Among the Moors. Sketches of Oriental life [With illustrations.] F.P

Preface

. A CRUMBLING EMPIRE. When you cross the immense wastes of the Moghreb, its gloomy plains, its denuded table-lands ; when you pass through its dead cities where glide noiselessly these spectres clad in white, whose forefathers conquered Spain ; when your eyes rest on these shattered monuments, marvels of architecture, that slowly crumble away under their shrouds of moss and lichen ; when you tread the accursed soil of this Empire which its inhabitants, full of morbid indifference for the present, devoid of any regret for the past or hope in the future, allow to fall into ruins without making an effort to retard its decay ; in presence of this absolute depression, this complete collapse, you cannot help being painfully impressed as at the sight of a moribund. You feel moved at the disappearance of the powerful and singular originality of this eternal failure among civilised nations, the world of Islam, that is becoming slowly dis aggregated, returning instinctively to the nomad life, to the primitive manners of its fathers, and you are filled with pity in

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. VI presence of the inconscient agony of this people of phantoms, the remains of a race of "reisers," so powerful in bygone times and to-day annihilated, that is dying quietly, with the pro found resignation, tinged with so gentle a melancholy, of those who are doomed, and whose days are numbered. The last refuge of expiring Islam, the Moghreb, hemmed in on all sides, is now sinking fast under the eyes of expectant Europe, watching jealously for its last gasp, and already fore stalling its succession. It is the crucible in which have been cast the bestiality of the negro, the ferocity of the Arab, the cunning of the Moor, the violence of the Berber, the knavery of the Jew, and the baseness of a handful of renegades, the scum of Europe, giving as a resultant the Moroccan, a compound of all these vices, a useless and pernicious kind that is fast disappearing, like the dodo, under the onset of the Occidentals, in the same manner that the negro and the yellow skin will disappear to make room for the brutal and conquering whites race.

An irresponsible and greedy barbarian, the unsuccessful and barren product of the learned schools of Greece, refractory to a civilisation that never had but an incomplete and momentary hold on his narrow undisciplined mind, rebellious to any culture, stricken with the nostalgia for his desert, the fatalist Arab is swept away, under the rude push of the Aryan, by the eddies of the feverish activity of the Occident, and returns to the place of his origin. There, as formerly his ancestors, as to-day his fellows, he will resume, after thousands of centuries, his adventurous and wandering life. He will recommence his sanguinary quarrels, his stubborn and incessant struggles for the possession of a spring, of a well, of some piece of pasture land, lost in the

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. VII midst of the burning sands, and he will lay in wait for the caravans in order to rob them. In the fine starlit night, when the flocks are again herded within the dark circle of the goat-hair tents, and warm aud acrid effluvia from their reeking bodies fill the air ; when the thin wreath of bluish smoke from a scanty fire of camel-dung shoots straight up to the calm sky ; when the young tribesmen, after a daring raid, have galloped back to the douar spurring on their maddened steeds white with foam, keeping a rough hold of terrified women flung across the saddles, the wives or daughters of the men of a neighbouring tribe, whom they have surprised and massacred in the darkness, violating the dead, mutilating the corpse ; when they have safely stored away their booty of human flesh, secured the captived women, bound the slaves, and collected the stolen flocks ; when they have stowed in some daubed blue, red, and yellow coffers the necklaces torn from the necks of dead women, the ear-rings with shreds of flesh still adhering to them, the rings wrenched off, in their hasty retreat, with the fingers that they adorned ; when in the twilight, after this ferocious hecatomb, they have prostrated themselves on the prayer-carpets, still recking with the blood of their late owners, and they have, for the fifth time during the day, proclaimed the glory of Allah and lauded Mahomet ; then .... an ancestor, a ferocious old male with biblical bearing, with cold and sober gestures, with haughty demeanour, full of savage pride and supreme presumption, will, in his weak shrill voice, his harsh guttural and poor tongue, make the enumeration of his forefathers, recite the list of his interminable genealogies.

He will, in a wordy, ex aggerated and flowery rhetoric, go into the sanglant detail of his hatred against rival clans, his quarrels with other tribes.

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. VIII He will wake the recollection of long-standing rancours, of secular vendettas. In his inflated, pompous, and lascivious poetry, he will tell his highway robberies, celebrate his abduc tions and rapes, recall the insults made to the dead, and reckon the heads that have been cut off. He will make a show of his disdainful hospitality, extol the prowesses of his own arm, the excellence of his weapons, and sing the praises of his swift steeds : the camel his faithful companion, the horse, his insepar able friend. His nervous and sickly nature, bent on marvellous and supernatural things, will prompt him to relate strange childish stories of malevolent djinns, who are charmed away by the power of amulets, and in absurd tales, he will bring in at every turn, Allah, the Prophet, or the Angel Gabriel, always with the sole object of making them point out the place of hidden treasure.

Of a sad and melancholy disposi tion, he will describe the terrors of the deserts and its terrible hardships. And the fierce tiger-hearted young men, handsome and elegant, his sons, will listen respectfully to his words, and the aged and venerable bandit, wrapped in the folds of his white woollen haik, majestic and superb, will then rise, and, supporting himself on the robust shoulders of his grandchildren, will return to his couch, casting a sidelong glance of impotent covetousness on the tent of the captive women. And to-morrow will be a renewal of yesterday. The old Sheik will repeat the same over and over again, his offspring will be careering in the desert, and will continue also the monotonous deeds of blood, the daily robberies, the life of everlasting brigandage. An unconscious monotheist, a fetichist reconciled to fatality, a fanatic hypnotised by the visions of a voluptuous and

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. IX sensual hereafter, he will daily recite mechanically the obliga tory prayers of Islam with his face turned towards Mecca ; at once a besotted bigot, as he is a hardened criminal, an inveterate thief. The Semite has never been anything but an abominable rascal, an insatiable, turbulent and licentious plunderer. Incapable of any self-consciousness, of rising to the level of a nation, he always remained the mere tribesman, the irre ducible barbarian, the man of prey, the Semite . . . ! a self loving egotist with an incomplete cerebral system, devoid of any notions of justice or morals, unable to distinguish between mine and thine, an Oriental lansquenet, pillaging and sacking friends and enemies alike, indifferently, without the least scruple. At a remote period, impelled by his nature and love of rapine, coveting the luxury of his industrious neighbours, he had already left his deserts, taken up his quarters on the coasts of Asia Minor, at Sidon and at Tyr, and covered the blue waves of the Mediterranean with his pirate barks, scouring the seas as he was laying waste the plains.

Bartering, thieving, plundering, slaking his thirst for gold and sensuous indulgence, he carried off the fair-haired daughters of Greece to fill his " gynecæi ; " he treacherously captured along the coasts, red-haired Celts, moody Iberians, Libyans from the Atlas, and sold them in the slave-markets. Reduced to slavery by the Assyrians, he extemporised the banking system, gave himself up to usury and became pos sessed of his captors' riches. Acting as a shameless go between, he cleverly conducted their debauches, graduated their excesses, and, while basely playing the spy upon them, was enabled to measure the degree of their weakness, and on

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. X several occasions his undisciplined hordes captured and ran sacked their capitals — Babylon and Nineveh. Creeping humbly into the Delta, followed by their dangerous " harem," at first by a succession of pacific partial and stealthy invasions, they came and disturbed the happy homes of the honest Pharaons and of the great folks of their court, provided for their senses that were satiated with the unvarying attractions of their homely better halves, the spicy and high-flavoured relish full of intended and studied surprises of the charms of their well-trained spouses. Then, when their gay partners, these experienced shrewd women, these incom parable virtuoses in the art of stimulating the senses, over whelmed with refined caresses their pitiful victims, hypnotised by this excess of feminine attentions, the husbands, these easy going Benedicts, thrust their hands into the money-bags, broke the safes open and rifled the contents of the drawers.

Once masters of the place, in possession of the hearts and purses of their over-confiding hosts, they called in the Hyksos, their rapacious brethren of the Euphrates, to take their share of the spoil, sent their miserable dupes about their business, placed on their own heads the " pschent " of the Pharaons, toadied the ox Apis, assumed the power and incurred the deadly hatred of the Egyptians, who ultimately drove them ignomini ously away. While the fathers were looting, the daughters corrupted. Constantly tormented by the imperious exigences of an inexor able eretheism, solicited by the furious appeals of wild desire, unable to overcome the frenzy of indomitable appetences, they feasted their exasperated sensuality, and, gorged with pleasure, bruised by violent embraces, they sunk prostrate in their shame and in the painful exaltation of their whole beinf.

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. XI They were stretching in the sun their supple loins encircled with golden belts. Their entrails panting, their nostrils dilated, flat on the marble of their terraces they dragged their powerful hips over the scorching slabs, lifted up their meagre bosoms and with smiling crimson lips apart, displaying the humid whiteness of their beautiful teeth, splendidly set in rosy gums, they inhaled the breeze of the sea and scented in the air the effluvia of man. When, over the blue waves, glided the dark craft of the pirates, with a horse's head carved at the prow and manned by robust Libyans, elegant Ionians, handsome Gauls, proud Latins, the slaves of their fathers, gleams of light blazed in their sombre pupils, their sharp look searched over the hard relief of the muscles, slid along the harmonious forms and remained laden with harsh desire, in face of the superb poses, the haughty demeanour, the disdainful indifference of the men of the North, and prolonged tremors twisted their slender limbs.

Hysterical mercenaries, they bathed by turn, in bull's blood to strengthen, or in cow's milk to soften their bronze-like brown bodies ; perfumed their moist flesh ; shook, like mares, their heavy mass of gold and silver ornaments, and bending their croup, rigid in a supreme spasm, listened breathless to their vibrating senses and to the sound of the gold that paid them. Perverse creatures with blackened eyelashes, dyed eyes, cheeks painted in vermilion, clad in purple, bespangled with gold and glittering gems spoiled from rifled nations, they insinuated themselves among the nations of the Occident, bringing their complicated amours, their clever depravity, their precocious impudicity ; opposing to the chaste virtue of the Aryan women the resources of their artful wiles.

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. XII By softening the redoubtable muscles of the Aryan, they paralysed his nerves, instilling into his pure and ruby blood the corroding virus of their disconcerting caresses, of their degrading lecherousness ; ruined its virile qualities, sapping his energy, his self-respect, and his respect for others, destroyed the family. Carthage afterwards kept up the traditions of Tyr and Sidon. The Semite, encamped at the foot of the Atlas, turned the Mediterranean into an Arab lake, subjected under its yoke the borderers, and enacted a tribute from them. Enslaving the nations of Africa under his iron rule, he broke the bones of the vanquished kings, drawing and quartering its slaves, and crucified his own unsuccessful generals. Engulfed in the mire of his voluptuous bestiality, he entrusted the defence of Carthage and its treasures to paid mercenaries, Greeks, Iberians, Gauls, Libyans, and made world-known the Punic good faith.

One day Rome crushed the nest of brigands, levelled their infamous den, and drove them back into their deserts. Later on, at the bidding of a visionary, they once more sallied from their solitudes, their armed mobs rushed on to the conquest of the world, and the men of Europe had a narrow escape of being all circumcised. Sceptical and mocking Greece provided these upstarts of victory with architects, mathematicians, thinkers, savants. She tried to smoothe a little the asperities of this crew of highwaymen, and to educate to a certain extent these primitive and dull understandings, roughly outlining for them a semblance of civilisation, a rather curious syncretism made up of all sorts of elements which, being skin-deep, flickered for a moment and then died out.

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. XIII These arrant cut-throats, incapable of carrying on this borrowed civilisation, incompatible with the aspirations of the race, with its instincts of depredation and savage independence, set to quarrelling among themselves, infested the seas and laid waste the coasts, giving free scope to their ungovernable passions, viewing with perfect indifference the decay of their cities, their monuments, their dwellings, filled with irresistible antipathy for a civilisation that was beyond their com prehension, pining for their tents, their roving life and their deserts. CONTENTS. PAGE TANGIER .......... 1 GEBELEH .......... 30 IN THE GHAEBIAH ........ 39 AEZILAH .......... 53 DJELIFAH .......... 62 SAHAL-EL-KHEMIS . . . . . . . . .71 EL-ARAISH .......... 82 AIN-BOUILEH-SIDI MOUKTAR ....... 93 SIDI-AISSA-BENI-HASSAN . . . . . . .109 IN THE PLAIN OF THE SEBOU. . . . . . .115 SIDI CASSIM 122 MEQUINEZ .......... 134 DJEDIDA .......... 162 THE MEHDIOUNA ......... 167 THE POOLS NEAR FEZ ........ 175 FEZ 182 IN VIEW OF FEZ ......... 215 MEKIS 218 ALONG THE ZAHROUN MOUNTAINS 223 AIN-ALI BENI HASSAN 227 VILLAGE OF SIDI-MOHAMMED-SHERIF 230 OUEZZAN CONTENTS.