Part 3

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 to which 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.

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 the mercy 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 the mercy 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 cafes 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 and silver 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 "Bebe" 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 care enough 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.

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. He says 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 feted 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 upon the 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 American women, 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.

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 me that 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 cafe 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 their countenances over their grain, and dancing-men and snake-charmers and story-tellers, as eloquent as actors, clamoring on every side.

The cafe 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. I came 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.

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 London _Times_. 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 disease and 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 last _ten 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.