In the Tail of the Peacock. Isabel Savory

Morocco.

      Fireplaces do not exist, though from December to March the thermometer has sometimes, on single occasions, touched freezing-point at night. Earthenware pans of charcoal, used for cooking, can be carried upstairs for warmth.

      The other rooms in Alarbi Abresha's house were all more or less replicas of the best room shorn of its gilt. As the laws of the Medes and Persians, so is the arrangement of the mattresses (divans) round the walls inside a Moorish house.

      A Moor does not spend his day indoors. He eats and sleeps at home, but is otherwise sitting talking with his friends in the city, or in his shop, or out at his garden-house or fields.

      He eats in any one of the divanned rooms in which he happens to be at the time, his rule being to "sleep where you will and eat where you will." A slave carries in his dish of meat on a tray, and puts it on a table four inches in front of the divan. Beef, mutton, and chicken are cooked in oil till they fall apart and can be eaten with the fingers. He eats vegetables and fruit, murmurs a "B`ism Allah" beforehand and a "Hamdoollah" (God be praised) at the end; washes his hands; drinks green tea, or begins his meal with it and bread of fine white flour. His wife has the refusal of the dish after her lord, never eating with him; and the slaves follow her. As many as five dishes may be brought up at a meal; and the master of the house, sampling each, chooses which he will eat, and sends the rest away. If he has a guest, it is the height of politeness to select small pieces off the dish and put them within the guest's reach, or, still better, into his mouth.

      Moors, unless they are wealthy men, eat "by the eye"—that is, not according to what they require, but according to that they see set before them: frequent hiccups express gratification at hospitality received, accompanied by "Hamdoollah." The amount which a Moor can eat is prodigious. There was a man at Fez who was reverenced as a saint by his neighbours, because he had been known to eat a hundredweight of coos-coosoo (porridge) and a whole sheep at a sitting.

      Alarbi Abresha, Junior, meanwhile, took us on into his father's guest-house, a suite of magnificent rooms, decorated in execrable taste, the barbaric glories of the old Moorish style giving place to modern French vulgarity. A courtyard house can be a strange mixture. Its woodwork, possibly arrar, a cypress of beautiful grain, scented like cedar, cinnamon-coloured, and immensely hard (out of which the Roman patricians cut their precious tables, valued at their weight in gold if as much as four feet wide: beams of arrar put into the Córdovo Mosque by the Moors a thousand years ago still exist); its old silk hangings; its tiles, kept polished like jet, and never desecrated by anything harder than a slippered sole—all alike are the finest relics of a taste which ruled in the construction of the Alhambra, where Mauresque design is seen at its best. The aristocrats of Tetuan are descendants of the old Andalusian families, who, having left Morocco and invaded Spain, settled there, built the Alhambra, were in the course of time driven back over the seas, and took refuge in Tetuan and other coast towns. Their very title-deeds, together with the keys of their houses in Granada, are still in the possession of their descendants in Tetuan.

      While the best work in the courtyard houses of to-day harks back to the brave days of Spain, the Moor of the twentieth century has less of the vitality and originality which distinguished his forefathers, and he is apt to mix cheap up-to-date decoration with the patio and the windowless wall, of which the Duke's guest-house may stand for an example.

      When the great door had shut behind us, and we were outside in the street again, it seemed both narrow and prosaic after the sunny patio, with the yellow-fringed orange-trees almost branching into the rooms, and the fitful accompaniment of running water, dear to the Moorish ear.

      In the course of the afternoon Mohammed, Ali, mules, and baggage put in an appearance, and we found them waiting in the feddan, anxious to put our tents up in the middle of the noisy, crowded sok, where the wind, which had dropped but little, was whirling dust round in clouds, and where we should have been the centre of a staring throng—at the same time, an ideal place in the servants' eyes, suggesting cafés and conversation the whole night through. The camping-ground which "the infidel" selects is an insoluble puzzle to the Moor, and they went off mystified and disappointed, under orders from the Consul to pitch the tents outside the city.

      Later on we followed, by a street redolent and sweet with honey, of which a great quantity had just come in from the Riff country, leading to Báb-el-Aukla (the Gate of Wisdom), so called because the elders of the city, the wise men, used to sit outside on some of the great rocks: a fine two-storied, square-shaped gateway, with a pointed arch and toothed ornament above it. Three little windows overlook the arch; the black noses of small cannon protrude in a long row out of the white parapeted walls; a flagstaff tops the whole, and flies the crimson streamer of Morocco. A line of sea-green tiling beneath the cannon breaks the flat wall, where the heads of turbulent tribesmen hang occasionally, sent over from some neighbouring raid by the Sultan's orders, and first salted by the Jews in the city, nolens volens. The cobbles were slippery under the gate. The huge, heavy wooden doors, studded with iron bolts, are barred and locked every night half an hour after sunset. Inside, looking back, just at the parting of two streets, a great white wall faced us, topped with green tiles, grass-grown; below, a horse-shoe arch, somewhat in relief, belted with coloured tiles, defaced by age, contained a long solid stone trough, into which two spouts of water gushed—never dry in this city of springs. Mules and donkeys and country-folk all stop and drink, and the front of the trough is carved.

      Báb-el-Aukla is the finest gate in the city.

      Go where you will in Tetuan, at every turn water bubbles into time-worn and artistically moulded troughs and basins, under quaint arches, tiled in blue and brown and white. In the narrow winding street-ways, between the houses, half dark, still the bubbling of water is heard, and the shining wet trough seen.

      As we left the city and walked down the sandy road which leads to the sea, our tents lay a quarter of a mile off, two white spots, pitched on grass just off the road, the mules picketed by them.

      We had a somewhat light meal at six o'clock, Mohammed's chicken turning out like hammered leather. He was no cook.

      Our Camp Outside Tetuan.

      An Arabic proverb says, "What is past is gone, and the future is distant; and to thee is the hour in which thou art." It was obviously never intended by the Creator that mankind should make plans. Morocco may have its drawbacks, but it is at least one of those few and blessed spots where it is waste of time to plan: life is a matter of to-day, and