has but few show places, for the place itself is the show. You can find
your best entertainment in picking your way through its winding, narrow
streets, and in wandering about the open market-places. The highways of
Tangier are all very crooked and very steep. They are also very uneven
and dirty, and one walks sometimes for hundreds of yards in a maze of
dark alleys and little passageways walled in by whitewashed walls, and
sheltered from the sun by archways and living-rooms hanging from one
side of the street to the other. Green and blue doorways, through which
one must stoop to enter, open in from the street, and you are constantly
hearing them shut as you pass, as some of the women of the household
recognize the presence of a foreigner. You are never quite sure as to
what you will meet in the streets or what may be displayed at your elbow
before the doors of the bazars. The odors of frying meat and of fresh
fruit and of herbs, and of soap in great baskets, and of black coffee
and hasheesh, come to you from cafes and tiny shops hardly as big as a
packing-box. These are shut up at night by two half-doors, of which the
upper one serves as a shield from the sun by day and the lower as a pair
of steps. In the wider streets are the bazars, magnificent with color
and with the glitter of gold lace and of brass plaques and silver
daggers; handsome, comfortable-looking Moors sit crossed-legged in the
middle of their small extent like soldiers in a sentry-box, and speak
leisurely with their next-door neighbor without gesture, unless they
grow excited over a bargain, and with a haughty contempt for the passing
Christian. There is always something beneficial in feeling that you are
thoroughly despised; and when a whole community combines to despise you,
and looks over your head gravely as you pass, you begin to feel that
those Moors who do not apparently hold you in contempt are a very poor
and middle-class sort of people, and you would much prefer to be
overlooked by a proud Moor than shaken hands with by a perverted one.
But the pride of the rich Moorish gentlemen is nothing compared to the
fanatic intolerance of the poor farmers from the country of the tribes
who come in on market-day, and who hate the Christian properly as the
Koran tells them they should. They stalk through the narrow street with
both eyes fixed on a point far ahead of them, with head and shoulders
erect and arms swinging. They brush against you as though you were a
camel or a horse, and had four legs on which to stand instead of two.
Sometimes a foreigner forgets that these men from the desert, where the
foreign element has not come, are following out the religious training
of a lifetime, and strikes at one of them with his riding-whip, and then
takes refuge in a consulate and leaves on the next boat.
I find it very hard not to sympathize with the Moors. The Englishman is
always preaching that an Englishman's house is his castle, and yet he
invades this country, he and his French and Spanish and American
cousins, and demands that not only he shall be treated well, but that
any native of the country, any subject of the Sultan, who chooses to
call himself an American or an Englishman shall be protected too. Of
course he knows that he is not wanted there; he knows he is forcing
himself on the barbarian, and that all the barbarian has ever asked of
him is to be let alone. But he comes, and he rides around in his baggy
breeches and varnished boots, and he gets up polo games and cricket
matches, and gallops about in a pink coat after foxes, and asks for
bitter ale, and complains because he cannot get his bath, and all the
rest of it, quite as if he had been begged to come and to stop as long
as he liked. Sometimes you find a foreigner who tries to learn something
of these people, a man like the late Mr. Leared or "Bebe" Carleton, who
can speak all their dialects, and who has more power with the Sultan
than has any foreign minister, and who, if the Sultan will not pay you
for the last shipment of guns you sent him, or for the grand-piano for
the harem, is the man to get you your money. But the average foreign
resident, as far as I can see, neither adopts the best that the Moor has
found good, nor introduces what the Moor most needs, and what he does
not know or care enough about to introduce for himself. Tangier, for
instance, is excellently adapted by nature for the purposes of good
sanitation, but the arrangements are as bad and primitive as they were
before a foreigner came into the place. They consist in dumping the
refuse of the streets, into which everything is thrown, over the
sea-wall out on the rocks below, where the pigs gather up what they
want, and the waves wash the remainder back on the coast.
[Illustration: SANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL]
If some of the foreign ministers would use their undoubted influence
with the Bashaw to amend this, instead of introducing point-to-point
pony races, they might in time show some reason for their invasion of
Morocco other than the curious and obvious one that they all grow rich
there while doing nothing. The foreign resident has a very great
contempt for the Moor. He says the Moor is a great liar and a rogue.
When people used to ask Walter Scott if it was he who wrote the Waverley
Novels he used to tell them it was not, and he excused this afterwards
by saying that if you are asked an impertinent or impossible question
you have the right not to answer it or to tell an untruth. The very
presence of the foreigner is an impertinence in the eyes of the Moor,
and so he naturally does not feel severe remorse when he baffles the
foreign invader, and does it whenever he can.
As a matter of fact, the foreign invader at Tangier is not, in a number
of cases, in a position in which he can gracefully throw down gauntlets.
There is something about these hot, raw countries, hidden out of the way
of public opinion and police courts and the respectability which drives
a gig, that makes people forget the rules and axioms laid down in the
temperate zone for the guidance of tax-payers and all reputable
citizens. As the sailors say, "There is no Sunday south of the equator."
It is hard to tell just what it is, but the sun, or the example of the
barbarians, or the fact that the world is so far away, breeds queer
ideas, and one hears stories one would not care to print as long as the
law of libel obtains in the land. You have often read in novels,
especially French novels, or have heard men on the stage say: "Come, let
us leave this place, with its unjust laws and cruel bigotry. We will go
to some unknown corner of the earth, where we will make a new home. And
there, under a new flag and a new name, we will forget the sad past, and
enter into a new world of happiness and content."
When you hear a man on the stage say that, you can make up your mind
that he is going to Tangier. It may be that he goes there with somebody
else's money, or somebody else's wife, or that he has had trouble with a
check; or, as in the case of one young man who was feted and dined
there, had robbed a diamond store in Brooklyn, and is now in Sing Sing;
or, as in the case of a recent American consul, had sold his protection
for two hundred dollars to any one who wanted it, and was recalled under
several clouds. And you hear stories of ministers who retire after
receiving an income of a few hundred pounds a year with two hundred
thousand dollars they have saved out of it, and of cruelty and bursts of
sudden passion that would undoubtedly cause a lynching in the chivalric
and civilized states of Alabama or Tennessee. And so when I heard why
several of the people of Tangier had come there, and why they did not
go away again, I began to feel that the barbarian, whose forefathers
swept Spain and terrorized the whole of Catholic Europe, had more reason
than he knew for despising the Christian who is waiting to give to his
country the benefits of civilization.
Tangier's beauty lies in so many different things--in the monk-like garb
of the men and in the white muffled figures of the women; in the
brilliancy of its sky, and of the sea dashing upon the rocks and
tossing the feluccas with their three-cornered sails from side to side;
and in the green towers of the mosques, and the listless leaves of the
royal palms rising from the centre of a mass of white roofs; and, above
all, in the color and movement of the bazars and streets. The streets
represent absolute equality. They are at the widest but three yards
across, and every one pushes, and apparently every one has something to
sell, or at least something to say, for they all talk and shout at once,
and cry at their donkeys or abuse whoever touches them. A water-carrier,
with his goat-skin bag on his back and his finger on the tube through
which the water comes, jostles you on one side, and a slave as black and
shiny as a patent-leather boot shoves you on the other as he makes way
for his master on a fine white Arabian horse with brilliant trappings
and a huge contempt for the donkeys in his way. It is worth going to
Tangier if for no other reason than to see a slave, and to grasp the
fact that he costs anywhere from a hundred to five hundred dollars. To
the older generation this may not seem worth while, but to the present
generation--those of it who were born after Richmond was taken--it is a
new and momentous sensation to look at a man as fine and stalwart and
human as one of your own people, and feel that he cannot strike for
higher wages, or even serve as a parlor-car porter or own a barbershop,
but must work out for life the two hundred dollars his owner paid for
him at Fez.
There is more movement in Tangier than I have ever noticed in a place of
its size. Every one is either looking on cross-legged from the bazars
and coffee-shops, or rushing, pushing, and screaming in the street. It
is most bewildering; if you turn to look after a particularly
magnificent Moor, or a half-naked holy man from the desert with wild
eyes and hair as long as a horse's mane, you are trodden upon by a
string of donkeys carrying kegs of water, or pushed to one side by a
soldier with a gun eight feet long.
There is something continually interesting in the muffled figures of the
women. They make you almost ashamed of the uncovered faces of the
American women in the town; and, in the lack of any evidence to the
contrary, you begin to believe every Moorish woman or girl you meet is
as beautiful as her eyes would make it appear that she is. Those of the
Moorish girls whose faces I saw were distinctly handsome; they were the
women Benjamin Constant paints in his pictures of Algiers, and about
whom Pierre Loti goes into ecstasies in his book on Tangier. Their robe
or cloak, or whatever the thing is that they affect, covers the head
like a hood, and with one hand they hold one of its folds in front of
the face as high as their eyes, or keep it in place by biting it between
their teeth.
The only time that I ever saw the face of any of them was when I
occasionally eluded Mahamed and ran off with a little guide called
Isaac, the especial protector of two American women, who farmed him out
to me when they preferred to remain in the hotel. He is a particularly
beautiful youth, and I noticed that whenever he was with me the cloaks
of the women had a fashion of coming undone, and they would lower them
for an instant and look at Isaac, and then replace them severely upon
the bridge of the nose. Then Isaac would turn towards me with a shy
conscious smile and blush violently. Isaac says that the young men of
Tangier can tell whether or not a girl is pretty by looking at her feet.
It is true that their feet are bare, but it struck me as being a
somewhat reckless test for selecting a bride. I will recommend Isaac to
whoever thinks of going to Tangier. He speaks eight languages, is
eighteen years old, wears beautiful and barbarous garments, and is
always happy. He is especially good at making bargains, and he
entertained me for many half-hours while I sat and watched him fighting
over two dollars more or less with the proprietors of the bazars. He was
an antagonist worthy of the oldest and proudest Moor in Tangier. He had
no respect for their rage or their contempt or their proffered bribes or
their long white beards. Sometimes he would laugh them to scorn--them
and their prices; and again he would talk to them sadly and plaintively;
and again he would stamp and rage and slap his hands at them and rush
off with a great show of disgust, until they called him back again, when
he and they would go over the performance once more with unabated
interest. Mahamed always paid them what they asked, and got his
commission from them later, as a guide should; but Isaac would storm and
finally beat them down one-half. Isaac can be found at the Calpe Hotel,
and is welcome to whatever this notice may be worth to him.
[Illustration: A WOMAN OF TANGIER]
I had read in books on Morocco and had been given to understand that
when you were told that the price of anything in a bazar was worth three
dollars, you should offer one, and that then the Moor would cry aloud to
Allah to take note of the insult, and would ask you to sit down and have
a cup of coffee, and that he would then beat you up and you would beat
him down, and that at the end of two or three hours you would get what
you wanted for two dollars. It struck me that this, if one had several
months to spare and wanted anything badly enough, might be rather
amusing. The first thing I saw that I wanted badly was a long gun, for
which the Moor asked me twelve dollars. I offered him eight. I then
waited to see him tear his beard and unwrap his turban and cry aloud to
Allah; but he did none of these things. He merely put the gun back in
its place and continued the conversation, which I had so flippantly
interrupted, with a long-bearded friend. And no further remarks on my
part affected him in the least, and I was forced to go away feeling very
much ashamed and very mean. The next day a man at the hotel brought in
the gun, having paid fourteen dollars for it, and said he would not sell
it for fifty. We would pay much more than that for it at home, which
shows that you cannot always follow guide-books.
There are only five things the guides take you to see in Tangier--the
cafe chantant, the governor's palace, the prisons, and the harem, to
which men are not admitted. They also take you to see the markets, but
you can see them for yourself. The markets are bare, open places covered
with stones and lined with bazars, and on market-days peopled with
thousands of muffled figures selling or trying to sell herbs and eggs
and everything else that is eatable, from dates to haunches of mutton.
It is a wonderfully picturesque sight, with the sun trickling through
the palm-leaf mats overhead on the piles of yellow melons at your feet,
and with strings of camels dislocating their countenances over their
grain, and dancing-men and snake-charmers and story-tellers, as eloquent
as actors, clamoring on every side.
The cafe chantant is a long room lined with mats, and with rugs
scattered over the floor, on which sit musicians and the regular
customers of the place, who play cards and smoke long pipes, with which
they rap continually on the tin ash-holders. The music is very strange,
to say the least, and the singing very startling, full of sudden pauses,
and beginning again after one of these when you think the song is over.
It is not a particularly exciting place to visit, but there is no choice
between that and the hotel smoking-room. Tangier is not a town where one
can move about much at night. There is also a place where the guests
tell you that you can see Moorish women dance the dance which so
startled Paris in the Algerian exhibit at the exposition. As I had no
desire to be startled in that way again, I did not go to see them, and
so cannot say what they are like. But it is quite safe to say that any
visitor to Tangier who thinks he is seeing anything that is real and
native to the home life of the people, and that is not a show gotten up
by the guides, is going to be greatly taken in. The harem to which they
lead women is not a harem at all, but the home of the widow of an
ex-governor, who sits with her daughters for strange women to look at.
It is a most undignified proceeding on the part of the widow of a dead
Bashaw, and no one but the guides know what she is doing. I came to
find out about it through some American women who went there with Isaac
in the morning, and were taken to call at the same place by an English
lady resident in the afternoon. The English woman laughed at them for
thinking they had seen the interior of a harem, and they did not tell
her that they had already visited her friends and paid their franc for
admittance to their society.
The other show places are the governor's palace and the prisons. The
palace is a very handsome Moorish building, and the prisons are very
dirty. All that the tourist can see of them is the little he can discern
through a hole cut in the stout wooden door of each, which is the only
exit and entrance. You cannot see much even then, for the prisoners, as
soon as they discover a face at the opening, stick it full of the
palm-leaf baskets that they make and sell in order to buy food. The
government gives them neither water, which is expensive in Tangier, nor
bread, unless they are dying for want of it, but expects the family or
friends of each criminal to see that he is kept alive until he has
served out his term of imprisonment.
[Illustration: WATER-VENDER AT THE DOOR OF A PRIVATE HOUSE]
A great deal has been written about these prisons of the Sultan, and of
the cruelty shown to the inmates, notably of late by a Mr. Mackenzie in
the London _Times_. You are told that in Tangier, within the four square
walls of the prison, there are madmen and half-starved murderers and
rebels, loaded with chains, dying of disease and want, who are
tortured and starved until they die. For this reason no one in Morocco
is sentenced for more than ten or twelve years, so you are told, because
he is sure to die before that time has expired. It seemed to me that if
this were true it would be worth while to visit the prison and to tell
what one saw there. When I was informed that, with the exception of two
residents of Tangier, no one has been allowed to enter the Sultan's
prison for the last _ten years_, I suspected that there must be
something there which the Sultan did not want seen: it was not a
difficult deduction to make. So I set about getting into the prison. It
is not at all necessary to go into the details of my endeavors, or to
tell what proposals I made; it is quite sufficient to say that in every
way I was eminently unsuccessful. It was interesting, however, to find a
people to whom the arguments and inducements which had proved effective
with one's own countrymen were foolish and incomprehensible. For two
days I haunted the outer walls of the prison, and was smiled upon
contemptuously by the Bashaw's counsellors, who sat calmly in the cool
hallway of the palace, and watched me kicking impatiently at the stones
in the court-yard and broiling in the sun, while the governor or Bashaw
returned me polite expressions of his regret. I finally dragged the
Consul-General into it, and brought things to such a pass that I could
see no way out of it but my admittance to the prison or a declaration of
war from the United States.
Either event seemed to promise exciting and sensational developments.
Colonel Mathews, the Consul-General, did not, however, share my views,
but arranged that I should have an audience with the Bashaw, during the
course of which he promised he would bring up the question of my
admittance to the prison.
On board the _Fulda_, I had had the pleasure of sitting at table next to
the Rev. Dr. Henry M. Field, the editor of the _Evangelist_, and a
distinguished traveller in many lands. While on the steamer I had
twitted the doctor with not having seen certain phases of life with
which, it seemed to me, he should be more familiar, and I offered, on
finding we were making the same tour for the same purpose, to introduce
him to bull-fights and pig-sticking and cafes chantants, and other
incidents of foreign travel, of which he seemed to be ignorant. He
refused my offer with dignity, but I think with some regret. I was,
nevertheless, glad to find that he was in Tangier, and that he was to be
one of the party to call at the governor's palace. On learning of my
desire to visit the prison Dr. Field added his petition to mine, and I
am quite sure that Colonel Mathews wished we were both in the United
States.
We first called upon the Sultan's Minister of Foreign Affairs, who
received us in a little room leading from a pretty portico near the
street entrance. It was furnished, I was pained to note, not with divans
and rugs, but with a set of red plush and walnut sofas and chairs, such
as you would find in the salon of a third-rate French hotel. The
Minister of Foreign Affairs was a dear, kindly old gentleman, with a
fine white beard down to his waist, but he had a cold in his head, and
this kept him dabbing at his nose with a red bandanna handkerchief
rolled up in a ball, which was not in keeping with the rest of his
costume, nor with the dignity of his appearance. He and Dr. Field got on
very well; they found out that they were both seventy years of age, and
both highly esteemed in their different churches. Indeed, the Minister
of Foreign Affairs was good enough to say, through Colonel Mathews, that
Dr. Field had a good face, and one that showed he had led a religious
life. He rather neglected me, and I was out of it, especially when both
the doctor and the cabinet minister began hoping that Allah would bless
them both. I thought it most unorthodox language for Dr. Field to use.
We then walked up the hill upon which stand the fort, the prisons, the
treasury, and the governor's palace, and were received at the entrance
to the latter by the same gentlemen who had for the last two days been
enjoying my discomfiture. They were now most gracious in their manner,
and bowed proudly and respectfully to Colonel Mathews as we passed
between two rows of them and entered the hall of the palace. We went
through three halls covered with colored tiles and topped with arches of
ornamental scrollwork of intricate designs. At the extreme end of these
rooms the Bashaw stood waiting for us. He was the finest-looking Moor I
had seen; and I think the Moorish gentleman, though it seems a strange
thing to say, is the most perfect type of a gentleman that I have seen
in any country. He is seldom less than six feet tall, and he carries his
six feet with the erectness of a soldier and with the grace of a woman.
The bones of his face are strong and well-placed, and he looks kind and
properly self-respecting, and is always courteous. When you add to this
clothing as brilliant and robes as clean and soft and white as a
bride's, you have a very worthy-looking man. The Bashaw towered above
all of us. He wore brown and dark-blue cloaks, with a long
under-waistcoat of light-blue silk, yellow shoes, and a white turban as
big as a bucket, and his baggy trousers were as voluminous as Letty
Lind's divided skirts. He could not speak English, but he shook hands
with us, which Moors do not do to one another, and walked on ahead
through court-yards and halls and up stairways to a little room filled
with divans and decorated with a carved ceiling and tiled walls. There
we all sat down, and a soldier in a long red cloak and with numerous
swords sticking out of his person gave us tea, and sweet cakes made
entirely of sugar. As soon as we had finished one cup he brought in
another, and, noticing this, I indulged sparingly; but the doctor
finished his first, and then refused the rest, until the Consul-General
told him he must drink or be guilty of a breach of etiquette.
[Illustration: A STREET DANCER]
The Bashaw and Colonel Mathews talked together, and we paid the governor
long and laborious compliments, at which he smiled indulgently. He did
not strike me as being at all overcome by them; he had, on the contrary,
very much the air of a man of the world, and seemed rather to be bored,
but too polite to say so. He looked exactly like Salvini as Othello.
While the tea-drinking was going on we were making asides to Colonel
Mathews, and urging him to propose our going into the prison, which he
said he would do, but that it must be done diplomatically. We told him
we would give all the prisoners bread and water, or a lump sum to the
guards, or whatever he thought would please the Bashaw best. He and the
Bashaw then began to talk about it, and the doctor and I looked
consciously at the ceiling. The Bashaw said that never since he had been
governor of Tangier had he allowed either a native or a foreigner to
enter the prison; and that if a European did so, he would be torn to
pieces by the fanatics imprisoned there, who would think they were
pleasing Allah by abusing an unbeliever. Colonel Mathews also added, on
his own account, that we would probably catch some horrible disease. The
more they did not want us to go, the more we wanted to go, the doctor
rising to the occasion with a keenness and readiness of resource worthy
of a New York reporter after a beat. I can pay him no higher compliment.
After a long, loud, and excited debate the Bashaw submitted, and the
Consul-General won.