_By_ A. E. W. Mason
_Manchester Regiment_
In the maps of Morocco you will see, stretching southwards of the city
of Mequinez, a great tract of uncharted country. It is lawless and
forbidden land. Even the Sultan Mulai el Hassen, that great fighter,
omitted it from his expeditions.
But certain tribes are known to inhabit it, such as the Beni M’tir, and
certain villages can be assigned a locality, such as Agurai, which lies
one long day’s journey from the Renegade’s Gate of Mequinez.
At Agurai Dimoussi was born, and lived for the first fifteen years of
his life—Dimoussi the Englishman, as he was called, though in features
and colour he had the look of an Arab with just a strain of Negro blood.
At the age of fifteen a desire to see the world laid hold upon Dimoussi.
As far as the eye could see from any mound about the village, there
stretched on every side a rolling plain, silent and empty. Hardly a bird
sang in the air above it; and everywhere it was dark with bushes wherein
the flowers of asphodel gleamed pale and small.
Dimoussi wearied of the plain. One thin, reddish line meandered
uncertainly from north to south, a stone’s throw from the village, where
the feet of men and mules passing at rare intervals through many
centuries had beaten down a path. Along this path Dimoussi allowed his
fancies to carry him into a world of enchantment; and one spring morning
his feet carried him along it, too.
For half a dozen men of the Beni M’tir carrying almonds and walnuts into
Mequinez happened to pass Agurai at a moment when Dimoussi was watching,
and his mother was at work on a patch of tilled ground out of sight.
Dimoussi had no other parent than his mother.
He ran into the hut, with its tent roof of sacking and its sides of
rough hurdles, which was his home, searched in a corner for a big
brass-barrelled pistol which had long been the pride of the
establishment, and, hiding it under his ragged jellaba, he ran down the
track and joined himself on to the tiny caravan. The next morning he
came to Mequinez, where he parted company with the tribesmen.
Dimoussi had not so much as a copper flouss upon him, but, on the other
hand, he had a pistol and the whole world in front of him. And what
reasonable boy could want more? All that day he wandered about the
streets, gaping at the houses, at the towers of the mosques, and at the
stalls in the markets, but as the afternoon declined, hunger got hold of
him. His friends of yesterday had vanished. Somehow he must get food.
He fingered the pistol under his jellaba irresolutely. He walked along a
street which he came to know afterwards as the Sôk Kubba. In the middle
was built a square tent of stone with an open arch at each side and a
pointed roof of fluted tiles trailed over by a vine. Just beyond this
stone tent the street narrowed, and on the left-hand side a man who sold
weapons squatted upon the floor of a dark booth.
“How much?” asked Dimoussi, producing his pistol, but loth to let it go.
The shopman looked at Dimoussi, and looked at the pistol. Then he tossed
it carelessly behind him into the litter of his booth.
“It is no good. As sure as my name is Mustapha, it would not kill a
rabbit. But see! My heart is kind. I will give you three dollars.”
He counted them out. Dimoussi stolidly shook his head. “Seven,” said he.
Mustapha reached behind him for the pistol, and flung it down at
Dimoussi’s feet.
“Take it away!” said he. “I will not haggle with foolish boys who have
stolen a thing of no value, and wish to sell it at a great price. Take
it away! Yet, out of my charity, I will give you four dollars.”
“Five,” said Dimoussi.
And five he received.
He bought rice and eggs in the market, and turned under an old archway
of green tiles into the Fondak Henna. There he cooked his food at a
fire, ate, and proposed to sleep.
But Fate had laid her hand upon Dimoussi. He slept not at all that
night. He sat with his back propped against the filigree plaster of one
of the pillars, and listened to a Moor of the Sherarda tribe, who smoked
keef and talked until morning.
“Yes,” said the Sherarda man, “I have travelled far and wide. Now I go
to my own village of Sigota, on Jebel Zarhon.”
“Have you been to Fez?” asked Dimoussi eagerly.
“I have lived in Fez. I served in the army of my lord the Sultan until I
was bored with it. It is a fine town and a large one. The river flows in
a hundred streams underneath the houses. In every house there is running
water. But it is nothing to the town of Mulai Idris.”
Dimoussi clasped his hands about his knees.
“Oh, tell me! Tell me!” he cried so loudly that in the shadows of the
Fondak men stirred upon their straw and cursed him.
“I have also travelled to Rabat, a great town upon the sea, whither many
consools come in fireships. A great town draped with flowers and cactus.
But it is nothing to Mulai Idris. There are no consools in Mulai Idris.”
All through his talk the name of Mulai Idris, the sacred city on the
slope of Jebel Zarhon, came and went like a shuttle of a loom.
The Sherarda Moor thought highly of the life in Mulai Idris, since it
was possible to live there without work.
Pilgrims came to visit the shrine of the founder of the Moorish Empire,
with offerings in their hands; and the whole township lived, and lived
well, upon those offerings. Moreover, there were no Europeans, or
“consools,” as he termed them.
The Moor spoke at length, and with hatred, of the Europeans—pale,
ungainly creatures in ridiculous clothes, given over to the devil,
people with a clever knack of invention, no doubt, in the matter of
firearms and cameras and spy-glasses, but, man for man, no match for any
Moor.
“Only three cities are safe from them now in all Morocco: Sheshawan in
the north, Tafilat in the south, and Mulai Idris. But Mulai Idris is
safest. Once a party of them—Englishmen—came rising up the steep road to
the gate even there, but from the walls we stoned them back. God’s curse
on them! Let them stay at home! But they must always be pushing
somewhere.”
Dimoussi, recognising in himself a point of kinship with the “consools,”
said gravely:
“I am an Englishman.”
The Sherarda man laughed, as though he had heard an excellent joke, and
continued to discourse upon the splendours of Mulai Idris until the
sleepers waked in their corners, and the keeper flung open the door, and
the grey daylight crept into the Fondak.
“Oh, tell me!” said Dimoussi. “The city is far from here?”
“Set out now. You will be in Mulai Idris before sunset.”
Dimoussi rose to his feet.
“I will go to Mulai Idris,” said he, and he went out into the cool,
clear air. The Sherarda Moor accompanied Dimoussi to the Bordain Gate,
and there they parted company, the boy going northward, the Moor
following the eastward track towards Fez. He had done his work, though
what he had done he did not know.
At noon Dimoussi came out upon a high tableland, as empty as the plains
which stretched about his native Agurai. Far away upon his left the
dark, serrated ridge of Jebel Gerouan stood out against the sky. Nearer
to him upon his right rose the high rock of Jebel Zarhon. In some fold
of that mountain lay this fabulous city of Mulai Idris.
Dimoussi walked forward, a tiny figure in that vast solitude. There were
no villages, there were no trees anywhere. The plateau extended ahead of
him like a softly heaving sea, as far as the eye could reach. It was
covered with bushes in flower; and here and there an acre of marigolds
or a field of blue lupins decked it out, as though someone had chosen to
make a garden there.
Then suddenly upon Dimoussi’s right the hillside opened, and in the
recess he saw Mulai Idris, a city high-placed and dazzlingly white,
which tumbled down the hillside like a cascade divided at its apex by a
great white mosque.
The mosque was the tomb of Mulai Idris, the founder of the empire.
Dimoussi dropped upon his knees and bowed his forehead to the ground.
“Mulai Idris,” he whispered, in a voice of exaltation. Yesterday he had
never even heard the name of the town. To-day the mere sight of it
lifted him into a passion of fervour.
Those white walls masked a crowded city of filth and noisome smells. But
Dimoussi walked on air; and his desire to see more of the world died
away altogether.
He was in the most sacred place in all Morocco; and there he stayed.
There was no need for him to work. He had the livelong day wherein to
store away in his heart the sayings of his elders. And amongst those
sayings there was not one that he heard more frequently than this:
“There are too many Europeans in Morocco.”
Fanaticism was in the very stones of the town. Dimoussi saw it shining
sombrely in the eyes of the men who paced and rode about the streets; he
felt it behind the impassivity of their faces. It came to him as an echo
of their constant prayers. Dimoussi began to understand it.
Once or twice he saw the Europeans during that spring. For close by in
the plain a great stone arch and some broken pillars showed where the
Roman city of Volubilis had stood. And by those ruins once or twice a
party of Europeans encamped.
Dimoussi visited each encampment, begged money of the “consools,” and
watched with curiosity the queer mechanical things they carried with
them—their cameras, their weapons, their folding mirrors, their brushes
and combs. But on each visit he became more certain that there were too
many Europeans in Morocco.
“A djehad is needed,” said one of the old men sitting outside the
gate—“a holy war—to exterminate them.”
“It is not easy to start a djehad,” replied Dimoussi.
The elders stroked their beards and laughed superciliously.
“You are young and foolish, Dimoussi. A single shot from a gun, and all
Moghrebbin is in flame.”
“Yes; and he that fired the shot certain of Paradise.”
Not one of them had thought to fire the shot. They were chatterers of
vain words. But the words sank into Dimoussi’s mind; for Dimoussi was
different. He began to think, as he put it; as a matter of fact, he
began to feel.
He went up to the tomb of Mulai Idris, bribed the guardian, who sat with
a wand in the court outside the shrine, to let him pass, and for the
first time in his life stood within the sacred place. The shrine was
dark, and the ticking of the clocks in the gloom filled Dimoussi’s soul
with awe and wonderment.
For the shrine was crowded with clocks: grandfather clocks with white
faces, and gold faces, and enamelled faces, stood side by side along the
walls, marking every kind of hour. Eight-day clocks stood upon pedestals
and niches; and the whole room whirred, and ticked, and chimed; never
had Dimoussi dreamed of anything so marvellous. There were glass balls,
too, dangling from the roof on silver strings, and red baize hanging
from the tomb.
Dimoussi bowed his head and prayed for the djehad. And as he prayed in
that dark and solitary place there came to him an inspiration. It seemed
that Mulai Idris himself laid his hand upon the boy’s head. It needed
only one man, only one shot to start the djehad. He raised his head and
all the ticking clocks cried out to him: “Thou art the man.” Dimoussi
left the shrine with his head high in the air and a proudness in his
gait. For he had his mission.
Thereafter he lay in wait upon the track over the plain to Mequinez,
watching the north and the south for the coming of the traveller.
During the third week of his watching he saw advancing along the track
mules carrying the baggage of Europeans. Dimoussi crouched in the bushes
and let them pass with the muleteers. A good way behind them the
Europeans rode slowly upon horses. As they came opposite to Dimoussi,
one, a dark, thin man, stretched out his arm and, turning to his
companion, said:
“Challoner, there is Mulai Idris.”
At once Dimoussi sprang to his feet. He did not mean to be robbed of his
great privilege. He shook his head.
“Lar, lar!” he cried. “Bad men in Mulai Idris. They will stone you. You
go to Mequinez.”
The man who had already spoken laughed.
“We are not going to Mulai Idris,” he replied. He was a man named Arden
who had spent the greater part of many years in Morocco, going up and
down that country in the guise of a Moor, and so counterfeiting accent,
and tongue, and manners, that he had even prayed in their mosques and
escaped detection.
“You are English?” asked Dimoussi.
“Yes. Come on, Challoner!”
And then, to his astonishment, as his horse stepped on, Dimoussi cried
out actually in English:
“One, two, three, and away!”
Arden stopped his horse.
“Where did you learn that?” he asked; and he asked in English.
But Dimoussi had spoken the only five words of English he knew, and even
those he did not understand.
Arden repeated the question in Arabic; and Dimoussi answered with a
smile:
“I, too, am English.”
“Oh! are you?” said Arden, with a laugh; and he rode on. “These Moors
love a joke. He learned the words over there, no doubt, from the
tourists at Volubilis. Do you see those blocks of stone along the
track?”
“Yes,” answered Challoner. “How do they come there?”
“Old Mulai Ismail, the sultan, built the great palace at Mequinez two
hundred years ago from the ruins of Volubilis. These stones were dragged
down by the captives of the Salee pirates.”
“And by the English prisoners from Tangier?” said Challoner suddenly.
“Yes,” replied Arden with some surprise, for there was a certain
excitement in his companion’s voice and manner. “The English were
prisoners until the siege ended, and we gave up Tangier and they were
released. When Mulai Ismail died, all these men dragging stones just
dropped them and left them where they lay by the track. There they have
remained ever since. It’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Challoner thoughtfully. He was a young man with the look of
a student rather than a traveller. He rode slowly on, looking about him,
as though at each turn of the road he expected to see some Englishman in
a tattered uniform of the Tangier Foot leaning upon a block of masonry
and wiping the sweat from his brow.
“Two of my ancestors were prisoners here in Mequinez,” he said. “They
were captured together at the fall of the Henrietta Fort in 1680, and
brought up here to work on Mulai Ismail’s palace. It’s strange to think
that they dragged these stones down this very track. I don’t suppose
that the country has changed at all. They must have come up from the
coast by the same road we followed, passed the same villages, and heard
the pariah dogs bark at night just as we have done.”
Arden glanced in surprise at his companion.
“I did not know that. I suppose that is the reason why you wish to visit
Mequinez?”
Challoner’s sudden desire to travel inland to this town had been a
mystery to Arden. He knew Challoner well, and knew him for a dilettante,
an amiable amateur of the arts, a man always upon the threshold of a new
interest, but never by any chance on the other side of the door, and,
above all, a stay-at-home. Now the reason was explained.
“Yes,” Challoner admitted. “I was anxious to see Mequinez.”
“Both men came home when peace was declared, I suppose?” said Arden.
“No. Only one came home, James Challoner. The other, Luke, turned
renegade to escape the sufferings of slavery, and was never allowed to
come back. The two men were brothers.
“I discovered the story by chance. I was looking over the papers in the
library one morning, in order to classify them, and I came across a
manuscript play written by a Challoner after the Restoration. Between
the leaves of the play an old, faded letter was lying. It had been
written by James, on his return, to Luke’s wife, telling her she would
never see Luke again. I will show you the letter this evening.”
“That’s a strange story,” said Arden. “Was nothing heard of Luke
afterwards?”
“Nothing. No doubt he lived and died in Mequinez.”
Challoner looked back as he spoke. Dimoussi was still standing amongst
the bushes watching the travellers recede from him. His plan was
completely formed. There would be a djehad to-morrow, and the honour of
it would belong to Dimoussi of Agurai.
He felt in the leathern wallet which swung at his side upon a silk
orange-coloured cord. He had ten dollars in that wallet. He walked in
the rear of the travellers to Mequinez, and reached the town just before
sunset. He went at once to the great square by the Renegade’s Gate,
where the horses are brought to roll in the dust on their way to the
watering fountain.
There were many there at the moment; and the square was thick with dust
like a mist.
But, through the mist, in a corner, Dimoussi saw the tents of the
travellers, and, in front of the tents, from wall to wall, a guard of
soldiers sitting upon the ground in a semicircle.
Dimoussi was in no hurry. He loitered there until darkness followed upon
the sunset, and the stars came out.
He saw lights burning in the tents, and, through the open doorway one,
the man who had spoken to him, Arden, stretched upon a lounge-chair,
reading a paper which he held in his hand.
Dimoussi went once more to the Fondak Henna, and made up for the wakeful
night he had passed here with a Moor of the Sherarda tribe by sleeping
until morning with a particular soundness.