati akbar! La iWia illdlahr As his
prolonged, quavering wail dies away, silent figures
here and there in the twilight landscape, with their
backs to the sunset, prostrate themselves in prayer,
and the violet haze of night falls over the bilk
Eleven,
THE DAMSEL WITH TJ3DE LUTE
Is this the falling night or thy smoothe black hair?
Is this the gleaming moon or thy wondrous face?
Is this a narcissus flower or thy white eyelid?
Are these little rows of white hailstones or thy bright teeth?
Are these two little ivory gourds upon thy bosom, or are they
thy breasts ?
Is this the restless desert sand beneath thy silken caftan, or
is it thy supple body?
If thou couldst but know how I yearn for thee thou wouldst
say,
"Is this madness or is it love?"
YAZKD EJBN MOAOUIA.
Eleven
THE DAMSEL WITH THE LUTE
AS the peaceful days of our captivity wear on,
amid quaint scenes and strange quiet beauty,
we gradually fall into the Eastern way of life and
come to enjoy the calm desuetude which is the
ideal of the older world. The calm of the orient is
not the dull placidity of Holland in repose, or the
inane, vacuous torpor of the American Sunday
mood, with its conscious virtue in acquiring merit
by imposed leisure; but rather the calm of beati-
tude, the acceptance of peace as the normal state
of soul, to which occasional activity comes as a re-
grettable divagation. The orient adores monotony
as the west does variety. It enjoys hearing the
same music, the same poems, delights in the same
perfumes, the same colours, the same designs. Its
art consists in infinite beautiful repetitions, and its
poetry in subtle variations on age-old themes. The
changeful interruption of western life does not
appeal to the east, and practical western "improve-
ments" in living are vaguely wondered at rather
251
252 OLD MOROCCO
than desired. A wealthy native may take a fancy
to own a kerosene lamp, or an extravagant prince
may buy an automobile; these things are romanti-
cally beautiful and remote to them. This is their
appeal rather than the thought of useful innova-
tion.
In writing of southern Morocco as "the orient"
I am speaking of the temper of its civilisation, for
although geographically it is the "Land of the Set-
ting Sun/' * in spirit it has more oriental conserva-
tism than Asia Minor or India. Then too, I am
describing southern Morocco as I see it at the
present moment. There are other forces in oriental
hearts besides this love of monotony and the joy
of calm. The fanaticism of religion, or blind
loyalty to some grasping lord, may suddenly
change this peaceful region, where life itself seems
all but arrested, into a land torn by wild guerilla
warfare and brutal pillage. Of this side of
Morocco one may read in the narratives of French
observers during the period' of conquest, which in
some regions is not yet over, or has not yet begun.
But the unprogressive life of little effort and the
dreaming quiet of these long afternoons represent
the ideal of the Moor, the oriental attitude to
existence.
* Maghreb El Aksa,
THE DAMSEL WITH THE LUTE 253
The Arab gentleman, or the Berber ca'id, finds
his recreation in the contemplation of quiet waters
in shady gardens, or in long conversations among
friends eating together and drinking innocuous
drinks, or in watching slow sensuous dancing and
hearing monotonously enervating music.
One afternoon, our host and jailor the calipha,
the Slave of the Compassionate, invites us to one
of these entertainments at his own kasba, a mile or
so away from the old castle of his brother the ea'id,
where we are living. With the delightful vague-
ness of this world in which time has no significance,
we are asked to come some time in the afternoon.
At about half past three we arrive at the kasba,
which, with its impressively solid towers and walls
suggestive of barbaric strength rather than of
comfortable living, rises in the middle of the bare
brown plain. We wait long in a dark high-built
entrance way, as crude and bare as a peasant's hut ;
and then are conducted into the palace itself, a
marked contrast, newly built of fired brick, and
cleanly plastered everywhere. We pass through
dazzling white spacious courtyards, through nar-
row passages and stairways and suites of darkened
chambers, that give an impression of whiteness,
silence, and emptiness. Everywhere our bare feet
sink into soft carpets of gorgeous dye, resplendent
254 OLD MOROCCO
as Keats's tiger-moth, carpets from the mountains,
from the Souss, from Marrakesh and Rabat, and
one a hideous German machine-made thing, doubt-
less a gift from a political agent. (Coals to New-
castle, and poor quality at that!)
In one long room, where besides the rich carpets
there is a great piece of silk embroidery on the wall,
we pass an amusing group of five very black dam-
sels in comically voluminous garments, some in
vivid magenta and some in bright saffron, caught
up in the middle with huge girdles. "They are
black but comely, as the tents of Kedar, as the cur-
tains of Solomon." They wear their hair in long
braids and have big plugs of silver in one ear, and
their names are five sweet symphonies, Leila,
Tahra, Aicha, Hyzyya, and Kadi j ah.
The reception room has a table and two Euro-
pean chairs, I fancy the only ones in the Souss, but
we prefer to sit on cushions and play with our feet
as the Moors do. Aicha with solemn, scared face
serves us with coffee, and the other ebony hand-
maidens stand in the door and roll the whites of
their eyes. My costume is much admired, straw-
coloured pajamas, the gift of the Red Cross in
Macedonia and a grey dressing gown bought in
Bucharest. The major-domo asks me if this is
the national dress of the "Meriki." Presently the
JOUSEHOLD SERVANTS IN THE COUSTYABD OF THE EASBA
AT AOULOU2.
255
THE DAMSEL WITH THE LUTE 257
Slave of the Compassionate arrives. As is usual
in Moorish social affairs, nothing happens at first.
We sit quietly together scarcely exchanging a
word, waiting for the refreshments. In due time,
Leila, Tahra, Alcha, Hyzyya, and Kadijah bring
in three dishes, one after another roast mutton with
a rich tomato sauce, chicken baked with olive oil and
smothered with raisins and onions, and a peppery
mutton stew, and then fragrant mint tea. The chauf-
feur, who is with us, is a great favourite with the
calipha; he is really the court jester. His huge ap-
petite is a theme always good. The seneschal of the
palace, who sits at the left of the serene calipha,
picks out handfuls of specially hot peppers dis-
guised in gravy and offers them to the always
hungry chauffeur. The resulting explosion of the
voluble young Frenchman immoderately delights
the Slave of the Compassionate.
As we while away another hour over grapes and
tea, Leila, Tahra, Aicha, Hyzyya, and Kadijah
ceremoniously carry in a huge German phonograph
* with a megaphone like a gigantic pink morning-
glory. We listen to innumerable records of Arab
music band selections from Cairo, singers from
Tunis, Casablanca, and Tangier. But oriental
music on a phonograph has no more charm than
a collection of dried wild flowers. It must be inter-
258 OLD MOROCCO
preted by flashing eyes, gestures full of meaning,
and bodies swaying in rhythmic dance. We ask
if there are no troops of the famous Shelluh singers
and dancers in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately
there are none about at present, but there is a boy,
the calipha tells us, one of the hundred hangers-on
of the palace, who aspires to be a troubadour.
The boy is sent for. He is a ragged little chap
with a pleasing face and a shy manner. He is
rather frightened at the honour come suddenly
upon him, but after a moment's meditation and a
few taps on the square tambourine he has brought
along, he begins to chant the proverbial sayings
of Sidi Hammou. Sidi Hammou is a half legend-
ary figure to whom most of the proverbial wisdom
and the satirical songs of the Souss are attributed.
He seems to have been a troubadour born here at
Aoulouz in the sixteenth century. The songs are
in a sort of rhythmic prose. The boy begins with
a set formula and chants the pieces, filling in the
pauses with a roulade on the square tambourine.
May God keep Sidi Hammou, the singer, the sage, the poet.
He said, that poor man:
They have trampled upon the flowers of the earth, the men
of old time;
The people of to-day, they live in the autumn of the world.
When the workers ask leave to go, is not the day done ?
When the heard hecomes white, is not a man done?
THE DAMSEL WITH THE LUTE 259
When the butcher has stopped selling, is not tile market done?
Drive in thy flocks, O shepherd, now the day is over.
He who has no friend can never say,
"I have been happy."
For it is friends that make life to pass.
It is not the steep paths that wear out the knees;
What wears them out are the words that change.
He who hath a broken heart, what may cure him,
Unless it be the smile or the word of a' friend?
The heart that hath no one to speak to,
Better exile for him or even death.
The shot from the ambuscade is the bitterest of all;
Bitter are the tears of a friend who weeps;
The rose-laurel is bitter; who ever ate it and found it sweet?
But I have eaten it for my friend; it was not bitter.
The gun and the bullet are not found apart;
Painted eyes are not found apart from antimony!
The heart is not found apart from its friends
Until they all go down under the ground.
Sidi Hammou said many wise words;
Thou canst not know them all,
No more than the bounds of the sea.
He who is without money, though his face be fair as the moon;
If he hath nothing, he is nothing.
Even alive he is as one dead.
silver douros, it is you that make ihe face to shine;
1 have found that the veins of the heart are in the hand.
Money is a clever talker, it will not let one say, "No."
Show it to someone, it will speak for thee;
Hunger is the greatest of woes;
The mill stops turning, and our children weep.
May God keep Sidi Hammou, the singer, the sage, ihe poet
He said, that poor man:
The wind, the lion, the river, slaves, women,
Whoever seeketh good among them, seeketh eviL
280 OLD MOROCCO
He who still hath his mother-in-law hath trouble.
Morning and evening when he cometh home, he eateth always
in anger.
The day the mother of his wife shall die,
Let him call a company to gather wood;
Let him heap up a hundred stones
And with his own hand let him build a fire o hell to burn her.
He will find peace.
Then he should take the daughter whom she hath left
And every morning make her eat a hundred blows with a stick.
For women and mules are from the same plant.
After the singing we must eat again, a kouskous
this time, without which no meal is complete. Now
the eating of kowJcous requires a special technique
which I never acquired. A handful of the moist
white grains must be rolled into a neat golf ball
with the right hand (to touch food with the left
hand is very bad manners) and then by a deft twist
of the thumb it is rolled into one's mouth. As the
balls I roll always explode just as I get them to
my mouth, I have to be fed by some kind neigh-
bour. When we have eaten a rarely flavoured,
exotic melon, the refreshments are over, and we
are to drive through the domain of the caid in the
wonderful automobile.
We leave the hall to the five ebony handmaidens
in magenta and saffron and go down to the outer
court. Here fifty of the calipha's retainers sur-
round him and kiss his shoulder as a token of fealty.
This in time of peace seems to be their only duty.
THE DAMSEL WITH THE LUTE 261
They pass the hours lounging about the court or
riding aimlessly over the plain, graceful and pic-
turesquely indolent, but not very smart in their
every-day costumes. The automobile road is a
casual affair, merely a cleared track through rough
stubble fields where the loose stone has been
scraped off. We bump and sway along for a half
hour over a brown dry country always the same.
Everywhere we meet groups of peasants returning
from the threshing floors, and here and there a
village or a fortified kasba; the men greet their
chieftain with shouts and uplifted right hands. At
one of the floors we stop and sit on a mat before a
brush hut and eat once more. The food is the same
kind that we have been gorging all the after-
noon, but we must make a pretence of continuing
to enjoy it. We drive back through magnificent
sunset scenes of "Orange and azure deepening into
gold/' and say farewell to our courteous host at
the gate of his kasba.
The next day we felt that we were sufficiently
in favour with the Slave of the Compassionate to
attempt to take our leave, and push on through the
Souss. In the afternoon, we had the mules packed
and everything ready for departure. We distrib-
uted liberal fabor to the major-domo, the slaves,
262 OLD MOROCCO
the cook, the water-boys, and the pickaninnies, to
every member of the palace household who put in
appearance at the news of our leaving. And then
we sent a messenger to the calipha's kasba to an-
nounce our intention and to ask permission to make
our adieux. After waiting several hours, the
messenger returned with orders that we were not
to leave. The calipha would come to see us. After
another hour, he came, gracious, smiling, and ex-
quisitely polite, but quite firm. We could not go.
No news had come as yet from Taroudant.
Monsieur Lapandery swore by his ancestors, and
we unpacked the mules.
In the early evening we had tea in the caicTs
garden, and talked long of politics, of trade and
development. We gathered that the Souss is
morally subdued and reconciled to the inevitable
extension of the Protectorate, The - great Glaoui
and the Goundafi have cast in their lot on the side
of the French, and the vassal tribesmen bow to the
will of their lords and the decree of Allah. This
talk was facilitated by the presence of a visiting
sheik who spoke Arabic and translated for the
calipha, when our imperfect knowledge of Shelluh
made it necessary. The twilight deepened over the
garden as we talked; the two Berbers occasionally
whispered confidences among themselves; and
THE DAMSEL WITH THE LUTE 203
Monsieur Lapandery twirled his moustaches and
gesticulated in his animated way. And meantime
little Kbira played about on the rich carpet, toying
with the great key of our apartments, large enough
to secure the treasure of the Sultan, but she had
one ear open to the conversation, and now came to
her father's rescue with a translation, and now
administered sharp cuffs to Lulu the hound for
trespassing on the sacred precincts of the carpet.
And in the midst of all this political talk, an old
servant behind us obeyed the inevitable muezzin's
call and said his prayer.
We were, of course, much disappointed that our
attempt to escape from our luxurious captivity had
failed, but when Allah sends a misfortune, he may,
if it please him, follow it by a great happiness.
Praise be to the Most Merciful!
Now it came to pass that night that our party
settled down to sleep earlier than usual, Monsieur
Lapandery and Kbira on the cushions in their
apartment, with the curtain down to keep out too
much night air; old Si Lhassen and his grandson,
in the storeroom with their heads on the bag of
silver douros; and I on my silk mattress outside in
our little court. The moonlight flooded everything
with the whiteness of hoar-frost, and made gleam-
264 OLD MOROCCO
ing metallic ripples in the little spattering foun-
tain, and shone strangely on the talismanic hand of
Fatima that formed one huge iron hinge of the
mysterious door from behind which we had heard
the careless laughter of women. My bed was in
the shadowed angle of the wall protected from the
brilliant white moonlight, and I lay listening to the
perfect silence, waiting for the monotonous tinkle
of the fountain to put me to sleep.
Then the lock of the mysterious door grated, the
door opened, and a lovely young girl with a two-
stringed lute in one hand and a felt prayer-cushion
in the other, appeared. She gives a swift glance
around, walks to the fountain and sits partly in the
shadow of an almond tree, with her exquisite profile
turned toward me, and one little bai*e foot peeping
out from her. dark-hued caftan into the moonlight.
No, she cannot be a vision, or she should be playing
a dulcimer and singing of Mount Abora. But she
plays a two-stringed lute called a rhab, a very flat
toned, strange-sounding instrument, out of which
she makes music as plaintive as the cry of a tired
child and as monotonous as the plash of the foun-
tain. She should be described by an Arab, not
by an occidental, and, in fact, she was described by
a poet fourteen hundred years ago in the Arabian
desert:
THE DAMSEL WITH THE LUTE 265
When the Pleiades shone in the heavens.
Glorious as a belt sown with precious stones,
I came to her.
With her day garments laid aside
She was clad only in a light rohe.
She waited for me behind the curtain of her tent.
She is like a pure pearl,
The shell of which hath a delicate cloudy whiteness,
A pearl nourished by kindly waters uTthe deep seas.
She turns aside;
She shows me the profile of a lovely cheek,
She looks in my eyes,
And her eyes show the softness of the antelope of Wadjra
Watching over her fawn.
Her neck has the grace of that of a white gazelle,
But the gazelle's neck is not covered with jewels like hers.
Her long hair, glossy black, falls gracefully over her shoulders,
Thick as a palm branch laden with dates.
In the morning her bed is perfumed with musk.
She sleeps long after the rising of the sun,
For she does not need to wear the dress and the girdle
Of those who labor.
The radiance of her brow scatters the shadows of night,
Even as a torch lighted by a hermit in his cave.
Time calms the wild desires of most lovers,
But nothing, O my Love, shall make my heart forget
The passion it feels for thee ! *
The adorable little damsel goes on strumming
her melancholy lute slowly, very slowly, always
looking at the moonlit ripples in the tiny basin.
Then in a soft, scarcely audible voice she sings a
homesick little tune that I cannot understand, but
it is full of yearning and tears, of longing for some
* Imr El Kais.
266 OLD MOROCCO
far-away oasis, or for her first lover, perhaps a
dark lithe-bodied Mauretainian garbed in blue.
She stops singing and sits motionless, gazing long
and silently at the fountain. The only way I can
explain her being here is that the news of our in-
tended departure was spread all through the pal-
ace, but the reversal of our plans by the calipha
was not known in the women's quarters. And her
master, the cai'd, is still away from home. In any
case, here she is, and I am broad awake and not
dreaming.
A faint stir of night air breathes over the court;
an almond leaf flutters down and floats like a little
boat in the basin of the fountain. My elbow is
cramped, but I am afraid to stir lest she should
know I am here and run frightened away. She re-
mains motionless with her chin resting in her little
henna-stained hand. And then I am afraid she
may go away and not know that I am here ! I wish
to speak to her, but how shall I begin? "Hail, for-
eign wonder?' 5 or, "Most sure the goddess on whom
these airs attend?" No, neither Milton nor Shake-
speare ever had just this situation to manage,
Finally, I begin simply with, "Good-evening, ma
cheriel" in the gentlest Arabic my Nazarene tongue
can use. She starts suddenly like an animal sur-
prised in the woods, is about to run, and then hesi-
THE DAMSEL WITH THE LUTE 267
tates, staring wide-eyed at my corner sheltered
from the moonlight. And I think of the old poet's
phrase about the antelope of TVadjra. Xow
verily, there is no might and there is no majesty
save in Allah, the glorious, the great! For of all
the greetings I might have chosen this was the one
to make her hesitate, for it turned out that her
name was Aziza ("Sweetheart"), the same as that
of my lady mule, and out of sheer curiosity she did
not immediately run away*
But the conversation so auspiciously begun stops
here, for, beyond a few words she does not under-
stand Arabic. I try some polite Shelluh phrases,
but we do not get on, for not only is my pronun-
ciation none of the best, but her dialect does not
sound like that I have heard around us here. She
makes me understand that she comes from a far
country, from a tribe who Eve under the tent, far
beyond the ancient oasis of Tafilalet, down in the
unknown Sahara. I try to remember a few phrases
from Arabic love songs,
It is not in the midst of the tribe to which thou bdongest
That thon dost really dwell;
Thy true lodging is in thy lover's heart
Of course she does not understand the words,
but I think she guesses what they mean.
268 OLD MOROCCO
Whenever I meet thee,
E'en though it be the middle of the night.
Then I think I see the radiant dawn!
And still she listens, but does not say a word,
I only look at the stars of heaven
Because they remind me of thine eyes !
For a long time we gaze at each other without
speaking. Then I ask Aziza, with a sign and
smile if I may go and sit beside her. She violently
shakes her head and the silver bangles in her
jewelled ears tinkle musically. I disregard her
refusal and sit beside her in the shadow of the little
almond tree. Another leaf flutters down and floats
in the fountain, and we both watch it silently for
a long time. Then she looks up into my face and
smiles. "Bow, arrow, and sword are all in her
glance."
And I take her little henna-stained hand in
mine.
Suddenly the perfect silence of the night was
startled by the long drawn howl of a dog 'far off
somewhere, baying at the moon, a strangely mourn-
ful sound, unpleasantly breaking in on the idyllic
mood. Aziza looked frightened and withdrew her
little hand from mine. Then came a low growl
from behind the curtained doorway at my back,
and Lulu the hound thrust out his head and began
THE DAMSEL WITH THE LUTE 269
a long terrifying ululation, partly in surprise at
seeing Aziza, and partly in answer to this fellow
far off across the plain. Aziza's noiseless bare feet
quickly disappeared through the mysterious door-
way, and the key cruelly grated in the lock.
Monsieur Lapandery, now aroused, thrust his
head out from the curtain and made sharp remarks
to Lulu, who was still continuing to howl.
"Ah, Monsieur," he asked in surprise, "what are
you doing up so late?"
"Nothing," I replied, "just dreaming in the
moonlight."
Twelve
THE RETURN
O traveller devouring the desert -ways and solitudes,,
Thou art in the right path,
And thou shalt arrive safe and sound.
Go on, speed thy pace., journey night and day,
For thou goest on toward a glorious Evening Star.
ABQURREBIA EL OHARNATHI.
Twelve
THE RETCBN
THE nes morning the calipha's runner came
back from Taroudant, where the higher
native authorities had consulted with the French
mission posted there. A letter from the Bureau
des Renseignments very courteously advised us,
because of the imperfect security of the country,
not to attempt to pursue our journey further into
the Souss, but to go back over the mountains to
Marrakesh. We were, of course, unwilling to do
this, but we had ijo choice, for the calipha sent us
back with an escort of two soldiers. We had been
detained but eight days in this strange old palace-
fortress, but we felt we had been living this indo-
lent, eventless life for a vaguely indefinite period.
Time had ceased to have any significance and had
become a succession of dreaming moments, a list-
less, monotonous peace.
As we rode through the outer court for the last
time, past the old negresses at the well, past the
curious students looking down from the mosque
273
274 OLD MOROCCO
roof, and past the sleepy guards at the gate, I
wondered if Aziza's dark eyes were among those
that peered out of the gloom behind the mysterious
little blue latticed windows. We took our cere-
monious farewell of the calipha at the gate of his
castle and, with our native guards, set out across
the plain for a short-cut trail that quickly brought
us into the wild and rugged heart of the great
Southern Atlas.
!The first two days were without important inci-
dents for the party, but rich in the experience of
travelling through scenes unbelievably wonderful,
panoramas of gigantic mountains bathed in clear
light, vistas of dead volcanic valleys, lurid, sul-
phurous, and strange; torrents of icy water roar-
ing from rocky caverns, and terrible ascents up
almost impassable slopes. Once at nightfall we
passed a small clan of migrating tribesmen in a
temporary camp. The unloaded camels browsed
on the scanty vegetation or lay in ruminating tran-
quillity under the argan trees; the women were
squatting near a dozen fires that blazed under tea
kettles and kouskous bowls; and the men lay
stretched out at ease waiting for their evening meal.
And one night we spent in a melldh, or Jewish
village. Throughout Morocco the Jews live in
villages apart from the Moslems, or, in the cities,
below-
THE RETURN 277
they have special quarters assigned to them. Be-
fore I had dismounted, a young Jew came and
walked by my side and held the spout of a metal
teapot to my lips. It was full of maya, a drink
distilled from wild honey. This is a very merry
beverage, the same thing as the old English
metheglin; it makes the bees buzz round in your
head, the flavor of the honeycomb is in your mouth,
and the world seems a wonderful place to live in,
It was Friday night, and old black bearded Jews
in long white mantles newly washed for the Sab-
bath, crowded round us and bade us welcome.
Some of the younger women were very pretty, with
delicate features and "eyes like the fishpools of
Heshbon by the gate of Bathrabbim." Shy
groups of them, gay in their Sabbath dress and
conspicuous with silver jewelry, gazed down at us
from a nearby housetop, and discussed us in tanta-
lising whispers. An old mother in Israel, a tooth-
less hag of ninety years, sat in the gloomy doorway
of her hut and muttered things at us as we passed,
as Deborah might have against the Philistines;
and Rebecca carried us fresh water in a big earthen
jar from the village well. And Rahab was there
among the rest, ready to quote the seventh chapter
of Proverbs.
Although it was after sun-down and the Sabbath
278 OLD MOROCCO
had begun, when no stroke of work may be done in
Hhe mellah, one thrifty old Jacob, probably with a
mental reservation about helping asses fallen into
a pit, brought us a bowl of sour milk, a very tasty
kouskous and a jar of honey. We expressed our
appreciation of his hospitality, which he assured us
was not worth mentioning; but when we had eaten
the food, true to his racial traditions, he demanded
an exorbitant sum in payment. And one loath-
some old scoundrel whispered in our ears the in-
famous proposal of sending his two daughters to
our camp after nightfall.
Monsieur Lapandery and I enjoyed our excel-
lent supper and appreciated the rather potent
maya; but old Si Lhassen was not so happy, for
his religion not only made him a prohibitionist, but
also forbade him to touch food prepared by an
unbelieving Jew; furthermore, the only thing we
had left in the way of supplies was part of a ham,
the product of the accursed pig! Little Kbira,
who considers herself French, of course had no
scruples in such matters. I often wondered how
the silent old patriarch felt about the apostasy of
his daughter and granddaughter, even though it
brought great material advantages with it. But
probably he thought nothing of it at all, for women
THE RETURN 2 79
having no souls, their religion must be a matter of
small consequence.
The next afternoon we started on the trail that
leads up over the great lonely peak of Tizi Oui-
cheddan. From below, mighty crags loom over
our heads, forbidding and almost impassable. The
narrow, perplexing path we must climb is lost a
few yards above us, and the black hard face of the
cliff seems to go up hundreds of feet almost sheer
to the sharp sky line. The two agile soldiers of
our guard have climbed on ahead. My mule plants
her sure feet in the ledges and crevices that afford
her scanty footing; her straining neck reaches for-
ward and I lean over to keep the balance and
loosen my feet in the stirrups, ready to jump
should some stone in the path give way under us.
Half way up the ascent I look down and wonder
how we have been able to make the climb, which
seems as impossible from above as from below.
Kbira is riding behind Monsieur Lapandery's
saddle, her arms clutching his waist, for the path
is too difficult for her to ride her heavily loaded
mule. Kino is a sure-footed horse, but this is no
journey for a horse; he is much less sure of himself
in the mountains than the dogged, experienced
little mules.
280 OLD MOROCCO
In a very dangerous place, Kino's hind legs
slipped, and, frantically trying to save himself, he
slid toward the edge of the precipice. I was like one
in the throes of a terrible nightmare, compelled to
watch a ghastly tragedy going on a few yards
below me, and utterly powerless to help. The
scene, which chilled one's blood to watch, must have
taken but a few seconds, but it seemed to be going
on for many tense and terrible minutes. It was like
the experience of being in an aeroplane that is
sideslipping close to the ground; an eternity of
waiting for the inevitable final crash.
Kbira fell over the slope, but saved herself by
clutching a scraggy shrub twenty feet below.
Monsieur Lapandery, in his effort to save Kbira,
could not leap from his horse, but he and the animal
slid toward the slope together and stopped at the
very edge. A large loose boulder rolled on Mon-
sieur Lapandery and for a moment pinned him to
the rock; Kino was unhurt, but lay still, terribly
frightened. I rescued Kbira from her position,
bandaged Monsieur Lapandery 's injured hand and
badly bruised chest, and dealt out a generous ration
of maya to restore the shaken morale of the party.
Monsieur Lapandery protested that he was not
hurt, and after a short rest we resumed the climb.
In another hour, we reach the great barren peak in
THE RETURN 281
a fierce cold wind that blows from a still higher
snow-capped summit miles off to the north. The
sky over the distant mountains has turned a
threatening leaden blue, and thunder rumbles over
the valley into which we must descend. For the
first hour we lead the animals down the dangerous
slope, and then reach the zone of vegetation. We
halt in a wild olive grove to rest and allow the tired
animals time to eat.
Monsieur Lapandery now shows that he has been
badly hurt. His nerve has kept him up so far, but
his chest pains him severely and he breathes with
difficulty. We make a bed of rugs and blankets
for him under the wild olives. He becomes terribly
depressed in spirit and evidently can go no farther.
A wild rain storm is raging to the north; strange
misty masses of cloud, like grotesque Protean ani-
mals, detach themselves from the dark northern
sky and move rapidly over the high mountain
peaks; and fierce lightning-flashes tear the gloom
that hangs thickly over the lofty Djebel Mskrin.
The sun has set in the great valley below us, but
up here among the hills, its golden rays stream
through the western clouds and break into lights
and shadows on the hundred summits piled in con-
fusion around us. An amber shadowless glow fills
the sombre olive grove where we are resting.
282 OLD MOROCCO
Monsieur Lapandery, very pale beneath his
tanned skin, lay propped up on a pile of brilliant
rugs I had bought in the Souss. His fine spirit,
which I had never seen desert him before, seemed
to have gone. In a dull voice he talked of his past
life, of his serious boyhood in Burgundy, of his
education for the priesthood, and of his loss of faith
in everything except the power of God. And then
he told of his wandering life in the colonies, of his
aimless struggles, with the usual lack of success
of a rolling stone, of his constant dissatisfaction
with life, and of his final resignation to his growing
belief in oriental fatalism.
"This may be my last cigarette," he said in a tone
that implied that nothing mattered. "Well, if it is,
so be it! InshaJlah!'' Little Kbira was sitting be-
side him softly crying, and old Si Lhassen sat cross-
legged at a little distance, smoking his Mef pipe,
his wrinkled face placidly inscrutable.
Then Monsieur Lapandery talked of Kbira, of
how she had been the only interest of his life for
the last two years. When he discovered that be-
sides her childish charm she had a keenness and
aptitude for learning, he had devoted himself to
her training. Making a future for her had given
him a new ambition. Then, still talking in an
unaccustomed low voice, he made his will, leaving
THE RETURN 283
all his small property to Kbira. He closed his eyes
and remained silent for a long time. There was
no sound but the animals munching their barley
and little Kbira softly crying. After a few min-
utes, he opened his eyes and looked at the marvel-
lous scene before us, the lightning storm playing
round Djebel Mskrin away to the north, and the
uncanny quiet light in the wild olive grove.
"Lamartine would have loved to die here in this
wonderful spot high up among the eternal hills 1"
said he, clutching his bruised chest with one hand
and making a gesture with the other. At last I
had the key to the situation. He was a sentimen-
talist finding a melancholy pleasure in his own
painful emotions. As his pulse was strong and no
ribs were broken, I could not believe that he was as
badly off as he felt he was. He breathed with diffi-
culty and was doubtless in some pain, but he be-
longed to the romantic generation of Lamartine,
and could not resist indulging in deathbed emo-
tions in the most romantic spot in the world. I f eft
that the mood would eventually pass, and so I
played up to it as well as I could, meanwhile keep-
ing a careful eye out for any change in his actual
symptoms.
Suddenly he pulled himself together, and, start-
ing up to his feet, exclaimed, "But my work is
284 OLD MOROCCO
not yet finished!" and patted little Kbira's curly
head. And soon with some assistance he mounted
Kino, and we started on down the mountain, hop-
ing to camp at the junction of the Oued Agoundis
with the Oued Nfis. I kept near him on foot for
fear he might fall. "If I do not make it," he said,
"I wish to be buried there where the rivers meet."
Several times during the descent he reined in, and
in the mood of one reluctant to leave the beauty of
the world, which more than compensates for the
sorrow of it, exclaimed with a sweep of his injured
hand toward the glorious darkening mountains,
"Ah, que c'est beau, Monsieur Andrews! Que
c'est beau!"
At dark we reached the camping spot and made
preparations for the night. The two Shelluh sol-
diers who had protested all along that they were
ordered to take us to the kasba of the Goundafi at
the upper end of the valley, now became unruly
and showed ugly symptoms. We refused to go to
the kasba because the detour would considerably
lengthen the journey, and we feared we might be
detained for several days more. The soldiers, how-
ever, preferred the fleshpots of the chief's castle
to a night in the open. I ordered Si Lhassen to
unpack the mules and busied myself with pretend-
ing to polish my very efficient-looking automatic.
A HALT FOR LUNCH. THE ATLAS TRAIL.
The author and little Kbira are ho:
Si Lhassen's tough chickens boil. The two cooks are L .
of the caid sent to accompany the party over the mountains.
2S5
THE RETURN 287
The soldiers at once dropped their threatening
manner and went off in search of food. In an hour
they returned with nothing, and as Si Lhassen's
efforts in the nearest village were unsuccessful,
there was nothing for it but to go supperless to bed.
Monsieur Lapandery had a little fever, and his
hurts were so painful that he could not sleep. I
made my bed beside him and lay awake till early
morning, drinking strong cold tea and smoking a
very old and very consoling pipe. I dreamily
spelled out the constellations until the late moon
came up and blotted most of them out. It was my
turn to become the sentimentalist enjoying emo-
tions. I thought of the astrologers and the lovers
and the dreamers who had puzzled over the stars
in this same valley six hundred years ago, when
these Atlas tribes had suddenly developed into a
militant power that conquered Morocco. Not ten
miles up the valley are the ruins of Tinmel, in the
eleventh century a rival of Marrakesh, a city of
perhaps a hundred thousand souls, which a great
barbarian queen destroyed centuries ago. And
to-day there is nothing left but the fragment of a
mosque and a great desolate cemetery, where
greedy natives dig for buried treasure among the
broken tombs.
288 OLD MOROCCO
If you would know the age of the world, my brothers,
Ask of the changeless stars Fakarden,
How many races and realms of earth they have seen
Following one another on through time,
And how long each endured.
And ask them how long it has been since days
Have followed in succession, day by day,
And for how many nights their shining fires
Have lighted the ways of travellers o'er the world.*
The injured man tossed restlessly at my side,
the Oued Nfis gurgled sullenly over the stones in
its half dry bed, and the jackals barked as they
came down from the hills to drink. By three
o'clock mule caravans began to go by, the drivers
singing their strangely beautiful yodels, one an-
swering another as they filed into the valley, and
the mountains echoed refrains. The yodels were
punctuated by the sharp calls to the mules, "Arrr
Zit! Zitr to urge them on, and ff Shook! Shook!
Ou&ay!" to hold them in. At dawn a flock of bleat-
ing sheep passed, pushing and crowding to drink
from the river. One shepherd lad carried a new-
born lamb on his arm, and the other, a laugh-
ing young barbarian, thumped a pottery tom-tom,
and I heard his sprightly rhythms blending with
the bleating of the sheep, as they passed down into
the river gorge.
After a morning's rest, Monsieur Lapandery
*Abou Ela El Moani
THE RETURN 2 89
was able to continue the journey. We got rid of
the two objectionable Shelluh soldiers by paying
them well, and sent them back to the Souss, and we
started on our way north. During the afternoon
and the next morning we went back through the
wonderful valley of the Oued Nfis, superb in its
wild scenery and fascinating with its primitive
population living in terraced cliff-dwellings and
picturesque mountain castles. The rest of our way
led through territory we had not traversed on the
trip south.
We passed a delightful day as the guests of the
Sheik Assou Ben Abderrahman, an old friend of
Monsieur Lapandery, His agadir is in the midst
of an upland valley in the marvellously beautiful
hill-slopes of the lower Atlas. The lovely spot is
called in Shelluh the "Liver of the Mountains.'*
The liver among the Berbers, as it was with the
ancient Greeks, is the seat of the affections, and
so is used where we should say "heart." The trail
into this mountain paradise winds for hours
through a flowery, bowery way, over-arched with
tangles of trailing vines of white clematis and
incense-breathing honeysuckle, varied with orange-
coloured wild rose fruits and purple-stained elder
berries, or occasionally the scarlet splash of joy of
a ripe pomegranate, from seeds blown south from
290 OLD MOROCCO
the garden of the Hesperides, On three sides of
the agadir steep summits rise two thousand feet
above the valley. Down the side of one of them
rushes an icy stream that tears a deep gully
through the hollow, and waters flourishing groves
of figs and olives and hanging, terraced patches of
millet and melon vines.
The Sheik Assou Ben Abderrahman receives us
most courteously, and feeds us with the usual boun-
tiful hospitality of a Moorish chieftain. We are
left in a little tower chamber to rest and sleep
through the afternoon, lulled into drowsiness by the
roaring stream, the wild doves moaning in the fig
trees, the intensely shrill, hot cry of innumerable
cicalas, and the buzzing of a million flies. At six in
the evening I go down the valley for a bath in an
icy-cold pool I have discovered, below a little water-
fall, and revel in the sharp contrast between the
stifling heat of the afternoon and the coldness
of this mountain stream. Two young Shelluh
girls driving diminutive cattle, come by and frankly
stare at me. The astonishment at suddenly dis-
covering a white, naked, and apparently insane
European splashing about under a waterfall and
diving into a boiling torrent pool, is so great that
they quite forget the proprieties. Perhaps they
take me for some crazy djinn, and will ask the local
THE RETURN 291
sorcerer for another protective amulet to add to the
collection around their necks.
After our tea with hot pancakes and butter and
honey, we sit on the roof of the square kasba tower
and wait for dinner. Here we enjoy the same calm
evening scenes that we have met everywhere in the
Moroccan countryside. Far across the hillsides the
flocks wind straggling down to fold, labourers come
by singing from the threshing-floor, and the sounds
of a lonesome pipe, or the desultory rhythm of the
omnipresent tom-tom floats on the air. Distant
lights begin to appear in the little villages, a mys-
terious bright beacon fire flashes high up on a
mountain top, and a cool fresh breeze stirs through
the valley.
After dinner old Si Lhassen lights his kief pipe
and tells a quaint folk-tale to little Kbira, who
sleepily cuddles up to him and listens, as children
always have, everywhere in the world, ever since
there have been grandfathers who knew animal
stories. I lay rolled in a blanket and listened to
the old man mumbling over the tale and little Kbira
quietly chuckling.
Once upon a time an ass, a cock, a sheep, and a
sleugi-dog all lived together in the courtyard of a
woman's house. The woman was going to have
a child. From time to time she became very peev-
*92 OLD MOROCCO
ish. She made so much trouble about the animals
in the yard that they became afraid. The sleugi-
dog said that next she would boil the cock for soup
and kill the sheep for his fleece, and beat the ass and
himself out of the house with rods. So they took
counsel together. All decided that it would be
safer to go and live in the mountains. They went
off to the mountains and lived in a cave.
One day the cock was scratching about. He
found a pit in which men had hidden a quantity
of grain. The ass ate greedily of the grain and
soon became very thirsty. The cock told him to
go down to the brook and drink but not to make
any noise. The ass went down and drank, and the
grain in his belly began to swell. Soon he became
very ill. He rolled on the ground and hee-hawed
wildly. A hyena heard the noise and came to the
place. He was going to eat the ass. The ass told
the hyena that he had three friends, a cock, a sheep,
and a dog who would make better eating. He was
too old and tough. He led the hyena up to the
cave. The sleugi-dog saw them coming and knew
what had happened. He told the cock and the
sheep to pretend to give the hyena a fair reception.
The ass and the hyena reached the cave. The cock
and the sheep went out to say, Salamolek! and
pretended to kiss his shoulder in humility. The
cock flew at the hyena and pecked out his eyes.
And the sheep butted him to death against the
rock. They took the hyena's skin and dried it in
the sun.
Another day the cock was scratching about. He
found another pit in which men had hidden a quan-
THE RETURN 293
tity of grain. The ass ate greedily (and so on as
before. A second hyena appears and in the same
way is brought to the cave). The cock and the
sheep and the sleugi-dog greet the hyena respect-
fully. The cock says to the sleugi-dog, "Go get
the hyena skin. Our guest wishes to sit down."
The cock fetches the skin. "No, take that back
and bring a finer one," says the cock. The sleugi-
dog takes the skin away. He comes back again
with the same skin. "No, not that one," says the
cock. "There is a finer, bigger one." The sleugi-
dog goes away again with the skin. The hyena
becomes frightened. This must be a bad place for
hyenas. He decides to run away. And so the ani-
mals escaped a second time.
After this, the story wandered on for many more
episodes, but I was very sleepy. I lay listening and
staring dreamily up at Leda's swan, until some-
how it turned into a hyena. And I never heard
the rest of the tale.
From the "Liver of the Mountains" to Marra-
kesh was a very long day's ride from early morn-
ing till nine at night, with three hours* midday
halt. We reluctantly left the wonderful green val-
ley and filed down past the fig orchard and the hill
slopes, where the dark olive trees still dreamed in
the dawn, and the early breeze ruffling the silvery
underside of their foliage, made pale waves in
294 OLD MOROCCO
sea of green. We soon struck the Oued Reraia,
where the place-names begin to fill in the sketchy
thin outlines on the map. The trail from here on
is broad and level, passing through a thickly popu-
lated and well-watered region, where innumerable
streams from the hills meet the Oued and try to
replenish its shrinking volume, as it winds slug-
gishly through a broad valley, which opens out into
the plain. Just before we left the foothills we
passed the famous Marabout shrine of Sidi
Brahim, which we could just glimpse far above our
heads on the edge of the cliff. The trails, which
lead here from every direction, are cluttered with
cairns heaped by pious pilgrims, who throng, in
certain seasons, from all parts of southern Morocco,
and as they approach the sacred shrine, purify
themselves with prayers and penances, of which
these stones remain as memorials. Farther on
down the trail, a little flume sluiced off from the
Oued, turns the lumbering wheel of an old stone
mill that leans in mournful dilapidation against
a huge rock.
The last stage of the journey, a blazing after-
noon through the terrible treeless plain, without a
single shadow to relieve the pitiless glare, seemed
the hardest of all the hard ways we had travelled.
For hours and hours we watched the Koutoubia
THE RETURN 295
tower grow from a small speck, scarcely visible
through the shimmering heat waves vibrating over
the brown dust, to a lighthouse towering above a
green sea of palms. At sunset, as we crept slowly
on toward our goal, the oasis city of Marrakesh
loomed vast and splendid, its ancient walls drenched
in the blood of the sun, its minarets of glowing
turquoise reaching up over rose-brown roofs and
sombre cypresses and palms. As the twilight
deepened, silhouetted flocks of sheep and hurrying,
belated caravans moved toward the ten great city
gates, and night shut down over the roofs and
courtyards that enclose the thousand mysteries of
Moorish life, and the lonely stars brooded over the
walls and mosques, with their terrible memories and
mournful dreams.
THE END
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