degrees, much gossip is interspersed, possibly he washes and prays, then eats, and sleeps a little; more gossip, until the sun tells him it is time to get outside the city gates; and then off he jogs again, singing, talking, back to the little reed-thatched hut, fenced in by its hedge of cactus. Life is too full of—call it resignation or content—to leave room for disturbing speculations, and he is born of a race which never repines: there is Allah and the One Faith, and the sun to lie down beneath and meditate and sleep. Not that the typical countryman is idle—far from it: he is hard-working, without any beer to do it upon.
It is a matter of more speculation as to what the courteous, solemn men, in turbans like carved snow, whom one meets walking along the beach telling their beads, or sees sitting in sunshine reading aloud in a low voice, steadily praising Allah, occupy themselves with from month to month; or the sleek sheikh—a countryman of some means, with smooth coffee-coloured face and a haik whiter than an iced birthday cake—perched between the peaks of his red cloth saddle, under which his hard, hammer-headed mule paces at an intermittent amble.
Probably the sheikh has ridden out of the city to inspect his crops. His house, with his wife, he has locked up: the keys are in his pocket. He swings along a sandy track bordered with cactus, reaches his garden door, which is painted Reckitt's blue, unlocks it, and, tying his mule up inside to a fruit-tree, proceeds to inspect his vines and prune casually some of the ashy-white branches of his fig-trees. Then he sets two ragged countrywomen to work to cut his vines and hoe his beans. He may read a few verses of the Korān later on. He may sleep. Eventually he ambles home. Other days he spends among his friends in the city, sitting in their little shops and gossiping consumedly. He may hire an empty shop of his own for the same purpose, and turn it into what might be called "a club." He will pray regularly; will play chess and draughts sitting in the front of a shop; will drink green tea. Whatever he does is done without haste, and towards evening he strolls serenely, with many interruptions, in the direction of his own house.
The climate of Morocco has never any of the brisk, freezing "grip" of a hard English winter, but rather tends towards encouraging indolence. In Tangier itself energetic English visitors find little superabundant scope for action: naturally enough, the residents, whom an enervating summer or two shears of much of the vitality with which they first landed, end in settling down into an enjoyable, mild routine. There is, however, shooting and a little pig-sticking for who will; but guns may not be brought into the country, and no European would be allowed to exploit its nullahs: if not killed, he would be turned back and escorted into trodden ways.
The principal day's excursion from Tangier is out to Cape Spartel and back again: before we left the place we started early one morning with this end in view, taking a donkey and boy carrying a camera, lunch, etc.—first along a cobbled roadway of which Tangier is immensely proud, across the river by a new bridge, and up the Mountain. The Mountain is the summer abode of Tangier, and shady houses and gardens civilize what was once a wild hill, in the days when our great British minister, Sir John Hay, did an unprecedented thing, and built himself a house there.
Forty years ago no Christian was safe outside Tangier without a guard, and it is largely to Sir John Hay's fearless trust in the honour of the Moor that the change is due. It may still be unwise to walk in lonely places after dark, or to become involved in a street row; for if one ruffian is excited to throw a stone, thirty will follow suit, and Europeans have thus been stoned to death. But those who live out in the Mountain and visitors to Spartel have nothing to fear in these days in the shape of attack and robbery.
It was about ten o'clock when we left behind us the leggy remains of a Roman aqueduct over the river, and, having climbed the Mountain, broke into open ground, stretching far away at the top. The cobbled road resolved itself into an unsophisticated path; the stiff cane fences, shutting out all but the tree-tops in the gardens from view, came to an end; and we were in a breeze off the Atlantic, on undulating hills covered with short scrub, gum-cistus, arbutus, tall white heather, oleander, and pink-and-white convolvulus.
The track led us up and down, and grew more stony as we went on, gradually rising, till we were about a thousand feet above the sea. Looking back, Tangier lay far below, and beyond it in the distance white cragged mountains glinted in the sun.
It was a glorious day, November 24: a fresh breeze, tempered as it so seldom is in England at that time of year. Our path wound round the hills and dipped towards the sea. From the stretches of heather through which we brushed we could hear below us the surf breaking on the rocks: it might have been a corner of the west coast of Scotland.
After eight miles' up-and-down tramp, the lighthouse at the end of the great cape, Spartel, the north-west corner of the African Continent, came into sight. This lighthouse was built at the instigation of the eleven Powers, but actually by the Sultan. The Powers—Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Russia, America, and Brazil—share the cost of its maintenance, and that of the whole road from Tangier to the lighthouse, which follows the line of telegraph-posts, the cable being laid to Spartel. The lighthouse is French built; its fixed intermittent white light can be seen thirty-six miles away, and it stands 312 feet above sea-level.
Sitting down at its base, looking out to sea, we watched the black spines of rock underneath us, set in whirlpools of foam—the Dark Continent showing the last of its teeth. On our left the coast trended away into the hazy distance: to our right across the blue Straits lay the yellow sands of the bay where Trafalgar was fought, and the irregular little town of Tarifa, backed by purple Spanish hills.
The evenings were short, and we were soon on our homeward way. The stunted bushes on each side of the path, disturbed by the devastating woodcutters, could hardly hold a lion in the present day. Yet in the course of Sir John Hay's forty odd years of administration in Morocco two were seen in these same woods, and he shot there himself a striped Hyæna rufus, a great shaggy animal with a bristling mane. One of the two lions ought to have been shot, but he doubled back, and was heard of afterwards travelling at a swinging trot between Tangier and Tetuan. He killed an ox in the valley the next day, and disappeared in the direction of the snow-topped mountains.
In this twentieth century lions in the north of Morocco would be a rare sight: towards the south the mountain-fastnesses hold them still, together with leopards, wild cats, etc.; but, like everywhere else, big game moves off as civilization moves on.
There remains the wild boar. The Moors hunt him with greyhounds, Europeans shoot him, and Englishmen have introduced pig-sticking. The largest pig Sir John Hay speared scaled twenty stone clean, and measured six foot four from snout to tail. But even pig are getting scarce. The Tent Club in Tangier organizes expeditions, and parties go out under canvas for a few days at a time: the result is nothing very great.
When it is a question of shooting pig, the Moors, born sportsmen, join one and all—small farmers and peasants—purely from the love of sport. Some act as beaters, wearing leathern aprons and greaves—such as the Greek peasantry wore—to protect their legs. They carry bill-hooks to cut their way through the thickets, and bring along a tribe of native dogs, which do good service—a cross between a collie and a jackal, veteran poachers, which prowl through the scrub, winding a boar at any distance. The thickets where pig lie are for the most part backed by the sea, and bordered by lake and marsh or plain, in which case it is not difficult to inveigle the driven boar to break where the guns are posted. A haunch of wild pig judiciously roasted, with a soupçon of wine in the gravy, is one of the delicacies of Morocco. As many as fifteen boars have been accounted for in a couple of days' shooting.
The sun went down; the soft air grew colder: we walked quickly back through the outskirts of Tangier, between gardens full of plumbago, dituria, geraniums, hibiscus, pointsettias, narcissus, frescia, and roses of all sorts, besides other flowers. Anything would grow in a soil which has been known to bear three crops of potatoes in one year, and where corn is sometimes sown and reaped all within the space of forty days.
An enterprising English market-gardener is this year growing vegetables and fruit for the London market, expecting to have green peas in Covent Garden in December, the duty on peas and tomatoes having been lowered to 5 per cent. This man acts as agent to a land-owner. Fortunes, indeed, might be made, if it were not a question of