Part 11

"Suddenly a loud hoarse voice exclaimed, 'Up, my lads! here are some very pretty mates!' We all recognised the notorious thief from Moscow, a haggard withered fellow, with the ugliest face I ever beheld. He crossed over to the women and examined in his way which would be the most desirable partner. Here he received an indignant push, and there an impudent alluring glance. Others, again--the better part--recoiled from the approach of the brute. He was followed by the Baschkire, who like a clumsy beast of prey drew nigh, muttering incoherently, 'I will have a fat woman, the fattest among them.' From his approach even the ugliest and most impudent instinctively recoiled--this wooer was really too hideous, at best only suited to a monkey. The third in order who came forward was the Don-Cossac, a pretty slender youth. An impudent lass jauntily met him and fell on his neck; but he pushed her aside, and walked towards the girl who had murdered her child. The discarded female muttered some insulting words, and hung the next moment on my own neck. I shook her off, and she repeated the attempt with my neighbour, and again unsuccessfully.

"Her example became contagious: presently the more shameless of the women made an onslaught on the men. Ten minutes later the scene had changed. In the centre of the room stood a number of men and women engaged in eager negotiation--shouting and scolding. The parties who had already agreed retired to the window-niches, and here and there a man pulled an unfortunate woman, making desperate efforts to escape from him. The females who yet retained a spark of womanhood crept into a corner of the room; and in another recess were three of us--the ex-professor, Count S., and myself. We had instinctively come together, watching with painful emotion this frantic spectacle, not inclined to participate in it. To me at least the thought of selecting a wife here never occurred.

* * * * *

"'Another half an hour at your disposal, ladies and gentlemen,' exclaimed our official tormentor; 'twenty minutes--yet fifteen minutes!'

"I stood as if rooted to the ground, my knees trembled, my agitation increased, but I remained motionless. Indeed, as often as I heard the unpleasant voice of the official, the blood rushed to my head, but I advanced not one step. My excitement increased--profound disgust, bitter despair--the wildest indignation which perhaps ever pierced a poor human heart. 'No,' I said; 'I must assert the dignity of my manhood!' I was determined not to make the selection of a wife under the eyes of this man. Another impulse I could hardly suppress--viz. to throw myself upon this imperial delegate and strangle him. And if I finally abstained from an act of violence, it was because I yet loved life, and wished not to end it on the gallows. Sir," continued M. Walerian, "the source of great misery on earth is this overpowering instinct of self-preservation; without it, I should be freed this day from all my misery. Thus I stood, so to speak, at bay in my corner, using all my efforts to subdue the evil spirit within me. My looks most probably betrayed me--for when my eyes met those of the official, I noticed an involuntary shudder. A moment afterwards he regarded me with a sly and malignant glance. I turned aside and closed my eyes on this harassing scene.

"'Yet five minutes, ladies and gentlemen! Those as yet undecided must speed themselves, and unburden their heart, or I shall be compelled by virtue of my office to tie them together. And although I shall do so conscientiously, and to the best of my knowledge, there is this risk--that you engage in a marriage of mere convenience, instead of one of free choice and inclination.'

"Though my agitation reached its climax, I made no move. I considered myself an accomplice in this disgraceful outrage, if I within the allotted five minutes declared my heart and made a choice. But another thought flashed across my mind: 'I may still be able to prevent the worst. Who knows with whom that rascal may couple me if I remain altogether passive? Choose for yourself!'--I made a step forward--a mist seemed before my eyes--my heart beat wildly--I staggered, I sought figures in order to distinguish and recognise myself.

"Sir," exclaimed the narrator with a sudden yell, "what scenes did I see there? I am no coward, but I--I dare not venture to speak of it. Thus I moved forward; hardly two minutes passed, but days would not suffice to relate what passed during these terrible moments through my heart and brain. I noticed in a corner a fainting woman, a young and delicate creature. I learnt afterwards that she was an orphan child, born of a dissolute woman in a penal settlement. A coarse fellow with cunning eyes bent over her, endeavouring to raise her from the ground. I suddenly pounced upon the fellow, struck him a heavy blow, and carried the unconscious woman away as if a mere child. I determined to defend her to the last. But no rescue was attempted, though the forger shook his fists at me, but had seemingly not the courage to approach nearer. Gazing about him, another female embraced him, a repulsive woman. He looked at her somewhat abashed, but soon submitted to her caresses.

"'Ladies and gentlemen! the allotted hour has passed,' said the official. 'I must beg the parties to come forward and make known to me their choice. This may be repugnant to some of you, but my duties prescribe it. I especially request the gentlemen in yonder corner to advance'--pointing to myself and the forger. I clenched my fists involuntarily, but stepped forward with the fainting woman. 'Cossacks, keep your "Kantschu" in readiness,' said the official to the guard which surrounded him. Turning first to me, he said: "And are you, sir, resolved to carry the woman you now hold in your arms, not only in this room, but through life?' I nodded assent. 'And what have you to say, damsel?' The poor creature was as yet unconscious. 'She is in a swoon,' I replied. 'In that case I am sorry,' continued the official, 'to have to refuse in his Majesty's name my consent to your union. In the interests of humanity, I require an audible yes from all parties. I have watched attentively the whole proceedings,' continued the official--'not from mere curiosity, but partly as a duty, and partly out of pure sympathy--and I can assure you, sir, without disparagement to your claims, that the choice of the young lady you now hold in your arms fell not upon you, but upon the gentleman yonder,' pointing to the forger. 'It was probably the excess of happiness at this selection which caused her fainting. For you there is waiting an adequate recompense--that ripe, desirable beauty who now only reluctantly holds the arm of your rival. Therefore, changez, Messieurs!' 'Scoundrel!' I exclaimed, and advanced to seize him. But ere I could lay hold of him, a fearful blow on my head stretched me stunned and bleeding to the ground. When I had somewhat recovered, our marriage procession was in progress of formation. The woman whom the official had assigned to me knelt at my side, bathing my head, endeavouring to revive me. 'I like you,' she observed, 'and will treat you well.' She raised me to my feet, placed her arm in mine, and pushed me in the ranks of the procession, which moved slowly towards the church. On our road a heavy hand seized me suddenly by the collar. 'Brother,' grunted a coarse voice in my ear, 'your stout woman takes my fancy. Will you change with me? Mine is certainly less corpulent, but younger in years.'

"It was the man behind me--the Baschkire. The female whom he dragged along was a lean, ugly, dark-complexioned woman, swooning or near a swoon. An expression of unutterable despair overspread her features, rendering them, if possible, yet more ugly. 'A woman who can suffer so intensely as this one unquestionably does, cannot be without a heart--is not altogether depraved, no matter what cause brought her here.' These reflections determined me. 'She is preferable to the woman at my side. Done!' I whispered to the Baschkire. Just crossing the threshold of the church, a momentary pause ensued, during which we effected the exchange; not without a murmur, however, on the part of my intended wife. But the Baschkire kept her quiet; and a closer inspection of her new partner seemed to satisfy her. The poor woman I led forward seemed hardly aware of the exchange, she was so entirely absorbed in her grief. We were married. The official only afterwards became aware of what had happened, but could not now undo it. But I had to suffer for it--terrible was the punishment."

Not another word was uttered by the unfortunate man. Quite overcome by the recital of his cruel fate, he suddenly arose and left the house.

On account of the approach of the Jewish Sabbath, my coachman urged on our journey. Half an hour later, we passed the lonely and desolate hostelry of poor M. Walerian, the exile of Siberia, who owed so much to imperial clemency.--F. A. S., _in Belgravia_.

CHRISTMAS IN MOROCCO.

"To-morrow Christmas for Moros!" said the gentle Hamed, our Moorish servant, entering the room soon after the bang of the last sunset gun of Ramadan had shaken our windows, and the thick smoke of the coarse Moorish powder had floated away, temporarily obscuring the gorgeous hues bestowed by the retiring luminary on the restless waters of the South Atlantic.

"To-morrow Christmas for Moros! In the morning Hamed clean house, go for _soko_; then all day no _trabally_; have new _haik_, new slippers, walk about all same _tejjer_."

By which little speech our faithful attendant meant to convey that to-morrow's rejoicing at the termination of the long and irksome fast of Ramadan was equivalent to the "Ingleez's" Christmas, and that, after putting the house in order and bringing the provisions from the _soko_, or market, he would do no more _trabally_, or work--the word being a corruption of the Spanish _trabajo_--but would don the new _haik_ and bright yellow slippers for which he had long been saving up, and to the purchase of which certain little presents from the children of our household had materially contributed; and would be entitled, by prescriptive holiday right, to "take his walks abroad" with the _dolce far niente_ dignity of a _tejjer_, or merchant.

I think we members of the little English community of Mogador--or, as the Moors fondly call this pleasantest town of the Morocco seaboard, "El Souerah," or The Beautiful--had almost as good reason as the Moslem population to rejoice at the termination of the great fast. The Moors not being allowed, during the holy month, to eat, drink, or smoke betwixt the rising and the setting of the sun--the more sternly orthodox even closing their nostrils against any pleasant odour that might casually perfume the air in their vicinity, and their ears against even the faintest sound of music--debarring themselves, in fact, from whatever could give the slightest pleasure to any of the senses, a considerable amount of gloom and listlessness was the inevitable result.

The servants in the various households, not over active and intelligent at the best of times, became, as the weary days of prayer and fasting wore on, appallingly idiotic, sleepy, and sullen, would do but little work, and that little never promptly nor well. Meals could not be relied on within an hour or two, rooms were left long untidy, essential little errands and messages unperformed, and a general gloomy confusion prevailed.

Did I, tempted by the smoothness of the sea, desire a little fishing cruise, and send a youthful Moor to the neighbouring rocks to get me a basket of mussels for bait, he would probably, directly he got outside the town-gates, deposit the basket and himself in the shade of the first wall he came to, and slumber sweetly till the tide had risen and covered all the rocky ledges where it was possible to collect bait. Had I told the youngster over night that he must come out to sea with me in the morning, and take care that my boat was put outside the dock, so that she would be afloat at a certain hour, I would find, on going down at daybreak with rods and tackle, that the boat was high and dry upon the mud, and it would take the united efforts of half a dozen Moors and myself to get her afloat at the end of nearly an hour's frantic struggling and pushing through mud and water, necessitating on my part the expenditure of a great amount of perspiration, not a little invective, and sundry silver coins.

And when we were fairly afloat my Mahometan youth would be so weak from fasting that his oar would be almost useless; and when we did, after an hour or so of the most ignominious zigzaging, reach our anchorage on one of the fishing-grounds, then would he speedily become sea-sick, and instead of helping me by preparing bait and landing fish, he would lean despairingly over the side in abject misery, and implore me to go home promptly--a piteous illustration of the anguish caused by an empty stomach contracting on itself.

Nor were these the only discomforts under which we groaned and grumbled.

From the evening when the eager lookers-out from minarets of mosques and towers of the fortifications first descried the new moon which ushered in the holy month of fasting, every sunset, as it flushed the far-off waves with purple and crimson and gold, and turned the fleecy cloudlets in the western sky to brightest jewels, and suffused the white houses and towers of Mogador with sweetest glow of pink, and gilded the green-tiled top of each tall minaret, had been accompanied by the roar of a cannon from the battery just below our windows.

"What the deuce is that?" asked a friend of mine, lately arrived from England, as we strolled homewards one evening through the dusty streets, and the boom of the big gun suddenly fell upon his astonished ear.

"Only sunset," I replied.

"Queer place this," said J. "Does the sun always set with a bang?"

"Always during Ramadan."

"Does it rise with a bang too? I hate to be roused up early in the morning!"

"No, there is no gun at sunrise; but there is a very loud one at about three in the morning, or sometimes half-past, or four, or later."

"Shocking nuisance!" remarked J. "My bedroom window's just over that abominable battery."

The early morning gun was a great trial, certainly. I would not have minded being _reveille en sursaut_, as a Frenchman would say, and then turning comfortably over on the other side, and going to sleep again.

But somehow or other I always found myself awake half an hour or an hour before the time, and then I _could not_ get to sleep again, but lay tossing about and fidgettily listening for the well-known din. At length I would hear a sound like the hum of an enormous fiendish nightmarish mosquito, caused by a hideous long tin trumpet, the shrill whistle of a fife or two, and the occasional tom-tomming of a Moorish drum. "Ha, the soldiers coming along the ramparts; they will soon fire now."

But the sound of the discordant instruments with which the soldiery solaced themselves in the night for their enforced abstinence from such "sweet sounds" in the day would continue for a long time before the red flash through my wide-open door would momentarily illumine my little chamber on the white flat roof, and then the horrid bang would rend the air, followed by a dense cloud of foul-smelling smoke; and then would my big dog Caesar for several minutes rush frantically to and fro upon the roof in hot indignation, and utter deep-mouthed barks of defiance at the white figures of the "Maghaseni," as they flitted ghost-like along the ramparts below, and snort and pant and chafe and refuse to be pacified for a long time.

At the firing of the sunset gun the Moors were allowed to take a slight refection, which generally consisted of a kind of gruel. I have seen a Moorish soldier squatting in the street with a brass porringer in his lap, eagerly awaiting the boom of the cannon to dip his well-washed fingers in the mess.

At about 9 P.M. another slight meal was allowed to the true believers, and they might eat again at morning gun-fire, after which their mouths were closed against all "fixings, solid and liquid," even against the smallest draught of water or the lightest puff at the darling little pipe of dream-inducing _kief_.

On the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan we were informed that twenty-seven guns would be fired that night, and that we had better leave all our windows open, or they would certainly be broken by the violence of the discharge. This was pleasant; still more delightful was the glorious uncertainty which prevailed in the minds of our informants as to the time at which we might expect the infliction.

Some said that the twenty-seven guns would be fired before midnight; Hamed opined that the cannonade would not take place till 3 or 4 A.M. Many of the guns on the battery in close proximity to our abode were in a fearfully rusty and honeycombed condition, so that apprehensions as to some of them bursting were not unnatural, and I thought it extremely probable that a few stray fragments might "drop in" on me.

That night I burned the "midnight oil," and lay reading till nearly two, when sweet sleep took possession of me, from which I was awakened about four in the morning by a terrific bang that fairly shook the house.

A minute more, and there came a red flash and another bang, presently another. Thought I, "I will go out and see the show;" so I went on to the flat white roof in my airy nocturnal costume, and leaning over the parapet looked down on to the platform of the battery below. A group of dim white figures, a flickering lantern, a glowing match, a touch at the breech of a rusty old gun, a swift skurry of the white figures round a corner, a squib-like fountain of sparks from the touch-hole, a red flash from the mouth, momentarily illumining the dark violet sea, a bang, and a cloud of smoke.

Then the white figures and the lantern appeared again; another squib, another flash, another bang, Caesar galloping up and down over the roof, snorting his indignation, but not barking, probably because he felt "unable to do justice to the subject;" and at length, after the eleventh gun had belched forth crimson flames and foul smoke, all was peace, save a distant discord of tin trumpets, _gouals_ and _gimbris_, and I returned to my mosquito-haunted couch with a sigh of relief.

Pass we now to the eve of "Christmas for Moros," and let ethnologist and hagiologist derive some satisfaction from the evidences I collected in this far-away Moorish town that the gladness of the Mahometan festival does, similarly to the purer joy of the Christian, though in a less degree perhaps, incline towards "peace and good-will to men," charity and kindliness.

As we sat chatting that evening round the tea-table, to us entered Hamed, bearing, with honest pride illumining his brown features, a great tray of richly engraved brass, heaped up with curious but tempting-looking cakes.

Gracefully presenting them to "the senora," he intimated that this was his humble offering or Christmas token of good-will towards the family, and that his mother (whom the good fellow maintains out of his modest wages) had made them with her own hands.

The cakes were made of long thin strips of the finest paste, plentifully sweetened with delicious honey, twisted into quaint shapes, and fried in the purest of oil. I need hardly say that the children were delighted, and immediately commenced to court indigestion by a vigorous onslaught on the new and tempting sweets. Nay, why should I blush to confess that I myself have a very sweet tooth in my head, and such a liking for all things saccharine that my friends say jokingly that I must be getting into my second childhood?--an imputation which, as I am only a little on the wrong side of thirty, I can bear with equanimity. However, I firmly decline to inform an inquisitive public how many of those delightful Moorish cakes I ate: truth to tell, I do not remember; but I enjoyed them heartily, nor found my digestion impaired thereby.

We had a little chat with Hamed--whose face was lighted up with the broadest of grins as we praised his mother's pastry and showed our appreciation of it in the most satisfactory manner--on certain matters of the Mahometan religion and the position of women in the future life. Some of the sterner Muslims believe that women have no souls; others opine that while good men go to "_Eljannah_," or heaven, and bad ones to "_Eljehannam_," or hell, women and mediocre characters are deported to a vague kind of limbo which they designate as "_Bab Maroksh_," or the Morocco Gate.

But the gentle, liberal, and gallant Hamed informed us, in reply to an individual query with regard to our Moorish housemaid, that "if Lanniya plenty good, no _tiefem_ (steal), no drinkum _sharab_ (wine), and go for _scula_ ("school," or religious instruction in the mosque, or in a schoolhouse adjoining it), by and by she go for "_Eljannah_."

I am hardly correct, by the way, in speaking of Lanniya as "house-_maid_," for Moorish maidens and wives never go in the service of European families, being prohibited by their religion from showing their faces; it is only widows and divorced women who may go about unveiled, and mingle with Christians.

The next morning, soon after the last gun of Ramadan had sounded its joyous boom in my ear, I was up and stirring, donning my shooting apparel and preparing for an early country walk with my faithful four-footed comrade. I had no fear of exciting the fanaticism of the Muslim population by going out shooting on their holy day, for there is not much bigotry in Mogador,--Moors, Christians, and Jews observing their several religions peacefully side by side, so that three Sundays come in every week, the Mahometan on Friday, the Jewish on Saturday, and then ours.

The sun, just rising from behind the eastern sand-hills, was gilding all the house-tops and minarets, till our white town looked like a rich assemblage of fairy palaces of gold and ivory; the smiling sea, serene and azure, came rippling peacefully up to the base of the rugged brown rocks, enlivened to-day by no statuesque figures of Moorish fishermen; nor did a single boat dot the broad blue expanse of the unusually smooth South Atlantic, of which the fish and the sea-fowl were for once left in undisturbed possession.

As I gazed from the flat roof away over the great town, I heard from many quarters loud sounds of music and merriment. As I passed presently through the narrow streets, with their dead white walls and cool dark arches, scarcely a camel was to be seen at the accustomed corners by the stores of the merchants, where usually whole fleets of the "ships of the desert" lay moored, unloading almonds, and rich gums, and hides, and all the varied produce of the distant interior.