TO THE GATE OF THE PICTURE CITY
Is it Pan's breath, fierce in the tremulous maiden-hair,
That bids fear creep as a snake through the woodlands, felt
In the leaves that it stirs not yet, in the mute bright air,
In the stress of the sun?
_A Nympholept._
By the time the little camp was astir and the charcoal fires had done
their duty to eggs, coffee, and porridge, Pepe Ratto, accompanied by two
of his Berber trackers, rode into the valley, and dismounted on the level
ground where our tent was pitched. At first sight the sportsman stood
revealed in our welcome visitor. The man whose name will be handed down to
future generations in the annals of Morocco's sport would attract
attention anywhere. Tall, straight, sunburnt, grizzled, with keen grey
eyes and an alert expression, suggesting the easy and instantaneous change
from thought to action, Pepe Ratto is in every inch of him a sportsman.
Knowing South Morocco as few Europeans know it, and having an acquaintance
with the forest that is scarcely exceeded by either Moor or Berber, he
gives as much of his life as he can spare to the pursuit of the boar, and
he had ridden out with his hunters this morning from his forest home, the
Palm Tree House, to meet us before we left the Argans behind, so that we
might turn awhile on the track of a "solitaire" tusker.
So the mules were left to enjoy an unexpected rest while their owners
enjoyed an uninterrupted breakfast, and the kaid was given ample time in
which to groom his horse and prepare it and himself for sufficiently
imposing entrance into the Picture City[53] that evening. Salam was
instructed to pack tents and boxes at his leisure, before he took one of
my sporting guns and went to pursue fur and feather in parts of the forest
immediately adjacent to the camp. A straight shot and a keen sportsman, I
knew that Salam would not bother about the hares that might cross his
path, or birds that rose in sudden flight away from it. His is the Moorish
method of shooting, and he is wont to stalk his quarry and fire before it
rises. I protested once that this procedure was unsportsmanlike.
"Yes, sir," he replied simply. "If I wait for bird to fly may be I miss
him, an' waste cartridge."
[Illustration: A NARROW STREET IN MOGADOR]
This argument was, of course, unanswerable. He would follow birds slowly
and deliberately, taking advantage of wind and cover, patient in pursuit
and deadly in aim. Our points of view were different. I shot for sport,
and he, and all Moors, for the bag. In this I felt he was my superior.
But, barring storks, all creatures were game that came within Salam's
range.
No Moor will harm a stork. Even Moorish children, whose taste for
destruction and slaughter is as highly developed as any European's, will
pick up a young stork that has fallen from its nest and return it to the
mother bird if they can. Storks sit at peace among the women of the hareem
who come for their afternoon airing to the flat roof-tops of Moorish
houses. Moorish lovers in the streets below tell the story of their hopes
and fears to the favoured bird, who, when he is chattering with his
mandibles, is doing what he can to convey the message. Every True Believer
knows that the stork was once a Sultan, or a Grand Wazeer at least, who,
being vain and irreligious, laughed in the beards of the old men of his
city on a sacred day when they came to pay their respects to him. By so
doing he roused the wrath of Allah, who changed him suddenly to his
present form. But in spite of misdeeds, the Moors love the stately bird,
and there are hospitals for storks in Fez and Marrakesh, where men whose
sanctity surpasses their ignorance are paid to minister to the wants of
the sick or injured among them. Many a time Salam, in pursuit of birds,
has passed within a few-yards of the father of the red legs or his
children, but it has never occurred to him to do them harm. Strange fact,
but undeniable, that in great cities of the East, where Muslims and
Christians dwell, the storks will go to the quarter occupied by True
Believers, and leave the other districts severely alone. I have been
assured by Moors that the first of these birds having been a Muslim, the
storks recognise the True Faith, and wish to testify to their preference
for it. It is hard to persuade a Moor to catch a stork or take an egg from
the nest, though in pursuit of other birds and beasts he is a stranger to
compunction in any form.
One of the trackers gave me his horse, and Pepe Ratto led the way down the
stream for a short distance and then into thick scrub that seemed to be
part of wild life's natural sanctuary, so quiet it lay, so dense and
undisturbed. After the first five minutes I was conscious of the forest in
an aspect hitherto unknown to me; I was aware that only a man who knew the
place intimately could venture to make a path through untrodden growths
that were left in peace from year to year. It was no haphazard way, though
bushes required careful watching, the double-thorned lotus being too
common for comfort.
[Illustration: A NIGHT SCENE, MOGADOR]
My companion's eye, trained to the observation of the woodlands in every
aspect, noted the stories told by the bushes, the gravel, and the sand
with a rapidity that was amazing. Twenty-five years of tireless hunting
have given Pepe Ratto an instinct that seems to supplement the ordinary
human gifts of sight and hearing. Our forefathers, who hunted for their
living, must have had this gift so developed, and while lying dormant in
Europeans, whose range of sports is compassed by the life of cities and
limited game preserves, it persists among the men who devote the best
years of their life to pitting their intelligence against that of the
brute creation. The odds are of course very much in favour of the human
being, but we may not realise readily the extreme cunning of hunted
animals. The keen sportsman, who rode by my side pointing out the track of
boar or porcupine, showing where animals had been feeding, and judging how
recently they had passed by difference in the marks too faint for my eyes
to see, confessed that he had spent months on the track of a single
animal, baffled over and over again, but getting back to his quarry
because he had with him the mark of the feet as copied when he tracked it
for the first time.
"No boar has four feet absolutely identical with those of another boar,"
he said, "so when once you have the prints the animal must leave the
forest altogether and get off to the Atlas, or you will find him in the
end. He may double repeatedly on his own tracks, he may join a herd and
travel with them for days into the thick scrub, where the dogs are badly
torn in following him, but he can never get away, and the hunter following
his tracks learns to realise in the frenzied changes and manoeuvres of the
beast pursued, its consciousness of his pursuit." In these matters the
trained and confirmed hunter's heart grows cold as the physiologist's,
while his senses wax more and more acute, and near to the level of those
of his prey.
That is but a small part of the hunter's lore. As his eyes and ears
develop a power beyond the reach of dwellers of cities with stunted sight
and spoiled hearing, he grows conscious of the great forest laws that rule
the life of birds and beasts--laws yet unwritten in any language. He
finds all living things pursuing their destiny by the light of customs
that appeal as strongly to them as ours to us, and learns to know that the
order and dignity of the lower forms of life are not less remarkable in
their way than the phenomena associated with our own.
To me, the whirring of a covey of sand-grouse or partridges could express
little more than the swift passage of birds to a place of security. To the
man who grew almost as a part of the forest, the movement was something
well defined, clearly initiated, and the first step in a sequence that he
could trace without hesitation. One part of the forest might be the same
as another to the casual rider, or might at best vary in its purely
picturesque quality. To the long trained eye, on the other hand, it was a
place that would or would not be the haunt of certain beasts or birds at
certain hours of the day, by reason of its aspect with regard to the sun,
its soil, cover, proximity to the river or other source of water supply,
its freedom from certain winds and accessibility to others, its distance
from any of the tracks that led to the country beyond the forest and were
frequented at certain seasons of the year. The trained hunter reads all
this as in a book, but the most of us can do no more than recognise the
writing when it has been pointed out to us.
[Illustration: HOUSE-TOPS, MOGADOR]
So it happened that my morning ride with the hardy hunter, whose
achievements bulk next to those of the late Sir John Drummond Hay in the
history of Moorish sport, had an interest that did not depend altogether
upon the wild forest paths through which he led the way. He told me how
at daybreak the pack of cross-bred hounds came from garden, copse, and
woodland, racing to the steps of the Palm Tree House, and giving tongue
lustily, as though they knew there was sport afoot. One or two grizzled
huntsmen who had followed every track in the Argan Forest were waiting in
the patio for his final instructions, and he told them of hoof prints that
had revealed to his practised eye a "solitaire" boar of more than ordinary
size. He had tracked it for more than three hours on the previous day,
past the valley where our tents were set, and knew now where the lair was
chosen.
"He has been lying under an argan tree, one standing well away from the
rest at a point where the stream turns sharply, about a mile from the old
kasbah in the wood, and he has moved now to make a new lair. I have made a
note of his feet in my book; he had been wallowing less than twenty-four
hours before when I found him. To-morrow, when we hunt the beast I hope to
track to-day, the pack will follow in charge of the huntsmen. They will be
taken through the wood all the way, for it is necessary to avoid villages
and cattle pasture when you have more than a score of savage dogs that
have not been fed since three o'clock on the previous afternoon. They are
by no means averse from helping themselves to a sheep or a goat at such
times."
We had ridden in single file through a part where the lotus, now a tree
instead of a bush, snatched at us on either side, and the air was
fragrant with broom, syringa, and lavender. Behind us the path closed and
was hidden; before us it was too thick to see more than a few yards ahead.
Here and there some bird would scold and slip away, with a flutter of
feathers and a quiver of the leaves through which it fled; while ever
present, though never in sight, the cuckoo followed us the whole day long.
Suddenly and abruptly the path ended by the side of a stream where great
oleanders spread their scarlet blossoms to the light, and kingfishers
darted across the pools that had held tiny fish in waters left by the
rainy season. When we pushed our horses to the brink the bushes on either
hand showered down their blossoms as though to greet the first visitors to
the rivulet's bank. Involuntarily we drew rein by the water's edge,
acknowledging the splendour of the scene with a tribute of silence. If you
have been in the Western Highlands of Scotland, and along the Levantine
Riviera, and can imagine a combination of the most fascinating aspects of
both districts, you have but to add to them the charm of silence and
complete seclusion, the sense of virgin soil, and the joy of a perfect day
in early summer, and then some faint picture of the scene may present
itself. It remains with me always, and the mere mention of the Argan
Forest brings it back.
Pepe Ratto soon recovered himself.
[Illustration: SELLING GRAIN IN MOGADOR]
"Yes," he said, in reply to my unspoken thoughts, "one seldom sees country
like this anywhere else. But the boar went this way."
So saying, the hunter uppermost again, he wheeled round, and we
followed the stream quite slowly while he looked on either hand for signs
of the large tusker. "We must find where he has settled," he continued.
"Now the weather is getting so warm he will move to some place that is
sandy and moist, within reach of the puddles he has chosen to wallow in.
And he won't go far from this part, because the maize is not yet ripe."
"Do they grow maize in this province?" I asked.
"Yes," replied the hunter. "I give the farmers the seed and they plant it,
for a boar is as fond of green maize as a fox is of chickens." He paused
and showed me the marks of a herd that had come to the water within the
past two days to drink and wallow. While I could see the marks of many
feet, he could tell me all about the herd, the approximate numbers, the
ages, and the direction they were taking. Several times we dismounted, and
he examined the banks very carefully until, at the fourth or fifth
attempt, tracks that were certainly larger than any we had seen revealed
the long-sought tusker.
We went through the wood, the hunter bending over a trail lying too faint
on the green carpet of the forest for me to follow. We moved over
difficult ground, often under the blaze of the African sun, and, intent
upon the pursuit, noted neither the heat nor the flight of time. For some
two miles of the dense scrub, the boar had gone steadily enough until the
ground opened into a clearing, where the soil was sandy and vegetation
correspondingly light. Here at last the track moved in a circle.
"See," said the hunter, a suspicion of enthusiasm in his tone, "he has
been circling; that means he is looking for a lair. Stay here, if you
will, with the horses while I follow him home." And in a minute he was out
of sight.
I waited patiently enough for what seemed a long time, trying to catch the
undersong that thrilled through the forest, "the horns of elf-land faintly
blowing," the hum such as bees at home make when late May sees the
chestnut trees in flower. Here the song was a veritable psalm of life, in
which every tree, bird, bush, and insect had its own part to play. It
might have been a primeval forest; even the horses were grazing quietly,
as though their spirits had succumbed to the solemn influences around us.
The great god Pan himself could not have been far away, and I felt that he
might have shown himself--that it was fitting indeed for him to appear in
such a place and at such a season.
The hunter came back silently as he had gone.
[Illustration: SELLING ORANGES]
"All's well," he said as he remounted; "he is a fine fellow, and has his
lair most comfortably placed. And you should have come with me, but your
creaking English gaiters would have disturbed him, while my soft native
ones let me go within thirty or forty yards of his new home in safety." My
companion was wearing the Moorish gaiters of the sort his trackers
used--things made of palmetto. When they follow on foot the trackers
wear leather aprons too, in order to deaden the sound made by their
passage through the resisting undergrowth.
Then we rode back by another route, down paths that only an Arab horse
could have hoped to negotiate, through densely wooded forest tracks that
shut out the sun, but allowed its brightness to filter through a leafy
sieve and work a pattern of dappled light and shadow on the grass, for our
delectation. Most of the way had been made familiar in pursuit of some
wild boar that would not stand and fight but hurried into the wildest and
most difficult part of the forest, charging through every bush, however
thick and thorny, in vain endeavour to shake off the pitiless pack. For my
companion no corner of the forest lacked memories, some recent, some
remote, but all concerned with the familiar trial of skill in which the
boar had at last yielded up his pleasant life.
We came quite suddenly upon the stream and past a riot of green bamboo and
rushes, saw the kaid's house, more than ever gaunt and dishevelled by
daylight, with the shining water in front, the wild garden beyond, and on
the other bank the Susi muleteers sitting with the black slave in pleasant
contemplation of the work Salam had done. Kaid M'Barak dozed on one of the
boxes, nursing his beloved gun, while the horse equally dear to him stood
quietly by, enjoying the lush grasses. Salam and the tracker were not far
away, a rendezvous was appointed for the hunt, and Pepe Ratto, followed by
his men, cantered off, leaving me to a delightful spell of rest, while
Salam persuaded the muleteers to load the animals for the last few miles
of the road between us and Mogador.
Then, not without regret, I followed the pack-mules out of the valley,
along the track leading to a broad path that has been worn by the feet of
countless nomads, travelling with their flocks and herds, from the heat
and drought of the extreme south to the markets that receive the trade of
the country, or making haste from the turbulent north to escape the heavy
hand of the oppressor.
It was not pleasant to ride away from the forest, to see the great open
spaces increasing and the trees yielding slowly but surely to the dwarf
bushes that are the most significant feature of the southern country,
outside the woodland and oases. I thought of the seaport town we were so
soon to see--a place where the civilisation we had dispensed with happily
enough for some weeks past would be forced into evidence once more, where
the wild countrymen among whom we had lived at our ease would be seen only
on market days, and the native Moors would have assimilated just enough of
the European life and thought to make them uninteresting, somewhat
vicious, and wholly ill-content.
The forest was left behind, the land grew bare, and from a hill-top I saw
the Atlantic some five or six miles away, a desert of sand stretching
between. We were soon on these sands--light, shifting, and intensely
hot--a Sahara in miniature save for the presence of the fragrant broom in
brief patches here and there. It was difficult riding, and reduced the
pace of the pack-mules to something under three miles an hour. As we
ploughed across the sand I saw Suera itself, the Picture City of Sidi
M'godol, a saint of more than ordinary repute, who gave the city the name
by which it is known to Europe. Suera or Mogador is built on a little
tongue of land, and threatens sea and sandhills with imposing
fortifications that are quite worthless from a soldier's point of view.
Though the sight of a town brought regretful recollection that the time of
journeying was over, Mogador, it must be confessed, did much to atone for
the inevitable. It looked like a mirage city that the sand and sun had
combined to call into brief existence--Moorish from end to end, dazzling
white in the strong sun of early summer, and offering some suggestion of
social life in the flags that were fluttering from the roof-tops of
Consuls' houses. A prosperous city, one would have thought, the emporium
for the desert trade with Europe, and indeed it was all this for many
years. Now it has fallen from its high commercial estate; French
enterprise has cut into and diverted the caravan routes, seeking to turn
all the desert traffic to Dakkar, the new Bizerta in Senegal, or to the
Algerian coast.
Salam and M'Barak praised Sidi M'godol, whose zowia lay plainly to be seen
below the Marrakesh gate; the Susi muleteers, the boy, and the slave
renewed their Shilha songs, thinking doubtless of the store of dollars
awaiting them; but I could not conquer my regrets, though I was properly
obliged to Sidi M'godol for bringing me in safety to his long home. Just
before us a caravan from the South was pushing its way to the gates. The
ungainly camels, seeing a resting-place before them, had plucked up their
spirits and were shuffling along at a pace their drivers could hardly have
enforced on the previous day. We caught them up, and the leaders explained
that they were coming in from Tindouf in the Draa country, a place
unexplored as yet by Europeans. They had suffered badly from lack of water
on the way, and confirmed the news that the Bedouins had brought, of a
drought unparalleled in the memory of living man. Sociable fellows all,
full of contentment, pluck, and endurance, they lightened the last hour
upon a tedious road.
At length we reached the strip of herbage that divides the desert from the
town, a vegetable garden big enough to supply the needs of the Picture
City, and full of artichokes, asparagus, egg plants, sage, and thyme. The
patient labour of many generations had gone to reclaim this little patch
from the surrounding waste.
We passed the graveyard of the Protestants and Catholics, a retired place
that pleaded eloquently in its peacefulness for the last long rest that
awaits all mortal travellers. Much care had made it less a cemetery than a
garden, and it literally glowed and blazed with flowers--roses, geraniums,
verbena, and nasturtiums being most in evidence. A kindly priest of the
order of St. Francis invited us to rest, and enjoy the colour and
fragrance of his lovingly-tended oasis. And while we rested, he talked
briefly of his work in the town, and asked me of our journey. The place
reminded me strongly of a garden belonging to another Brotherhood of the
Roman Catholic Church, and set at Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, where,
a few years ago, I saw the monks labouring among their flowers, with
results no less happy than I found here.
After a brief rest we rode along the beach towards the city gate. Just
outside, the camels had come to a halt and some town traders had gathered
round the Bedouins to inquire the price of the goods brought from the
interior, in anticipation of the morrow's market. Under the frowning
archway of the water-port, where True Believers of the official class sit
in receipt of custom, I felt the town's cobbled road under foot, and the
breath of the trade-winds blowing in from the Atlantic. Then I knew that
Sunset Land was behind me, my journey at an end.
FOOTNOTES:
[53] Mogador, called by the Moors "Suera," _i.e._ "The Picture."
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.