Mograbel-Acksa: a journey in Morocco, etc

Front matter

MOGREB-EL-ACKSA Portrait of ihec lufAor as -At eilch _ Kohammedol c/asi MOGREB-EL-ACKSA A JOURNEY IN MOROCCO BY R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM WITH A PORTRAIT AND MAP " Show me Sohail and I will show you the moon " LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN TO HAJ MOHAMMED ES SWANI EL BAHRI I <DET)ICJTE THIS 'BOOF^ Not that he will ever read, or even, being informed of it, ever comprehend its nature, except in so far as to think it some " Shaitanieh " or another not to be under stood. But I do so because we have travelled much together, and far, and it must have been at times a sore temptation to him, in lonely places, not to assure himself of Paradise bv "nobbling'' an unbeliever. Still, I would trust myself with him even to go the pilgrimage to Mecca ; therefore, he must trust me. when I swear not to have cast a spell on him (as Christians will upon occasion) by writing his name here for unbelieving men to wonder at.

Preface

TO WAYFARING MEN. Sirs, the Holy Scriptures which, as we know, were written for our learning, seem to imply that some of us are fools. This may be so, and when I moralise, wrapped in the frequent contemplation of my travels, upon lost opportunities, lack of discernment, and on the general folly incident to all mankind, but which each man deems centred in himself, I think so too. But still a traveller in this travelling world, going perhaps to nowhere, or to some place that he would rather never visit, cannot but find his most congenial public amongst wayfaring men. Therefore to you who, like myself, have crossed, or even now are crossing, desert or pampa in the night ; riding towards Capella, if in the southern hemisphere (Sohail in Africa), keeping the wind a little blowing on your right cheek, dismounting now and then to smoke and rest the horses, then camping on some river, sleeping fitfully and rising oft to view your horses feeding so quietly under

PREFACE.

VIII the southern stars; or you, who in the liner, ocean tramp, or even "windjammer" are going somewhere for no special reason, I now address myself. Writers, I take it, firstly write to please themselves, if not, 'tis ten to one their writing pleases nobody. Following my postulate I have set down that which pleased me upon my pilgrimage, hoping that it may please at least some two or three who, like myself, have wandered. Therefore in this, my modest book of travels, I have tried to write after the fashion that men speak over the fire at night, their pipes alight, hands on their rifles, boots turned towards the blaze, ears strained to catch the rustle of a leaf, and with the tin tea mug stopped on its journey to the mouth when horses snort ; I mean I strove to write down that which I saw without periphrasis, sans flag wagging, and with no megrim in my head of having been possessed by some great njoralpurpose, with out which few travellers nowadays presume to leave their homes.

I fear I have no theory of empires, destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, spread of the Christian faith, of trade extension, or of hinterlands ; no nostrum, by means of which I hope to turn Arabs to Christians, reconcile Allah and Jahve, remove the ancient lack of comprehension between East and West, mix oil and vinegar, or fix the rainbow always in the sky so that the colour-blind may scan it at their leisure through the medium of a piece of neutral-tinted

PREFACE.

IX glass ; and generally I fear I write of things without a scrap of interest to right-thinking men: of humours, sayings, proverbs, traits of character ; little of eating, drinking, or night alarms of vermin, as travellers will ; but, on the contrary, of lonely rides, desolate camping places, of ruined buildings seen in pecu liar lights, of simple folk who pray to Allah seven times a day, and act as if they never prayed at all; in fact of things which to a traveller, his travels o'er, still conjure up the best part of all travel — its melancholy. So I apologise for lack of analysis, neglect to dive into the supposititious motives which influence but ill-attested acts, and mostly for myself for having come before the public with the history of a failure to accomplish what I tried ; and having brought together a sack of cobwebs, a pack of gossamers, a bale of thistle-down, dragon flies' wings, of Oriental gossip as to byegone facts, of old-world recollections, of new-world practices halt understood; lore about horses' colours, of tales of men who never bother much to think, but chiefly act, carv ing their lives out, where still space is left in which to carve, and acting thus so inconsiderately whilst there still remain so many stones unbroken, social problems to be solved, and the unpuncturable pneumatic tyre not yet found out.

Touching my traveller's privilege I propose to use it sparingly, but atthesametimenottoblurtoutthebrutal truth too trippingly, for truth, I take it, suffers by too

PREFACE.

X much comprehension, in the same manner as the Mass has suffered even by its transmutation into Elizabethan English. Religion, once made understandable of all, loses its authenticity, and soon degenerates into the arid dialectics of the self-righteous Nonconformist. What so consoling to a religious man, as in a building (with the entry free), to join in singing praises to an unknown God, in an uncomprehended tongue ? And so perhaps the truth,* declare it quite unblushingly, and it may become as little interesting as is an ill concocted lie. It may be, that my poor unphilosophic recollections of a failure, may interest some, who, like myself, have failed, but still may like to hear that even in a failure you can see strange things, meet as strange types, and be impressed as much with wild and simple folk, as any traveller who thundered through the land, Bible and gun in hand, making himself no spiced conscience, but putting into practice the best traditions of our race, confident that the one way to win a " nigger's " heart " is to speak English to him," and doing so even at the rifle's mouth.

But if they do not interest, then I fall back again upon my wanderers, and hope that in my slight impres sions, they may find something they recognise, some thing that they have felt before upon the journey that they make across the Pampa of their lives, making it as * And Jesus said " truth is from Heaven ; " Pilate answered, " there fore truth is not on earth." Gospel of Nicodemus, chap, hi., verses 12 and 13.

PREFACE.

XI they do in general on horses hipshot, lean and saddle galled, asking their way from those they meet, who answer them as wise as they, " Ride on to the lone tree on the horizon, then bear a little to the right, and if you keep the line, you cannot miss the houses, for the barking of the dogs will guide you, if it falls dark." And then comes evening, and the travellers still kicking at their horses' sides, straining their eyes, keep pushing forward, stumbling and objurgating on the trail. R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM. MOGREB-EL-ACKSA

Chapter I

South-south-west, a little westerly with a cloudy sky, and with long rollers setting into the harbour of Tangier, and the date October ist in the last year of supposititious grace. The old white town, built round the bay with the Kasbah upon its hill, and the mosque tower just shining darkly against the electric light, for Tangier passed from darkness to electric light, no gas or oil lamps intervening, gave the effect as of a gleaming horse-shoe in the dark. Outside the harbour, moored twice as far away as the French ironclad, swung the Rabat at anchor, for the captain, a Catalan of the true Reus breed, was bound to sup plement his lack of seamanship with extra caution, and towards her we made our way late in the evening in a boat manned by four strong-backed Jews, and seated silently, for it was the first stage of a journey concerning which each of our friends had added his wisest word of disencouragement.

Nothing so spurs a man upon a journey as the cautions of his friends, " dangerous," " impossible," " when you get there nothing worth seeing," and the like, all show you plainly that the thing is worth the venture, for you know the world is ever proud to greet the conqueror £ MOGRE B-EL-ACKSA 2 with praise and flowers, but he has to conquer first. And if he fails, the cautious kindly friend wags his wise head and shakes his moralising finger, thinks you a fool, says so behind your back, but cannot moralise away experience, that chiefest recompense of every traveller. So in the boat besides myself sat Hassan Suleiman Lutaif, a Syrian gentleman, who acted as interpreter, and Haj Mohammed es Swam, a Moor of the Riff pirate breed, short, strong, black bearded, turned-up moustache, and speaking Spanish after the Arab fashion, that is without the particles, and substitution of the gerund for every portion of the verb.

El Haj and I were old acquaintances, having made several journeys in Morocco, and being well accustomed to each other's ways and idiosyn crasies upon the road. Our bourne was Tarudant, a city in the province of the Sus, but rarely visited by Europeans, and of which no definite account exists by any traveller of repute. Only some hundred and fifty miles from Mogador, it yet continues almost untouched, the only Moorish city to which an air of mystery clings, and it remains the only place beyond the Atlas to the south in which the Sultan has a vestige of authority.* Outside its walls the tribesmen live the old Arab life, all going armed, constantly fighting, each man's hand against his neighbour, and, therefore, in a measure, raised against himself. And yet a land of vines, of orange gardens, olive yards, plantations of pomegranates, Roman remains, iich mines; but cursed " with too much powder," as the Arabs say, and therefore doomed, up to the present day, to languish * Since writing this it has been shown that he has more authority in the Sus than was thought, as witness the landing of the Globe Venture Company's filibusters, which was promptly checked.

MOGREB-EL-ACKSA 3 without pauperism, prostitution, and the modern vices which, in more favoured lands, have long replaced the old world vices which man brought with him into the old-world. Even my friends were all agreed that to reach Tarudant in European clothes was quite impossible. Thus a disguise became im perative. After a long discussion I determined to impersonate a Turkish doctor travelling with his " taleb " *— that is, scribe — to see the world and write his travels in a book. God, the great doctor, but under Him His earthly vicegerents, practicants, practitioners, with or without diploma, throughout the east, enjoy considerable respect ; they kill, they cure, and still God has the praise. No one asks where they studied, and if faith in his powers helps a doctor in his trade, the east of all lands should be most congenial to all those who live by lancet, purge, and human faith.

My stock of medicines was of the most homeric type, quinine and mercury, some Seidlitz powders, eye wash for ophthalmia, almost, in fact, as simple as that of the old Scotch doctor who doctored with what he styled the two simples, that is, laudanum and calomel. The multitudinous dialects of Arabic, the constant travelling, either upon the pilgrimage or for the love of travel, which seems inherent in the Arab, render it possible for a European occasionally to pass un recognised, even although his stock of Arabic is as exiguous as was my own. Behold us, then, approach ing the Rabat, a steamer of the Linea Trans-Atlan tica Espafiola, bound for Mogador, some five days' * " Taleb " literally means a learned man, but in Morocco it is applied to everyone who can read and write, in fact, as the Spaniards say, " sabe de pluma " ; my " taleb " did not fall under the latter head, being a learned man, and a gentleman.

MOGREB-EL-ACKSA 4 j iurney below Tangier, the point at which I intended to put on Moorish clothes, buy mules and horses, engage a guide, and set out for Tarudant, the city Avhere La Caba, Count Julian's daughter (she whose beauty tempted Don Rodrigo, and to avenge whose honour her father sold Spain to the Moors), lies buried, though how she came to die there is to his torians unknown. On board the ship no light, no look-out, and the accommodation ladder triced up for the night, stewards asleep, and the long narrow vessel dipping her nose into the rollers, rolling and heaving in the dark, whilst we in Spanish, English, Arabic, and Portuguese rang all the changes upon ship ahoy. At last a sulky, sleepy quartermaster deigned to let down the ladder, and we scrambled upon deck. Next morning found us off Arzila, the Julia Con stantia Zilis of the Romans, a small walled town lost among orange gardens, and girt by walls built by the Portuguese.

Over the gateway the half-obliterated arms of Portugal can still be seen, but mouldering to decay, as is the country that they represent. Close to the walls rises the tomb of the Saint of Arzila; the white dome springs from a dense thicket of palmetto, dwarf rhododendron, berbenis, and aromatic shrubs, a tiny stream bordered by oleanders (bitter as is an oleander is a proverb in the land) runs past it ; above the dome and red-tiled roof two palms keep watch, and whisper in the wind the secrets palm trees know, and tell each other of the East, and of the various changes, Arab and Berber, Moor and Portuguese, they have seen during the course of their slow growth and long extended days. Columbus visited the place; the battle of Trafalgar was fought a few leagues off, and an old shepherd, still living where he was born, MOGREB-EL-ACKSA 5 above the lighthouse on Cape Spartel, remembers to have seen it as a boy when he lay out upon the hills tending his goats.

Inside the town decay and ruin, heaps of garbage, a palace falling here, a hovel there. A town almost entirely given up to Jews, who carry on their business fleecing the Moors, and still complaining when at last the cent, per cented victim turns and rends. The best known citizen is Mr. Ben Chiton, an Israelite of the best type, old, and white bearded, and with round, beady eyes like an old rat, Consul of seven nations, with all the seven flag-staffs on his hospitable roof. Dressed in the Jewish gown girt round the waist, wearing his slippers over white cotton stockings, and the black cup badge of the servitude of all his race throughout Morocco. His house is neat and clean, almost beyond the power of endurance, " Rahel " and " Mordejai " labouring incessantly with broom and whitewash brush, and he himself talking incessantly in the Toledan* dialect and thick Jewish accent, of politics, of kings, ambassadors, and as to whether England and France will go to war over the question of the Niger and the like, whilst all the time he presses brandy on you in a lordly glass holding about a pint, which you must swallow no matter what the hour, the while he calls upon the God of Isaac to bear him witness that the house is yours, and shows you, with just pride, the chair on which he says the Prince of Wales once sat, although historians do not seem to chronicle his passage through the town.

An Israelite * The Toledan dialect is the old Spanish of the Jews, who were expelled from Spain. They speak the Spanish of the sixteenth century, using the X instead of J, and with other peculiarities. They inhabit the towns of Tetuan, Tangier, Alcazar, Arzila, Larache, and Rabat, and are the highest ca<te Jews of Morocco. The Jews of the interior speak Arabic, come from the East, and are in general of a lower type. MOGREB-EL-ACKSA 6 of Israelites, a worthy Jew, come of the tribe of Judah, as he says, one to whose house all travellers are welcome ; loved by his family with veneration, as the heads of Jewish houses are; long may he prosper, and may his roof grow broad as a phylactery, and become strong enough to bear the flag-staffs of all the nations upon earth, and his house long remain to show the curious what most probably a Jewish house in Spain was like before the Catholic Kings, in their consuming thirst for unity, expelled the Jews, sweeping at one fell blow commerce and usury out of their sacred land, and setting up a faith so uniform that to be saved by it was so easy that one wonders any one was lost.

A few hours' steaming brings us to Earache (El Areish), once a great stronghold of the Moorish pirates who infested the narrow straits, and who at times ran as far north as Plymouth, westward to Naples, and made the coasts of France, Spain, Italy and Portugal their especial hunting grounds. Three of their galleys still lie rotting in the Luccos, and at low tide their ribs can still be seen projecting from the sand. The city, painted red, white, and blue, and thewholescaleof tints from brown to Naplesyellow stands on a hill, and is to-day the haunt of Consuls of all nations, who have replaced the pirates of the times gone by. Consuls of France and Spain, of Portugal, of Montenegro, Muscat, Costa Rica, Brazil, United States, their flag-staffs rear aloft from almost every housA-top, and their great flags, large in pro portion to the smallness of the state they represent, flap in the breeze ; the caps of liberty, the rising suns, and other trade-marks of the various states seeming to wink and to encourage one another in the attempt to be the first to show the glories of the commercial system to the benighted Moors.

All MOGREB-EL-ACKSA 7 round the town the walls and ramparts run, built by the Portuguese during the period when they possessed the place. At the west side a ditch remains, now turned into a garden, and in it artichokes, egg-plants, and pimentos grow, and the green stuffs of various kinds for which the Moors are famous, so much so that in the times they lived in Spain, it was a current saying of a good farmer " that he grows as many egg plants in his garden as a Morisco gardener."* Just at the corner of the ditch the walls run into as sharp an angle as the bows of a torpedo boat, and on the ramparts usually is seen a colony of storks, who build their nests amongst the mouldering gabions, ravelines, and counterscarps, and sit and chatter on the brass guns and carronades, with curling snakes around the touch-holes, and with inscription setting forth their date, the place of casting, and the legend " Viva Portugal !

" their gunners gone, their carriages long mouldered into dust, and the storks left to sit and mock the pomps and circumstance of foolish war. From the town sallied out (in 1578) the army under Don Sebastian, who met his fate fighting the infidel at Alcazar el Kebir, near a long bridge over a marshy stream known as El-Ma Khassan. The battle still is called amongst the Moors " The Three Kings' Fight," for besides Don Sebastian fell two Moorish kings. With Don Sebastian there fell the flower of the nobility of Portugul, and by his death the crown passed quickly to Phillip II. (the Prudent) of Spain, who knew far better than to embark in expeditions into Africa. The battle was memorable, for Abdel- Malik, King of Fez, died of exnaustion on the field, and Don Sebastian, rather than survive disgrace, * Coge mas berengenas que un hortelano Morisco.

MOGREB-EL-ACKSA plunged, as did Argentine at Bannockburn, into the thickest of the fight, and fell or disappeared, for though his faithful servant, Resende, claimed to have seen his body, so much doubt existed of his death that the strange sect known as Sebastianists arose in Portugal. Their tenet was that Don Sebastian was still alive, but kept in durance by the Moors, and in remote and old-world villages believers linger even to the present day. I myself saw a sort of pterodactyle, years ago in Portugal, a strange old man dressed in black clothes, and wrapped, in heat and cold alike, in a thick cloak. The people of the village called him mad, but, looking at the thing impartially, madness and faith are the same thing, the only difference being as to the mountain which the believer wishes to remove.

Lela Mamouna, the female saint who guards Larache from pestilence and famine, sudden death, and the few simple ailments which Arabs suffer from, has her white crenelated sanctuary on a hill which overlooks the sea, and to her tomb women who wish for children to carry on the misery of life, repair, and pray or chatter with each other, and no doubt the saint is just as tolerant of scandal as are the wise old men who sun their stomachs at the windows of a club. But at this cursed port, Larache, of the Beni-Aros, after a signal had been made by a man mounted on a mule, who held one end of a row of flags, the other being made fast to a post, a great annoyance fell upon the blameless captain of the good ship Rabat. The bar at El Areish is three times out of four impassable when steamers call, as here the river Luccos* meets the tide, and such a surf gets up * Luccos is the El Kuos of the Arabs, and the Luxos of the Romans.

MOGREB-EL-ACKSA 9 that as the people have no surf boats, communication from a vessel to the shore is always dangerous, and not infrequently impossible. This, to an ordinary steamer, means either delay or loss of cargo, generally the latter, for when the bar is bad it often takes three or four days to become passable, and as the anchorage is most precarious a south-east gale causes great danger to a vessel lying in the open roads. On this occasion, though the sea was like a sheet of ice, smooth, shining, and the bar just marked by a thin line of foam, to the astonishment of the uniniti ated passengers the fury of the captain knew no bounds, the officers turned sulky, and the one man on board who seemed unmoved was the unlucky priest, who shipped to please the owners of the line, or to appease the folly of the nation, or for " empeno,"* or for some other reason at present not made known, passed all his time in fishing when in port, or when at sea in studying counterpoint, and playing on a piano which was tuned about the time Queen Isabella was expelled from Spain.

A narrow, nine-knot crank and Clyde-built steamer was the Rabat, full five-and-twenty years of age, boilers too small, but engines sound, and the whole vessel kept as clean as holystone and paint could clean, brass work all shining, and herself ever a rolling like a swing-boat at a fair, sailed out of Barcelona, owned by the Spanish Trans-Atlantic Company (Chairman : the Marquis of Comillas), and subsidised by the Spanish Government to carry mails down the Morocco coast in order that the majesty of Spain might fill the eyes and strike the imagination of the Moorish dogs, and show them that the Spaniards * " Empeno" means " a job." The phrase is well understood through out the Spams, and the practice much indulged in. MOGREB-EL-ACKSA 10 were on a level with the other nations, such as " Inglis," "Frances," "el Bortokez " (Portuguese), "el Brus " (the Germans, that is, Prussians), and the Austrians, called by the Moors "el Nimperial."

Captain from Reus, taciturn, and shaved each Sunday when the priest said mass, for it is decent for a man to stand before his God with a clean chin, at other times a stubble on his face on which a man might strike a match, so that the match had not been made in Spain. P'our officers : an Andalusian, two Catalans, and a Basque; two engineers, and the aforementioned priest, together with a crew of eighteen men and half a dozen stewards, served to get the craft, whose utmost measurement could not be above twelve hundred tons, across the sea. Ihe Pope had granted plenary indulgence in the following terms: "for looking to the circumstances, the weather, etc., I deign to grant full dispensation accord ing to the ecclesiastic law, from fasting and from abstin ence (from meat) to all those who by reason, either of their profession or as passengers, find themselves on board the vessels of this Company, and that for three years' time, excepting (if it can be done without too great an inconvenience) on Good Friday and on the Virgils of the Apostles, Saint Peter and Saint Paul, also on Christmas Day and any other day which may be opportune .... on which three days I also dispense from sin the passengers and crew if any difficulty unforeseen by me makes their compliance an impossibility."

Given " en Vaticano " and through the Bishop of Madrid and Alcala under whose ægis it appears that Spanish ships all sail armed with this plenary indulgence ; manned with the priest and men and duly subsidised, it could not be expected that the Rabat cared much for passengers, still less for MOGREB-EL-ACKSA 11 cargo ; so when the lumbering " barcazas" approached the ship, curses loud, gutteral, and deep were heard on every side. The unwilling sailors, mostly Valencians and Catalans, stood by to work the donkey engine ; but their fears were vain, for it appeared that all the cargo was but four bales of "Zatar" (Marjoram) for the Habana and a few thousand melons for the Sultan's camp. The bales of " Zatar " soon were dumped into the hold, but five long hours were wasted passing the melons up from hand to hand ; in counting them, recounting them, in storming, and the whole time a noise like Babel going on, shouting of Moors, cursing of Spaniards, and the confusion ten times intensified because no man could speak a word the other understood.

The Rabat having been only five years upon the coast, no one on board could speak a word of Arabic. Why should they, did they not speak"Christian,"and areSpaniards and sailors to be supposed to burrow in grammars as if they were schoolboys or mere Englishmen. A miserable Jew, fearfully sea-sick, balancing upon the gunwale of a boat, in a mixed jargon of Arabic and Portuguese kept tale after a fashion of the melons, and at last the vessel put to sea amid the curses of the passengers, and having earned the name amongst the Arabs of " Abu Batigh," the Father of the Melons. Amongst the Arabs almost every man is Father of something or some quality, and lucky he who does not find himself styled, Father of the " ginger beard," or of "bad breath," or any other personal or moral failing, peculiarity, or notable defect.

Once more we urge our nine-knot course, and now find time to observe our fellow-passengers. In the cabin a German lady and her daughters are enduring agonies of sea-sickness, on the way to join her MOGREB-EL-ACKSA 12 husband at Rabat.* The husband, known as the "mojandis," that is, engineer to the Sultan, proves, when we meet him, to be a cheery polyglot blas phemer, charged with the erection of some forts at the entrance to the harbour of Rabat. For a wonder the bar of the river Bu-Regeh proves passable, and the German lady and her husband can land, which is, it seems, a piece of luck, for the bar is known as the most dangerous of all the coast. Rabat, perhaps the most picturesquely situated of any city in Morocco, stands on a hill underneath which the river runs, and the spray from the bar is drifted occasionally into the houses like a shower of snow.

Here is the richest colony of the Spanish Jews, and here the best Moriscot families took refuge after the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. The town is estimated to contain some 20,000 inhabitants, and it is one of the four official capitals* ; the Sultan has a palace with enormous gardens on the outskirts of the town. Just opposite is built Salee, called by the Moors " Sala," famous for having given its name to the most enter prising of the pirates of the coast in days gone by. To-day it is a little white mouldering place, baked in the fierce sun, or swept by south-west gales, according to the season and the time of year. The inhabitants are still renowned for their fanaticism, and the traveller who passes through the place is seldom able to dis- * The Germans are slowly but surely driving us out of the coast trade in Morocco.

It may well be said of them that they are conquering the world with the trombone and the ophicleide, as the Romans did with the pick and shovel. Where these "bummel bands" once get a footing, their empire and all that, is sure to follow t The Moriscos went to Tetuan, Fez, and Rabat, and in consequence the upper classes of all these cities are fairer in colour and more enlightened in mind than those of any other city of Morocco. X The others are Fez, Marakesh, and Mequinez. The system of an ambulatory capital also obtained formerly in Bolivia. MOGREB-EL-ACKSA 13 mount, but traverses the place trying to look as dignified as possible amid a shower of curses, a sporadic curse or two, and some saliva if he ventures within range of mouth. Many a poor Christian has worked his life out in the construction of the walls, and the superior whiteness of the inhabitants would seem to show that some of the Christian dogs have left their blood amongst the people of the place.