CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHESCANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES
When a man gets his company he presents the regiment with a piece of plate, or a silver inkstand, or a picture, or something which commemorates a battle or a man, and so the regimental headquarters are always telling a story of what has been in the past and inspiring fine deeds for the future. Each regiment has its peculiarity of uniform or its custom at mess, which is distinctive to it, and which means more the longer it is observed. Those in authority are trying to do away with these signs and differencesin equipment, and are writing themselves down asses as they do so.
You will notice, for instance, if you are up in such things, that the sergeants of the 13th Light Infantry wear their sashes from the left shoulder to the right hip, as officers do, and not from the right shoulder, as sergeants should. This means that once in a great battle every officer of the 13th was killed, and the sergeants, finding this out, and that they were now in command, changed their sashes to the other shoulder. And the officers ever after allowed them to do this, as a tribute to their brothers in command who had so conspicuously obliterated themselves and distinguished their regiment. There are other traditions, such as that no one must mention a woman's name at mess, except the title of one woman, to which they rise and drink at the end of the dinner, when the sergeant gives the signal to the band-master outside, and his men play the national anthem, while the bandmaster comes in, as Mr. Kipling describes him in "The Drums of the Fore and Aft," and "takes his glass of port-wine with the orfficers." The Sixtieth, or the Royal Rifles, for instance, wear no marks of rank at the mess, in order to express the idea that there they are all equal. This regiment had once for its name the King's American Rifles, and under that name it took Quebec and Montreal, and I had placed in front of me at mess one night a little silver statuette in the equipment of a Continental soldier, exceptthat his coat, if it had been colored, would have been red, and not blue. He was dated 1768. In the mess-room are pictures of the regiment swarming over the heights of Quebec, storming the walls of Delhi, and running the gauntlet up the Nile as they pressed forward to save Gordon. All of this goes to make a subaltern feel things that are good for him to feel.
Every day at Gibraltar there is tennis, and bands playing in the Alameda, and parades, or riding-parties across the Neutral Ground into Spain, and teas and dinners, at which the young ladies of the place dance Spanish dances, and twice a week the members of the Calpe Hunt meet in Spain, and chase foxes across the worst country that any Englishman ever rode over in pink. There are no fences, but there are ravines and cañons and precipices, down and up and over which the horses scramble and jump, and over which they will, if the rider leaves them alone, bring him safely.
And if you lose the rest of the field, you can go to an old Spanish inn like that which Don Quixote visited, with drunken muleteers in the court-yard, and the dining-room over the stable, and with beautiful dark-eyed young women to give you omelet and native wine and black bread. Or, what is as amusing, you can stop in at the officer's guard-room at the North Front, and cheer that gentleman's loneliness by taking tea with him, and drying your things before his fire while he cuts the cake, and the women of the partystraighten their hats in front of his glass, and two Tommies go off for hot water.
There was a very entertaining officer guarding the North Front one night, and he proved so entertaining that neither of us heard the sunset gun, and so when I reached the gate I found it locked, and the bugler of the guard who take the keys to the Governor each night was sounding his bugle half-way up the town. There was a dark object on a wall to which I addressed all my arguments and explanations, which the object met with repeated requests to "move on, now," in the tone of expostulation with which a London policeman addresses a very drunken man.
TEA IN THE OFFICERS' QUARTERSTEA IN THE OFFICERS' QUARTERS
I knew that if I tried to cross the Neutral Ground I would be shot at for a smuggler; for, owing to Gibraltar's being a free port of entry, these gentlemen buy tobacco there, and carry it home each night, or run it across the half-mile of Neutral Ground strapped to the backs of dogs. So I wandered back again to the entertaining officer, and he was filled with remorse, and sent off a note of entreaty to his Excellency's representative, to whom he referred as a D. A. A. G., and whose name, he said, was Jones. We then went to the mess of the officers guarding the different approaches, and these gentlemen kindly offered me their own beds, proposing that they themselves should sleep on three chairs and a pile of overcoats; all except one subaltern, who excused his silence by saying diffidently that he fancied I would not care to sleep in the feverofficer of the keys pass every night, and the guards turn out to salute the keys, and I had rather imagined that it was more or less of a form, and that the pomp and circumstance were all there was of it. I did not believe that the Rock was really closed up at night like a safe with a combination lock. But I know now that it is. A note came back from the mysterious D. A. A. G. saying I could be admitted at eleven; but it said nothing at all about sentries, nor did the entertaining officer. Subalterns always say "Officer" when challenged, and the sentry always murmurs, "Pass, officer, and all's well," in an apologetic growl. But I suppose I did not say "Officer" as I had been told to do, with any show of confidence, for every sentry who appeared that night—and there seemed to be a regiment of them—would not have it at all, and wanted further data, and wanted it quick. Even if you have an order from a D. A. A. G. named Jones, it is very difficult to explain about it when you don't know whether to speak of him as the D. A. A. G. or as General Jones, and especially when a young and inexperienced shadow is twisting his gun about so that the moonlight plays up and down the very longest bayonet ever issued by a civilized nation. They were not nice sentries, either, like those on the Rock, who stand where you can see them, and who challenge you drowsily, like cabmen, and make the empty streets less lonely than otherwise.
They were, on the contrary, fierce and in a terrible hurry, and had a way of jumping out of the shadow with a rattle of the gun and a shout that brought nerve-storms in successive shocks. To make it worse, I had gone over the post, while waiting for word from the D. A. A. G., to hear the sentries recite their instructions to the entertaining officer. They did this rather badly, I thought, the only portion of the rules, indeed, which they seemed to have by heart being those which bade them not to allow cows to trespass "without a permit," which must have impressed them by its humor, and the fact that when approached within fifty yards they were "to fire low." I found when challenged that night that this was the only part of their instructions that I also could remember.
This was the only trying experience of my stay in Gibraltar, and it is brought in here as a compliment to the force that guards the North Front. For of them, and the rest of the inhabitants and officers of the garrison, any one who visits there can only think well; and I hope when the Rock is attacked, as it never will be, that they will all cover themselves with glory. It never will be attacked, for the reason that the American people are the only people clever enough to invent a way of taking it, and they are far too clever to attempt an impossible thing.
A great many thousand years ago Hercules built the mountain of Abyla and its twin mountain which we call Gibraltar. It was supposed to mark the limits of the unknown world, and it would seem from casual inspection, as I suggested in the last chapter, that it serves the same purpose to this day. Men have crept into Africa and crept out again, like flies over a ceiling, and they have gained much renown at Africa's expense for having done so. They have built little towns along its coasts, and run little rocking, bumping railroads into its forests, and dragged launches over its cataracts, and partitioned it off among emperors and powers and trading companies, without having ventured into the countries they pretend to have subdued. But from Paul du Chaillu to W. A. Chanler, "the Last Explorer," as he has been called, just how much more do we know of Africa than did the Romans whose bridges still stand in Tangier?
The "Last Explorer" sounds well, and is distinctlyamot, but there will be other explorers to go, and perhaps to return. There are still a few things for us to learn. The Spaniards and the Pilgrim fathers touched the unknown world of America only four hundred years ago, and to-day any commercial traveller can tell you, with the aid of an A B C railroad guide, the name of every town in any part of it. But Turks and Romans and Spaniards, and, of late, English and Germans and French, have been pecking and nibbling at Africa like little mice around a cheese, and they are still nibbling at the rind, and know as little of the people they "protect," and of the countries they have annexed and colonized, as did Hannibal and Scipio. The American forests have been turned into railroad ties and telegraph poles, and the American Indian has been "exterminated" or taught to plough and to wear a high hat. The cowboy rides freely over the prairies; the Indian agent cheats the Indian—the Indian does not cheat him; the Germans own Milwaukee and Cincinnati; the Irish rule everywhere; even the much-abused Chinaman hangs out his red sign in every corner of the country. There is not a nation of the globe that has not its hold upon and does not make fortunes out of the continent of America; but the continent of Africa remains just as it was, holding back its secret, and still content to be the unknown world.
You need not travel far into Africa to learn this; you can find out how little we know of itat its very shore. This city of Tangier, lying but three hours off from Gibraltar's civilization, on the nearest coast of Africa, can teach you how little we or our civilized contemporaries understand of these barbarians and of their barbarous ways.
A few months since England sent her ambassador to treat with the Sultan of Morocco; it was an untaught blackamoor opposed to a diplomat and a gentleman, and a representative of the most civilized and powerful of empires; and we have Stephen Bonsal's picture of this ambassador and his suite riding back along the hot, sandy trail from Fez, baffled and ridiculed and beaten. So that when I was in Tangier, half-naked Moors, taking every white stranger for an Englishman, would point a finger at me and cry, "Your Sultana a fool; the Sultan only wise." Which shows what a superior people we are when we get away from home, and how well the English understand the people they like to protect.
Tangier lies like a mass of drifted snow on the green hills below, and over the point of rock on which stands its fortress, and from which waves the square red flag of Morocco. It is a fine place spoiled by civilization. And not a nice quality of civilization either. Back of it, in Tetuan or Fez, you can understand what Tangier once was and see the Moor at his best. There he lives in the exclusiveness which his religion teaches him is right—an exclusiveness towhich the hauteur of an Englishman, and his fear that some one is going to speak to him on purpose, become a gracious manner and suggest undue familiarity. You see the Moor at his best in Tangier too, but he is never in his complete setting as he is in the inland cities, for when you walk abroad in Tangier you are constantly brought back to the new world by the presence and abodes of the foreign element; a French shop window touches a bazar, and a Moor in his finest robes is followed by a Spaniard in his black cape or an Englishman in a tweed suit, for the Englishman learns nothing and forgets nothing. He may live in Tangier for years, but he never learns to wear a burnoose, or forgets to put on the coat his tailor has sent him from home as the latest in fashion. The first thing which meets your eye on entering the harbor at Tangier is an immense blue-and-white enamel sign asking you to patronize the English store for groceries and provisions. It strikes you as much more barbarous than the Moors who come scrambling over the vessel's side.
BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATEBREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE
They come with a rush and with wild yells before the little steamer has stopped moving, and remind you of their piratical ancestors. They look quite as fierce, and as they throw their brown bare legs over the bulwarks and leap and scramble, pushing and shouting in apparently the keenest stage of excitement and rage, they only need long knives between their teeth and a cutlass to convince you that you are at themercy of the Barbary pirates, and not merely of hotel porters and guides.
My guide was a Moor named Mahamed. I had him about a week, or rather, to speak quite correctly, he had me. I do not know how he effected my capture, but he went with me, I think, because no one else would have him, and he accordingly imposed on my good-nature. As we say a man is "good-natured" when there is absolutely nothing else to be said for him, I hope when I say this that I shall not be accused of trying to pay myself a compliment. Mahamed was a tall Moor, with a fine array of different-colored robes and coats and undercoats, and a large white turban around his fez, which marked the fact that he was either married or that he had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. He followed me from morning until night, with the fidelity of a lamb, and with its sheeplike stupidity. No amount of argument or money or abuse could make him leave my side. Mahamed was not even picturesque, for he wore a large pair of blue spectacles and Congress gaiters. This hurt my sense of the fitness of things very much. His idea of serving me was to rush on ahead and shove all the little donkeys and blind beggars and children out of my way, at which the latter would weep, and I would have to go back and bribe them into cheerfulness again. In this way he made me most unpopular with the masses, and cost me a great deal in trying to buy their favor. I was never so completely at themercy of any one before, and I hope he found me "intelligent, courteous, and a good linguist."
As a matter of fact, there is very little need of a guide in Tangier. It has but few show places, for the place itself is the show. You can find your best entertainment in picking your way through its winding, narrow streets, and in wandering about the open market-places. The highways of Tangier are all very crooked and very steep. They are also very uneven and dirty, and one walks sometimes for hundreds of yards in a maze of dark alleys and little passageways walled in by whitewashed walls, and sheltered from the sun by archways and living-rooms hanging from one side of the street to the other. Green and blue doorways, through which one must stoop to enter, open in from the street, and you are constantly hearing them shut as you pass, as some of the women of the household recognize the presence of a foreigner. You are never quite sure as to what you will meet in the streets or what may be displayed at your elbow before the doors of the bazars. The odors of frying meat and of fresh fruit and of herbs, and of soap in great baskets, and of black coffee and hasheesh, come to you from cafés and tiny shops hardly as big as a packing-box. These are shut up at night by two half-doors, of which the upper one serves as a shield from the sun by day and the lower as a pair of steps. In the wider streets are the bazars, magnificent with color and with the glitter of gold lace and of brass plaques andsilver daggers; handsome, comfortable-looking Moors sit crossed-legged in the middle of their small extent like soldiers in a sentry-box, and speak leisurely with their next-door neighbor without gesture, unless they grow excited over a bargain, and with a haughty contempt for the passing Christian. There is always something beneficial in feeling that you are thoroughly despised; and when a whole community combines to despise you, and looks over your head gravely as you pass, you begin to feel that those Moors who do not apparently hold you in contempt are a very poor and middle-class sort of people, and you would much prefer to be overlooked by a proud Moor than shaken hands with by a perverted one. But the pride of the rich Moorish gentlemen is nothing compared to the fanatic intolerance of the poor farmers from the country of the tribes who come in on market-day, and who hate the Christian properly as the Koran tells them they should. They stalk through the narrow street with both eyes fixed on a point far ahead of them, with head and shoulders erect and arms swinging. They brush against you as though you were a camel or a horse, and had four legs on which to stand instead of two. Sometimes a foreigner forgets that these men from the desert, where the foreign element has not come, are following out the religious training of a lifetime, and strikes at one of them with his riding-whip, and then takes refuge in a consulate and leaves on the next boat.
I find it very hard not to sympathize with the Moors. The Englishman is always preaching that an Englishman's house is his castle, and yet he invades this country, he and his French and Spanish and American cousins, and demands that not only he shall be treated well, but that any native of the country, any subject of the Sultan, who chooses to call himself an American or an Englishman shall be protected too. Of course he knows that he is not wanted there; he knows he is forcing himself on the barbarian, and that all the barbarian has ever asked of him is to be let alone. But he comes, and he rides around in his baggy breeches and varnished boots, and he gets up polo games and cricket matches, and gallops about in a pink coat after foxes, and asks for bitter ale, and complains because he cannot get his bath, and all the rest of it, quite as if he had been begged to come and to stop as long as he liked. Sometimes you find a foreigner who tries to learn something of these people, a man like the late Mr. Leared or "Bébé" Carleton, who can speak all their dialects, and who has more power with the Sultan than has any foreign minister, and who, if the Sultan will not pay you for the last shipment of guns you sent him, or for the grand-piano for the harem, is the man to get you your money. But the average foreign resident, as far as I can see, neither adopts the best that the Moor has found good, nor introduces what the Moor most needs, and what he does not know or careenough about to introduce for himself. Tangier, for instance, is excellently adapted by nature for the purposes of good sanitation, but the arrangements are as bad and primitive as they were before a foreigner came into the place. They consist in dumping the refuse of the streets, into which everything is thrown, over the sea-wall out on the rocks below, where the pigs gather up what they want, and the waves wash the remainder back on the coast.
SANITARY OUTFITSANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL
If some of the foreign ministers would use their undoubted influence with the Bashaw to amend this, instead of introducing point-to-point pony races, they might in time show some reason for their invasion of Morocco other than the curious and obvious one that they all grow rich there while doing nothing. The foreign resident has a very great contempt for the Moor. Hesays the Moor is a great liar and a rogue. When people used to ask Walter Scott if it was he who wrote the Waverley Novels he used to tell them it was not, and he excused this afterwards by saying that if you are asked an impertinent or impossible question you have the right not to answer it or to tell an untruth. The very presence of the foreigner is an impertinence in the eyes of the Moor, and so he naturally does not feel severe remorse when he baffles the foreign invader, and does it whenever he can.
As a matter of fact, the foreign invader at Tangier is not, in a number of cases, in a position in which he can gracefully throw down gauntlets. There is something about these hot, raw countries, hidden out of the way of public opinion and police courts and the respectability which drives a gig, that makes people forget the rules and axioms laid down in the temperate zone for the guidance of tax-payers and all reputable citizens. As the sailors say, "There is no Sunday south of the equator." It is hard to tell just what it is, but the sun, or the example of the barbarians, or the fact that the world is so far away, breeds queer ideas, and one hears stories one would not care to print as long as the law of libel obtains in the land. You have often read in novels, especially French novels, or have heard men on the stage say: "Come, let us leave this place, with its unjust laws and cruel bigotry. We will go to some unknown corner of the earth, where we will make a new home.And there, under a new flag and a new name, we will forget the sad past, and enter into a new world of happiness and content."
When you hear a man on the stage say that, you can make up your mind that he is going to Tangier. It may be that he goes there with somebody else's money, or somebody else's wife, or that he has had trouble with a check; or, as in the case of one young man who was fêted and dined there, had robbed a diamond store in Brooklyn, and is now in Sing Sing; or, as in the case of a recent American consul, had sold his protection for two hundred dollars to any one who wanted it, and was recalled under several clouds. And you hear stories of ministers who retire after receiving an income of a few hundred pounds a year with two hundred thousand dollars they have saved out of it, and of cruelty and bursts of sudden passion that would undoubtedly cause a lynching in the chivalric and civilized states of Alabama or Tennessee. And so when I heard why several of the people of Tangier had come there, and why they did not go away again, I began to feel that the barbarian, whose forefathers swept Spain and terrorized the whole of Catholic Europe, had more reason than he knew for despising the Christian who is waiting to give to his country the benefits of civilization.
Tangier's beauty lies in so many different things—in the monk-like garb of the men and in the white muffled figures of the women; in the brilliancy of its sky, and of the sea dashing uponthe rocks and tossing the feluccas with their three-cornered sails from side to side; and in the green towers of the mosques, and the listless leaves of the royal palms rising from the centre of a mass of white roofs; and, above all, in the color and movement of the bazars and streets. The streets represent absolute equality. They are at the widest but three yards across, and every one pushes, and apparently every one has something to sell, or at least something to say, for they all talk and shout at once, and cry at their donkeys or abuse whoever touches them. A water-carrier, with his goat-skin bag on his back and his finger on the tube through which the water comes, jostles you on one side, and a slave as black and shiny as a patent-leather boot shoves you on the other as he makes way for his master on a fine white Arabian horse with brilliant trappings and a huge contempt for the donkeys in his way. It is worth going to Tangier if for no other reason than to see a slave, and to grasp the fact that he costs anywhere from a hundred to five hundred dollars. To the older generation this may not seem worth while, but to the present generation—those of it who were born after Richmond was taken—it is a new and momentous sensation to look at a man as fine and stalwart and human as one of your own people, and feel that he cannot strike for higher wages, or even serve as a parlor-car porter or own a barbershop, but must work out for life the two hundred dollars his owner paid for him at Fez.
There is more movement in Tangier than I have ever noticed in a place of its size. Every one is either looking on cross-legged from the bazars and coffee-shops, or rushing, pushing, and screaming in the street. It is most bewildering; if you turn to look after a particularly magnificent Moor, or a half-naked holy man from the desert with wild eyes and hair as long as a horse's mane, you are trodden upon by a string of donkeys carrying kegs of water, or pushed to one side by a soldier with a gun eight feet long.
There is something continually interesting in the muffled figures of the women. They make you almost ashamed of the uncovered faces of the American women in the town; and, in the lack of any evidence to the contrary, you begin to believe every Moorish woman or girl you meet is as beautiful as her eyes would make it appear that she is. Those of the Moorish girls whose faces I saw were distinctly handsome; they were the women Benjamin Constant paints in his pictures of Algiers, and about whom Pierre Loti goes into ecstasies in his book on Tangier. Their robe or cloak, or whatever the thing is that they affect, covers the head like a hood, and with one hand they hold one of its folds in front of the face as high as their eyes, or keep it in place by biting it between their teeth.
The only time that I ever saw the face of any of them was when I occasionally eluded Mahamed and ran off with a little guide called Isaac, the especial protector of two Americanwomen, who farmed him out to me when they preferred to remain in the hotel. He is a particularly beautiful youth, and I noticed that whenever he was with me the cloaks of the women had a fashion of coming undone, and they would lower them for an instant and look at Isaac, and then replace them severely upon the bridge of the nose. Then Isaac would turn towards me with a shy conscious smile and blush violently. Isaac says that the young men of Tangier can tell whether or not a girl is pretty by looking at her feet. It is true that their feet are bare, but it struck me as being a somewhat reckless test for selecting a bride. I will recommend Isaac to whoever thinks of going to Tangier. He speaks eight languages, is eighteen years old, wears beautiful and barbarous garments, and is always happy. He is especially good at making bargains, and he entertained me for many half-hours while I sat and watched him fighting over two dollars more or less with the proprietors of the bazars. He was an antagonist worthy of the oldest and proudest Moor in Tangier. He had no respect for their rage or their contempt or their proffered bribes or their long white beards. Sometimes he would laugh them to scorn—them and their prices; and again he would talk to them sadly and plaintively; and again he would stamp and rage and slap his hands at them and rush off with a great show of disgust, until they called him back again, when he and they would go over the performance once more with unabated interest.Mahamed always paid them what they asked, and got his commission from them later, as a guide should; but Isaac would storm and finally beat them down one-half. Isaac can be found at the Calpe Hotel, and is welcome to whatever this notice may be worth to him.
A WOMAN OF TANGIERA WOMAN OF TANGIER
I had read in books on Morocco and had been given to understand that when you were told that the price of anything in a bazar was worth three dollars, you should offer one, and that then the Moor would cry aloud to Allah to take note of the insult, and would ask you to sit down and have a cup of coffee, and that he would then beat you up and you would beat him down, and that at the end of two or three hours you would get what you wanted for two dollars. It struck methat this, if one had several months to spare and wanted anything badly enough, might be rather amusing. The first thing I saw that I wanted badly was a long gun, for which the Moor asked me twelve dollars. I offered him eight. I then waited to see him tear his beard and unwrap his turban and cry aloud to Allah; but he did none of these things. He merely put the gun back in its place and continued the conversation, which I had so flippantly interrupted, with a long-bearded friend. And no further remarks on my part affected him in the least, and I was forced to go away feeling very much ashamed and very mean. The next day a man at the hotel brought in the gun, having paid fourteen dollars for it, and said he would not sell it for fifty. We would pay much more than that for it at home, which shows that you cannot always follow guide-books.
There are only five things the guides take you to see in Tangier—the café chantant, the governor's palace, the prisons, and the harem, to which men are not admitted. They also take you to see the markets, but you can see them for yourself. The markets are bare, open places covered with stones and lined with bazars, and on market-days peopled with thousands of muffled figures selling or trying to sell herbs and eggs and everything else that is eatable, from dates to haunches of mutton. It is a wonderfully picturesque sight, with the sun trickling through the palm-leaf mats overhead on the piles of yellow melons at your feet, and with strings of camels dislocating theircountenances over their grain, and dancing-men and snake-charmers and story-tellers, as eloquent as actors, clamoring on every side.
The café chantant is a long room lined with mats, and with rugs scattered over the floor, on which sit musicians and the regular customers of the place, who play cards and smoke long pipes, with which they rap continually on the tin ash-holders. The music is very strange, to say the least, and the singing very startling, full of sudden pauses, and beginning again after one of these when you think the song is over. It is not a particularly exciting place to visit, but there is no choice between that and the hotel smoking-room. Tangier is not a town where one can move about much at night. There is also a place where the guests tell you that you can see Moorish women dance the dance which so startled Paris in the Algerian exhibit at the exposition. As I had no desire to be startled in that way again, I did not go to see them, and so cannot say what they are like. But it is quite safe to say that any visitor to Tangier who thinks he is seeing anything that is real and native to the home life of the people, and that is not a show gotten up by the guides, is going to be greatly taken in. The harem to which they lead women is not a harem at all, but the home of the widow of an ex-governor, who sits with her daughters for strange women to look at. It is a most undignified proceeding on the part of the widow of a dead Bashaw, and no one but the guides know what she is doing. Icame to find out about it through some American women who went there with Isaac in the morning, and were taken to call at the same place by an English lady resident in the afternoon. The English woman laughed at them for thinking they had seen the interior of a harem, and they did not tell her that they had already visited her friends and paid their franc for admittance to their society.
The other show places are the governor's palace and the prisons. The palace is a very handsome Moorish building, and the prisons are very dirty. All that the tourist can see of them is the little he can discern through a hole cut in the stout wooden door of each, which is the only exit and entrance. You cannot see much even then, for the prisoners, as soon as they discover a face at the opening, stick it full of the palm-leaf baskets that they make and sell in order to buy food. The government gives them neither water, which is expensive in Tangier, nor bread, unless they are dying for want of it, but expects the family or friends of each criminal to see that he is kept alive until he has served out his term of imprisonment.
WATER-VENDERWATER-VENDER AT THE DOOR OF A PRIVATE HOUSE
A great deal has been written about these prisons of the Sultan, and of the cruelty shown to the inmates, notably of late by a Mr. Mackenzie in the LondonTimes. You are told that in Tangier, within the four square walls of the prison, there are madmen and half-starved murderers and rebels, loaded with chains, dying of diseaseand want, who are tortured and starved until they die. For this reason no one in Morocco is sentenced for more than ten or twelve years, so you are told, because he is sure to die before that time has expired. It seemed to me that if this were true it would be worth while to visit the prison and to tell what one saw there. When I was informed that, with the exception of two residents of Tangier, no one has been allowed to enter the Sultan's prison for the lastten years, I suspected that there must be something there which the Sultan did not want seen: it was not a difficult deduction to make. So I set about getting into the prison. It is not at all necessary to go into the details of my endeavors, or to tell what proposals I made; it is quite sufficient to say that in every way I was eminently unsuccessful. It was interesting, however, to find a people to whom the arguments and inducements which had proved effective with one's own countrymen were foolish and incomprehensible. For two days I haunted the outer walls of the prison, and was smiled upon contemptuously by the Bashaw's counsellors, who sat calmly in the cool hallway of the palace, and watched me kicking impatiently at the stones in the court-yard and broiling in the sun, while the governor or Bashaw returned me polite expressions of his regret. I finally dragged the Consul-General into it, and brought things to such a pass that I could see no way out of it but my admittance to the prison or a declaration of war from the United States.
Either event seemed to promise exciting and sensational developments. Colonel Mathews, the Consul-General, did not, however, share my views, but arranged that I should have an audience with the Bashaw, during the course of which he promised he would bring up the question of my admittance to the prison.
On board theFulda, I had had the pleasure of sitting at table next to the Rev. Dr. Henry M. Field, the editor of theEvangelist, and a distinguished traveller in many lands. While on the steamer I had twitted the doctor with not having seen certain phases of life with which, it seemed to me, he should be more familiar, and I offered, on finding we were making the same tour for the same purpose, to introduce him to bull-fights and pig-sticking and cafés chantants, and other incidents of foreign travel, of which he seemed to be ignorant. He refused my offer with dignity, but I think with some regret. I was, nevertheless, glad to find that he was in Tangier, and that he was to be one of the party to call at the governor's palace. On learning of my desire to visit the prison Dr. Field added his petition to mine, and I am quite sure that Colonel Mathews wished we were both in the United States.
We first called upon the Sultan's Minister of Foreign Affairs, who received us in a little room leading from a pretty portico near the street entrance. It was furnished, I was pained to note, not with divans and rugs, but with a set of red plush and walnut sofas and chairs, such as youwould find in the salon of a third-rate French hotel. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was a dear, kindly old gentleman, with a fine white beard down to his waist, but he had a cold in his head, and this kept him dabbing at his nose with a red bandanna handkerchief rolled up in a ball, which was not in keeping with the rest of his costume, nor with the dignity of his appearance. He and Dr. Field got on very well; they found out that they were both seventy years of age, and both highly esteemed in their different churches. Indeed, the Minister of Foreign Affairs was good enough to say, through Colonel Mathews, that Dr. Field had a good face, and one that showed he had led a religious life. He rather neglected me, and I was out of it, especially when both the doctor and the cabinet minister began hoping that Allah would bless them both. I thought it most unorthodox language for Dr. Field to use.
We then walked up the hill upon which stand the fort, the prisons, the treasury, and the governor's palace, and were received at the entrance to the latter by the same gentlemen who had for the last two days been enjoying my discomfiture. They were now most gracious in their manner, and bowed proudly and respectfully to Colonel Mathews as we passed between two rows of them and entered the hall of the palace. We went through three halls covered with colored tiles and topped with arches of ornamental scrollwork of intricate designs. At the extreme endof these rooms the Bashaw stood waiting for us. He was the finest-looking Moor I had seen; and I think the Moorish gentleman, though it seems a strange thing to say, is the most perfect type of a gentleman that I have seen in any country. He is seldom less than six feet tall, and he carries his six feet with the erectness of a soldier and with the grace of a woman. The bones of his face are strong and well-placed, and he looks kind and properly self-respecting, and is always courteous. When you add to this clothing as brilliant and robes as clean and soft and white as a bride's, you have a very worthy-looking man. The Bashaw towered above all of us. He wore brown and dark-blue cloaks, with a long under-waistcoat of light-blue silk, yellow shoes, and a white turban as big as a bucket, and his baggy trousers were as voluminous as Letty Lind's divided skirts. He could not speak English, but he shook hands with us, which Moors do not do to one another, and walked on ahead through court-yards and halls and up stairways to a little room filled with divans and decorated with a carved ceiling and tiled walls. There we all sat down, and a soldier in a long red cloak and with numerous swords sticking out of his person gave us tea, and sweet cakes made entirely of sugar. As soon as we had finished one cup he brought in another, and, noticing this, I indulged sparingly; but the doctor finished his first, and then refused the rest, until the Consul-General told him he must drink or be guilty of a breach of etiquette.
A STREET DANCERA STREET DANCER
The Bashaw and Colonel Mathews talked together, and we paid the governor long and laborious compliments, at which he smiled indulgently. He did not strike me as being at all overcome by them; he had, on the contrary, very much the air of a man of the world, and seemed rather to be bored, but too polite to say so. He looked exactly like Salvini as Othello. While the tea-drinking was going on we were making asides to Colonel Mathews, and urging him to propose our going into the prison, which he said he would do, but that it must be done diplomatically. We told him we would give all the prisoners bread and water, or a lump sum to the guards, or whatever he thought would please the Bashaw best. He and the Bashaw then began to talk about it, and the doctor and I looked consciously at the ceiling. The Bashaw said that never since he had been governor of Tangier had he allowed either a native or a foreigner to enter the prison; and that if a European did so, he would be torn topieces by the fanatics imprisoned there, who would think they were pleasing Allah by abusing an unbeliever. Colonel Mathews also added, on his own account, that we would probably catch some horrible disease. The more they did not want us to go, the more we wanted to go, the doctor rising to the occasion with a keenness and readiness of resource worthy of a New York reporter after a beat. I can pay him no higher compliment. After a long, loud, and excited debate the Bashaw submitted, and the Consul-General won.
The first prison they showed us was the county jail, in which men are placed for a month or more. It was dirty and uninteresting, and we protested that it was not the one which the Bashaw had described, and asked to be shown the one where the enemies of the government were incarcerated. Colonel Mathews called back the Bashaw's soldiers, and we went on to the larger prison immediately adjoining. Some time ago the inmates of this made a break for liberty, and forced open the one door which bars those inside from the outer world. The guards fired into the mass of them, and the place shows where the bullets struck. To prevent a repetition of this, three heavy bars were driven into the masonry around the door, so close together that it is impossible for more than one man to leave or enter the prison at one time even when the door is open. And the opening is so small that to do this he must either crawl in on his hands and knees, orlift himself up by the crossbar and swing himself in feet foremost. It impressed me as a particularly embarrassing way to make an entrance among a lot of people who meditated tearing you to pieces. I pointed this out to the doctor, but he was determined, though pale. So the guards swung the door in, and the first glimpse of a Christian gentleman the prisoners had in ten years was a pair of yellow riding-boots which shot into space, followed by a young man, and a moment later by an elderly gentleman with a white tie. We made a combined movement to the middle of the prison, which was lighted from above by a square opening in the roof, protected by iron bars. This was the only light in the place. All around the four sides of the patio or court were rows of pillars supporting a portico, and back of these was a second and outer corridor opening into the porticos, and so into the patio. The whole place—patio, porticos, and outer corridor—was about as big as the stage of a New York theatre. It was paved with dirt and broken slabs, and littered with straw. There was no furniture of any sort. With the exception of the sink upon which we stood, directly under the opening in the roof, the place was in almost complete darkness, although the sun was shining brilliantly outside.
I think there must have been about fifty or sixty men in the prison, and for a short time not one of them moved. They were apparently, to judge by the way they looked at us, as muchstartled as though we had ascended from a trap like goblins in a pantomime, and then half of them, with one accord, came scrambling towards us on their hands and knees. They were half naked, and their hair hung down over their eyes; and this, and their crawling towards us instead of walking, made them look more or less like animals. As they came forward there was a clanking of chains, and I saw that it was because their legs were fettered that they came as they did, and not standing erect like human beings. The guard who followed us in was over two minutes in getting the door fastened behind him, and my mind was more occupied with this fact than with what I saw before me; for it seemed to me that if there was any tearing to pieces to be gone through with, I should hate to have to wait that long while the door was being opened again. This thought, with the shock of seeing thirty wild men moving upon us out of complete darkness on their hands and knees, was the only sensation of any interest that I received while visiting the prison.
IN THE PRISONIN THE PRISON
The inmates looked exactly like the poorer of the Moors outside, except that their hair was longer and their clothing was not so white. There was one man, however, quite as well dressed as any of the Sultan's counsellors, and he seemed to be the only one who objected to our presence. The rest did nothing except to gratify their curiosity by staring at us; they did not even hold out their hands for money. They were very dirtyand poorly clothed, and their long imprisonment had made them haggard and pale, and the iron bars around their legs gave them a certain interest. The atmosphere of the place was horribly foul, but not worse than the atmosphere of either the men's or women's ward at night in a precinct station-house in New York city. Indeed, I was not so much impressed with the horrors of the Sultan's prison as with the fact that our own are so little better, considering our advanced civilization. I do not mean our large prisons, but the cells and the vagrants' rooms in the police stations. There the vagrant is given a sloping board and no ventilation. In Tangier he is given straw and an opening in the roof. To be fair, you must compare a prisoner's condition in jail with that which he is accustomed to in his own home, and the homes of the Moors of the lower class are as much like stables as their stables are like pigsties. The poor of Tangier are allowed, through the kindness of the Sultan, to sleep on the bare stones around the entrance to one of the mosques. For the poor sick there has been built a portico, about as large as a Fifth Avenue omnibus, opposite this same mosque. This is called the hospital of Tangier. It is considered quite good enough for sick people and for those who have no homes. And every night you will see bundles of rags lying in the open street or under the narrow roof of the portico, exposed to the rain and to the bitter cold. If this, in the minds of the Moors, is fair treatment of the sick and the poor, one cannot expect themto give their criminals and murderers white bread and a freshly rolled turban every morning.
If I had seen horrible things in the Sultan's prison—men starving, or too sick to rise, or chained to the walls, or half mad, or loathsome with disease—I should certainly have been glad to call the attention of other people to it, not from any philanthropic motives perhaps, but as a matter of news interest. I did not, however, see any of these things. Dr. Field, I believe, was differently impressed, and is of the opinion that the outer corridor contained many things much too horrible to believe possible. He compared this to Dante's ninth circle of hell, and made a point of the fact that the guard had called me back when I walked towards it. I, however, went into it while the doctor and the guard were getting the door open for us to return, and saw nothing there but straw. It seemed to me to be the place where the men slept when the rain, coming through the opening in the roof, made it unpleasant for them to remain in the court.
It may seem that my persistence in visiting the prison is inconsistent with what I have said of foreigners forcing themselves into places in Morocco where they are not wanted, but I am quite sure that, had any one heard the stories told me of the horror of these jails, he would have considered himself justified in learning the truth about them; and I cannot understand why, if the members of the legations who tell these stories believe them, they have not used their influenceto try and better the condition of the prisoners, rather than to introduce game-laws for the protection of partridges and wild-boars. It is, perhaps, gratifying to note that the two gentlemen of whom I spoke as having visited the prison in the last ten years were the American Consul-General and another resident American. Both of these contributed food to the prisoners, and reported what they had seen to our government.
On the whole, Tangier impresses one as a fine thing spoiled by civilization. Barbarism with electric lights at night is not attractive. Tangier to every traveller should be chiefly interesting as a stepping-stone towards Tetuan or Fez. Tetuan can be reached in a day's journey, and there the Moor is to be seen pure and simple, barbarous and beautiful.
There are certain places and things with which the English novel has made us so familiar that it is not necessary for us to go far afield or to study guide-books in order to feel that we have known them intimately and always. We know Paddington Station as the place where the detective interrogates the porter who handled the luggage of the escaping criminal, and as the spot from which the governess takes her ticket for the country-house where she is to be persecuted by its mistress and loved by all the masculine members of the household. We also know that a P. and O. steamer is a means of conveyance almost as generally used by heroes and heroines of English fiction as a hansom cab. It is a vessel upon which the heroine meets her Fate, either in the person of a young man on his way home from India, or by being shipwrecked on a desert island on her way to Australia, and where the only other surviving passenger tattooes his will upon her back, leaves her all his fortune, and consideratelydies. Long ago a line of steamers ran to the Peninsula of Spain; later they shortened their sails, as the Romans shortened their swords, and, like the Romans, extended their boundaries to the Orient. This line is now an institution with traditions and precedents and armorial bearings and time-hallowed jokes, and when you step upon the deck of a P. and O. steamer for the first time you feel that you are not merely an ordinary passenger, but a part of a novel in three volumes, or of a picture in the LondonGraphic, and that all sorts of things are imminent and possible. It may not have occurred to you before embarking, but you know as soon as you come over the side that you expected to find the deck strewn with laces and fans and daggers from Tangier, and photographs of Gibraltar, and such other trifles for possible purchase by the outbound passengers, and that the crew would be little barefooted lascars in red turbans and long blue shirts, with a cumberband about their persons, and that you would be called to tiffin instead of to lunch.
A fat little lascar balanced himself in the jolly-boat outlined against the sky and held aloft a red flag until the hawser swung clear of the propeller, when he raised a white flag above him and stood as motionless as the Statue of Liberty, while theSutlejcleared Europa Point of Gibraltar and headed towards the East. Then he pattered across the deck and leaned over the side and crooned in a lazy, barbarous monotone to the waves. The sun fell upon the boat like a spelland turned us into sleepy and indolent fixtures wherever it first found us, and showed us the white-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada of Spain to the north, and the dim blue mountains of Africa to the south. The deck below was scrubbed as white as a bread-board, and the masts and rigging threw black shadows on the awning overhead, and on every side the blue Mediterranean and the bluer Mediterranean sky met and sparkled and reflected each other's brilliancy like mirrors placed face to face.
For four days the sun greeted theSutlejby day and the moon by night, and the coast of Africa played hide-and-seek along her starboard side, disappearing in a white mist of cloud for an hour or so, and then running along with us again in comfortable proximity. On the other side boats passed at almost as frequent intervals, and at such friendly range that one could count the people on the decks and read their flag signals without a glass. The loneliness of the North Atlantic, where an iceberg stands for land, and only an occasional tramp steamer rests the eye, is as different to this sea as a railroad journey over the prairie is to the jaunt from New York to Washington. On the second night out we see Algiers, glowing and sparkling in the night like a million of fire-flies, and with the clear steady eye of the light-house warning us away, as though the quarantine had not warned some of us away already. And on the third night we pass Cape Bon, and can imagine Tunis lying tantalizinglynear us, behind its light-house, shut off also by the quarantine that the cholera at Marseilles has made imperative wherever the French line of steamers touch. By this time the twoscore passengers have foregathered as they would never have done had they all been Americans, or had there been three hundred of them, and their place of meeting the deck of a transatlantic steamer instead of one of this picturesque fleet, upon which you expect strange things to happen.