ARABIAN DAYS
It was in the early days of 1894 that J. and I set sail for Italy,
whither his work called him, and that on the way I beguiled him into one
of our merriest adventures.
“Our tickets allow us to stop over here for a week,” I whispered as the
steamer’s anchor chain rattled through the hawseholes and the lights of
Gibraltar glittered like golden fireflies fluttering over the huge Rock.
“But our luggage is booked for Naples,” J. objected. _He_ was eager to
push on to his studio in Rome. All the afternoon I had been drawn as by
a magnet to the mysterious blue coast of Africa. Here we were at the
Pillars of Hercules; should we ever be here again? If an ally had not
loomed up at that moment I should never have lived my seven Arabian days
and nights. He introduced himself with a sweeping bow.
“I am Ferguson, friend of the Americans. You are from Boston; you live,
perhaps, upon the Common? I know the best people there, the Quincys, the
Shaws, the Winthrops. I will show you their letters.”
“It is not necessary,” I interrupted, “for I also know Mark Twain, who
has told all Americans about you.”
The famous guide of the “Innocents Abroad” seemed to dilate at this,
till he shut out the Rock itself. He was an impressive-looking person,
tall, handsome, with splendid and seductive manners. He came to my aid,
and in ten minutes the matter was settled.
“I will show you Spain. I know what you want; some ladies do not
understand traveling, but _you_ shall see everything! Gypsy dances, eh?
Palaces, pictures, Seville, Granada? Yes, we will go to Morocco. You
shall visit the Sultan’s harem!”
Letters to my mother and sisters give some impressions of that precious
stolen week.
[To my Mother.]
Tangier, January 12, 1894.
We took ship at Gibraltar for Morocco, a pleasant sail of not more
than three hours. As the steamer drew near the shore a swarm of
boats rowed by turbaned Moors came out to meet us. Tangier lies at
the foot of a spur of the Atlas Mountains on the edge of an almost
circular bay; from the boat it looked like a round white pearl set
in a ring of yellow sand. We clambered into a small craft rowed by
four Moors and crowded with rival guides and interpreters who
fought for us and our possessions. A young Jew, Abraham Levy, won
the fight. Ferguson, finding us too small game for his picking, had
handed us on to him. We soon found that in Morocco the Jew stands
for what in some parts of the world the Christian stands
for,--education, intelligence, cleanliness; in a word, the higher
civilization. The Moors are a fine race, tall, handsome, with
haughty austere faces and a pride of bearing I have yet to see
surpassed.
At the city gate our porters laid down our luggage at the feet of
three grave Moors dressed in white turbans and bournouses,
reclining gracefully in a small cell smoking keef, a mixture of
hashish and snuff. No word was spoken; the Moors looked calmly at
us and we at them for what seemed a long time. Then the eldest of
the trio nodded, the bearers took up our traps and we passed
through the gate into the city.
“All right,” whispered Abraham, “you see I understand these people.
Did you ever pass through a customhouse so easily?”
None of us had guessed that it was a customhouse!
The whole life of Tangier seems to be lived in the streets. The
market is a perfect babel of strange tongues. Veiled women seated
on the ground sell queer flat loaves of bread and great bunches of
violets. The stalls are piled with golden tangerines, tiny limes,
mammoth lemons, scarlet peppers, purple eggplant--every fruit or
vegetable you ever saw and many you never heard of!
The children are very handsome with enormous eyes and skins of
bronze velvet! The Moorish is the best Oriental dress I have seen,
save that of the Bedouins of the Pyramids, which it resembles.
Abraham piloted us through a maze of narrow twisted streets crowded
with strange figures; Moors in white bournouses, Jews in black
gaberdines, negro slaves with gashed cheeks and wild-looking
Berbers with blue eyes, the descendants of white men settled
centuries ago in the hills and fiercer looking even than the
Moors....
In the late afternoon Dr. Baltzell (a fellow traveler) and I went
for a ride in the outlying country. It might better be called
desert, for it was all sand with an occasional fig tree. The sand
from the beach seems to have been driven inland and rises up in
little hills, reaching far into the interior. We rode into the
sunset till we reached the ruins of an old Roman bridge and then
back to town in a wonderful pink twilight under a crescent moon.
Abraham lifted up his voice and sang a wild Hebrew melody, while
Abdallah the donkey boy trotted along beside me, twisting the tail
of Zuleiman, my unfortunate mule. When our retinue learned that
Baltzell was an M.D., every door flew open to him, as physicians
are held in high respect. Abraham consulted him about his fiancée,
and Abdallah about his wife. The doctor’s offer to go and see the
patients was respectfully declined. The symptoms of both ladies
were minutely described, and he was urged to prescribe. The
doctor’s own stock of simples soon gave out, and we commandeered my
bottle of soda mints and my box of Brown’s bronchial troches, which
he distributed freely. At dinner there was quail for the doctor,
mere larks for us; his pillow was of down, ours of straw; he had a
fine horse to ride, the rest of us had to put up with mules or
donkeys!
I liked the Moors immensely, but they did not like us. A handsome
boy bit his thumb at me! When I laughed at his insolence, Abraham
whispered anxiously, “Do not notice them--it is better not--it is
not safe!”
Raisuli, the brigand chief, was believed to be near the city and we
were not allowed to ride far beyond the gates. I asked to see a
school. Abraham led me to the open door of a cellar, where twenty
boys from three to ten years old were seated upon the earth floor
repeating verses from the Koran. The master, an old Moor with a
long beard, frowned at us, and a youth of fifteen who was writing
neatly in a book closed it hurriedly and started to his feet,
muttering angrily.
“He is afraid that the shadow of a Christian might fall upon the
page. If that happened, he would tear it out and all his labor
would be lost,” Abraham explained.
Outside the gate is the Sok, or market place. Here we heard a
native teller of tales recite the story of the Fisherman and the
Genie. While we were there a caravan from Fez arrived at the Sok,
the camels grunted and scolded just like those you remember we rode
in the Egyptian desert. That night a friend arranged a concert for
us. There were six musicians with a lute, a tambourine, a reban and
a shepherd’s pipe. The leader chanted a wailing song, the others
joining in the chorus.
“They are singing ‘The Lament for Granada’!” said our host.
It was on a later visit to Tangier that I made the acquaintance of the
famous Sharifa, Madame Wazzan, the English wife of the late Sharif, the
native ruler of this part of the country. She was an interesting
personage and for many years played an important part in Moroccan
affairs. She was a strong, masterful-looking woman rather Oriental in
type, but thoroughly British in her tastes. Her drawing-room was the
most characteristically English room I ever saw out of Great Britain. On
the walls hung signed photographs of royalties and distinguished
personages from all over the world, for this vigorous woman with
iron-gray hair and aquiline features was a power in the land of her
adoption. She spoke of her late husband with affection. His portrait
held the central place on the walls. I met the wife of her son, a pretty
Oriental with the regulation henna-tinted nails and palms. Tea was
served English fashion and it was not till I was introduced to the
Oriental part of the establishment that I realized what the Sharifa
meant when she said:
“I lead a double life. With Arabs I am an Arab; with Europeans I am
a European.”
The Sharifa has done much to help civilize her adopted country. She
told me that she had introduced vaccination to Tangier, where she
vaccinates hundreds of children every year. I met Muli Hassan, her
grandson and heir to the title, a pretty, well-mannered child.
“In certain respects,” the Sharifa told me, “my grandchildren are
brought up English fashion, as my children were. But I never forget
that they are not only noble, but in the eyes of the people here,
almost sacred persons. The crowd of cripples and beggars you saw
outside my gate were waiting for the chance of touching Muli
Hassan’s garments when he goes out to ride.”
The influence of such English women as the Sharifa of Wazzan and
Lady Hester Stanhope upon the Mohammedan world into which they
married, is beyond calculation. It must have been a very potent
one, and perhaps worth to the British Empire the awful price they
must have paid!
[To Laura Richards.]
On board the steamer, bound
for Naples, January 19, 1894.
When we saw Granada we did not wonder that the Moors still mourned
for their lost paradise.
At Seville we found a good English pension, honest and cheap, and
best of all Don Antonio Sucillio, a friend of J.’s and one of the
leading Spanish sculptors. He took us to his heart and we had two
days of pure unmixed delight at Seville in the shadow of the
Giralda, one of the perfect towers in the world, as lovely in its
way as the Giglio at Florence. We saw some fine Murillos, the
unique cathedral, the Alcazar, and the House of Pilate, only less
beautiful than the Alhambra and the fitting prelude to this
brightest jewel in the crown of Spain.
We reached the marvelous garden of delight, Granada, at nine
o’clock on a full moonlight night. The next morning we were in the
Alhambra in the very room where Queen Isabella first listened to
Columbus and promised him her jewels for his quest. The capital of
the Moors is perched on a high hill behind which rise the snow-clad
Sierras. The town of Granada lies at the foot of the hill reserved
for the palaces and gardens. The exterior of the Alhambra is grim
and simple, but noble in its somber strength. The interior--but it
is indescribable! The beauty of design, the wealth of color, the
wonderful harmony, the romance, the hot passionate quality of it
all makes Greece seem cold and Italy thin compared to it. Charles
the Fifth did a little butchering and Ferdinand and Isabella a
little more, but on the whole it has been wonderfully preserved.
Restoration is only made when necessary and is so perfectly done
that one asks not to be told where the original work leaves off and
the reproduction begins.
We saw the Zingari of Andalusia living in caves scooped from the
living rock. A dance was arranged for us; four girls and one man
trod strange and beautiful measures. The best dancer of the five,
whose name is Incarnacion, is partly Spanish. When the performance
was half over, each of the women kissed me on the cheek and gave a
little mock embrace to the gentlemen of our party. As they were
well scrubbed and freshly dressed, I enjoyed the pretty ceremony.
We were offered wine, which we declined and they drank.
Andalusia was inhabited by the Moors for seven hundred and
seventy-seven years before the Spaniards drove them out! Poor
dears, how sorry I am they ever left it. Many of them took with
them the massive iron doorkeys of their houses, believing that they
would surely return some day to the land their industry had made
fruitful, their art made beautiful. To-day in some ancient houses
of Morocco these keys of the lost homes of Granada and Andalusia
still hang upon the wall!
Andalusia is now chiefly important to the rest of the world as the
treasure house of their scattered buildings, each one a gem, while
the Moors, since they went back to Morocco, do not seem to have
done much for themselves or for anybody else. Was it pleasant, do
you think, to stand in the room of the Alhambra where Washington
Irving lived, and to pick a leaf from the tree that bore his
favorite oranges, also to eat an orange from the same? Our guide,
Antonia Jimenez, was the great, great nephew of his guide. Irving’s
“Alhambra” is a classic; it gives the feeling of the place
wonderfully.
How do you suppose it felt to be in Seville and to have Don Antonio
Sucillio announced and go out with this fascinating Spaniard and
partake of breakfast in a summer house lost in orange trees, to
have a hidden singer caroling fierce war ballads and passionate
love songs and a guitarist do the things with his instrument that
only a Spaniard can do? Oh, week of romance and joy stolen from the
workaday winter! A never-failing fount of happy memory. Even the
beggars, the sturdiest of their breed in all the world, have a
charm. Spain! Spain! It has taken the flavor out of everything
else. I must go back if only for Madrid, where only one sees
Velasquez. At Seville one gains a good idea of Murillo, who was a
native of that charming city of roses. The finest specimens are
[Illustration: LAURA E. RICHARDS
From a photograph by Reynolds]
[Illustration: FLORENCE HOWE HALL
From a photograph by Langhorne]
in the damp dreadful old gallery where the pictures are suffering
horribly. There is the divine San Antonio with the child Christ
appearing to him, and a very fine Conception. The week in Spain was
comparable to nothing but an Arabian Nights’ tale; the dazzle of
the Alhambra is still in my eyes!