Part 7

Fortunately, the attention of the family had been attracted by something occurring just out of our range of vision, though we knew nothing of this at the time. The negative was not developed till we reached America, so the camera recorded a scene which we ourselves have never looked upon. Encouraged by the silence following our first attempt, we chose another section of the wall and repeated our manœuver. Unfortunately a preliminary click was heard by our sitters, whose startled expressions, faithfully registered, prove that they have seen the guilty lens and shutter winking at them from the summit of the wall. Some have already hid their faces, others are apparently crying out in protest; even the dog, like a good Mohammedan, turns his back to the "painting machine." The unique picture tells us what manner of women is concealed by the shroudlike garments, which are worn in the streets and which make women, be they young, old, rich, poor, beautiful, or ugly, appear as like, one to another, as are bales of woolen cloth. Street life in Fez is for women a perpetual masquerade, a lifelong domino party. But in these high-walled gardens all the participants unmask, throw off their haiks, and during the home hours regain an individuality of visage, form, and dress. This revelation of the inner life of Fez makes the city seem more human to us, less like a city of specters, ghosts, and animated mummies. Nevertheless these people seem not quite real to us, for we did not actually see them, nor did they see us, face to face. Next day two huge black men-slaves came to notify us that if any more mysterious boxes appeared over the garden-wall their master, now absent, should be informed, and our departure hastened.

We had one neighbor, however, who was more sociable; in fact, he became painfully familiar. He lived at a street corner where he enjoyed a squatter-right, for he had been squatting there without intermission for five years or more. The man is crazy. He invariably greets us with loud howls, and insists upon it that we are "his mothers!" Then, like a whining child, he teases for matches with which to light a fire. He has a mania for collecting brushwood, building fires, and then extinguishing them by calmly sitting down upon the flames, much to the detriment of his cuticle and raiment. When his clothes are burned completely off, he counts upon his prudish neighbors for a new garb. Altogether, he is decidedly eccentric even for a madman; and he must be very mad, for he either refuses money, or, when it is thrust upon him, tosses it away to other beggars who are always crouching near.

Toward the close of our visit we managed to scrape acquaintance with the servants of another neighbor. One was a veiled woman, who would smile at us through her mask, and another a fat negress slave, as unctuous and good-natured as any Mississippi mammy. "And are there really slaves in Fez?" some one may ask. There are; and every day in a certain remote and cheerless market-place young negresses are sold at auction. Seldom, however, does a stranger witness this trafficking in human flesh. At his approach, buyers and sellers, slaves and auctioneers, mysteriously vanish. Thrice we found the market-place deserted. Twice, owing to the skillful manœuvering of our guide, we surprised the market in full swing, and saw six little negro girls, fresh from the barbarous regions of the south, purchased by solemn white-robed citizens at prices varying from eighty to two hundred dollars.

But do not think because our neighbors do not call upon us that we receive no social courtesies whatever. On the contrary, the Minister of Finance, the Moorish Secretary of the Treasury, one of the highest and by a curious coincidence one of the richest dignitaries in Morocco, one day, invited us to dinner. The invitation was delivered through the British vice-consul, who promised to accompany us and to see that we made no _faux pas_. We were not rude enough to take a camera with us, knowing the prejudices of the Moors, and therefore I have no picture of the gorgeous palace into the courtyard of which we were ushered by a group of slaves. Our host resembled the rich men we see daily in the streets, being princely in bearing, haughty and reserved. Contrary to Moorish custom, we sat at a table and on chairs, instead of on the floor. There were no other guests. As soon as we were seated, Mr. MacLeod took from his pocket a paper parcel and opened it, displaying three pairs of knives and forks.

"I always carry these when I dine out with the Moorish swells; they don't have any," he explained; "and they like to have me bring them when they are entertaining foreign guests."

"But how do they eat?" we asked.

"Watch his Excellency, and you'll soon understand."

At this moment there appeared a huge round platter, three feet in diameter, on which has been erected a pyramid of chickens. To each of us an entire bird was given. Then our host, with deft fingers, tore his portion very neatly into shreds, picked out the choicest morsels of the chicken and passed them to us. Then followed pyramids of pigeons, then huge chunks of mutton, then sausages on spits; and that those sausages were not less than two inches thick and one foot long I am positively certain, because we each were compelled to take a whole one, and I remember my vain efforts to get it all upon my plate, three inches of protruding sausage threatening the table-cloth on each side. And every course was carved by our host, who used nothing sharper than his finger-nails, and every time he came upon a morsel of especial daintiness, he courteously offered it to one of us. We were almost stuffed to death, for the consul warned us that to refuse the proffered tidbits would be a great affront. There were no sauces, no vegetables, nothing but meats roasted underground by slow fires that had burned all night.

We had nothing with which to wash down this "all too solid" food except sickly lukewarm rosewater. And not content with stuffing us and forcing us to drink that perfumed liquid, our host would every now and then give a signal, whereupon the servants would spray stronger rosewater down our backs and in our ears. Never was anything more welcome than the tiny cups of Turkish coffee that at last were brought to end our tortures. I could not blame my friend, when, on our return to our own house, he declared that he had had enough of Oriental luxury, exclaiming as Haj brought the "antidotes," "Let me be an American for a minute!"

The table was served by two slaves, and by a young man whose bearing told us that he was no servant. He was, in fact, the eldest son of our host. Custom commands that the son should wait upon the father's guests. Imagine this custom introduced at Washington, and picture the sons of a cabinet-official passing huge finger-bowls around the banquet table!

As for our conversation, it turned first upon the only modern institution in the city, the Arsenal and Rifle Factory of the Sultan. The secretary spoke of course in Arabic, the vice-consul acting as interpreter. Then we were questioned regarding the city whence we come, Chicago; and, being native-born Chicagoans, no urging was required to wring from us the story of the great phœnix city on the shore of the American inland sea. We described "skyscrapers," elevators, cable-cars, and trolleys. Then we told of the World's Fair, visited in one day by seven times more people than reside in Fez, and then with a keener interest the secretary listened to the incredible figures relating to the movements of wheat and corn and to the shipments of beef and mutton. Next, as a climax, we launched enthusiastically into pork statistics, but our spokesman checks us with the caution: "Hush! Don't shock his Excellency; remember his religious prejudices. Don't say a word about the pigs. You know the Moslem eats no pork." Therefore we leave our host unenlightened regarding the pet industry of our western metropolis.

The next day we devote to the Jewish quarter, a distinct and separate city, called the "Mellah." We approach it through the Hebrews' burial ground, a place of whited sepulchers, dwellings for the dead, and dingy huts, temporary abodes for living men and women; for there are two populations in the Jewish cemetery, a fixed population of the wealthy dead, a passing population of the living poor. You must remember that in these Moorish cities the Jews are still compelled to dwell apart from true believers. Their houses are confined in the restricted Mellah, where no provision was originally made for an increase of population. Therefore the poorer and the weaker Jews have been squeezed out of its gates and have found refuge here in the city of the dead, where they have built crude huts and begun life anew. The streets or passageways are, however, far cleaner than those of the inner Mellah, and we cannot but agree that residence in the freer atmosphere of this city of the dead is preferable to living on the other side of yonder walls, where every inch of space is occupied, where the atmosphere is heavy with bad odors, and where sunshine and fresh air are things almost unknown.

A poor old Jew, a man with a large dependent family, serves as our guide. He tells of the misery of his people, begs me to repeat in my own land the story of their woe. It is not the Sultan, he says, who is most cruel to them; it is the rich men, the elders and the rabbis of his own tribe whom he accuses of injustice.

The right to build these shelters in the cemetery was granted by the Sultan to the poor, when the overcrowding of the Mellah proper became a menace to the public health. Nevertheless, no poor man is permitted to take up his abode among these cast-out members of the tribe until he has paid certain fees to the headmen of the quarter. He says that the oppression of Jew by Jew is harder to bear than the much-talked-of oppression to which the children of Israel have been subjected by the Sons of Ishmael. The statements of our pauper guide surprised us, but what he said was confirmed by every poor Jew with whom we talked. They all declared that the rich elders and the rabbis of their own tribe were their hardest masters. A wealthy man, with whom we discussed the question later, assured us that his class had almost impoverished itself with charities, that the cause of all the evil lay in the decrease of commerce and the rapid increase of the Jewish population. The poor, undoubtedly, are very poor; and though the rich live in apparent luxury and comfort, it cannot be true that Fez is the only city in the world where the rich Jews abandon their own people to starvation and distress. The noble Jewish charities throughout the world argue the contrary, and even in Fez the philanthropy of European Jews is manifest in the excellent school established here in this very Mellah by the French branch of the Israelite Alliance.

We can assure all those who have given pecuniary support to the Alliance that the money is here spent conscientiously, and that the work now doing among the Moorish Jews is nobly done and worthy the sympathy and encouragement of every lover of humanity. But in spite of the educational and civilizing influences of the school, many reforms in customs remain to be effected, and it is to be hoped that in the future, a daughter of the Mellah will not be given in marriage at the age of ten and, like one girl we saw, be mother of a family at fourteen years of age, and become at twenty-five a hideous old woman. Let us hope that in another generation girl-children who at fourteen are still unmarried will not be regarded, as they are to-day, in the light of hopeless spinsters.

As for the sanitary reforms demanded in the Mellah, you have but to enter the crowded streets to be convinced that they are numberless. Here Jews are packed like live sardines in greasy boxes. Pierre Loti describes the Mellah as "an airless huddle of houses squeezed together as if screwed in a compress, and emitting all sorts of stifling odors." Again he tells of finding here "moldy smells in varieties that are not known elsewhere." But how is it possible to expect cleanliness on the part of people who are denied a sufficiency of space and air and light and water, who are not permitted to remove the refuse from their streets, lest the Moorish scavenger should lose his fee; people who are despised by their Moslem fellow-citizens, called "dogs," and forced to walk barefooted through the streets of Moorish Fez?

As a crowning indignity, the Moors have decreed that the place of deposit for dead animals, from cats to camels, shall be at the gate of the Mellah; and every night the jackals feast and sing their death chants beneath the walls of this unhappy Jewish city. We are surprised, however, to find here and there a touch of color in the dress of these unfortunate inhabitants, for black has always been the uniform imposed upon the Jew. Black is to Moorish minds the color of disgrace; hence were the Jews compelled to wear black caps and gaberdines. To-day, however, this regulation is not so rigidly enforced, although the general tone of the men's dress is very somber.

In every street we see old men, who could, without a change of raiment, step on the theatrical stage and look the part of Shylock to the life. In tiny shops, like niches bordering these streets, sit the gold- and silver-smiths, the lawyers, scribes, and money-changers; there are few idlers here. Jewish industry and thrift here rise superior to the discouraging surroundings. A few shops boast a supply of foreign merchandise. The merchants greet us with a polite "_buenos dias_," and converse in fluent Spanish; for besides Hebrew and Arabic, these people speak the language of the land from which their fathers were cruelly cast out by Spanish kings.

The commerce of the land is largely in the hands of Moorish Jews, who are forbidden by law to leave the country, lest a general exodus occur, and the trade of the entire empire, deprived of their fostering care, languish and ultimately die. Many large fortunes have been accumulated here, by usury and commerce. We made a formal call one Sabbath afternoon at the home of one of the richest Jews in Fez, old Mr. Bensimon. Magnificent, indeed, is the interior of the house, with its carved, painted doors, its stucco arabesques, immaculate tiled floors, and richly furnished rooms. The Bensimons are of the old conservatives. They speak no Spanish and have no knowledge of anything away from their immediate surroundings. The Mellah is their world; their house is one of the rare oases of elegance in the midst of a wilderness of squalor. But they are all very gracious to us; of the two pretty little girls, eleven and thirteen years of age, respectively, the elder is already married, the younger is a fiancée.

A curious incident gave us an insight into the reality of their religion. To amuse our host we performed some tricks of sleight-of-hand. Producing a silver dollar, I asked the aged father to assure himself that it was a real dollar, not tampered with in any way. He seemed reluctant to pick up the coin.

"You must not urge him," said our guide. "It is the Jewish Sabbath; a Jew may not touch filthy lucre on the holy day."

Before departing we were asked to take tea with the family, and were forthwith ushered into an apartment, furnished with that crude gaudiness that is the result of Oriental imitation of Occidental fashions. Of their "European Room" they are as proud as we are of our so-called "Oriental dens." The mirrors, clocks, sofas, and chandeliers, imported from the continent, are the envy of their neighbors.

Tea-drinking in Morocco is a solemn ceremony, to the stranger almost a sickening one. A handful of tea is put in the teapot, and the pot is filled to the very top with sugar, broken from a huge cone loaf; then boiling water is poured on. Then a bouquet of mint is thrust into this saturated solution of sugar and tea. Next, half a glassful is thrown away to exorcise evil spirits, and then one glassful is boldly swallowed by the host to reassure the guests by proving that there is no intent to poison them. Extravagant as this may sound, it is a necessary bit of etiquette in a land where tea-parties are so often fatal to a rich man's enemies. Finally, little painted glasses full of mint tea are served to all, and the traditional three rounds of this abominable concoction—a sort of warm and flat mint-julep, with the true soul of a mint-julep lacking—must be drunk on pain of being thought ill-bred. If the glasses are not completely emptied every time, the residue is complacently turned back into the teapot, to which more mint and water have meantime been added, and the greater noise we make in drinking the tea, the better are our manners thought to be. The resulting sounds at a really fashionable tea-party suggest the releasing of the air-brakes on a railway train.

During the function, sticky sweetmeats and preserved fruits, that are as revolting as they are adhesive, are passed repeatedly, and every time we are expected to accept and eat. I nearly ruined my digestion in an attempt to be polite. My friend, more happily situated, is able to pour most of his tea out of the window, and deftly to drop the sticky abominations out upon the heads of the passers-by.

Escaping finally, we make another call, this time upon the little colony connected with the mission school of the French Israelite Alliance. We find it most refreshing to meet a group of educated people, with whom to talk of all the strange things we have seen. Among them are the teachers, sent from France, their wives and families, and also a number of the most progressive Jews in Fez. The boys are students of the school, and a fat one is presented as the prize pupil of the institution, the pride and admiration of his teachers who put him through his paces at a blackboard to convince us of his cleverness. He certainly did gallop through arithmetical puzzles with rapidity and ease, and answered the questions that we propounded with a facility that put us quite to shame, for we could think of nothing difficult enough to stagger him for a moment.

Then, after another infliction of mint tea and some sweetmeats that seemed like sugar-coated sausages, we take our leave, descend the narrow stairway, and pass out into the dingy little street. An avalanche of shouts and laughter overwhelms us, and looking up we see the sky-line of the house adorned with a border of kindly faces, smiling down a cheery "_au revoir_." For it has been arranged that we are all to meet again upon the morrow. These new-found friends have been invited to spend the day at our villa, to attend a picnic in our garden, to forget there in the leafy spaciousness of our temporary abode the cramped and airless houses of the Mellah.

There are no private gardens in the Mellah, lack of space forbids; nor are there public gardens in the Moorish city. Therefore the Jews must take their air and sunshine on the housetops, where level terraces, surrounded by low parapets, afford them opportunities to bake themselves in the torrid atmosphere of Africa. Needless to say, our invitation was accepted, and next morning, shortly after breakfast, a caravan of white-robed guests makes its appearance at our garden door. The women have ridden on mule-back across the city, for they are all protégés of France, and therefore are not compelled to go about on foot, like nearly all their co-religionists.

Great preparations have been made by Haj for their entertainment. He has adorned the house and court-yard with objects borrowed from unsuspecting owners. Let me explain that almost every evening when we return from rambles in the city, we find awaiting us two or three dealers in curios, rugs, old brocades, and Moorish weapons; their goods spread out in a most artistic, tempting fashion. Haj has induced the men who came the night before to leave their goods on approval until the following evening; and thus it is that we are able to give our picnic a rich Oriental setting without incurring any great expense. In the picture of the merrymakers it may be interesting to identify my friend, who sits on the extreme left, robed in a white burnoose. Then on the right is Haj, dressed in his best; near him there sits an old gray-bearded man. He is our only Moorish guest, one of the few Moors who is free from the prejudices of his race, who does not fear to sit at meat with Jews and Christians; moreover, he speaks Spanish fluently. But he is more of a good fellow than a good Mohammedan; to our knowledge he dares to disregard the rule of total abstinence imposed upon the nation, for in his home there is a secret cellar filled with wine. And, curiously, this old _bon vivant_, who to-day makes merry with us in our Moorish garden, bears the same name as he who sang the joys of the "jug in a Persian Garden" long ago; his name, too, is Omar.