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THE R'KASS

CHAPTER IV

TO THE GATES OF MARRAKESH

In hawthorn-time the heart grows bright,
The world is sweet in sound and sight,
Glad thoughts and birds take flower and flight,
The heather kindles toward the light,
The whin is frankincense and flame.

The Tale of Balen.

If you would savour the true sense of Morocco, and enjoy glimpses of a life that belongs properly to the era of Genesis, journey through Dukala, Shiadma, or Haha in April. Rise early, fare simply, and travel far enough to appreciate whatever offers for a camping-ground, though it be no more than the grudging shadow of a wall at mid-day, or a n'zala not overclean, when from north, south, east, and west the shepherd boys and girls are herding their flocks along the homeward way. You will find the natives kind and leisured enough to take interest in your progress, and, their confidence gained, you shall gather, if you will, some knowledge of the curious, alluring point of view that belongs to fatalists. I have been struck by the dignity, the patience, and the endurance of the Moor, by whom I mean here the Arab who lives in, and not the aboriginal Berber, or the man with black blood preponderating in his veins. To the Moor all is for the best. He knows that Allah has bound the fate of each man about his neck, so he moves fearlessly and with dignity to his appointed end, conscious that his God has allotted the palace or the prison for his portion, and that fellow-men can no more than fulfil the divine decree. Here lies the secret of the bravery that, when disciplined, may yet shake the foundations of Western civilisation. How many men pass me on the road bound on missions of life or death, yet serene and placid as the medi?val saints who stand in their niches in some cathedral at home. Let me recall a few fellow-wayfarers and pass along the roadless way in their company once again.

A TRAVELLER ON THE PLAINS

First and foremost stands out a khalifa, lieutenant of a great country kaid, met midmost Dukala, in a place of level barley fields new cut with the media luna. Brilliant poppies and irises stained the meadows on all sides, and orchards whose cactus hedges, planted for defence, were now aflame with blood-red flowers, became a girdle of beauty as well as strength. The khalifa rode a swiftly-ambling mule, a beast of price, his yellow slippers were ostentatiously new, and his ample girth proclaimed the wealthy man in a land where all the poor are thin. "Peace," was his salutation to M'Barak, who led the way, and when he reached us he again invoked the Peace of Allah upon Our Lord Mohammed and the Faithful of the Prophet's House, thereby and with malice aforethought excluding the infidel. Like others of his class who passed us he was but ill-pleased to see the stranger in the land; unlike the rest he did not conceal his convictions. Behind him came three black slaves, sleek, armed, proud in the pride of their lord, and with this simple retinue the khalifa was on his way to tithe the newly-harvested produce of the farmers who lived in that district. Dangerous work, I thought, to venture thus within the circle of the native douars and claim the lion's share of the hard-won produce of the husbandmen. He and his little company would be outnumbered in the proportion of thirty or forty to one, they had no military following, and yet went boldly forth to rob on the kaid's behalf. I remembered how, beyond Tangier, the men of the hills round Anjera had risen against an unpopular khalifa, had tortured him in atrocious fashion, and left him blind and hideously maimed, to be a warning to all tyrants. Doubtless our prosperous fellow-traveller knew all about it, doubtless he realised that the Sultan's authority was only nominal, but he knew that his immediate master, the Basha, still held his people in an iron grip while, above and beyond all else, he knew by the living faith that directed his every step in life, that his own fate, whether good or evil, was already assigned to him. I heard the faint echo of the greeting offered by the dogs of the great douar into which he passed, and felt well assured that the protests of the village folk, if they ventured to protest, would move him no more than the barking of those pariahs. The hawks we saw poised in the blue above our heads when small birds sang at sunsetting, were not more cheerfully devoid of sentiment than our khalifa, though it may be they had more excuse than he.

On another afternoon we sat at lunch in the grateful sombre shade of a fig-tree. Beyond the little stone dyke that cut the meadow from the arable land a negro ploughed with an ox and an ass, in flat defiance of Biblical injunction. The beasts were weary or lazy, or both, and the slave cursed them with an energy that was wonderful for the time of day. Even the birds had ceased to sing, the cicadas were silent in the tree tops, and when one of the mules rolled on the ground and scattered its pack upon all sides, the Maalem was too exhausted to do more than call it the "son of a Christian and a Jew."

THE MID-DAY HALT

Down the track we had followed came a fair man, of slight build, riding a good mule. He dismounted by the tree to adjust his saddle, tighten a stirrup thong, and say a brief prayer. Then, indifferent to the heat, he hurried on, and Salam, who had held short converse with him, announced that he was an emissary of Bu Hamara the Pretender, speeding southward to preach the rising to the Atlas tribes. He carried his life in his hands through the indifferently loyal southern country, but the burden was not heavy enough to trouble him. Bu Hamara, the man no bullets could injure, the divinely directed one, who could call the dead from their pavilion in Paradise to encourage the living, had bade him go rouse the sleeping southerners, and so he went, riding fearlessly into the strong glare that wrapt and hid him. His work was for faith or for love: it was not for gain. If he succeeded he would not be rewarded, if he failed he would be forgotten.

Very often, at morning, noon, and sunset, we would meet the r'kass or native letter-carrier, a wiry man from the Sus country, more often than not, with naked legs and arms. In his hand he would carry the long pole that served as an aid to his tired limbs when he passed it behind his shoulders, and at other times helped him to ford rivers or defend himself against thieves. An eager, hurrying fellow was the r'kass, with rarely enough breath to respond to a salutation as he passed along, his letters tied in a parcel on his back, a lamp at his girdle to guide him through the night, and in his wallet a little bread or parched flour, a tiny pipe, and some kief. Only if travelling in our direction would he talk, repaying himself for the expenditure of breath by holding the stirrup of mule or horse. Resting for three to five hours in the twenty-four, sustaining himself more with kief than with bread, hardened to a point of endurance we cannot realise, the r'kass is to be met with on every Moorish road that leads to a big city—a solitary, brave, industrious man, who runs many risks for little pay. His letters delivered, he goes to the nearest house of public service, there to sleep, to eat sparingly and smoke incessantly, until he is summoned to the road again. No matter if the tribes are out on the warpath, so that the caravans and merchants may not pass,—no matter if the powder "speaks" from every hill,—the r'kass slips through with his precious charge, passing lightly as a cloud over a summer meadow, often within a few yards of angry tribesmen who would shoot him at sight for the mere pleasure of killing. If the luck is against him he must pay the heaviest penalty, but this seldom occurs unless the whole country-side is aflame. At other times, when there is peace in the land, and the wet season has made the unbridged rivers impassable, whole companies of travellers camp on either side of some river—a silver thread in the dry season, a rushing torrent now. But the r'kass knows every ford, and, his long pole aiding him, manages to reach his destination. It is his business to defy Nature if necessary, just as he defies man in the pursuit of his task. He is a living proof of the capacity and dogged endurance still surviving in a race Europeans affect to despise.

We met slaves-dealers too from time to time, carrying women and children on mules, while the men slaves walked along at a good pace. And the dealers by no means wore the villainous aspect that conventional observers look to see, but were plainly men bent upon business, travelling to make money. They regarded the slaves as merchandise, to be kept in tolerably fair condition for the sake of good sales, and unless Ruskin was right when he said that all who are not actively kind are cruel, there seemed small ground on which to condemn them. To be sure, they were taking slaves from market to market, and not bringing Soudanese captives from the extreme South, so we saw no trace of the trouble that comes of forced travel in the desert, but even that is equally shared by dealers and slave alike.

The villages of Morocco are no more than collections of conical huts built of mud and wattle and palmetto, or goat and camel skins. These huts are set in a circle all opening to the centre, where the live-stock and agricultural implements are kept at night. The furniture of a tent is simple enough. Handloom and handmill, earthenware jars, clay lamps, a mattress, and perhaps a tea-kettle fulfil all requirements.

A dazzling, white-domed saint's shrine within four square walls lights the landscape here and there, and gives to some douar such glory as a holy man can yield when he has been dead so long that none can tell the special direction his holiness took. The zowia serves several useful purposes. The storks love to build upon it, and perhaps the influence of its rightful owner has something to do with the good character of the interesting young birds that we see plashing about in the marshes, and trying to catch fish or frogs with something of their parents' skill. Then, again, the zowia shelters the descendants of the holy man, who prey upon passers in the name of Allah and of the departed.

Beyond one of the villages graced with the shrine of a forgotten saint, I chanced upon a poor Moorish woman washing clothes at the edge of a pool. She used a native grass-seed in place of soap, and made the linen very white with it. On a great stone by the water's edge sat a very old and very black slave, and I tried with Salam's aid to chat with him. But he had no more than one sentence. "I have seen many Sultans," he cried feebly, and to every question he responded with these same words. Two tiny village boys stood hand in hand before him and repeated his words, wondering. It was a curious picture and set in striking colour, for the fields all round us were full of rioting irises, poppies, and convolvuli; the sun that gilded them was blazing down upon the old fellow's unprotected head. Gnats were assailing him in legions, singing their flattering song as they sought to draw his blood. Before us on a hill two meadows away stood the douar, its conical huts thatched with black straw and striped palmetto, its zowia with minaret points at each corner of the protecting walls, and a stork on one leg in the foreground. It cost me some effort to tear myself away from the place, and as I remounted and prepared to ride off the veteran cried once more, "I have seen many Sultans." Then the stork left his perch on the zowia's walls, and settled by the marsh, clapping his mandibles as though to confirm the old man's statement, and the little boys took up the cry, not knowing what they said. He had seen many Sultans. The Praise to Allah, so had not I.

ON GUARD

By another douar, this time on the outskirts of the R'hamna country, we paused for a mid-day rest, and entered the village in search of milk and eggs. All the men save one were at work on the land, and he, the guardian of the village, an old fellow and feeble, stood on a sandy mound within the zariba. He carried a very antiquated flint-lock, that may have been own brother to Kaid M'Barak's trusted weapon. I am sure he could not have had the strength to fire, even had he enjoyed the knowledge and possessed the material to load it. It was his business to mount guard over the village treasure. The mound he stood upon was at once the mat'mora that hid the corn store, and the bank that sheltered the silver dollars for whose protection every man of the village would have risked his life cheerfully. The veteran took no notice of our arrival: had we been thieves he could have offered no resistance. He remained silent and stationary, unconscious that the years in which he might have fulfilled his trust had gone for ever. All along the way the boundaries of arable land were marked by little piles of stones and I looked anxiously for some sign of the curious festival that greets the coming of the new corn, a ceremony in which a figure is made for worship by day and sacrifice by night; we were just too late for it. For the origin of this sacrifice the inquirer must go back to the time of nature worship. It was an old practice, of course, in the heyday of Grecian civilisation, and might have been seen in England, I believe, little more than twenty years ago.

Claims for protection are made very frequently upon the road. There are few of the dramatic moments in which a man rushes up, seizes your stirrup and puts himself "beneath the hem of your garment," but there are numerous claims for protection of another sort. In Morocco all the Powers that signed the Treaty of Madrid are empowered to grant the privilege. France has protected subjects by the thousand. They pay no taxes, they are not to be punished by the native authorities until their Vice-Consul has been cited to appear in their defence, and, in short, they are put above the law of their own country and enabled to amass considerable wealth. The fact that the foreigner who protects them is often a knave and a thief is a draw-back, but the popularity of protection is immense, for the protector may possibly not combine cunning with his greed, while the native Basha or his khalifa quite invariably does. British subjects may not give protection,—happily the British ideals of justice and fair-play have forbidden the much-abused practice,—and the most the Englishman can do is to enter into a trading partnership with a Moor and secure for him a certificate of limited protection called "mukhalat," from the name of the person who holds it. Great Britain has never abused the Protection system, and there are fewer protected Moors in the service or partnership of Britons throughout all Morocco than France has in any single town of importance.

If I had held the power and the will to give protection, I might have been in Morocco to-day, master of a house and a household, drawing half the produce of many fields and half the price of flocks of sheep and herds of goats. Few mornings passed without bringing some persecuted farmer to the camp, generally in the heat of the day, when we rested on his land. He would be a tall, vigorous man, burnt brown by the sun, and he would point to his fields and flocks, "I have so many sheep and goats, so many oxen for the plough, so many mules and horses, so much grain unharvested, so much in store. Give me protection, that I may live without fear of my kaid, and half of all I own shall be yours." Then I had to explain through Salam that I had no power to help him, that my Government would do no more than protect me. It was hard for the applicants to learn that they must go unaided. The harvest was newly gathered, it had survived rain and blight and locusts, and now they had to wait the arrival of their kaid or his khalifa, who would seize all they could not conceal,—hawk, locust, and blight in one.

At the village called after its patron saint, Sidi B'noor, a little deputation of tribesmen brought grievances for an airing. We sat in the scanty shade of the zowia wall. M'Barak, wise man, remained by the side of a little pool born of the winter rains; he had tethered his horse and was sleeping patiently in the shadow cast by this long-suffering animal. The headman, who had seen my sporting guns, introduced himself by sending a polite message to beg that none of the birds that fluttered or brooded by the shrine might be shot, for that they were all sacred. Needless perhaps to say that the idea of shooting at noonday in Southern Morocco was far enough from my thoughts, and I sent back an assurance that brought half a dozen of the village notables round us as soon as lunch was over. Strangely enough, they wanted protection—but it was sought on account of the Sultan's protected subjects. "The men who have protection between this place and Djedida," declared their spokesman, sorrowfully, "have no fear of Allah or His Prophet. They brawl in our markets and rob us of our goods. They insult our houses, they are without shame, and because of their protection our lives have become very bitter."

"Have you been to your Basha?" I asked the headman.

"I went bearing a gift in my hand, O Highly Favoured," replied the headman, "and he answered me, 'Foolish farmer, shall I bring the Sultan to visit me by interfering with these rebels against Allah who have taken the protection from Nazarenes?' And then he cursed me and drove me forth from his presence. But if you will give protection to us also we will face these misbegotten ones, and there shall be none to come between us."

A VILLAGE AT DUKALA

I could do no more than deliver messages of consolation to the poor tribesmen, who sat in a semicircle, patient in the quivering heat. The old story of goodwill and inability had to be told again, and I never saw men more dejected. At the moment of leave-taking, however, I remembered that we had some empty mineral-water bottles and a large collection of gunmaker's circulars, that had been used as padding for a case of cartridges. So I distributed the circulars and empty bottles among the protection hunters, and they received them with wonder and delight. When I turned to take a last look round, the pages that had pictures of guns were being passed reverently from hand to hand; to outward seeming the farmers had forgotten their trouble. Thus easily may kindnesses be wrought among the truly simple of this world.

The market of Sidi B'noor is famous for its sales of slaves and horses, but I remember it best by its swarm of blue rock-pigeons and sparrow-hawks, that seemed to live side by side in the walls surrounding the saint's white tomb. For reasons best known to themselves they lived without quarrelling, perhaps because the saint was a man of peace. Surely a sparrow-hawk in our island would not build his nest and live in perfect amity with pigeons. But, as is well known, the influence of the saintly endures after the flesh of the saint has returned to the dust whence it came.

The difference between Dukala and R'hamna, two adjacent provinces, is very marked. All that the first enjoys the second lacks. We left the fertile lands for great stony plains, wind-swept, bare and dry. Skeletons of camels, mules, and donkeys told their story of past sufferings, and the water supply was as scanty as the herbage upon which the R'hamna flocks fare so poorly. In place of prosperous douars, set in orchards amid rich arable land, there were Government n'zalas at long intervals in the waste, with wattled huts, and lean, hungry tribesmen, whose poverty was as plain to see as their ribs. Neither Basha nor Kaid could well grow fat now in such a place, and yet there was a time when R'hamna was a thriving province after its kind. But it had a warlike people and fierce, to whom the temptation of plundering the caravans that made their way to the Southern capital was irresistible. So the Court Elevated by Allah, taking advantage of a brief interval of peace, turned its forces loose against R'hamna early in the last decade of the nineteenth century. From end to end of its plains the powder "spoke," and the burning douars lighted the roads that their owners had plundered so often. Neither old nor young were spared, and great basketsful of human heads were sent to Red Marrakesh, to be spiked upon the wall by the J'maa Effina. When the desolation was complete from end to end of the province, the Shareefian troops were withdrawn, the few remaining folk of R'hamna were sent north and south to other provinces, the n'zalas were established in place of the forgotten douars, and the Elevated Court knew that there would be no more complaints. That was Mulai el Hassan's method of ruling—may Allah have pardoned him—and his grand wazeer's after him. It is perhaps the only method that is truly understood by the people in Morocco. R'hamna reminded me of the wildest and bleakest parts of Palestine, and when the Maalem said solemnly it was tenanted by djinoon since the insurrection, I felt he must certainly be right.

One evening we met an interesting procession. An old farmer was making his way from the jurisdiction of the local kaid. His "house" consisted of two wives and three children. A camel, whose sneering contempt for mankind was very noticeable, shuffled cumbrously beneath a very heavy load of mattresses, looms, rugs, copper kettles, sacks of corn, and other impedimenta. The wives, veiled to the eyes, rode on mules, each carrying a young child; the third child, a boy, walked by his father's side. The barley harvest had not been good in their part of the country, so after selling what he could, the old man had packed his goods on to the camel's back and was flying from the tax-gatherer. To be sure, he might meet robbers on the way to the province of M'touga, which was his destination, but they would do no more than the kaid of his own district; they might even do less. He had been many days upon the road, and was quaintly hopeful. I could not help thinking of prosperous men one meets at home, who declare, in the intervals of a costly dinner, that the Income Tax is an imposition that justifies the strongest protest, even to the point of repudiating the Government that puts it up by twopence in the pound. Had anybody been able to assure this old wanderer that his kaid or khalifa would be content with half the produce of his land, how cheerfully would he have returned to his native douar, how readily he would have—devised plans to avoid payment. A little later the track would be trodden by other families, moving, like the true Bedouins, in search of fresh pasture. It is the habit of the country to leave land to lie fallow when it has yielded a few crops.

There were days when the mirage did for the plain the work that man had neglected. It set great cities on the waste land as though for our sole benefit. I saw walls and battlements, stately mosques, cool gardens, and rivers where caravans of camels halted for rest and water. Several times we were deceived and hurried on, only to find that the wonder city, like the ignis fatuus of our own marshlands, receded as we approached and finally melted away altogether. Then the Maalem, after taking refuge with Allah from Satan the Stoned, who set false cities before the eyes of tired travellers, would revile the mules and horses for needing a mirage to urge them on the way; he would insult the fair fame of their mothers and swear that their sires were such beasts as no Believer would bestride. It is a fact that when the Maalem lashed our animals with his tongue they made haste to improve their pace, if only for a few minutes, and Salam, listening with an expression of some concern at the sad family history of the beasts—he had a stinging tongue for oaths himself—assured me that their sense of shame hurried them on. Certainly no sense of shame, or duty, or even compassion, ever moved the Maalem. By night he would repair to the kitchen tent and smoke kief or eat haschisch, but the troubles of preparing beds and supper did not worry him.

THE APPROACH TO MARRAKESH

"Until the feast is prepared, why summon the guest," he said on a night when the worthy M'Barak, opening his lips for once, remonstrated with him. That evening the feast consisted of some soup made from meat tablets, and two chickens purchased for elevenpence the pair, of a market woman we met on the road. Yet if it was not the feast the Maalem's fancy painted it, our long hours in the open air had served to make it more pleasant than many a more elaborate meal.

We rode one morning through the valley of the Little Hills, once a place of unrest notorious by reason of several murders committed there, and deserted now by everything save a few birds of prey. There were gloomy rocks on all sides, the dry bed of a forgotten river offered us an uncomfortable and often perilous path, and we passed several cairns of small stones. The Maalem left his mule in order to pick up stones and add one to each cairn, and as he did so he cursed Satan with great fluency.[16]

It was a great relief to leave the Little Hills and emerge on to the plains of Hillreeli beyond. We had not far to go then before the view opened out, the haze in the far distance took faint shape of a city surrounded by a forest of palms on the western side, a great town with the minarets of many mosques rising from it. At this first view of Red Marrakesh, Salam, the Maalem, and M'Barak extolled Allah, who had renewed to them the sight of Yusuf ibn Tachfin's thousand-year-old city. Then they praised Sidi bel Abbas, the city's patron saint, who by reason of his love for righteous deeds stood on one leg for forty years, praying diligently all the time.

We each and all rendered praise and thanks after our separate fashions, and for me, I lit my last cigarette, careless of the future and well pleased.