ON THE SEBÙ.
It was noon of the fifth day after our departure from Fez, when, after a
five hours’ ride through a succession of deserted valleys, we passed
once more through the gorge of Beb-el-Tinca, and saw again before us the
vast plain of the Sebù inundated by a white, ardent, implacable light,
of which the memory alone makes my face glow. All, except the Ambassador
and the captain, who participated in the fabled virtue of the
salamander, that lives in fire without being burned, covered their heads
like brethren of the Misericordia, wrapped themselves in their mantles
and cloaks, and without a word, with heads down, and eyes half closed,
descended into the terrible plain, confiding in the clemency of God.
Once the voice of the commandant was heard announcing that a horse was
dead _already_. One of the baggage-horses had fallen dead. No one made
any comment. “Horses,” added the commandant, spitefully, “always die
_first_.” These words also were received in mortal silence. In about
half an hour another faint voice was heard, asking Ussi to whom he had
_bequeathed_ his picture of Bianca Cappello. Throughout the journey
these were the only words heard. The heat oppressed all. Even the
soldiers were silent. The caid, Hamed Ben-Kasen, in spite of the great
turban that shaded his visage, was dripping with sweat. Poor general!
That very morning he had shown me an attention that I shall remember all
my life. Noticing that I lagged behind, he came up, and banged my mule
with such heartfelt zeal, that in a few moments I was carried at a
gallop in front of all the others, bouncing in my saddle like an
india-rubber automaton, and reached the camp five minutes in advance of
them all, with my inside upside down, and my heart full of gratitude.
That day no one came out of his tent until the dinner hour, and the
dinner was silent, as if all were still oppressed by the heat of the
day. One event alone aroused some excitement in the camp. We were at
dessert, when we heard a sound of lamentation proceeding from the
escort’s quarters, and at the same time the noise of regular blows, as
of some one being whipped. Thinking it to be some joke of the servants
and soldiers, we took, at first, no notice of it. But suddenly the cries
become excruciating, and we heard distinctly, in an accent of
supplicating invocation, the name of the founder of Fez—“Muley-Edris!
Muley-Edris! Muley-Edris!”
We all rose at once from the table, and running to the quarter whence
the noise proceeded, arrived in time to see a sad spectacle. Two
soldiers held suspended between them, one by the shoulders, the other by
the feet, an Arab servant; a third was furiously flogging him with a
whip; a fourth held up a lantern; the rest stood round in a circle, and
the caid looked on with folded arms.
The Ambassador ordered the instant release of the victim, who went off
sobbing and crying, and asked the caid what this meant. “Oh, nothing,
nothing,” he answered; “only a little correction.” He then added that
the man was punished because he had persisted in throwing little balls
of _cùscùssù_ at his companions, a grave offence, in a Mussulman a
sacrilege, because he is commanded to respect every kind of aliment
produced by the earth as a gift of God. As he spoke, the poor caid, a
kind man at heart, did not succeed in concealing, however he might wish
to do so, the pain and pity that he felt at being forced to inflict the
castigation; and this sufficed to restore him to his place in my heart.
In the night we were awakened by a burning hot wind from the east, which
drove us panting from our tents, in search of air that we could breathe;
and at dawn we resumed our journey under a sky that announced a hotter
day than the preceding one. The heavens were covered with clouds, on one
side all on fire with the rising sun, and broken here and there by
dazzling beams of light; on the opposite side all was black, striped by
oblique streaks of rain. From this troubled sky there fell a strange
light, which seemed to have passed through a yellow veil, and tinted the
stubble fields with an angry sulphurous color that offended the eye. Far
off the wind raised and whirled about with furious rapidity immense
clouds of dust. The country was solitary, the air heavy, the horizon
hidden by a veil of leaden-colored vapor. Without ever having seen the
Sahara, I imagined that it might sometimes present that same aspect, and
was about to say so, when Ussi, who has been in Egypt, stopping
suddenly, exclaimed in wonder: “This is the desert!”
After four hours’ journey we arrived upon the bank of the Sebù, where we
were met by twenty horsemen of the Beni-Hassen, led by a handsome boy of
twelve, the son of the governor, Sid-Abdallah. They came to meet us at a
gallop, with the usual shouts and discharges of musketry.
The camp was pitched in all haste near the river, on a bare piece of
ground, full of deep gullies; and having breakfasted quickly, we
withdrew to our tents.
This was the hottest day of the journey.
I will try to give a distant idea of our torments. Let the gentle reader
prepare his or her heart to feel profound compassion. I wipe my dripping
brows, and begin.
At ten o’clock in the morning, when my two companions and I withdrew to
our tents, the thermometer marked forty-two degrees centigrade in the
shade (about 107-1/2° Fahrenheit). For about an hour the conversation
continued animated. After that we began to find a certain difficulty in
terminating our periods, and were reduced to simple propositions. Then,
as it cost too much fatigue to put subject, verb, and attribute
together, we stopped talking and tried to sleep. It was useless. The hot
beds, the flies, thirst, and restlessness, would not let us close an
eye. After much fretting and fuming, we resigned ourselves to stay
awake, and tried to cheat the weary time in some occupation. But it
could not be done. Cigars, pipes, books, maps, all dropped from our
nerveless hands. I tried to write: at the third line the page was bathed
in the perspiration that streamed from my forehead like water from a
squeezed sponge. I felt my whole body traversed by innumerable springs,
which intersected, followed, joined each other, forming confluents and
streams, running down my arms and hands, and watering the ink in the
point of my pen. In a few minutes, handkerchiefs, towels, veils, every
thing that could serve the purpose, were as wet as if they had been
dipped in a bucket. We had a barrel full of water; we tried to drink, it
was boiling. We poured it out; it had hardly touched the earth when no
trace of it could be seen. At noon the thermometer marked forty-four and
a half degrees. The tent was an oven. Every thing we touched scorched
us. I put my hand on my head, and it felt like a stove. The beds heated
us so that we could not lie down. I tried to put my foot outside the
tent, and the ground was scorching. No one spoke any more. Only now and
then was heard a languid exclamation: “It is death.” “I cannot bear
this.” “I shall go mad.” Ussi put his head out of the tent for an
instant, his eyes starting out of his head, murmured in a suffocated
voice, “I shall die,” and disappeared. Diana, the poor dog, lying down
near the commandant’s bed, panted as if she were at her last gasp.
Outside of the tent no human voice was heard, no human being was
visible, the camp seemed deserted. The horses neighed in a lamentable
manner. The doctor’s litter, standing near our tent, cracked as if it
were splitting in pieces. Suddenly we heard the voice of Selam running
by, and calling out, “One of the dogs is dead.”
“One!” answered the faint voice of the commandant, facetious to the
last.
At one o’clock the thermometer marked forty-six and a half degrees. Then
even complaints ceased. The commandant, the vice-consul, and I lay
stretched on the ground motionless, like dead bodies. In the whole camp
the Ambassador and the captain were perhaps the only Christians who
still gave signs of life. I do not remember how long this condition
lasted. I was steeped in a sort of stupor, dreaming with my eyes open,
and a thousand confused images of cool spots and frozen objects chased
each other through my brain: I was springing from a rock into a lake, I
was putting the back of my neck against the spout of a pump, I was
building a house of ice, I was devouring all the ices in Naples, and the
more I sprinkled myself with water and drank cool drinks, the hotter,
the thirstier, the wilder I became. At last the captain exclaimed in a
sepulchral voice: “Forty-seven!”[7] It was the last voice I remember to
have heard.
Footnote 7:
About 116-1/2° Fahrenheit.
Toward evening the son of the governor of the Beni-Hassen, the boy whom
we had seen in the morning, came to visit the Ambassador in the name of
his father, who was ill. He entered the camp on horseback, accompanied
by an officer and two soldiers, who took him in their arms when he
dismounted, and advanced with solemn step toward the Ambassador,
trailing his long blue mantle like a robe, with his left hand upon the
hilt of a sabre longer than himself, and his right extended in
salutation.
In the morning, seen on horseback, he had seemed a handsome boy; and he
had indeed beautiful pensive eyes and a small pallid oval face; but on
foot, we saw that he was ricketty and deformed. From this no doubt came
his melancholy looks. In all the time he remained with us, no smile
moved his lip, his face never brightened for a moment. He looked at us
all with a profound attention, and answered the Ambassador’s questions
with short sentences, spoken in low tones. Once only a gleam of pleasure
came into his eyes; it was when the Ambassador told him that he had
admired, in the morning, his bold and graceful riding; but it was only a
gleam.
Although all our eyes were upon him, and this was probably the first
time that he had appeared in an official capacity before a European
embassy, he showed no shadow of embarrassment. He slowly drunk his tea,
ate some sweetmeats, whispered in the ear of his officer, settled two or
three times his little turban on his head, looked attentively at our
boots, and showed that he was a little bored; then, in taking leave, he
pressed the Ambassador’s hand to his breast, and returned to his horse
with the same royal gravity with which he had approached the tent.
Lifted into the saddle by his attendants, he said once more, “Peace be
with you!” and galloped off, followed by his small and hooded staff.
That same evening several sick people came to consult the doctor, who,
with the dragoman Solomon and a company of soldiers, had started a
little earlier for Tangiers, by the way of Alkazar. Among the rest came
a poor half-naked boy, lean, and with his eyes in such a state that he
could see with difficulty, while he seemed exhausted with fatigue. “What
do you want?” asked Morteo. “I seek the Christian physician,” he
answered in a trembling voice. When he heard that he was gone, he stood
a moment as if stunned, and then cried out in despair: “Am I to lose my
sight then! I have come eight miles to be cured by the Christian
physician! I must see him!” and he broke out into sobs and tears. Morteo
put some money into his hand, which he received with indifference, and
pointing out the way which the doctor had taken, told him that if he
walked quickly he might perhaps overtake him. The boy stood a moment
uncertain, looking with eyes full of tears, and then slowly limped away.
The sun went down that evening under an immense pavilion of gold and
flame color, and striking across the plains his last blood-colored
beams, set behind the straight line of the horizon like a monstrous
glowing disk that was sinking into the bowels of the earth.
And the night was almost cold!
In the morning at sunrise, we were on the left bank of the Sebù, at the
same point where we had crossed coming from Tangiers; and we had hardly
reached it before we saw appear upon the opposite bank, with his
officers and soldiers, the governor, Sid-Bekr-el-Abbassi, with the same
white vesture, and the same black horse caparisoned in sky blue, with
which he had the first time appeared.
But the passage of the river presented this time an unforeseen
difficulty.
Of the two boats on which we were to cross, one was in pieces; the other
broken in more than one place, and half sunk in the mud of the shore.
The little _duar_ inhabited by the boatmen’s families was deserted; the
river was dangerous to ford, and no other boat to be had except at a
distance of a day’s journey. How were we to cross, and what was to be
done? A soldier swam across and carried the notice to the governor, who
sent another soldier by the same road to explain. The boatmen had been
notified the night before to hold themselves in readiness for the
passage of the Ambassador and his suite, who would arrive in the
morning; but finding the boats in an unserviceable condition, and not
being capable, or not choosing to endure the fatigue of mending them,
they had fled during the night, heaven knows where, with their families
and animals, to avoid punishment by the governor. There was nothing to
be done but to try and mend the least broken of the two boats, and this
we did. The soldiers went off to get men from the neighboring _duars_,
and the work was begun under the direction of Luigi, one of the two
sailors, who on that, to him memorable occasion, gloriously sustained
the honor of the Italian marine. It was good to see how the Arabs and
Moors labored. Ten of them together, yelling and flying about, did not
do in half an hour the work that Luigi and Ranni, in military silence,
did in five minutes. Everybody gave orders, everybody criticized,
everybody got angry, everybody cut the air with imperious gestures,
until they all seemed like so many admirals, and not one of them
accomplished any thing. Meantime the governor and the caid conversed in
loud voices across the river; the soldiers careered about at a gallop
seeking the fugitives along the banks; the sumpter beasts forded the
river in a long file with water up to their necks; the workmen chanted
the praises of the Prophet, and on the opposite shore arose a great blue
tent under which the slaves of Sid-Bekr-el-Abbassi were busy in
preparing an exquisite collation of figs, sweetmeats, and tea, which we
watched through our glasses, humming the while a chorus from a
semi-serious opera, composed during our sojourn at Fez, and called “_Gl’
Italiani nel Marôcco_.”
With the aid of the Prophet, the boat was ready within two hours; Ranni
took us on his shoulders, and deposited us one by one on the prow, and
we reached the other side, with our feet up to the ankles in water, that
came in on every side, but without having been forced to swim for it; a
good fortune, of which we were not sure at our departure.
The governor, Sid-Bekr-el-Abbassi, who had heard of the praises which
the Ambassador had bestowed upon him to the Sultan, was more amiable and
fascinating to us than ever. After a little rest, we went on to
Karia-el-Abbassi, which we reached about noon, and were received and
passed the hot hours in the same white chamber in which thirty-five days
before we had seen the pretty little daughter of our host peep at us
from behind the paternal turban.
Here Sid-Bekr-el-Abbassi presented to the Ambassador, among other
people, a Moor of about fifty years of age, of a noble aspect and
agreeable manners, whom none of us, I think, have since forgotten,
because of the strange things we were told about his family. He was the
brother of one Sid-Bomedi, formerly governor of the province of Ducalla,
who languished for eight years in the dungeons of Fez. A tyrant and a
prodigal, after having bled his people, he contracted ruinous loans with
European merchants, accumulated debt upon debt, brought the wrath of God
within and without his house, was arrested and taken to Fez by order of
the Sultan, who, believing him to be the possessor of hidden treasures,
had his house pulled down and search made among the ruins and under the
foundations, and banished from the province, under pain of death, all
his family, in the fear that they, knowing the hiding-place, would get
possession of the money. But, nothing being found—perhaps because there
was nothing—and the Sultan still persisting in his belief in a treasure
which the prisoner knew and refused to reveal, the latter had never more
beheld the light of the sun, and was, perhaps, condemned to die in
prison. And the case of Sid-Bomedi is not rare among the governors of
Morocco, who, being all more or less enriched at the expense of their
people, furnish the government that wishes to get possession of their
wealth, the advantage of doing so under color of punishing a guilty man.
The governor, or the pashà upon whom the governor has set his eye, is
called in a friendly manner to Fez, or to Morocco, or perhaps arrested
suddenly in the night by a company of the imperial soldiers, who take
him by forced marches to the capital, tied on the crupper of a mule,
with his head hanging down and his face turned to the sun. As soon as he
arrives he is loaded with chains and thrown into a dungeon. If he
reveals the hiding-place of his wealth, he is sent back with honor to
his province, where in a little while, by worse exactions than before,
he can make up again that which has been taken from him. If he will not
reveal it, he is left to rot in his prison, and bastinadoed every day
until the blood comes, until, reduced to extremity, he decides to speak
rather than perish in chains. If he reveals only in part, he is
bastinadoed just the same, until he has made a clean breast of it. Some
of the more astute ones, foreseeing the catastrophe in time, turn it
aside by going in person to the court with a long caravan of camels and
mules laden with precious gifts; but in order to make these gifts, they
are obliged to spend a large part of their wealth; and it follows that
their safety is scarcely less fatal to the provinces governed by them
than if they were to return from their prison despoiled of all their
treasure. Some, also, die in prison, and under the stick make no
revelations, in order to leave all they have to their families, who know
where it is concealed; and others die because they have nothing to
reveal. But these are rare, because in Morocco it is the custom to hide
money, and it is known that the Moors are masters in the art. They talk
of treasures built up under the sill of the house-door, in the pilasters
of the court, in the stairs, in the windows; of houses demolished stone
by stone to the foundations, without the discovery of a treasure that
was really there; of slaves killed and secretly buried, after having
helped their masters to conceal it; and the vulgar mix with these
horrible and painful truths their pretty legends of spirits and
prodigies.
The governor, el-Abbassi, accompanied us toward evening as far as the
camp, which was about two hours distant from his house, in a field full
of flowers and tortoises, between the river Dà, which divides itself
just there into an infinity of canals, and a beautiful hill crowned by
the green cupola of a saint’s tomb. At a gunshot from our tents was a
large _duar_, surrounded by aloes and the Indian fig. All the
inhabitants rushed out at sight of us. Then we saw how much the governor
was beloved by his people. Old men, young men, youths and children, all
ran to him to have his hand placed upon their heads, and then went away
content, turning back to look at him with an expression of affection and
gratitude. The presence, however, of the beloved governor did not serve
to protect us from the usual bitter glances and the usual reproaches.
The women, half-hidden behind the hedges, with one hand pushed forward a
child to go and be blessed by the governor, and with the other sent his
brother to tell us that we were dogs. We saw babies about two feet high,
quite naked, and hardly able to stand, coming tottering toward us, and
showing a fist about as large as a nut, cry, “Accursed be thy father!”
and because they were afraid to come alone they made groups of seven or
eight, so compact that they might all have been carried on a tray; and
advancing with a threatening air to within ten paces of us, stammered
out their small insolence. How they amused us! One group among others
advanced against Biseo to wish that some relation or other of his might
be roasted. Biseo raised his pencil; the two first falling back upon the
others, they in their turn upon those behind, half the army presently
lay with their legs in the air. Even the governor burst out laughing.