In The Tail Of The Peacock Part 8

The treatment of Mohammedan women, against which so much has been written, is after all Oriental, and nothing more. The Kor[=a]n speaks of woman as an inferior being, an incomplete creation, needing no education, to be rigorously and jealously guarded all her life, and who after death may or may not be admitted into the Mohammedan heaven. Her function, if rich, is to bear children, and to be treated like a petted lap-dog: if poor, to work as a labourer. But interrogate the wife of a rich Moor on the subject, and she will not have the slightest wish to educate herself, but will affirm emphatically, "We have children and enough to eat. Why should we want to learn anything?"

It is manifestly absurd to compare Mohammedanism with Christianity, which are each the outcome of a distinct race, divided by that greatest barrier--a racial gulf.

Christianity, it must be confessed, bearing in mind the Christian renegades with whom the Moor has traded, is looked upon by him for the most part as a thing beneath contempt. It had five hundred years, before Mohammed was born, in which to impress itself on the East. It signally failed. And yet only a few years after Mohammed's death his religion had taken by storm Egypt, Turkey, Arabia, Persia, Turkestan, parts of India, the Malay Peninsula, the north coast of Africa, and parts of China, introducing monotheism, and impressing temperance and cleanliness on uncivilized millions, but never advancing beyond that point. It is borne in upon one that, in spite of missionary effort, Morocco will change its religion for that of Christianity when, as its own proverb says, "The charcoal takes root and the salt buds." The East, when it adopts other tenets, will exchange its own for a wider and a more universal cult than that which modern sects and parties are endeavouring and failing to introduce to-day.

While we were in our small quarters at the fonda, the weather by no means came up to the high standard it is said to reach in December. A few sunny days, when we could bask out of doors, were grudgingly sandwiched between many wet ones, and again and again the Ramadhan sunrise gun awoke us to gouts of almost tropical rain, a fiery sunrise followed by an hour's brilliant sunshine, the herald of a shamelessly distorted April day. The little gutters down the middle of the streets ran like torrents, carrying off chickens' heads and cabbage-stalks; hail scoured the pebbles; outside the city "the dry land was over your boots"; the road to the sea was impa.s.sable, and the rivers between Tangier and Tetuan were unfordable; snow lay in patches on the mountains; half the vale was inundated; the river could be heard a mile away; both our windows leaked; and down in the little patio, where the family sat, the waters were out.

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

A TYPICAL MOORISH STREET.

[_To face p. 108._]

From the west coast at Saffi terrible reports arrived of the havoc the weather had made of the city. The lowest barometer ever seen had preceded sheets of rain, and a solid _hamla_ (flood) had entered the gates from the valley above, filling the narrow streets in a few moments to a depth of seven and eight feet, and carrying everything before it: men, women, children, and cattle were swept in a torrent through the water-gate out to sea, sometimes a hand stretched out above the eddies. Then the gate became blocked with floating _debris_ and bodies, and the flood rose to ten feet in the princ.i.p.al street. The townspeople who survived took refuge on their roofs. The vice-governor was drowned. Houses, shops, mills, and mosques were gutted as if by fire; furniture and household goods were ruined; the Saffi shopkeepers were beggared. For many weeks after the survivors starved upon roots, in spite of a subscription raised in Tangier to relieve them.

The rain apparently was something like a waterspout. Happily Tetuan was exempt from waterspouts, and on days when the rain gave over for a time we rode, or, picking our way along the muddy streets, drank tea with some Moor.

One dull afternoon we sampled the state of the roads outside, R. on a donkey, and Mr. Bewicke and myself on foot. Walking out by the Gate of the Tombs, we bore to the left, and dived into the narrowest of narrow lanes, shut in with tall cane fences and high mud-banks crowned with p.r.i.c.kly pear, the shape of whose fat, fleshy leaves recalls moles' paws.

The donkey was an unusually large one, and its pack rolled more than packs in general: before we saw the last of Tetuan its rider had many a fall off her unsteady perch; and if there is truth in the Moorish saying that "one does not become a horseman till one is broken," R. may claim to have qualified. It shied and bucked and came on its nose over rocks; but this time Mr. Bewicke's boy, Mohr, directed its ways, and thoroughly enjoyed cudgelling it along with a stick, helped by its rider's switch, cut from a quince-tree, which often as not hit Mohr instead of the a.s.s.

By-and-by we met a countryman, his wife, and a donkey. The woman, who wore little except two striped towels, and a handkerchief round her head, staggered along under a great load of f.a.ggots. She was stunted and wrinkled, removed mentally but few degrees from the three-year-old weather-beaten donkey which minced along in front of her, also loaded with f.a.ggots. The woman had strips of rough leather bandaged round her legs to protect them from thorns. Her feet were bare. Her husband sauntered last of all, presumably looking after the donkey: he had no load. Another time the donkey also might be exempt, while the woman was still burdened; and the man, when asked why, if he would not carry the load himself, he did not at least put it upon the donkey, would reply, "Because it is too heavy for the a.s.s."

A little farther on and a magnificent Riffi pa.s.sed us, walking along at a smart pace into the city, his face "old oak" colour, framed in a turban of dark red-brown strings of wool. He wore a chocolate-coloured jellab, embroidered at the edge with white, and sewn with tufts of red, violet, yellow, and green-coloured silks: a tall, wiry fellow, with a back like a ram-rod, a thin face, and keen, defiant eyes. The light glittered on his long, bra.s.s-plated Riffi gun: a red leather pouch full of bullets hung at his side. He was a great contrast to the labourer who pa.s.sed us afterwards, also bound for the city--an old and grizzled monkey-faced man, with his head tied round with a ragged red cloth gun-case. His jellab hung in tatters, but he also carried a gun, and by a string a brace of partridges and a wild duck, which "bag," after some bargaining, became ours for the sum of one-and-sixpence.

Among the brown jellabs and varied turbans European clothes were forcibly out of their place: a people like the Moors, childlike, patriarchal, whose lives embody one of the oldest and perhaps best ideas of a simple existence, may well hate the sight, on the face of their select country, of prosaic tailoring and hideous head-gear. The traveller in his boots, where boots are things unknown, pa.s.ses the m.u.f.fled women with their silent gait, the picturesque ruffians with their swinging stride, and is unable to help feeling not at home and something of a blot on the landscape.

The lane we wandered up had been, and was still in places, a watercourse, and we struggled along the steep chasms gouged out of the soft soil, and clambered over rocks which had withstood the torrent.

By-and-by a red door intervened on our left, fitted into an imposing whitewashed arched gateway, with a mounting-block on each side, and the great bra.s.s ring-shaped knocker in the middle of the door which the Moors have left all over Spain--the garden-house of the French Consul. In another four months, when all aristocratic Tetuan would migrate in a body into their "summer-houses," and by their mutual presence rea.s.sure each other as to their safety, the Consul would move out of the city: at present he would look on such a step as sheer madness.

An old negro slave, with a beard like cotton-wool, was at work in the garden, and, opening the door, let us in to look round. A wide gravel path led up to the dazzling walls of the house, spotless as a sheet of glazed cream-laid note-paper, the window-frames and door picked out with Reckitt's blue. A white railing in front edged the terrace, the steps of which were tanned by the damp salt air a fine rusty ochre. The house inside was built on the invariable Moorish lines--kitchen and inferior rooms on the ground floor, one great lofty room above, and the flat roof over all. A garden-room flanked the house on the south-east, the front open to the garden, pillared and arched with the old white plastered "horse-shoe." In underneath the arches were shade and cool tiling, and outside more tiled ground suggested steaming brews of fragrant green tea, tiny gla.s.ses, low tables, and long divans spread under the sky.

It was a grey day, and height beyond height on into the Riff country was cloud-capped, while _shar d'jebel_ (the hair of the mountain, as the Moors call snow) whitened a few furrowed peaks. The flats lay below to the left, and a horizontal blue pencil line was scored beyond them.

Cow-birds stalked about the garden among some new vines which the old negro was putting in.

We sat down on the terrace, looking at the view, and the silence of the place was above all things most striking. A cavalcade of mules tailed away in the distance in single file along the faint track to the sea; the packed white city lay to the right, but no voices reached us; here cart-wheels, railway-trains, threshing-machines, and busy farm life were not. It would have been hard to age and wrinkle in such a spot--Adam and Eve might have felt at home.

It was also a weedy one, this Paradise: a tangle of greenery spread underneath the oranges, hanging like yellow tr.i.m.m.i.n.g on a green fabric, choking the vines and a few scarlet geraniums. Labour, in such indolent and self-possessed acres, was a crude and gauche idea.

The greybeard with the marmoset face and leathern ap.r.o.n let us out at the red door: he had a history. His master, a prosperous Moor, once offered to free him: the old slave refused the offer, on the score that he was quite content as he was. However, his master urged him to accept, and he was eventually given his freedom. But later on the master lost all his money, and ruin was before him. His old slave came back. "See here, my master; here am I. Take me; sell me"; and he finally persuaded the man to sell him. He seemed contented enough as the property of the French Consul, who is a Moor.

We pa.s.sed a party of closely veiled women, as we strolled citywards, taking advantage of a break in the wet weather to visit their gardens, carrying a great key, and accompanied by two or three ink-black slaves, fine upstanding women, well fed and clothed, looking good-tempered to a fault, whose children, by the same husband and master, would rank equally with those of the wives.

Mohammedan women, though veiled and supervised, have at least their gardens to saunter out to and visit when the tracks allow. Jewesses in Morocco deserve infinitely more pity. Their one recreation seemed to consist in walking as far as the Jewish cemetery, ten minutes outside the Gate of the Tombs, and attending to the gravestones of their friends.

The cemetery is gradually absorbing one side of a rough red-earthed hill; it has no fence of any description round it, and the flat pale-blue and white tombstones spread over the ground look in the distance like so much washing out to dry. The stones are all alike, oblong lozenges, inscribed in Hebrew.

Here, especially on Fridays, the women's day, Jewesses congregate, flocking along the cemetery road--the mourners in ponderous black skirts, vast breadths of crimson silk let into the fronts and embroidered with gold, white shawls over head and forehead, a yellow sash-end edged with red appearing behind, and completing their mourning. Some of the shawls are family heirlooms, and only parted with for five-pound notes.

Loud checks and gaudy colours adorn the Rahels, Donahs, Zulicas, and Miriams not in mourning, as well as the white shawls; and the procession troops to the cemetery, sallow, sad-eyed daughters of Jacob, talking a mixture of Arabic and Spanish, with a few English and Shillah words thrown in.

Of all life's unfortunates, the Jew in Morocco was once, next to the negro in the West Indies, the most persecuted and degraded of G.o.d's creatures.

In Tangier and the seaport towns, where the Christian representatives countenance and support him, the Jew, subject to certain restrictions, is in the present day a flourishing member of the community; but in the interior his fate is still a hard one.

There is a Jewish tradition that when Shalmaneser, King of a.s.syria, conquered the Israelites, the tribe of Naphthali took refuge in the interior of Africa, and spread to Morocco. Jewish tombstones are certainly to be found dating as far back as twelve hundred years, and one synagogue possesses fragments of the Old Testament written on parchment, while there is a population of from four to five thousand Jews in the Atlas Mountains who have lived there since time immemorial.

Perhaps the wandering Jew merely drifted into Morocco just as he drifts all over the universe, and he would have taken refuge in North Africa more particularly when Spanish persecution became intolerable.

Once in Morocco, the Moors permitted the Jews to remain because they were useful to them; but upon certain conditions. They are confined to a certain quarter of the city--the Jews' Quarter, the Ghetto in fact--which is shut and locked by a gate at sunset, barring them from the outer world. In their own quarter they may do as they like, except ride a horse; the horse is considered too n.o.ble an animal to be ridden by the Jew: outside they may not ride at all, not even a mule, but are obliged to trudge barefoot through the slush of the rest of the city, summer and winter. They are compelled to wear one costume--a long black gabardine and a black skull-cap. Few Jewesses care to leave their quarters by themselves, for fear of insult. No synagogues or public places of worship are allowed them, and they must address Moors as _Sidi_, or "My lord."

But these customs are fast dying out. There is one which universally obtains: the Jews' Quarter is known as the _Mellah_; Mellah means "salt"

in Arabic,--the Jews are compelled to salt the heads of conquered tribes killed in battle, and of criminals, which are afterwards nailed on the city walls as trophies and warnings.

In Tetuan the Jews are influential and well treated: many of them wear European clothes. On Sat.u.r.day--the Jewish Sabbath--a young masher (a Mordejai, or Baruch, or Isaac) would boast a pair of brand-new yellow shoes and white socks, but wear at the same time a dove-coloured gabardine down to his heels and a mauve sash round his waist.

Claret-coloured gabardines were fashionable, and a black skull-cap inevitable.

Though Tetuan was lax and liberal in its treatment of the Israelites, wealthy families of whom it possessed, the Mellah was at once the noisiest and filthiest quarter of the city, teeming with children (unlike the Moorish quarters, where there are few), who played and fought, laughed and cried, by fifties down the three princ.i.p.al arteries of the quarter, whose few feet of walking-s.p.a.ce were lined with small and dirty greengrocers' and butchers' shops, their stock-in-trade encrusted with flies. On hot days the Mellah stank; on wet it was deep in black slime.

Once upon a time it ran close to the Jama-el-Kebeer; and when a hundred years ago the Sultan who had built the big mosque sent his envoy to examine it, all was approved of except the proximity of the Jews'

Quarter. "Can a mosque be admired near Jews?" was speedily answered by the Tetuanites, who turned the Israelites neck and crop out of house and home, giving them another piece of ground walled in and sufficiently removed.

The sons of Abraham are only tolerated all the world over. As a nation, Moors loathe them. To a pig, which they count "unclean," they give the epithet of _jew_: out pig-sticking, when the pig breaks, the beaters shout, "The jew! the jew!" To begin with, having forced his presence on an unwilling people, the Jew retains his own exclusiveness, neither marries a Moor nor eats with a Moor, nor treats him as anything else except unclean. Not only this, but by unscrupulous cunning Jews contrive to exercise a maddening oppression over a people with whom they have chosen to cast in their lot, swindling, extorting money, and playing a hundred low tricks upon the very race on the produce of whose labour they live: at the same time their exasperating patience and cringing humility, court contempt and insult.

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

A STREET IN THE JEWS' QUARTER, TETUAN.

[_To face p. 116._]

The poorest Moor in Tetuan is a gentleman: the richest Jew is not. But he has his good points: a great sense of brotherhood, a strong bond of freemasonry among the Jewish nation, undaunted energy, and an unshaken faith in their religion are all admirable points in themselves. Energy in Tetuan was concentrated in the Mellah. The best workmen were all Jews. A hundred things were sold by them which no Moor made.

Thus in their Ghetto live the Chosen People, the Separate People, of strange and ancient customs,--leaving the hair uncut for a year after a relative's death, sitting on the floor, and not on a chair, for a week after; twisting a pocket-handkerchief round the waist on the Sabbath in order to save "the work" of carrying it; slitting the b.u.t.ton-hole of the waistcoat in time of distress instead of "rending the garment"; eating _adafina_ on the Sabbath, an indigestible dish of hard-boiled eggs, meat, and potatoes prepared overnight and left on the fire till next morning.

There is no end to ceremonials throughout a Jew's life: the first at his circ.u.mcision, the next when his hair is cut for the first time, the next when he goes to the synagogue for the first time, and so on.

When a Jew was buried in Tetuan, the uncoffined body, wrapped in sheets on a wooden bier, might only be borne out of the city by the _Bab-el-Je'f_, literally the Gate of the Unclean Dead--that is, the Jews'

Gate.

The mourners howled and the male relatives cried aloud; friends followed, talking and smoking cigarettes. It happened sometimes that the grave was not ready when the cortege reached the cemetery, and that the party would sit down on the hillside while it was lengthened and deepened; from time to time the body would be measured with a walking-stick, and the result compared with the grave.

It is impossible to write about the Jews and omit one certain point.

Before the traveller has lived a week in Morocco he begins to hear of _protection_, and he carries with him vague words--"protected Jews" and "protected Moors"--which one sentence can explain. _Protection_ means that a European living in Morocco, a Portuguese, a Frenchman, an Englishman--it matters not--has it in his power to make the Jew or the Moor desiring protection a nominal citizen of that country, Portugal or France or what not, and can allow him the rights of a citizen and the protection of the same; while it follows that the Sultan and the Moorish Government have no more power to touch him than they have to touch a French or an English subject, the protected Jew or Moor being outside their jurisdiction, and only answerable to the consul of that country which has given him protection, whether Germany, France, or any other.

The advantage of protection is to guarantee thereby the safety of property. It was inst.i.tuted a hundred years and more ago, to obviate the difficulties and dangers incurred by Europeans in trading with Jews and Moors in a country so badly governed as Morocco. Supposing that a European went into partnership and traded with a Jew or a Moor who was unprotected, in course of time, when the Jew or Moor became rich, the Moorish Government would hear of it, and set to work systematically to bleed him. Naturally the European partner would lose money in the general robbery. Therefore _protection_.

There is scarcely a Jew of property in Morocco who is not protected, and there are hundreds and hundreds of protected Moors; but though many Moors have enjoyed security for themselves and their belongings by this means, others less fortunate, more especially some years ago, have only escaped the talons of Moorish despotism to fall into the clutches of European swindlers, adventurers who have dared--themselves somewhat beyond the reach of their own home government--to fleece the unsuspecting Mohammedan, bribing some basha to imprison him for the rest of his days.