In The Tail Of The Peacock Part 13

Bread three times a week 4d.

b.u.t.ter twice a week 9d.

Charcoal for cooking purposes, and oil for lamps, added three shillings to our moderate weekly expenditure. Living is cheap enough in Morocco, nor are servants' wages heavy. S'lam and Tahara had eighteen shillings a month and their food, which was simple indeed--a loaf each of native bread a day, green tea, lump sugar, and odds and ends from our meals. Our rent, it will be remembered, came to thirty shillings a month. Morocco suits "reduced circ.u.mstances."

Once a week, one of the little donkeys, which pa.s.sed along our "lane" in droves, carrying charcoal into the sok, was waylaid, brought into the garden, and its three pannierfuls commandeered for us and stored in the mules' stable, where Tahara did the washing in a great tub bought from Mr. Bewicke.

Milk was left every morning by a Moor, who took it in for sale to the sok.

When the accounts were all settled up, S'lam would swing out of the room with a "Bon soir tout-le-monde," unless he stayed to give R. a lesson in Arabic, which he could write as well as read--an unusual thing, and marking him for a scholar in his country.

Blood-feuds among the Riff tribe are common enough. S'lam's father was shot when S'lam was a boy. As soon as he grew up, S'lam shot the man. He had left the Riff in consequence: he was a "marked man," they said; but he began to talk of going back again, and while he was with us he bought a new French rifle. In the Riff he might be potted at, he might not: he would risk that. The brother or son of the man whom he had shot would never trouble to journey far for the purpose of shooting him. Why should they? All in good time. Some day, when he came their way, they would put a bullet into him. Only women die in their beds in the Riff. "Sudden death, Good Lord, grant us."

Men in the Riff who have blood-feuds will not go out of their houses in the early mornings without first sending the women and children to look if the coast is clear: neither will they walk up a hedgerow nor in a wood, but across the fields, keeping well in the open, since murder is always committed out of sight, decently, and in good order.

A man living in Tetuan now, has a blood-feud with an enemy, who has been in consequence obliged to move to Tangier. Sometimes he comes over, secretly, by night, to see his mother, and lies hidden in her house till the sok is full of market people in the middle of the day, when he can go out into the crowd without running great risk,--though in the sok a quarrel sometimes arises; in a flash, guns are up at men's shoulders--bang--bang--and bullets ping into the soft walls, if not into some one or other. Only lately a boy was shot twice in the thigh, happening to be in the way in a scuffle.

S'lam and Tahara were often amusing, if not interesting: never commonplace or "well-meaning." One corner of the roof of Jinan Dolero had been left unwhitewashed, the whitewashers' ladder was still there, and one morning S'lam came to say in his best French, "Deux mesdames. Pour arranger en haut."

The two madams were the whitewashers--two black madams, clad in a couple of striped towels each, Ali Slowee's slaves, bought for, say, 7 each. A very ragged countrywoman who came and weeded the garden, and seemed almost devoid of intelligence, was also a madam.

S'lam was deft with a needle; he borrowed one of ours and a thimble, sat himself down in the kitchen, and st.i.tched away at a large white garment "pour Maman," he said--sat up half the night, finished it, and took it to her next day.

He did not make a bad man-servant; but he was fond of tempting Fate by carrying trays, laden with china and gla.s.s, balanced on one hand; then he would stoop down and pick up a kettle in the other, there would be an ominous clatter, if not crash, in the tray amongst our crockery, and S'lam would murmur reproachfully under his breath, "O tray! tray!"

He bought a new jellab for wearing on visits to the sok; and after it had been proudly shown us, it was found, neatly folded up, placed on a hat-box in our bedroom. When we asked why it was there, he was taken aback. "Mightn't he keep it there? It was new: it was very clean."

One evening, when he came in to settle accounts, he said that he wished to write a letter. Would we give him a sheet of paper and envelope? They were produced. We were not quite prepared for it, when he at once drew up a chair, sat down at the table, and politely asked for a pencil. But it was impossible to snub so simple and well-meaning a child. I sharpened a pencil, and S'lam wrote diligently for quite half an hour, without a pause, from right to left, wonderful spidery characters: it was a long letter to his old master down in Morocco City. He held his string-turbaned head on one side, and was without embarra.s.sment as he sat between R. and myself (one of us worked, the other wrote); indeed, S'lam might have spent his evenings in a drawing-room all his life. When the letter was finished, he accepted a stamp most gratefully, wished us "Bon soir," and departed.

Tahara had her eccentricities too, of which one was an extraordinary apt.i.tude for annexing wherewithal to tie round her head in place of her own yellow silk scarf, which was kept for high days. One week one of our table-napkins was raised to this honour; the next one of our clean bedroom towels had taken its place round her dark locks.

I made her a present of a flannel shirt to wear, but the second day S'lam had appropriated that, and wore it in place of his waistcoat, unb.u.t.toned.

Apparently, in the eyes of the Tetuan world, we were taking a most unprecedented and foolhardy step in sleeping outside the city in the winter: the Ceuta "road" near us was said to be famous for robbery and murder. For some reason or other a reputation clung to us of being fabulously rich. The Moors warned, the missionaries seriously expostulated with us. None of them would have done it, and Mr. Bewicke was put down as mad for countenancing such an action. But we had two men in the house at night; for, besides S'lam, a labourer was induced to sleep in the mules' stable for our protection, and we had a couple of rifles and a revolver. Now, since the news of the murder of A----, one wonders . . . . . But _he_ was alone: _we_ had the safety of numbers.

To show how jealous Moors can be, and what precautions they take about their women, S'lam never allowed the labourer inside the garden gate unless he himself had come in. The man sat and waited on the bank. Then, after he was installed in the stable, the door between the kitchen and stable was locked and bolted. When we went out, Tahara was made to bolt every door; and if any one came to the house, she would only call down to them out of our bedroom window.

The first night we slept in our garden-house and for several nights after, the basha took upon himself to send us out a guard of soldiers, who were responsible for our safety. We never asked this favour, and were annoyed; for they slept under our windows, talked and coughed the whole night, lay on the bulbs in a flower-bed, and stole the lemons. Seeing, however, that we did not pay them anything at all for the attention, the basha soon grew tired of sending them, much to our relief; for when, to prevent their depredations, we locked them outside the garden door, they broke down our fence, scrambled into the garden, and lay under the p.r.i.c.kly pears, as being a safer place than the lane outside.

There has never such a thing been known, as a guard without a cough, or who do not talk. If told to be silent, they reply that they must talk to keep awake; for if they fell asleep, how could they guard? Occasionally, to show how much on the alert they are, guards will discharge their guns in the dead of night. Altogether Moorish soldiers at close quarters are not conducive to sleep.

We had an excitement one night, but it turned out to be groundless. Guns were fired from the garden-house below ours, repeatedly, about 10 p.m., and S'lam got into a fever of excitement, brought his rifle up into our sitting-room, and sat watching at one of the windows. He thought it was tribesmen come down from the hills to rob. At last the firing stopped, and R. and I went to bed; but S'lam was up all night, and Tahara brought their mattress upstairs and slept in our sitting-room for safety. It turned out to be Moors who had come out to sleep for one night, and were amusing themselves by firing rifles from the loop-holes and out in the garden.

There is an advantage in being in a country where game is not sacred. For instance, one evening after tea, standing on the steps outside our "bungalow," in the hush which came just after sunset, R. and I were startled by a familiar call over in the garden next ours. S'lam was strolling about, and confirmed our supposition--a partridge. We went indoors and forgot about it; but ten minutes later the report of a gun brought us out again, and there was S'lam crashing over the great bamboo fence into "next door" with his rifle, scudding across our neighbour's beans, then stooping down over something; a second later and he was back again, across the palisade like a lamplighter, and striding triumphantly up our path with a partridge dangling from his hand--a red-legged Frenchman, which we hung long. This acquisition to the larder had to be applauded perforce, in spite of its being shot sitting, and on some one else's acres. As luck would have it, S'lam's great bullet, about the size commonly used for big game, had gone through its head: he navely explained the advantages of shooting birds through the head. But I think he was a fair shot. Most Riffis are.

I suppose that the Riff tribe is more or less an anomaly. Think, if you can, of a clan or a tribe who are pirates, wreckers, who encourage slavery, who count the vendetta an admirable custom, who have no laws, no governors, who acknowledge as their supreme head a Sultan who has never from all ages ventured within their borders--a tribe who have, as it has been said, "no fear, no anything, save and excepting their faith in One G.o.d and Mohammed as his Prophet, their own daggers, a Martini-Henry if they can get one, and failing that, a ten-foot-long Riff gun, coral-studded, ivory-b.u.t.ted, bra.s.s-bound, and deadly to handle"--a people who live in a country without roads, _and all within a few hours of Gibraltar_: have they their parallel, except among adventurers in the Far East, and those but a few upon distant seas?

[Ill.u.s.tration: TWO WOMEN FROM THE RIFF COUNTRY.

[_To face p. 172._]

To explore the unknown Riff country would be interesting indeed. No book has been written upon it except from hearsay, and no European has penetrated across its length and breadth. The Riffis want no foreign interlopers among their sacred hills, and would "knife" the first who showed his face. It is but two days' journey eastwards from Tetuan, this select and exclusive country, and it extends about a hundred and fifty miles, with a population, it is reported, of one hundred and fifty thousand souls. Strange to think that no European pioneer, nor gentleman-rover, has ever exploited the Riff.

The law of the vendetta, is the law and the ten commandments of the Riffi, which, if he fail to keep, renders him in the eyes of his country-folk d.a.m.ned to all eternity, to be ostracised among men. A widow will teach her baby-son to shoot, and studiously prepare him for his one great duty, that as early as possible he may put a bullet into the murderer of his father. And thus the feud is nourished. Even the great-great-grandson of a man who has taken a life years upon years ago is not safe. He will probably meet with a dagger or the muzzle of a long gun one day.

But a people who inculcate such severe and cursory measures have their redeeming-points. It is a fact that cursing and swearing, so common among Moors, and polygamy and adultery, are seldom, if ever, met with in the Riff: for if one Riffi insults another, it is at the peril of his life; while the stain of immorality is wiped out at once by death.

The gun, pistol, or dagger is the Riffi's summary judge and jury. He submits to no authority. Questions on land, on inheritance, all legal questions, are settled in each village by the keeper of the mosque. He arranges marriages.

The Riffis are therefore a moral people: a man has but one wife; the women do not veil, and yet familiarity is not tolerated between the s.e.xes; a young man will go out of his way to avoid pa.s.sing close by a young woman whom he sees in the distance, lest he be suspected of behaving lightly to her.

The Riffis are an indomitable race, one which has never been conquered, magnificent raw material out of which to shape a battalion of infantry.

Though acknowledged as the Kaliph of the Prophet and their religious head, the Sultan, as has been said, has never dared to put his head in this independent hornets' nest.

They are an industrious tribe, growing crops a.s.siduously and rearing cattle: their valleys are fertile and well farmed for an uncivilized country. But these details must be taken for what they are worth. S'lam could say nothing but good of the Riff: how cheap living was, and how abundant food,--except when rain failed, and then there followed disastrous famine, and starving Riffis would come down to Tetuan, and lie in the caves outside the city, and live on roots, doing any work which offered; and some of them would die, in spite of the missionaries'

kindness and unremitting efforts.

There are many legends about the Riffis: they boast one tribe among themselves who are said to be descended from the Romans; and there is no reason against the a.s.sumption, since the Romans were in Morocco after Caesar's day. Another family claims to be descended from the inhabitants of Sodom. Some of them are quite fair--regular "carrots": Vandal blood may run in their veins. While, again, some people say there are Celts among them, with Irish characteristics and Irish words. Possibly. Pirates and rovers are apt to introduce foreign strains.

At any rate they have nothing in common with the Arabs, but are as unlike that race as a Scotchman is unlike an Italian. Berber is of course their common origin, and they are identical with the Kabyles of Algeria, the Touariks of the Sahara, and the Guanches of the Canary Isles. Shillah, the Berber dialect which they speak--one of the many dialects belonging to that race--is not a written language; but an educated Riffi learns to write and read at his village _jama_ (mosque school); he uses the Arabic character in writing, and he learns to read the Kor[=a]n.

Yet in one great point, like the Arabs, the Riffi, in common with the Berber race, lacks the power of cohesion and the spirit of patriotism, which should have welded all Berbers into one powerful people. Internal strife, that curse of Africa, has split them up into isolated units, and they stand at the same point they stood at a thousand years ago.

Nor have the Riffis, in common with the Moors, reached the point of discarding "petticoats and drapery"--that is to say, they wear the brown, hooded, woollen jellab, and the white woollen haik--a sheet of material without seam, which they cast round themselves something like a Roman toga. Perhaps a cotton tunic is worn underneath.

Part of the sleeves, the hood, and front of the jellab are often beautifully embroidered in coloured silks. On the border of the cloth thin leaves of dried gra.s.s are laid, which are worked over and over with coloured silk, and make a thick, handsome edging. The coloured leather belts which they wear; the large embroidered leather pouches, with deep-cut leather fringes, which hold bullets and powder and money and hemp-tobacco; their shaved heads, with one long oiled and combed or plaited lock; their turbans, red or brown, of strings of wool,--all complete a Riffi, and a very fine-looking fellow he can be.

The labour element, which as a whole is antagonistic to the spirit of Morocco, crops up here and there, less in the casually fanned fields than in out-of-the-way corners. The Potters' Caves just outside Tetuan const.i.tute one of those corners. There is always work going on in the caves, and smoke coming out of one or other of the many kilns, all the year round. Morocco and Moorish architecture would be nowhere without the potteries. Those infinitesimal little tiles which fit together and make such artistic colour-patterns, lining the _al-fresco_ patios, facing the walls of the rooms, the pillars and doorways and flooring, the houses throughout, are every one of them kneaded and cut and baked there: crocks to wash in, pans for charcoal, immense water-pots, small water-pots, bowls and shallow basins, dishes of all sizes, and saucers down to the smallest, even ink-bottles, all come into being there.

Leaving the city by _Bab-el-Nooadtha_ (the Gate of Sheaves), a little winding path leads to the caves, which lie among thickets of p.r.i.c.kly pear, at the foot of the Anjera Hills, out of which they have been hollowed, probably by the action of water. Immense ramifications they are--great dark halls, roofed _au naturel_ in corrugated rock with fissured sides, where maiden-hair fern hangs cool and green. Here in the dark shadows are a little company of workmen, chiefly in brown jellabs and leathern ap.r.o.ns, one cutting squares out of the soft clay with a penknife--he has a pattern to help him keep them exact; another cuts diamonds, another stars: piled up together, they look like little pastry shapes in brown, beside the workmen, who are all sitting cross-legged on the ground.

A little farther on two more men are dipping the top surfaces of the diamonds into an earthenware bowl full of yellow "cream," which will glaze and colour them, all in one. This sulphur-colour, and a blue, and a white, are generally used for the tiles--no other shades, as a rule. A boy in a corner is at work at one of the first processes, treading out a vast circle of yellowish clay into the consistency of stiff dough. A rather superior old Moor in a white turban, perhaps the master-workman, is deftly cutting out rosettes. In the front of the cave a little brown donkey, with pasterns as weak as a reed, is standing under the weight of four great earthenware pots full of water, two balanced on each side its pack. A boy empties them one by one of the water, pouring it into a natural basin scooped out in the ground, well puddled with clay, and therefore without a leak. The water is wanted to mix with the "dough."

Then the donkey patters off for another load, the boy sitting sideways on its pack and shaking his heels--that makes it go.

To the left stands a kiln in process of being packed with millions of the clay dice, which, baked hard, dove-tailed together, and forming a smooth, polished surface, will keep many a room cool. The kiln next door to it, is full of pots and pans of all shapes and sizes, but its opening is plastered up with clay, and they are not to be seen. Into the great fiery furnace underneath, a man is thrusting dry brown bushes, and dried p.r.i.c.kly pear, and whatever rubbish will burn. Much of it has been hacked off the hillside by women, and has come on their backs many a mile. There is a crackling sound, smoke comes out, and a pink flame glows behind the man's body. The tiles ought to bake all right.

Meanwhile, the same boy inside the cave has got his clay into good order--it is about two inches thick, and something the size of a big round table; then he stoops down, and, with a knife held in both hands, scores the clay across, much as toffee is scored; which done, each square, about a foot in diameter, is carried off to be cut up into little shapes or to go upon the potter's wheel.

The potter sat in his little pit, working the wheel with his foot--as Carlyle says, "one of the venerablest objects, old as the Prophet Ezekiel and far older. Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes."

The potter thumped his wet clay; then, as the wheel turned, pressed and moulded it with clever clay-encrusted hands: the sleeves were turned back from his bony chocolate-coloured arms. He had a grey goatee and a quiet smile, a dirty turban round his head, a white tunic mostly clay, and underneath a claret-coloured garment showed at the neck.

He was a spare, wizened old man: perhaps his work, like Dante's, had made him "lean for many years." The faster his wheel revolved, the truer apparently was the shape of the vessel he turned out. His country might accept the lesson--that labour, like the wheel, conduces towards a good end. I fancy that a decadent people, who will neither work nor spin, but choose to rest and lie at ease, give the potter Destiny no chance. He has no wheel, this potter--for Morocco will not labour, nor be broken, nor disciplined; and so he is reduced to a mere kneading and baking, without the means he fain would employ; and he turns out a mere makeshift--his production at best is "not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch--a mere enamelled vessel of dishonour."

[Ill.u.s.tration: SELLING EARTHENWARE POTS.

[_To face p. 178._]

The great pot which the potter slowly evolved out of the soft brown clay under our eyes was not perfect: he made it entirely by eye, and it matched the rest of the group to the ordinary observer; yet it had a distinct "lean." Did it grumble to itself, that