In the Sacred City
The sharp lesson, then the goodwill; and always even during the
infliction of the lesson, fair dealing between man and man, and nothing
taken without payment on the spot. This, the traditional policy of the
great French Governors, was carried out in Fez. Only the lesson was not
so sharp as many thought it should have been. But the policy achieved
its end, and it was not long before many a Fasi, like his kinsmen of the
Chaiouïa, would proudly assure you that he was a Frenchman. The work of
settlement and order could be transferred to other regions, and Gerard
de Montignac went with it. He served in the mountains about Taza during
the autumn of that year, and then went upon long leave. He was in Paris
for Christmas, and there, amidst its almost forgotten lights and
brilliancies, took his pleasures like a boy. He hunted in the Landes,
returned to Morocco, and a year later, after a campaign in the country
south of Marrakesch, got his step and the command of his battalion.
For three months afterwards he was stationed at Meknes and drew his
breath. He had the routine of his work to occupy his mornings, and in
this city of wide spaces and orchards to engross his afternoons. Meknes
with the ruined magnificence of its palaces of dead kings, its huge
crumbling stables, the great gate of mosaic built through so many years
by so many captives of the Sallee pirates, and so many English prisoners
from Tangier; that other gate hardly less beautiful to the north of the
town; its groves of olives; its long crumbling crenellated walls
reaching out for miles into the country with no reason, and with no
reason abruptly ending—Meknes satisfied the æsthetic side of him as no
other city in that enchanted country. He delighted in it as a woman in
her jewels.
But in the autumn the Zarhoun threatened trouble for the hundredth
time—the Zarhoun, that savage mountain mass with its sacred cities
which frowns above the track from Meknes to Rabat and through which the
narrow path from Tangier to Fez is cleft. It was decided that the sacred
cities must at last throw open their gates and the Zarhoun be brought
into line. The work was entrusted to Gerard de Montignac.
“You will have a mixed battalion of infantry, a squadron of Chasseurs, a
section of mitrailleuses, and a couple of mountain guns,” said the
Commander-in-Chief. “But I think you will not need to use them. It will
be a demonstration, a reconnaissance in force, rather than an attack.”
Thus one morning of June, Gerard led his force northwards over the
rolling plain, onto the higher ground, and marching along the flank of
Djebel Zarhoun, camped that night close to the tall columns and broken
arches of Volubilis. In front of the camp, a mile away, dark woods of
olive trees mounted the lower slopes, and above them the sacred city of
Mulai Idris clung to the mountain sides, dazzlingly white against the
sombre hill and narrowing as it rose to an apex of one solitary house.
In the failing light it had the appearance of a gigantic torrent, which,
forcing itself through a tiny cleft, spread fanwise as it fell, in a
cascade of foam.
There was no fighting, as the Commander-in-Chief had predicted. At nine
o’clock the next morning the Basha, followed by three of his notable
men, rode down on their mules through the olive groves, and, being led
to the little tent over which floated the little red flag of the
commander, made his obeisance.
“I will go back with your Excellency into the city,” said Gerard, and he
gave orders that a company of tirailleurs should escort him.
Thus, then, an hour later they set out: Gerard riding ahead with the
Basha upon his right, the notables behind, and behind them again the
company of tirailleurs advancing in column of platoons with one Captain
Laguessière at their head. When they reached the first of the rising
ground, Gerard reined in his horse and stared about him.
The Basha, a portly man with a black beard, smiled with a flash of white
teeth and the air of one expecting compliments. He did not get them,
however. Gerard’s face wore, indeed, a quite unfriendly look. He turned
round in his saddle.
“Captain Laguessière.”
Laguessière, who had halted his company, rode up to Gerard’s side.
“Do you see?”
“Yes, my Commandant. I have been wondering for the last few minutes
whether it was possible. If these fellows had put up a fight we might
have lost a lot of men.”
“Yes,” said Gerard, shortly.
To the right and left of the track which led up to the gate of the town,
very well placed, just on the first rise of the ground, were fire
trenches. Not roughly scooped shallow depressions, but real trenches
scientifically constructed. Deep and recessed and with traverses at
short intervals. The inside walls were revetted; arm rests had been cut
for the riflemen, the earth dug from the trenches had been used for
parapets and these had been turfed over for concealment; there were
loopholes, artfully hidden by bunches of grass or little bundles of
branches and leaves. Communication trenches ran back and—nothing so
struck Gerard de Montignac with surprise as this—the extra earth had
been built into parapets for dummy trenches, so that the fire of the
attacking force might be diverted from those which were manned.
The surprise of the two officers caused the Moors the greatest
satisfaction. The three notables were wreathed in smiles. The Basha
laughed outright.
“They are good,” he said, nodding his head.
“Too good,” replied Gerard, gravely. “But it is as well that you did not
use them against us.”
To the Moors this rejoinder seemed the very cream of wit. The Basha
rocked in his saddle at the mere idea that his trenches could have been
designed against the French.
“No, indeed! We are true friends of your Excellency and your people. We
know that you are just and very powerful too. These trenches were
intended to defend our sacred city from the Zemmour.”
“Oh, the Zemmour! Of course,” exclaimed Gerard, openly scoffing.
The Zemmour were turbulent and aggressive and marauders to a man. They
lived in the Forest of Mamora and sallied out of it far afield. But they
were also the bogey men of the countryside. You threatened your
squalling baby with the Zemmour, and whatever bad thing you had done,
you had done it in terror of the Zemmour.
The Basha was undisturbed by Gerard de Montignac’s incredulity.
“Yes, the Zemmour are very wicked people,” he said, smiling virtuously
and apparently quite unconscious that he himself presided over a city of
malefactors and cutthroats. “But now that you have taken us poor people
under your protection we feel safe.”
Gerard smiled grimly and Captain Laguessière stroked his fair moustache
and remarked: “He has a fine nerve, this old bandit.”
“And when did you expect the Zemmour?” asked Gerard.
“Two weeks, three weeks ago. They sent word that they would attack us on
a certain night, so that we might be ready.”
“And then they didn’t come?” said Gerard.
“No.”
Captain Laguessière laughed, incredulous of the whole story. But Gerard
recognised a simple form of humour thoroughly Moroccan. To warn your
enemy that you meant to attack him, to keep him on the watch and
thoroughly alarmed all night and then never to attack him at all—that
might well seem to the Zemmour a most diverting stroke of wit. The
Zemmour, after all, were not so very far from Zarhoun.
“I wonder,” said Gerard.
“I don’t, my Commandant,” replied Captain Laguessière. “I think that if
they hadn’t seen our mountain guns passing up the track below, we should
have found these trenches manned this morning.”
Gerard turned about on his horse and looked down onto the plain.
“Yes. They could see very clearly. That’s the explanation—so far.”
He gave his attention once more to the construction of the trenches.
“And who taught you to make those trenches, my friend?” Gerard asked,
looking keenly at the Basha. The Basha answered composedly:
“It was Allah who put it into our heads. Allah protecting the holy city
where Mulai Idris lies buried.”
“That’s all very fine,” Captain Laguessière observed. “But then who lent
Allah his copy of the Manual of Field Engineering?”
“Exactly,” Gerard agreed with a laugh. “I think we had better find that
out. No Moor that ever I met with would take the time and trouble, even
if he had the skill, to work out——” and the laugh died off his lips.
He turned suddenly startled eyes upon his companion. “Laguessière!” he
exclaimed, and again, in a lower key, “Yes, Laguessière! I was sure that
I had never met you before.”
“Not until this expedition, my Commandant.”
“Yet your name was familiar to me. I did not think why. I was too busy
to think why. But I remember now. You were in Fez two years ago. Yes, I
remember now.”
His face darkened and hardened and grew very menacing as he sat with
moody eyes fixed upon the ground and seeing visions of old and pleasant
days leap into life and fade. “Volubilis, too!” he said in a low voice.
“Yes, just below those olives.”
Strange that he should have seen the columns and broken arches yesterday
and again this morning, and only thought of them with wonder as the
far-flung monuments of the old untiring Rome! And never until this
moment as things of great and immediate concern to him—signs perhaps
for him to read and not neglect. For of all the pictures which he saw
changing and flickering upon the ground, two came again and again. He
saw Baumann and his friends riding in the springtime between clumps of
asphodel towards those high pillars, and a horde of wild ragged men
pouring out of the gates of this white-walled city, and Baumann
shrinking back as a tall youth whirled with a grin a great staff about
his head. Then he saw the same man, whirling the same staff, charge with
Laguessière’s section in a street of Fez. A grim and sinister fancy
flashed into his mind. He wondered whether he had been appointed by
destiny to demand here and to-day an account for the betrayal of a great
and sacred trust. He looked up the hill to where the big wooden gates
stood open.
“Is that the only entrance into Mulai Idris?” he asked of the Basha.
“The only one.”
Gerard de Montignac turned to his subordinate.
“You will set a guard upon that gate, Captain Laguessière. No one is to
go out until I give a further order.”
“Very well, my Commandant.”
“You will have the town patrolled and the walls watched. I will bring up
another company to act with you.”
He wrote an order with a pencil in his note book, detached the leaf, and
sent it back by an orderly to the camp. “Now we will move on,” he said.
All his good humour had vanished. He had no longer any jests to exchange
with the Basha as the little cavalcade rode upwards among the olive
trees and through the steep, narrow streets of the town.
In an open space just below that last big house which made the apex of
the triangle, a seat was placed, and to this Gerard de Montignac was
conducted. The little city lay spread out in a fan beneath him. The
great Mosque in which the tomb of the Founder of the Moorish Empire was
sheltered stood at the southern angle. Gerard looked down into a corner
of its open precincts and saw men walking to and fro. He called the
Basha to his side, and pointed down to it.
“Yes, that is the great Mosque, your Excellency.”
“No one will violate it. For us it is sacred as for you,” said Gerard.
“But no food must go into it. That is a strict order.”
“It shall be obeyed.”
“I shall place men of my own in the streets about the entrances. They
will molest no one, but they will see to it that the order is obeyed.”
The Mosque was sanctuary, of course. Any man who took refuge there was
safe. Neither the law nor any vengeance could touch him. But no man must
die in it, for that would be a defilement. A little time, therefore, and
any refugee would be thrust out by the guardians of the sanctuary, lest
his death should taint the holy place.
Gerard sent a messenger down with a new order to Laguessière at the gate
and waited on the seat until it had been carried out, and Laguessière
had ridden to his side. The two officers lunched with the Basha and his
notables in the big house and drank the five cups of tea with them
afterwards.
“I will now ride with you through the town,” said Gerard to the Basha.
“You shall tell me of the houses and of those who live in them. And you
shall take me into those I wish, so that I may speak to them and assure
them of our friendship.”
“That will be an excellent thing,” replied the Basha.
Gerard kept a sergeant and a small guard of soldiers with him, and with
the Basha on his mule beside him he rode down on the left side of the
town. For on this side only, he had seen, were there any houses of
importance. The rest of the town was made up of hovels and little
cottages. The three chief men who rode with the Basha pointed out their
own residences with pride; the owners of others were described, and at
each of them Gerard smiled and said he was content. They made thus a
complete circuit of the city.
“Your Excellency has not thought fit to enter any one of the houses,”
said the Basha with a smile of reproach. Gerard led him a little apart.
“I will make good that omission now,” he replied. “There was one which
we passed. You did not speak of it at all. Yet it was a good house, a
fine house, finer almost than any except your Excellency’s own.”
The Basha was apparently mystified. He could not remember.
“I think that I can find the house again,” said Gerard. “I hope that I
shall be able to. For it attracted me.” He looked the Basha in the eyes.
“That is the house which I wish to enter and whose owner I wish to see.”
Finality was in Gerard’s voice as clearly as in his words. The Basha
bowed to it.
“It is for your Excellency to give orders here. We are in God’s hands,”
he said, and he drew a step nearer to Gerard de Montignac. “It is
permitted to dismiss my friends now to their homes? Si Tayeb Reha, whom
we shall visit, will not be prepared for so many.”
“Si Tayeb Reha?” Gerard repeated. “That is his name? I had a thought it
might be Ben Sedira.”
The Basha shook his head.
“That is not a name known in Mulai Idris.”
He turned to his notables and took leave of them with ceremonious
speeches. Then he mounted his mule again and rode down the hill beside
Gerard with the sergeant and the escort at their heels. Gerard said not
a word now. He was thinking of those carefully constructed trenches
outside the city, and his face grew hard as granite. They came to a
house of two storeys with one latticed window in the uppermost floor,
and for the rest a blank wall upon the street. It was for Fez a small
house, for Mulai Idris one of importance. The door opened upon a side
street, and the sergeant knocked upon it whilst Gerard and the Basha
dismounted. There followed a long silence whilst a little crowd gathered
about the soldiers. Gerard wondered what message that sharp loud
knocking brought to the inmate. Had he seen the cavalcade ride past from
a corner of that latticed window and with a smile upon his lips believed
himself to be safe? What a shattering blow, then, must have been this
sudden knocking upon his door? Or was he himself altogether in error?
Gerard drew a breath of relief at the mere hope that it might be so.
Well, he would know now, for the door was opened. And in a moment all
Gerard’s hopes fell. For the native who opened it was surprised into a
swift movement as his eyes fell upon Gerard in his uniform. It was a
movement which he checked before he had completed it, but he was too
late. He had betrayed himself. It was the involuntary movement of an old
soldier standing to attention at the sudden appearance of an officer.
The Basha spoke a few words to the servant who stood inside. There was
no court in this house. A staircase faced them steeply, and on the right
hand of it was the kitchen. Gerard turned to the servant as he passed
in.
“And what is your name?”
“Selim,” answered the servant. He led the way up the dark staircase.
There was no window upon the staircase; the only light came from the
doorway upon the street. At the top there was a landing furnished with
comfort, and in the middle of the landing was a fine door. Selim knocked
upon it, and would have opened it. But Gerard laid his hand upon his arm
and with a gesture in place of words bade him stand aside. He opened the
door himself and entered. He was standing in a room of low roof but
wide. It was furnished altogether in the Moorish style, and with a
certain elegance. But the elegance was rather in the disposition of the
room than in the quality of its equipment. One great window, with a
balcony protected by a rail, gave light to the room; and it looked not
upon the street but across a great chasm to the mountain, for the house
was built upon the town wall. The light thus flooded the room. Close to
the window a tall Moor was standing. He bowed and took a step forward.
“Had I hoped that your Excellency would do me the honour to visit my
poor house,” he said with a smile, “I should have made a better
preparation.”
He had a small beard trimmed neatly to a point and a thin line of
moustache. Gerard did not answer him for a little while. He took out his
note book and wrote in it and detached the leaf. Then he sent Selim down
the stairs to fetch up the sergeant of his escort; and it was noticeable
that, scrupulous as he usually was in this land of observances, he made
use of the servant as his messenger without troubling himself to ask the
master’s permission.
When the sergeant came up into the room, Gerard handed him the sheet of
paper.
“You will send this by one of your men immediately to Captain
Laguessière at the gate.”
“Very well, my Commandant,” and the sergeant went out of the room.
Gerard turned to the Basha.
“I have sent an order to remove the posts from the neighbourhood of the
Mosque, and to throw open the gates so that men may go out and in as
they will.”
The Basha expressed his thanks. There would be no trouble. The people of
Mulai Idris were very good people, not like those scoundrels from the
Forest of Mamora, and quite devoted to the French.
“Since this morning,” Gerard answered with a smile. “We shall have much
to say to one another to-morrow morning, in a spirit of help and
goodwill. But I beg you to leave me now, so that I may talk for a little
while privately with Si Tayeb Reha. For I have come now to the end of
this day’s work.”
Si Tayeb Reha bowed gravely. It was the only movement he had made since
he had spoken his words of welcome upon Gerard’s first entrance into the
room.
The Basha took his leave, went downstairs and mounted his mule.
“We are all in God’s hands,” he said, and he rode slowly away towards
his house. Within the room the two men stood looking at each other in
silence.
[Illustration: _A William Fox Production._ _The Winding Stair._
“SO—YOU HAVE BETRAYED EVERY TRUST—WHERE IS YOUR HONOR?”]