In The Tail Of The Peacock Part 4

A gutter runs down the middle of the streets, where chickens are killed, and the heads and uneatable parts of flesh, fish, and fowl thrown. Mules and donkeys walk along the gutter, while foot-people flatten themselves against the walls. A well-laden mule fairly absorbs the width of the little streets.

The condition of these wretched transport animals is not due so much to wanton cruelty as to neglect, and to a callousness bred of long familiarity. A Moor will not trouble to prevent his beasts having sore backs and fistulated withers and raw hindquarters, any more than he sees that his children are warmly clad and suitably fed. Fond of both, he is foolish and apathetic, treating his mules roughly, cramming them with unnecessary food or neglecting them, and invariably working them till they drop.

One or two little cafes we pa.s.sed round the feddan, and banished any connection between them and lunch for ever and a day.

A little room in the shade hung with yellow matting, no chairs, but a wide divan at the far end, where a few Moors sat cross-legged or reclined, smoking long pipes of soothing kif, and eating the pernicious haschisch--this const.i.tutes a cafe. A few of the Moors are playing cards; the rest look on. A dome-shaped pewter teapot, filled with a brew of steaming tea, stands on a low table, with a painted gla.s.s beside it half full of mint, which a freckled boy in a coa.r.s.e jellab fills up from the teapot to the brim and puts to his lips; then he lights a cheap cigarette. A great urn, with an oil lamp under it, stands in one corner.

No self-respecting Moor patronizes these cafes: he is the most fanatical of Mohammedans in a land reputed to be more strictly religious than any Eastern country. In public he observes his Prophet's laws, only indulging _sub rosa_ in smoking--"eating the shameful," as it is called.

Mohammed knew very well that Eastern peoples drink to get drunk, and smoke and eat opium for the purpose of intoxicating their senses. _Kif_, a herb something like hemp, produces this effect on the brain. He therefore forbade both.

When a Moorish "swell" wants to amuse himself, instead of pa.s.sing the time at a cafe he goes out for the day into the country. There is generally an expression of perfect satisfaction with life as he finds it, on his lineless biscuit-coloured face and in his brown agate eyes--a content seldom expressed under the top-hats in the Park. Time is to him no "race": he drifts easily down the years; knows no other home than, it may be, Tetuan; nor is conscious that Tetuan sleeps, as it has slept for ages, curled up, underneath the towering hills, white, petrified, like Lot's wife.

Still down more streets, and on towards the Belgravia of the city we walked, leaving steaming little hot-fritter shops, where _sfins_ are fried in oil and eaten with honey, where cream tarts may possibly be made and honeyed cakes, and crisp pastry prepared with attar of roses, and candied musk lemons, and dates mixed with almond paste. We left the fried-fish shops and fried spitted-meat shops behind, whence emerge _kabobs_--second only to _coos-coosoo_--and a smell indescribable; and we wound down tortuous alleys, past quiet windowless houses, whose great painted doors, yellow and brown, studded with enormous nails and knockers, spoke respectability.

Never a straight street for six yards. Here an angle with a door; turn down under an archway: there a tiny branching alley, which we follow: here another door; plunge down the opposite way. A woman pa.s.ses us with a friend, walking as only women in Morocco walk--figures in creamy haiks of the finest wool, which swathe them entirely from top to toe like a sheet, a pair of eyes barely showing between the folds. At the bottom of the haiks a flash of colour obtrudes, tomato in one, beetle-green in the other, and filmy muslin over both, which in their turn allow a glimpse of ankles wrapped round in snowy linen folds--rose-pink, gold-embroidered slippers completing the whole, suggestive of a tea party.

A yard farther and we pa.s.s _El-Jama-el-Kebeer_ (the Big Mosque), which, unlike that at Tangier, stands with its doors wide open, but in front of which no infidel may linger. There was a vision of a cool tiled courtyard and splashing fountains of white marble and clean yellow matting, of endless tiled pillars vanishing into shade. There are saint-houses in the city where women are allowed to pray, but only upon one night in the whole year in El-Jama-el-Kebeer--a field-day among the wives and concubines, who flit like white moths through the darkness in flocks to worship, carrying red-and-blue lanterns.

At last we reached the house of the Moor upon whom Mr. Bewicke intended us to call--a specimen of the best Moorish houses.

Alarbi Abresha has been nicknamed "the Duke of Westminster"--the wealthiest man in Tetuan. A slave responded to the hammer of the great knocker, demanded who knocked, and then opened the door. Alarbi Abresha was out; but his son, a youth badly marked with small-pox, received us, dressed in a jellab of pale blue, ta.s.selled, and worked in white. Mr.

Bewicke asked after _the house_. No one in Morocco inquires after the wife or family distinctively.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._]

ALARBI ABRESHA'S HOUSE.

[_To face p. 54._]

A long pa.s.sage led us into a large _patio_ (courtyard), in which orange-trees were growing. It was open to the sky, the floor tiled with shining tesselated tile-work; a marble fountain rippled in the middle: the dado round the four walls, the three rows of pillars which on all sides supported the gallery above--all were tiled in the same mosaic of small saffron-yellow, powder-blue, and white tiles, which are baked, coloured, and glazed in primitive potteries outside the city, and made only in Tetuan and Fez. A Moorish house is the essence of purity and light, with its whitewashed walls, its absence of all stifling furniture, and its capability of being sluiced down from top to bottom every day with rivers of water by barefooted slaves.

"The Duke" had spared no dollars to make his house beautiful. Of the triple row of arches, supported by the pillars round the patio, the outside row was a plain horse-shoe, the inner toothed, the inmost carved.

Through an avenue of pillars the rooms all round the patio look out upon the fountain and the orange-trees. Slaves occupied them. The kitchen also and the hummum are always on the ground floor. We were taken up to the first floor by the tiled staircase, with a plaster fan-sh.e.l.l ceiling, and were shown into the best room--the room belonging to the master of the house. The tiled floor was hidden by an ugly modern French carpet in strips: white and coloured mattresses were laid all round the walls upon the floor instead of chairs. Two immense bra.s.s bedsteads stood in recesses, blue silk four-posters; a great cushioned mattress on the carpet beside the bed is reported to be used by the wife; a slave will often sleep in the same room. The lower half of the whitewashed walls was hung with ancient silk brocaded hangings, a long-forgotten relic of the old wandering life as nomad Arabs, and still used by Arabs for the insides of their tents. The richer the owner, the better his silk hangings: the design is invariably a succession of horse-shoe arches, more or less embroidered, and giving the rooms a warm, luxurious air. In the mosques very fine mats are used; in ordinary houses, cafes, and shops, yellow matting lines the walls. Above the old hangings the Duke had hung a line of immense and tawdry gilt-framed mirrors. There were clocks in the room to the number of ten, some of them going; two inlaid cabinets; three cases of artificial flowers under gla.s.s; a great wooden coffer--the wife's property--holding a wardrobe of clothes; a gun on one of the walls; a rosary; a thermometer made in Germany: these were the only knick-knacks. Moorish rooms combine bedroom with sitting-room, but are devoid of washing-apparatus, tables, chairs, books, or pictures.

Bathing is done in the hummum or in the courtyard of the mosque; of books there are none; while pictures Mohammed forbade, as inclined to lead to idolatry. Query: have many artists been lost to the world in fourteen hundred years among a sect numbering a hundred millions?

The ceiling and woodwork of the room were painted in barbaric, gaudy hues, which mellow with age and "tone" like a faded Kashmir shawl. A row of tiled pillars divided the room lengthwise, and raised the inner half a step above the outer: it was immensely lofty, lighted by the great double doors only, which stood wide open on to the patio. Gla.s.s is not used in Morocco: the windowless rooms are aired by the unfastened doors which look on to the patio, itself open to the winds of heaven. The outside world can have little idea of the life going on within the courtyard house: there is much seclusion therein, in fitting harmony with the spirit of Morocco.

Fireplaces do not exist, though from December to March the thermometer has sometimes, on single occasions, touched freezing-point at night.

Earthenware pans of charcoal, used for cooking, can be carried upstairs for warmth.

The other rooms in Alarbi Abresha's house were all more or less replicas of the best room shorn of its gilt. As the laws of the Medes and Persians, so is the arrangement of the mattresses (_divans_) round the walls inside a Moorish house.

A Moor does not spend his day indoors. He eats and sleeps at home, but is otherwise sitting talking with his friends in the city, or in his shop, or out at his garden-house or fields.

He eats in any one of the divanned rooms in which he happens to be at the time, his rule being to "sleep where you will and eat where you will." A slave carries in his dish of meat on a tray, and puts it on a table four inches in front of the divan. Beef, mutton, and chicken are cooked in oil till they fall apart and can be eaten with the fingers. He eats vegetables and fruit, murmurs a "B'ism Allah" beforehand and a "Hamdoollah" (G.o.d be praised) at the end; washes his hands; drinks green tea, or begins his meal with it and bread of fine white flour. His wife has the refusal of the dish after her lord, never eating with him; and the slaves follow her. As many as five dishes may be brought up at a meal; and the master of the house, sampling each, chooses which he will eat, and sends the rest away. If he has a guest, it is the height of politeness to select small pieces off the dish and put them within the guest's reach, or, still better, into his mouth.

Moors, unless they are wealthy men, eat "by the eye"--that is, not according to what they require, but according to that they see set before them: frequent hiccups express gratification at hospitality received, accompanied by "Hamdoollah." The amount which a Moor can eat is prodigious. There was a man at Fez who was reverenced as a saint by his neighbours, because he had been known to eat a hundredweight of _coos-coosoo_ (porridge) and a whole sheep at a sitting.

Alarbi Abresha, Junior, meanwhile, took us on into his father's guest-house, a suite of magnificent rooms, decorated in execrable taste, the barbaric glories of the old Moorish style giving place to modern French vulgarity. A courtyard house can be a strange mixture. Its woodwork, possibly _arrar_, a cypress of beautiful grain, scented like cedar, cinnamon-coloured, and immensely hard (out of which the Roman patricians cut their precious tables, valued at their weight in gold if as much as four feet wide: beams of arrar put into the Cordovo Mosque by the Moors a thousand years ago still exist); its old silk hangings; its tiles, kept polished like jet, and never desecrated by anything harder than a slippered sole,--all alike are the finest relics of a taste which ruled in the construction of the Alhambra, where Mauresque design is seen at its best. The aristocrats of Tetuan are descendants of the old Andalusian families, who, having left Morocco and invaded Spain, settled there, built the Alhambra, were in the course of time driven back over the seas, and took refuge in Tetuan and other coast towns. Their very t.i.tle-deeds, together with the keys of their houses in Granada, are still in the possession of their descendants in Tetuan.

While the best work in the courtyard houses of to-day harks back to the brave days of Spain, the Moor of the twentieth century has less of the vitality and originality which distinguished his forefathers, and he is apt to mix cheap up-to-date decoration with the patio and the windowless wall, of which the Duke's guest-house may stand for an example.

When the great door had shut behind us, and we were outside in the street again, it seemed both narrow and prosaic after the sunny patio, with the yellow-fringed orange-trees almost branching into the rooms, and the fitful accompaniment of running water, dear to the Moorish ear.

In the course of the afternoon Mohammed, Ali, mules, and baggage put in an appearance, and we found them waiting in the feddan, anxious to put our tents up in the middle of the noisy, crowded sok, where the wind, which had dropped but little, was whirling dust round in clouds, and where we should have been the centre of a staring throng--at the same time, an ideal place in the servants' eyes, suggesting cafes and conversation the whole night through. The camping-ground which "the infidel" selects is an insoluble puzzle to the Moor, and they went off mystified and disappointed, under orders from the Consul to pitch the tents outside the city.

Later on we followed, by a street redolent and sweet with honey, of which a great quant.i.ty had just come in from the Riff country, leading to _Bab-el-Aukla_ (the Gate of Wisdom), so called because the elders of the city, the wise men, used to sit outside on some of the great rocks: a fine two-storied, square-shaped gateway, with a pointed arch and toothed ornament above it. Three little windows overlook the arch; the black noses of small cannon protrude in a long row out of the white parapeted walls; a flagstaff tops the whole, and flies the crimson streamer of Morocco. A line of sea-green tiling beneath the cannon breaks the flat wall, where the heads of turbulent tribesmen hang occasionally, sent over from some neighbouring raid by the Sultan's orders, and first salted by the Jews in the city, _nolens volens_. The cobbles were slippery under the gate. The huge, heavy wooden doors, studded with iron bolts, are barred and locked every night half an hour after sunset. Inside, looking back, just at the parting of two streets, a great white wall faced us, topped with green tiles, gra.s.s-grown; below, a horse-shoe arch, somewhat in relief, belted with coloured tiles, defaced by age, contained a long solid stone trough, into which two spouts of water gushed--never dry in this city of springs. Mules and donkeys and country-folk all stop and drink, and the front of the trough is carved.

Bab-el-Aukla is the finest gate in the city.

Go where you will in Tetuan, at every turn water bubbles into time-worn and artistically moulded troughs and basins, under quaint arches, tiled in blue and brown and white. In the narrow winding street-ways, between the houses, half dark, still the bubbling of water is heard, and the shining wet trough seen.

As we left the city and walked down the sandy road which leads to the sea, our tents lay a quarter of a mile off, two white spots, pitched on gra.s.s just off the road, the mules picketed by them.

We had a somewhat light meal at six o'clock, Mohammed's chicken turning out like hammered leather. He was no cook.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OUR CAMP OUTSIDE TETUAN.

[_To face p. 60._]

An Arabic proverb says, "What is past is gone, and the future is distant; and to thee is the hour in which thou art." It was obviously never intended by the Creator that mankind should make plans. Morocco may have its drawbacks, but it is at least one of those few and blessed spots where it is waste of time to plan: life is a matter of to-day, and

To-morrow?--Why, To-morrow I may be Myself with Yesterday's Seven Thousand Years.

Thus some time that evening, when, after coping unsuccessfully with the chicken, it struck R. and myself that Tetuan had attractions over and above the head of Tangier, we settled then and there to stay on at Tetuan as long as we liked the place, though the weather looked very much like rain, not at all like camping out, and we had no clothes with us to speak of.

Overcoming or ignoring these difficulties, we finally decided to pay off our three men, send them back by themselves to Tangier with the tents and camp outfit, write to the Villa Valentina, pay our bill, have our boxes packed up and sent over to us at Tetuan by muleteer, and move ourselves into the Spanish _fonda_ (inn) inside the city. Thus were we left for the next six days with one clean collar apiece.

In Tangier there had been some speculation on the elasticity of the Spartan wardrobes which we had brought out from England, at a moment when the dread of a vast impedimenta happened to lie strong upon us. In Tetuan such panics bury themselves. The slimmest wardrobe will suffice. A country's own materials, whether home-spun of Kashmir or sheep-skin coat of Afghanistan, naturally meet its requirements best: deficiencies are easily supplied, and later on we lived in mufti off the backs of Tetuan sheep.

Lying in bed in the early morning before it was light, duck were to be heard calling up the river; and, breakfast over, we strolled down to the banks, where the thick green orange-trees on the opposite side bore a crop of cow-birds, sitting like a covey of white c.o.c.katoos on the tips of the branches among the golden oranges, so thick and snowy that the tree might well have burst into abnormal flower.

By nine o'clock the camp was struck, and we had burnt our ships: the last of the five mules, three men, and baggage tailed off out of sight along the road to Tangier.

Under a cloudy sky, prophesying rain, we walked into the city to look for quarters: better, perhaps, a fonda in Tetuan than a tent at the fondak in wet weather.

CHAPTER III

DIFFICULTIES OF "LODGINGS" IN MOROCCO--A SPANISH FONDA--A MOORISH TEA PARTY--POISON IN THE CUP--SLAVES IN MOROCCO--EL DOOLLAH--MOORISH CEMETERY--RIDE TO SEMSAR--SHOPPING IN TETUAN--PROVISIONS IN THE CITY.

CHAPTER III