AT RABAT
At the time that the Krupp Company were mounting heavy-calibre guns
at Rabat other German contractors proposed to cut the bar of the Bu
Regreg and open the port to foreign trade. But the people of both Rabat
and Sali protested, saying that this would let in more _Nasrani_ and
that the half-dozen already there, who bought their rugs and sold them
goods from Manchester and Hamburg, were quite enough. Up to the time
the French gunboats appeared--preceded by the news of their effective
work at Casablanca--the arrival of twenty Europeans at Rabat would have
given rise to much murmuring and no doubt to a good many threats.
Now, however, more than double that number of Frenchmen alone had come
to the town. From Tangier had come the Minister of France and all
his staff, accompanied by a score of soldiers and marines; and from
Casablanca had followed a troop of correspondents, French and English.
Yet the hapless Moors, stirred as they had never been before, were
required to give them right of way.
‘Balak! Balak!’ went the cry of the Maghzen soldier, leading the
Christians through the crowded, narrow streets, and meekly, usually
without a protest, the natives stood aside. Most of the people did
not understand. Had not the Prophet said that they should hate the
Christians? Yet now their lord, Mulai Abdul Aziz, Slave of the Beloved,
sat upon his terrace--so rumour vowed--sat with some Frenchmen and
listened towards Ziada to the cannon of some other Frenchmen as they
slaughtered faithful Moslems! At Rabat, besides the townsfolk,
there were refugees from Casablanca; there were tribesmen still in
arms; there were saints who had followed the Sultan from Fez; there
were madmen who are sacred, and impostors who pretended to be mad;
there were soldiers trained to every crime; in short, there were men
from every corner of the variegated empire, any one of whom would
gladly have laid down his life to slay a Christian had the Sultan so
commanded. Yet months have passed and they have kept the peace, though
Frenchmen still slay Moors within the sound of Rabat’s walls.
A Shawia tribesman who spoke a little English, a tall young man with
dark skin, and an ear torn by an earring at the lobe, met us at the
landing and extended his hand. He took upon himself to help us with
our luggage, and we let him show us the way to the French hotel
lately opened. Of course this man was anxious to serve us as guide
and interpreter, and we were glad to have him. Driss Wult el Kaid
was his name, Driss, son of the Kaid. He had worked for Englishmen
at Casablanca, and from his accent we could tell they had been
‘gentlemen.’ No ‘h’s’ did he shift from place to place, while his
pronunciation of such words as ‘here’ and ‘there’ were always drawled
out ‘hyar’ and ‘thar.’ ‘Now, now,’ he would say with a twisting
inflection, for all the world like an Oxford man wishing to express
the ordinary negative ‘no.’ It was humorous. English of this sort, to
the mind of a mere American, associates itself with aristocracy, while
the face of a mulatto goes only with the under-race of the States. It
was difficult, in consequence, to reconcile the two. But Driss soon
demonstrated that he was worthy to speak the language of the upper
man. The manners and the dignity of a ruling race were his heritage;
and proud he was, though his bearing towards the poorest beggar never
appeared condescending. A gentleman was Driss. ‘Me fader,’ he told us
in fantastic Moro-English, ‘me fader he was one-time gov’nor Ziada.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Now, now; he in prison.’
‘What for?’ we asked.
‘Me fader,’ Driss explained, looking sorrowful, ‘he paid ten thousan’
dollar Hassani for (to be) gov’nor; two year more late ’nother man
pay ten thousan’ dollar more, and he ’come gov’nor; me fader got no
more money, so go prison.’ This was the old story, the same wherever
Mohammedans govern; one man buys the right to rule and rob a province;
over his head another buys it, to be succeeded by a third, and so on.
We told Driss that this could not happen if the French ruled the
country; it could not happen, we said, in Algeria.
‘I know, I know,’ said Driss. ‘Me fader he write (wrote) in a book
about Algeria, and he teach me to read. Tell me, Mr. Moore, is it true
a man can give his money to ’nother man and get a piece of paper, then
go back long time after and get his money back?’
I told Driss that there were such institutions as banks, which even the
Sultan could not rob; and he believed, but seemed to wonder all the
more what manner of men Christians were. ‘It is fiendish; no wonder
they defeat us; they work together inhumanly,’ he seemed to say;
‘indeed you cannot know our God!’
Good old Driss; both Weare and I became very fond of him. In a day he
spoke of himself as our friend, and I believe we could have trusted
him in hard emergencies. He was brave and not unduly cautious, though
occasionally, when we would stop in a road and gather a crowd, he would
say imperatively: ‘Come away, Mr. Weare and Mr. Moore; some fanatic may
be in that crowd and stick you with his dagger. Come on, come on!--I’m
your friend; I don’t want see you dead.’
Driss had vanities. He told us his age, twenty-three, and told us in
the same breath that few Moors knew exactly how old they were. He said
his wife--who was only twenty--could read and write a little, informing
us at the same time that very few women could read. He told us that his
wife was almost white. Driss was ashamed of his own colour, and when
a French correspondent asked in his presence if he was a slave, the
poor boy coloured and dropped his head. He had certainly been born of a
slave.
Still there was nothing humble about Driss. Among his people he was
exceptional and he enjoyed the distinction. He was a Ziada man; he
could read and write; he could make more money than his fellows--and
he hoped some day to acquire European protection; he was fine-looking,
tall, strong, and without disease.
Driss was a thoroughly clean fellow. He never touched bread without
washing his hands, a custom prevailing among some Moslems but not
general with the Moors. This with him seemed only a matter of habit
and desire of decency, for he was not particularly devout in his
religion.
‘But you think,’ we said, ‘that all _Nasrani_ are unclean.’ At first
Driss denied this, out of consideration for us, but on being pressed he
admitted that it was the feeling of the ignorant of his race that, like
pigs, all Christians were filthy in person as well as soul.
We discussed with him the great moral vice of Mohammedan countries,
and he admitted that it was prevalent in Morocco no less than, as we
told him, it prevailed farther east, and that it affected all classes.
He told me that it was the custom of the wealthy father of the better
class of Moors, in order to protect his sons, to make them each a
present of a slave girl as they attain the age of fifteen or sixteen.
Of course, from the Mohammedan point of view, there is nothing immoral
in this; indeed the mothers of sons often advocate it.
It was the fasting month of Ramadan at the time of our sojourn at
Rabat, and no one could eat except at night. Every evening at six
o’clock a white-cloaked gunner came out of the Kasbah walls and rammed
into his antique cannon a load of powder sufficient, it would seem,
to raise the dead of the cemetery in which it was discharged. For
two reasons--that it was the cemetery and that the Ramadan gun was
here--this was the gathering-place of all Moslems. Often we, too, went
up to see the crowd and to watch with the gunner and the other Moors
for the signal. All eyes were turned, not towards the Atlantic to see
old Sol set, but inland, towards the town, where towered above the low
houses a great white minaret, whence the Muezzin watched the sun and
signalled with a banner of white. At the blast of the cannon a great
shout went up from the hundred small boys gathered about; and, with the
slope of the hill to lend them speed, everybody went hurrying into
the town, the skirts of those who ran fluttering a yard behind them.
In a minute came the boom from the gun of the _m’halla_, the city of
tents, on the hills visible beyond the town walls. When we passed down
the streets to our supper five minutes later, everybody was swallowing
great gulps of _hererah_, Ramadan soup, breaking the long day’s fast.
The little cafés, dingy and deserted during the day, were now brilliant
and crowded, the keeper himself eating with one hand while he served
with the other; and the roadway was studded with little groups of men
who had squatted where they stood half-an-hour before the setting of
the sun, and, spoon in hand, waited for the gun to boom.
Christians and Mohammedans treat their religions with a curious
difference: where the one is generally ashamed of reverence and never
flaunts his faith, the other is afraid not to make a considerable
show of his. Not a Moor would dare to eat or even touch a drop of
water in the sight of another during Ramadan; though under our window
overlooking the river it was the custom of an old beggar to come daily
at noon, to roll himself into a ball on the ground as if sleeping, and
under the cover of his ragged _jeleba_ make his lunch. Had he been
caught at this he would probably have been stoned out of town.
One day during Ramadan we were taken by a Jewish merchant, a British
subject, to the house of a wealthy Moor with whom he traded in goods
from Manchester. The house was down a turning off the street of arches,
and the turning came to an end at the Moor’s door, a massive oaken
door with the heads of huge rivets showing every six or seven inches.
It was the width of the narrow street, about six feet, and the height
of one’s shoulder. We approached quietly and knocked lightly, for our
friend told us that the Moor did not care for his neighbours to see
us entering his house. The entrance, which was at one corner of the
square house, led into the courtyard, of which the ornate walls were
spotlessly white-washed, the floor was of green tiles, and the roof,
as is usual, of glass. The reception room, the length of one side of
the house, though but twelve feet wide, had low divans all round the
walls, leaving but a long, narrow aisle the length of the room, to the
right and to the left of the arched entrance. Rising in tiers at each
end were broader divans, to appear as beds one beyond another, though
their luxurious and expensive upholstering, covered with the richest of
native silks, were evidently never displaced by use. About the room,
in cases above the divans, were many little ornaments, noticeably tall
silver sprinklers filled with rose-water and other perfumes; but most
curious to us were the innumerable clocks, most of them cheap things,
all set at different hours in order that their bells should not drown
each other’s melodious clangs.
Two little slave girls, who giggled at us all the while, brought in
a samovar much after the Russian pattern, and silver boxes of broken
cone sugar and of European biscuits. Our host made tea in the native
fashion, brewed with quantities of sugar and flavoured heavily with
mint; green tea, of course. He filled our cups again and again, though
he would take nothing, till we too wished we respected Ramadan, for
we were told by our Jewish friend that it would be impolite to drink
less than five or six cups. Along with this refreshment the silver
sprinklers were passed us by the giggling little blacks, that we might
sprinkle our clothes, and no doubt they thought we needed perfuming,
though they did not hold their noses, as other Europeans have told
me they often do when close to Nazarenes. Perhaps their master had
instructed them in good behaviour, for he was indeed a gentleman, and
he had travelled on one occasion to London and to Paris. It was at this
point, when the Moor, with immaculate fingers, sprinkled his own long
white robes, that one could appreciate their feeling that we are filthy
people. We wear the same outer garments for months, and they are never
washed; indeed, we wear dark colours that the dirt may not show; here
we had entered upon this gentleman’s precious carpets with our muddy
boots, where a sockless Moor would shift his slippers. And they have
habits too which make for bodily cleanliness, habits which they know we
have not, as, for instance, that of shaving the hair from every part of
the body but the face. Our conversation was chiefly on comparisons of
customs, our host noticing that we shaved our faces, the Moors their
heads, and we remarking--for he was too polite--that we kept on our
shoes when we entered a house, whereas the Moors wore their fezzes or
their turbans. He said that he had beheld in London the extraordinary
sight of a pair of ordinary Moorish slippers set upon a table as an
ornament; and he had seen also the woman sultan, Queen Victoria.
At Ramadan there are generally continual street festivities during
the eating hours of the night; but the gloom cast over the country by
the presence of the French kept these now to a minimum. There was not
even, in spite of the Sultan’s presence any powder play, a thing which
I was particularly anxious to witness, to learn for myself to what
degree the Moors are hard upon their animals. I know that Moslems are
seldom deliberately cruel; but I know, too, that the vanity of the Moor
makes him ride with a cruel bit and a pointed spur that could reach
the vitals of a horse, and both of these, I have heard, they employ
in a vicious manner in their famous, dashing powder play. But most of
their cruelty is only from neglect, laziness, and ignorance. Camels
wear their shoulders and their necks through to the bone--the sight is
a common one--because their masters do not trouble to pad their packs
properly; two men will ride an undersized donkey already overloaded
with a pack; and, as is the way among all Moslems, an animal when it
comes to die may suffer for weeks or months, yet will not be killed
because ‘Allah gave life, and Allah alone may take it away.’ Still
there is the Moorish sect of _Aisawa_, that in a mad stampede tears a
sheep to pieces in the streets and eats it still palpitating.
[Illustration: A CAMP OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF RABAT.]
There were some interesting Englishmen at Rabat, notably the _Times_
correspondent, W. B. Harris, who has travelled with several Sultans
of Morocco, and lived some time as a Moor in order that he might
learn their ways and penetrate to the farthest reaches of the country
forbidden to the Christian. There was also Mr. Allan Maclean, likewise
an authority on Morocco, now busy with the Maghzen to arrange for the
release of certain prisoners, which Raisuli exacted as one of the
stipulations of Kaid Maclean’s release. There was then the British
Consul, George Neroutsos, an old friend of the Sultan and a man whom
he often consults on matters of European policy.
With some of the Englishmen we took long rides around the town, passing
several times through the _m’halla_, where we were never welcome;
the camp of Abdul Aziz was in sympathy with Mulai Hafid. We saw the
soldiers who were sent to fight Hafid and joined his ranks with all
their arms. Gradually we saw the army dwindle away until there could
have been no more than four thousand men between the discredited Sultan
and his hostile brother, whose following of tribesmen was reported to
number variously from twenty to sixty thousand men. Had the army of the
French not stood between them and fought the Hafid _m’hallas_, Rabat
would surely have fallen and Abdul Aziz would now be a royal prisoner
safe in the keeping of his brother. For want of money to pay the troops
Abdul Aziz was forced to pawn his jewels; and at last, by a royal
decree, he made good ‘a hundred sacks’ of silver coins that had been
confiscated as counterfeit. It was because of a threatened revolt of
the troops for want of pay that the Spaniards in February occupied the
port of Mar Chica.