From Pillar to Pillar--Historic Souvenirs--Off to Africa--The
Sweetly Pretty Albert--Gibraltar by Moonlight--The
Chain-Gang--Across the Strait--A Difficult Landing--Albert is
Hurt--"Fat Mahomet"--The Calendar of the Centuries Put
Back--Tangier: the People, the Streets, the Bazaar--Our Hotel--A
Coloured Gentleman--Seeing the Sights--Local Memoranda--Jewish
Disabilities--Peep at a Photographic Album--The Writer's Notions on
Harem Life.
I WAS gradually getting into the mood of Pistol, and cried a foutra for
the world of business and worldlings base. My soul was longing for
"Africa and golden joys." Here I was at the elbow, so to speak, of the
mysterious Continent, where the geographers set down elephants for want
of towns. Why should I not visit it? I might never have such a chance
again. I stood in the shadow of one Pillar of Hercules. Why not make
pilgrimage to the other? Having notched Calpe on my staff, I resolved to
add Abyla to the record.
I was the more inclined to this, as I had recollection that Tangier had
been part of the British dominions for one-and-twenty years. In 1662
Catharine of Braganza, the "olivader-complexioned queen of low stature,
but prettily shaped," whose teeth wronged her mouth by sticking a little
too far out, brought it as portion of her dowry to Charles II. The 2nd,
or Queen's Own Regiment, was raised to garrison the post, and sported
its sea-green facings, the favourite colour of her Majesty, for long in
the teeth of the threatening Moors. The 1st Dragoons still bear the
nickname of "the Tangier Horse," and were originally formed from some
troops of cuirassiers who assisted in the defence of the African
stronghold for seventeen years; and the 1st Foot Regiment owes its title
of "Royal" to the distinction it gained by capturing a flag from the
Moors in 1680. That was the year when old John Evelyn noted in his diary
that Lord Ossorie was deeply touched at having been appointed Governor
and General of the Forces, "to regaine the losses we had lately
sustain'd from the Moors, when Inchqueene was Governor." His lordship
relished the commission so little--indeed, it was a forlorn errand--that
he took a malignant fever after a supper at Fishmongers' Hall, went
home, and died. In 1683 the Merry Monarch caused the works of Tangier to
be blown up, and abandoned the place, declaring it was not worth the
cost of keeping. The Merry Monarch was not prescient. A century
afterwards Gibraltar was indebted for a large proportion of its
supplies, during the great siege, to the dismantled and deserted
British-African fortress. For many reasons Tangier was not to be missed.
By a happy coincidence a party of three in the Club-House Hotel--a
retired army captain, his wife, and a lady companion--were anxious to
take a trip to Africa. We agreed to go together, and had scarcely made
up our minds, when another retired captain, who habitually resided in
Tangier, gratified us by the information that he was returning there,
and would be happy to give us every assistance in his power. Retired
Captain No. 1 was a jolly fellow, fond of good living and not
overburdened with aestheticism--a capital specimen of a hearty
Yorkshireman. He looked after the provand. His wife, portly and short of
temper, was as good-natured as he. She insisted on discharging the
bills. The lady-companion was thin, accomplished, and melancholy. She
kept us in sentiment. Retired Captain No. 2 was a fellow-countryman of
mine, bright-brained and waggish. He was the walking guide-book, with
philosophy and friendship combined. I was nigh forgetting one, and not
by any means the least important, member of the party--Albert. Mrs.
Captain introduced him to me as a sweetly pretty creature. At her
request I looked after him. Tastes vary as to what constitutes beauty,
but I candidly think a broad thick head, crop ears, a flattish nose, and
heavy jowls could not be called sweetly pretty without straining a
point; and all these Albert possessed. He was a bull-dog (I believe his
real name was Bill, and that he had been brought up in Whitechapel). As
a bull-dog he had excellent points, and might be esteemed a model of
symmetry and breeding by the fancy, or even pronounced a beauty and
exquisitely proportioned by connoisseurs; but sweetly pretty--never! I
could not stomach that, especially when Albert growled and laid bare his
ruthless set of sound white teeth.
Before leaving Gibraltar I had two novel sensations, nocturnal and
matutinal. The first was a view of the Bay by moonlight, the white
crescent shining clearly down on a portion of the inner waters brinded
by shipping, and on the outer spread of sleepy, cadenced wavelets
rippling phosphorescently under the pallid rays. By the Mole were
visible the outlines of barques, steamers, coal-brigs, and xebecs; away
to the left were the _Catapult_ and a few of her mosquito companions;
and far out rode at anchor a stately frigate of the United States'
fleet. The twinkling lamps of the city afloat sending out reddish lines,
and the fuller, clearer, luminous pencillings of the gas-lamps of the
city ashore, made a not ungrateful contrast to the quivering chart of
poetic moonbeams. Bending over their edge were the deep shadows of the
massive Rock; and bounding them, at the other side, the barren
foot-hills of Algeciras mellowed into a phantom softness by distance and
the night.
Next morning, as I strolled by the sea-wall towards the Ragged Staff
Battery, I saw a sight that took away my appetite for breakfast. Pacing
slowly to their work to the music of clanking chains was a column of
wretched convicts.[A] What haggard faces, with low foreheads, sunken
eyes, and dogged moody expression or utter blankness of expression!
Purely animal the most of that legion of despair and desperation looked,
and sallow and sickly of complexion. They were a blot on the fresh
sunshine. How hideous their coarse garb of pied jackets branded with the
broad arrow, their knickerbockers and clumsy shoes! Wistfully they moved
along, hardly daring to glance at me, through fear of the turnkeys with
loaded rifles marching at their sides. I almost felt that, if I had the
power, I would demand their release, as did the Knight of La Mancha that
of the criminals on their way to the galleys, although they might have
been as ungrateful as Gines de Passamonte; but those hang-dog
countenances banished impulses of chivalry.
The little steamer, the _Spahi_, which conveyed us across the Strait,
was seaworthy for all her cranky appearance, and made the passage of
thirty-two miles quickly and comfortably for all her roughness of
accommodation. She was a cargo-boat, but her skipper was English, and
did his best to make the ladies feel at home. Besides, Captain No. 1 had
brought a select basket of provisions and a case of dry, undoctored
champagne. One of our first experiences as we cleared Algeciras, with
turrets like our martello-towers sentinelling the hills, and the
three-masted wreck--"Been twenty-one days there," said the skipper, "and
not an effort has been made to raise it yet, and not even a warning
light is hung over it at night"--was to sight a bottle-nosed whale
puffing and spewing its predatory course.
"What are those ruins upon the Spanish shore for?" asked the
accomplished lady.
When she was informed that they were the beacons raised in the days of
old, when the Moorish corsairs haunted that coast, and that the moment
the pirate sail was descried in the offing (I hope this is correctly
nautical) the warning fire blazed by night, or the warning plume of
smoke went up by day, to summon Spain's chivalry to the rescue, she was
enchanted, and recited a passage from Macaulay's "Armada."
We made the transit in a little over three hours, and, rounding the
Punta de Malabata, cut into the Bay of Tangier, and eased off steam at
some distance from the Atlantic-washed shore. There is no pier, but a
swell and discoloration, projecting in straight line seawards, marks
where a mole had once stood. That was a piece of British handiwork; but
the Moor, who is no more tormented by the demon of progress than the
Turk, had literally let it slide, until it sank under the waters.
The Sultana of Moorish cities Tangier is sometimes called, and truly she
does wear a regal, sultana-like air as seen from afar, cushioned in
state on the hillside, her white flat roofs rising one above another
like the steps of a marble staircase, the tall minarets of the mosques
piercing the air, and the multitudinous many-coloured flags of all
nations fluttering above the various consulates. But in this, as in so
many other instances, it is distance which lends enchantment to the
view.
We went as near to the shore as we could in small boats, and when we
grounded, a fellowship of clamouring, unkempt, half-naked Barbary Jews,
skull-capped, with their shirts tied at their waists and short cotton
drawers, rushed forward to meet us, and carry us pickaback to dry land.
The ladies were borne in chairs, slung over the shoulders of two of
these amphibious porters, or on an improvised seat made by their linked
hands, but to preserve their equilibrium the dear creatures had to clasp
their arms tightly round the necks of the natives. This would not look
well in a picture, above all if the lady were a professional beauty. But
there was nothing wrong in it, any more than in Amaryllis clinging to
the embrace of Strephon in the whirling of a waltz. Custom reconciles to
everything. On stepping into the small boat I had my first difficulty
with Albert. I trod on his tail. The dog looked reproachfully, but did
not moan. His mistress scowled, and warned me to take care what I was
about for an awkward fool. Her husband, with a pained look on his face,
mutely apologized for her, and I humbly excused myself and vowed
amendment. I am not revengeful, but I did enjoy it when one of the
porters, tottering under the weight of the fat lady, made a false step
and nearly gave her a sousing. I clambered on my particular Berber's
back, dear Albert in my arms, and we splashed merrily along; but Captain
No. 1, who turned the scales at seventeen stone two pounds, had not so
uneventful a landing. Twice his bearer halted, and the warrior,
abandoning himself to his fate, swore he would make the Berber's nose
probe the sand if he stumbled.
As I was discharged on the beach, I was confronted by a majestic Moor.
His grave brown face was fringed with a closely-trimmed jet-black beard,
and his upper lip was shaded with a jet-black moustache. He wore a white
turban and a wide-sleeved ample garment of snowy white, flowing in
graceful folds below his knees; and on his feet were loose yellow
slippers, peaked and turned up at the toes. This was Mahomet Lamarty,
better known as "Fat Mahomet," who had acted as interpreter to the
British troops in the Crimea, and who, at this period, was making an
income by supplying subalterns from Gib with masquerade suits to take
home and horses to ride. Mahomet in his sphere was a great man. He was
none of your loquacious _valets de place_, no courier of the
Transcendental school. He had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and was a
Hadji; he was a chieftain of a tribe in the vicinity, and had fought in
the war against the Spanish infidels; he could borrow his purest and
finest Arab from the Kadi; he was free to the sacred garden of the
Shereef, or Pope-Sultan, one of the descendants of the Prophet, Allah be
praised!
Mahomet, who was known to both the Captains, passed our small
impedimenta through the custom-house--there is an orthodox custom-house,
though there is no proper accommodation for shipping--and we trailed at
his heels up the close, crowded, rough alleys which did duty as streets.
It would be hard to imagine a more thorough-going change than our scurry
across the waves had effected. We were in another world completely. We
had been transported as on the carpet of the magician. It was as if the
calendar had been put back for centuries, and the half-forgotten
personages of the "Thousand-and-One Nights" were revivified and had
their being around us.
Tangier is a walled and fortified town; but Vauban had no hand in the
fortifications, and it is my private opinion the walls would go down
before a peremptory horn-blast quicker than those of Jericho. It swarms
with a motley population much addicted to differences in shades of
complexion. The Tangerines exhaust the primitive colours and most of the
others in their features. There are lime-white Tangerines, copper and
canary-countenanced Tangerines, olive and beetroot-hued Tangerines,
Tangerines of the tint of the bottom of pots, Tangerines of every--no, I
beg to recall that, there are no well-defined blue or green Tangerines;
at least, none that came under my ken. The town is as old as the hills
and courageously uncivilized. There is no gasholder, no railway-station,
no theatre, no cab-stand, no daily paper, and no drainage board to go
into controversy over. It is unconsciously backward, near as it is to
Europe--a rifle-shot off the track of ships plying from the West to the
ports of the Mediterranean. It preserves its Eastern aroma with a fine
Moslem conservatism. Its ramparts of crumbling masonry are ornamented
with ancient cannon useless for offence, useless for defence. There is
said to be a saluting-battery; but the legend runs that the gunners
require a week's clear notice before firing a salute.[B] There is no
locomotion save in boxes and on the backs of quadrupeds; and quadrupeds
of the inferior order are usually, when overtaken by death, thrown in
the streets to decompose. But if the irregularity of the town would
galvanize the late Monsieur Haussmann in his grave, its situation would
satisfy the most exacting Yankee engineer. It is huddled in a sheltered
nest on the fringe of a land of milk and honey; it has the advantage of
a spread of level beach, and rejoices in the balmiest of climes.
The streets are so narrow that you could light a cigar from your
neighbour's window on the opposite side; but there is no window, neither
at this side nor the other. A hole with a grating is the only window
that is visible. Moors are jealous, and to be able to appreciate their
household comforts you must first succeed in turning their houses inside
out. Those who have dived into the recesses say the fruit is as savoury
as the husk is repulsive. The windowless houses with their backs
grudgingly turned to the thoroughfares are low for the most part, and
the thoroughfares are--oh! so crooked--zigzag, up and down, staggering
in a drunken way over hard cobble-stones and leading nowhere. There are
mosques and stores entered by horse-shoe arches, a bazaar dotted over
with squatting women, cowled with dirty blankets, selling warm
griddle-cakes; moving here and there are the same spectral figures,
similar dirty blankets veiling them from head to foot; over the way are
cylinders of mat, with nets caging the apertures at each end, to hold
the cocks and hens, rabbits and pigeons, brought for sale by Riffians,
descendants of the corsairs of that ilk, stalwart, brown, and
bare-legged, with heads shaven but for the twisted scalp-lock left for
the convenience of Asrael when he is dragging them up to Paradise.
Hebrews have their standings around, and deal in strips of cotton, brass
dishes, and slippers, or change money, or are ready for anything in the
shape of barter. Seated in the shade of that small niche in the wall, as
on a tailor's shop-board, is an adool, or public notary, selling advice
to a client; in the alcove next him is a worker in beads and filigree;
from a dusty forge beyond comes the clang of anvils, where half-naked
smiths are hammering out bits or fashioning horse-shoes. Mules with
Bedouins perched, chin on shin, amid the bales of merchandise on their
backs, cross the bazaar at every moment; or files of donkeys, stooping
under bundles of faggots, pick their careful way. By-and-by--but this is
not a frequent sight--a Moslem swell ambles past on a barb, gorgeous in
caparisons, the enormous peaked saddle held in its place by girths round
the beast's breast and quarters, and covered with scarlet hammer-cloth.
If we move about and examine the stalls, we see lumps of candied
sweetmeats here; charms, snuff-boxes made of young cocoanuts and beads
there; and jars of milk or baskets of dates elsewhere. At the fountain
yonder, contrived in the wall, mud approached by rugged, sloppy steps,
water-carriers, wide-mouthed negro slaves, male and female, with brass
curtain-rings in their ears, and skins blacker than the moonless
midnight, come and go the whole day long, and gossip or wrangle with
loafers in coarse mantles and burnous of stuff striped like
leopard-skin. Beside the silent, gliding, ghost-like Mahometan women and
the Hottentot Venus, you have Rebecca in gaudy kerchief and Dona Dolores
in silken skirt and lace mantilla from neighbouring Spain. In the
mingling crowd all is novelty, all is noise, all is queer and shifting
and diversified.
The hotel where we put up was owned by Bruzeaud, formerly a messman of a
British regiment. It was approached by a filthy lane, and commanded a
prospect of a square not much larger than a billiard-table. In the
middle of this square was the limp body of a deceased mongoose. At the
opposite side of it was a Mahometan school, where the children were
instructed in the Koran, and their treble voices as they recited the
inspired verses in unison kept up drone for hours. The build and
surroundings of the hostelry left much opening for improvement, but we
had no valid ground for complaint. The beds were clean, Bruzeaud was a
good cook, the waiter was attentive and smiled perpetually, which made
up for his stupidity; we had a single agreeable fellow-guest in a
Frenchman, who spoke Arabic, and had lived in the city of Morocco as a
pretended follower of the Prophet; and, besides, there was that dry
undoctored champagne, which it is permissible to drink at all meals in
Africa.
There was another hotel in Tangier, a more pretentious establishment,
owned by one Martin--surname unknown. Martin was a character. He was an
unmitigated coloured gentleman, blubber-lipped and black as the ace of
spades, with saffron-red streaks at the corners of his optics. He was a
native of one of the West India Islands, I believe, but I will not be
positive. Mahomet Lamarty pressed me to tell him in what English county
Englishmen were born black, and when I said in none, he gravely
ejaculated that in that case Martin was a liar, and habitually ate dirt.
To avert possible complications into which I might have been drawn, I
had to hasten to explain that Martin might possibly have been born in a
part of England known as the Black Country. He had served in the
steward's department on the ship of war where the Duke of Edinburgh,
then Prince Alfred and a middy, was picking up seamanship. Hence his
Jove-like hauteur. He had rubbed-skirts with Royalty, and to his
fetter-shadowed soul some of the divinity which hedges kings and their
relatives had adhered to him. I never met a darkey who could put on such
fearful and wonderful airs. Where he did not order he condescended. He
showed me an Irish constabulary revolver which he had received from "his
old friend, Lord Francis Conyngham--'pon honour, he was delighted to
meet him. It was good for sore eyes--who'd a-thought of his turning up
there!" Splendidly inflated Martin was when he spoke of "his servants."
This thing was entertaining until he grew presumptuous. If you are
polite to some people they are familiar, and want to take an ell for
every inch you have conceded. And then you have to tell them to keep
their place. But Martin, with the instincts of his race, saw in time
when it was coming to that. What a misery it must be for a coloured
gentleman of ambition that the tell-tale _odor stirpis_ cannot be
eliminated! Martin spent extraordinary amounts of money on the purchase
of essences, but to no effect; he could not escape from himself; the
scent of the nigger, _che puzzo!_ would hang round him still. He was a
great coward with all his magniloquence, and when cholera attacked
Tangier, left it in craven terror, and sequestered himself in a country
house a few miles off.
The two captains and I "did" Tangier conscientiously, with the zest of
Bismarck over a yellow-covered novel, and the thoroughness of a Cook's
tourist on his first invasion of Paris. We crawled into a stifling crib
of a dark coffee-house, and sucked thick brown sediment out of
liliputian cups; we smoked hemp from small-bowled pipes until we fell
off into a state of visionary stupor known as "kiff;" we paid our
respects to the Kadi, exchanged our boots for slippers, and settled down
cross-legged on mats as if we were the three tailors of Tooley Street;
we almost consented to have ourselves bled by a Moorish barber--Mahomet
Lamarty's particular, who lanced him in the nape of the neck every
spring--for the Moorish barber still practises the art of Sangrado, and
also extracts teeth. But in my note-taking I was sorely handicapped by
my ignorance of the language. Arabic is spoken in the stretch extending
from Tetuan to Mogador by the coast, and for some distance in the
interior; Chleuh is the dialect of the inhabitants of the Atlas range,
and Guinea of the negroes. Spanish is slightly understood in Tangier and
its vicinity, and is well understood by the Jews. The houses are
generally built of chalk and flint (_tabia_) on the ground-floor, and of
bricks on the upper story. Moorish bricks are good, but rough and
crooked in make. The houses inhabited by Jews are obliged to be coated
with a yellow wash, those of natives are white, those of Christians may
be of any colour. The Jews are made to feel that they are a despised
stock, and yet with Jewish subtlety and perseverance they have managed
to get and keep the trade of the place in their hands. That fact may be
plainly gathered from the absence of business movement in the bazaars
and public resorts of Tangier on the Jewish Sabbath. Your Hebrew does
not poignantly feel or bitterly resent being reviled and spat upon,
provided he hears the broad gold pieces rattling in the courier-bag
slung over his shoulder. He nurses his vengeance, but he has the common
sense to perceive that the readiest and fullest manner of exacting it is
by cozening his neighbour. At this semi-European edge of Africa he
enjoys comparative license, although he is forced to appear in skull-cap
and a long narrow robe of a dark colour something like a priest's
soutane. But the son of Israel when he has a taste for finery (and which
of them has not?) compensates for the gloom of his outer garment by
wearing an embroidered vest, a girdle of some bright hue, and white
drawers.
The daughters of Israel--but my conscience charges me with want of
gallantry towards them in a previous chapter, and now I can honestly
relieve it and win back their favour. They are the only beautiful women
who mollify the horizon of Tangier: the Mahometan ladies are not
visible, those of Spanish descent are coarse, and of English are
washed-out; while their lips are against the negresses. I have a batch
of photographs of females in an album--aye, of believers in the Prophet
amongst them, for it is a folly to imagine you cannot obtain that which
is forbidden. Hercules, I fancy, must have overcome with a golden sword
the dragon that watched the gardens of the Hesperides--which, by the
way, were in the neighbourhood of Tangier, if Apollodorus is to be
credited. On looking over that album, the majority of the faces are
distinctly those of Aaronites, and most favourable specimens of the
family, too There are melting black orbs curtained with pensive lashes,
luxuriant black hair, regular features, and straight, delicately
chiselled noses. These Jewesses generally wear handkerchiefs disposed
in curving folds over their heads, and are as fond of loudly-tinted
raiment and the gauds of trinketry as their sisters who parade the sands
at Ramsgate during the season. There is a photograph before me, as I
write, of a Jewish matron, fat, dull, double-chinned, and sleepy-eyed,
who must have been a belle before she fell into flesh. She wears massy
filigree ear-rings, two strings of precious stones as necklaces,
ponderous bracelets, edgings of pearls on her bodice, and rings on all
her fingers. Her shoulders are covered with costly lace, and the front
of her skirt is like an altar-cloth heavy with embroidery. I dare say,
if one might peep under it, she has gold bangles on her ankles. It would
surprise me if she had an idea in her head beyond the decoration of her
person. As we turn the leaf, there is a full-blooded negress with a
striped napkin twisted gracefully turban-wise round her hair, and coils
of beads, large and small, sinuously dangling on her breast, like the
chains over the Debtor's Door at Newgate. A very fine animal indeed,
this negress, with power in her strong shiny features; a nose of
courage, thin in the nostrils, and cheek-bones high, but not so high as
those of a Red Indian. If she were white, she might pass for a
Caucasian, but for that gibbous under-lip. She lacks the wide mouth and
the hinted intelligent archness of the Two-Headed Nightingale, and has
not the moody expression and semi-sensuous, semi-ferocious development
of the muscular widows of Cetewayo; but for a negress she is handsome
and well-built, and would fetch a very good price in the market. The
slave-trade still flourishes in Morocco. On the next page we meet two
types of young Moorish females: one a peasant, taken surreptitiously as
she stood in a horse-shoe archway; the other a lady of the harem,
taken--no matter by what artifice. The peasant, swathed from tip to heel
in white like a ghost in a penny booth, and shading her face with a
cart-wheel of a palm-leaf hat looped from brim to crown, and with one
extremity of its great margins curled, is a prematurely worn,
weather-stained, common-looking wench, with a small nose and screwed-up
mouth. She is a free woman, but I would not exchange the dusky
bondswoman for five of her class. Centuries of bad food, much
baby-nursing, and field-labour sink their imprint into a race. The harem
lady, whose likeness was filched as she leaned an elbow against a low
table, is in a state of repose. She squats tailor-fashion, her fingers
are twined one in another in her lap, her eyes are closed, and her
expression is one of drowsy, listless voluptuousness. She is fair, and
her dress (for she is not arrayed for the reception of visitors) is
simple--a peignoir, and a sash, and a fold of silk binding her long rich
tresses. A soft die-away face, with no sentiment more strongly defined
than the abandonment to pleasure and its consequent weariness. By no
means an attractive piece of flesh and blood, and yet a good sample of
the class that go to upholster a seraglio.
I have never had the slightest anxiety to penetrate the secrets of the
Moslem household, and I consider the man who would wish to poke his nose
into its seclusion no better than Peeping Tom of Coventry--an insolent,
lecherous cad. I would not traverse the street to-morrow to inspect the
champion wives of the Sultan of Turkey and Shah of Persia amalgamated;
and I deserve no credit for it, for I know that they are puppets, and
that more engaging women are to be seen any afternoon shopping in Regent
Street or pirouetting in the ballets of half-a-dozen theatres.
Your lady of the harem is an insipid, pasty-complexioned doll, nine
times out of ten, and would be vastly improved in looks and temperament
if she were subjected to a course of shower-baths, and compelled to take
horse-exercise regularly and earn her bread before she ate it.
How do I know this? it may be asked. Who dares to deny it? is my answer.
But here is a digression from our theme of the condition of the Jews at
Tangier, and all on account of a few poor photographs! In one sentence,
that condition is shameful. It is a reproach to the so-called civilized
Powers that they do not interfere to influence the Emir-al-Mumenin to
behave with more of the spirit of justice towards his Jewish subjects.
In Fez and other cities they have to dwell in a quarter to
themselves--"El Melah" (the dirty spot) it is called in Morocco city;
and when they leave the Melah they have to go bare-footed. They are not
permitted to ride on mules, nor yet to walk on the same side of the
street as Arabs.
The late Sir Moses Montefiore, a very exemplary old man in some
respects, visited Morocco in his eightieth year to intercede on behalf
of his co-religionists, and promises of better treatment were made; but
promises are not always kept.