Part 4

On board the _Fulda_, I had had the pleasure of sitting at table next to the Rev. Dr. Henry M. Field, the editor of the _Evangelist_, 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 cafes 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 you would 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 end of 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.

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 to pieces 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, or lift 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 much startled 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.

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 dirty and 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 them to 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 influence to 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.

III

FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO

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 considerately dies. 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 London _Graphic_, 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 the _Sutlej_ cleared 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 spell and 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 the _Sutlej_ by 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 tantalizingly near 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.

When an American goes to sea, he reads books, or he calculates the number of tons of coal it is taking to run the vessel at that rate of speed, and he determines that rate of speed by counting the rise and fall of the piston-rod, with his watch in his hand; and when this ceases to amuse him he plays cards in the smoking-room or holds pools on the run and on the pilot's number. The Englishman joins in these latter amusements, because nothing better offers. But when his foot is on his native heath or on the deck of one of his own vessels, he demonstrates his preference for that sort of entertainment which requires exercise and little thought. If it is at a country-house, he plays games which entail considerable running about, and at picnics he enjoys "Throw the handkerchief," and on board ship he plays cricket and other games dear to the heart of the American at the age of five. This is partly because he always exercises and likes moving about, as Americans do not, and because the reading of books (except such books as _Mr. Potter of Texas_, which, I firmly believe, every Englishman I ever met has read, and upon which they have bestowed the most unqualified approval as the truest picture of American life and character they have ever found) entertains him for but a very short period at a time.

So a netting is placed about the upper deck for him, and he plays cricket; not only he, but his wife and his sister and his mother and the unattached young ladies under the captain's care, who are going out to India, presumably to be met at the wharf by prospective husbands. There is something most charming in the absolute equality which this sport entails, and the seriousness with which the English regard it. We could not in America expect a white-haired lady with spectacles to bowl overhand, or to see that it is considered quite as a matter of course that she should do it by the member of the last Oxford eleven, nor would our young women be able to hold a hot ball, or to take it with the hands crossed and only partly open, and not palm to palm and wide apart. An American, as a rule, walks in order that he may reach a certain point, but the Englishman walks for the sake of the walking. And he plays games, also, apparently for the exercise there is in them; games in which people sit in a circle and discuss whether love or reason should guide them in going into matrimony do not appeal to him so strongly as do "Oranges and lemons," or "Where are you, Jacob?" which is a very fine game, in which an early training in sliding to bases gives you a certain advantage. It is certainly instructive to hear a captain who got his company through storming Fort Nilt last year in the Pamir inquire, anxiously, "Oranges or lemons? Yes, I know. But _which_ should I say, old chap? I'm a little rusty in the game, you know." If people can get back to the days when they were children by playing games, or in any other way, no one can blame them.

The island of Gozo rose up out of the sea on the fourth day--a yellow rib of rock on the right, with houses and temples on it--and demonstrated how few days of water are necessary to rob one's memory of the usual look of a house. One would imagine by the general interest in them that we had spent the last few years of our lives in tents, or in the arctic regions under huts of snow and ice. And then the ship heads in towards Malta, and instead of dropping anchor and waiting for a tender, glides calmly into what is apparently its chief thoroughfare. It is like a Venice of the sea, and you feel as though you were intruding in a gentleman's front yard. The houses and battlements and ramparts lie close on either side, so near that one could toss a biscuit into the hands of the Tommies smoking on the guns, or the natives lounging on the steps that run from the front doors into the sea itself. The yard-arms reach above the line of the house-tops, and the bowsprit seems to threaten havoc with the window-panes of the custom-house. We are not apparently entering a harbor, but steaming down the main street of a city--a city of yellow limestone, with streets, walls, houses, and waste places all of yellow limestone. We might, for all the disturbance we are making, be moving forward in a bark canoe, and not in an ocean steamer drawing twenty-five feet of water. And then when the anchor drops, dozens of little boats, yellow and green and blue, with high posts at the bow and sterns like those on gondolas, shoot out from the steps, and their owners clamor for the proud privilege of carrying us over the few feet of water which runs between the line of houses and the ship's sides.