CHAPTER I

INTO THE DAYS OF HAROUN ER RASHID

“You go to see my cousin el Raisuli—to write about him,” said Mulai Sadiq at Tetuan. “For what reason? Between Africa and Europe there is a barrier higher than these mountains. You cannot cross it.”

I had gone to see the old Sherif with regard to my journey to Tazrut, for he acted as agent in Tetuan for his famous relative. His house was most attractive with its little court lined with mosaic and surrounded by white Moorish arches, from behind which peeped his slave-women, their brilliant crimson dresses showing through long coats of white muslin to match their turbans, corded with many-coloured silks. Mulai Sadiq is thin and wiry, aged about sixty, bald, with a grey beard. He has an ill- kept appearance, for he is an “alim” who considers that learning is very much preferable to cleanliness. He was willing to talk for hours of the adventures of ‘_the_ Sherif,’[1] of whom he is the antithesis, since his face is intelligent and sympathetic and his hands talk even more expressively than his lips. When he got excited he took off his turban and thumped his fists on the ground, or flung them open above his head. I found him sitting on the floor, surrounded by immense tomes, with many others piled up behind him. He had to move a number before there was room for me to sit down, and then, with his spectacles pushed forward on his long nose, he began to talk about my journey.

“The Sherif will welcome you with great honour,” he said, “but it is a long way and it is my duty to come with you, that you may travel in all respect.” Thus it was arranged, and he went off to telephone to the secretary of el Raisuli in primitive Tazrut!

The great Hispano-Suisa car flung itself on to the road as if it would devour the strip of dusty white which fled before it. The old walls of Tetuan disappeared. Away on the hillside a splash of green marked Samsa, where legend tells of a Portuguese Queen imprisoned in a subterranean maze. The dew was still on the sugar-cane, mist on the river. Peasants were driving their flocks to market; the men rode on donkeys, idle hands crossed on the pommel, the women, their haiks[2] bundled above their knees to show stout leather leggings, their hats, the size of umbrellas, hiding their faces, trudged behind their lords, bearing huge bundles of firewood or sacks of grain. A figure swathed in a burnous, rifle slung across his back, appeared on the skyline, and there was the watchword of Morocco—a veiled country, alert and suspicious.

Up and up soared the road, an incredible feat of engineering, and never for an instant did the driver slacken his pace. By precipices where the wheels spun on the edge of eternity, by nightmare twists and spirals where the path slipped eel-like from beneath us, the Spanish car took us into the land for which Spain and Raisuli had fought their amazing battle. Right and left rose the mountains, their first slopes thick with scrub and grass, their summits barren. Here and there a police post guarded the road, two or three men, shirts open to the sun, with their horses, and a tent as brown as the rocks. Where the river Hayera trickled through a wadi,[3] wild olives grew in profusion. Cactus lifted its spikes above thickets of pink oleanders, the flower which the Arabs say brings death to any who sleep in its perfume. A Moorish village, the mud houses smothered under their weight of thatch, appeared among the boulders which strewed the landscape. On the hillside the Qubba of a saint drew white-robed figures to worship. A Sherif rode by on a mule with scarlet-trappings, and a servant running in front, crying, “Make way for the guest of God, the blessed one.”

[Illustration: Spanish Morocco]

The sun of Africa mellowed the scene, but, when a cloud crept over us, it showed a sinister land where the villages hid among rocks of their own colour and shape, so that one looked across a deserted prospect to the hills that tore the sky. A watchful land where a dozen of Raisuli’s snipers could hold up a Spanish column. Ben Karrish appeared as a serrated white wall. Here, the Spanish post is built round an old house of Raisuli’s to which the Sherif fled after the taking of Ain el Fondak. A few yards away is the mosque where he prayed for the miraculous intervention which his followers believe was afforded by the disaster of Melilla. A boy offered me flowers, a compressed bundle of morning-glory and yellow lilies. “There are but two good things in the world, flowers and women,” he said.

“Won’t you put the women first?”

“Ullah, they are the same thing! My master, the Sherif, has never refused the petition of a woman, but, Ullah, flowers are less trouble!”

Further on the road narrowed between wild vines and thickets of fig and dardara. “Raisuli’s tribesmen used to hide there and pick off our men like rabbits,” said the Spaniard who travelled with me. “Their chief is a strategist—we made war against shadows, and lost thirty men to their one.”

Across the hills in front toiled a line of great, grey beetles which resolved themselves into lorries, packed with troops. The driver’s eye brightened. “It is possible that we may see some little thing, after all,” he vouchsafed, and spun past the nearest camion with two wheels down the bank. For an hour we overtook the various units of two columns _en route_ for Dar Yacoba and the trouble that was reported vaguely “somewhere in the mountains to the East.”

A cloud of dust which looked like a battle surrounded a mountain battery and a long line of mules laden with Maxim-guns. Far up among the purple crags smoke appeared. “Is there really something doing?” murmured my companions, but I was unresponsive. It seemed to me very much too hot for any comfortable warfare.

One by one we left the marching columns and came into the purple wilderness of Jebel Maja, whose height so impresses the Moors that they say the daughter of Noah is buried on its topmost crag, the only one that showed above the Flood. Far up on every hilltop appeared a fort, its isolation emphasizing the inviolability of the land it watched. Goats strayed across the road, but the herdsmen were invisible. Then came the stir of guarded bridge-heads, and again the name of Raisuli—“Here a man was killed on either side of him, when he stopped at the height of the battle, a mark for the whole countryside, while his horse drank.” Rows of tents on the edge of a cliff, rows of mules tethered where those obstinate animals could have no desire to slip over it, showed us Dar Yacoba.

Then came the last steep kilometres to Xauen, the one-time city of mystery, of which men spoke in whispers, for it belongs to the Ahmas tribe, crudest and most savage of mountain folk. Twenty years ago they burned Christians in the market-place, and a certain street is still called the “Way of the burned.” The men of Xauen had a secret language, and, if a stranger could not give the password at their gate, the most mercy he could expect was that his pickled head should adorn it, suspended by the ears. Xauen understands neither clocks nor calendars, and, when the Spanish troops entered in October, 1920, it was to find they had stepped back into the sixteenth century, from which the Jews, barefoot and bareheaded, hailed them with “Viva, viva, Elizabeth the Second!”[4]

Xauen’s claim to mystery lies in the fact that it is so deeply embedded in a cleft of the mountains as to be invisible till one is fifty yards from the walls. “We have arrived,” said the driver, and I looked blankly at the rocks and the deserted slopes. In another moment there was a town before us. By magic, white houses climbed one above another, madnas, tiled with the old faded green, soared from hedges of prickly-pear, and, below this huddled mass of roof and court, slipping like a cascade from the mountain-side, lay the great Berber castle, time-mellowed, sun- bleached, relic of an Empire whose very history is lost. We left the twentieth century outside the gate with the car, which could take us no further, and, preceded by a black slave carrying my luggage, passed into the days of Haroun er Rashid and the Thousand and one Nights. Veiled women stole into doors that looked as if it was the first time they had been opened since the beginning of time. Each arch, each window, was carved exquisitely and differently. A muazzin[5] cried the noon prayer from a mosque which overlooked the Qubba of a Rashid from Bagdad. The dim musk-perfumed shops framed the grey beards of Xauen’s “ulema,” a rosary between their fingers, their drapery flowing over the street.

One of these was a cousin of Raisuli’s, a man prematurely bent and worn. “He has been called upon to defend the Sherif at moments when he would rather have been listening to his singing birds,” murmured a Kaid. A tiny scarlet door, with a lantern that once must have belonged to Aladdin, led us into the Qadi’s house. Slender Moorish arches surrounded a fountain, babbling to the swallows which perched in serried ranks upon the balconies.

Our host received us in a room whose ornamentation was particularly garish and crowded after the courts below. He had but two teeth, which hung from his mouth like tusks, but his manners were beautiful and unhurried. “The blessing of Allah, for you go to see the Sherif. He is a great man and the last of them.”

Seated on cushions and leaning against a wall lined with strips of satin, yellow, blue and red, we conversed gravely and with long silences, as befitted a first visit. “With el Raisuli will pass much of Morocco,” said our host. “You will not understand his ways—perhaps he will not speak at all—but, Ullah, his mind works all the time while he watches you. Nobody knows what he thinks, but he reads the minds of all men. That is his power.”

“It is true,” said the Spaniard. “He is an astute psychologist.”

The complicated apparatus necessary for a tea of ceremony was brought in by slaves, whose waistcoats paled the heaped-up colour in the room. Our host beckoned to another greybeard and slowly, meticulously, the tea was brewed with mint and spice and ambergris. “The Sherif likes mint—it is his only pleasure. There must always be fresh stores in his house. Otherwise he cares about nothing. He has no eye for beauty. He has never known love for anyone or anything.” Someone interrupted, “His son, Sidi Mohamed el Khalid. El Raisuli offered his whole fortune to anyone who would save his life when he was ill of fever.” The Qadi made a movement of protest. “It is his race which lives in his son—the Sherifs of Jebel Alan. Besides, there is the curse. . . .” “What curse?” But somehow the question was not answered. Sweet cakes and biscuits were pressed upon us. Long-stemmed bottles of scent were offered that we might sprinkle our clothes, but the name of Raisuli was no more mentioned.

In the coolness after the early sunset, while the mountain walls turned slowly indigo, I explored the town. Its narrow streets ran downwards, steeply cobbled, by way of the Mosque and the Square where the Jews might not pass for fear of defiling its holiness. The suq, so narrow that two could hardly walk abreast, was roofed with mats, till it twisted abruptly to the cistern of ice-cold water that the Arabs believe will cure most ills. A leper bent over it, his face distorted to the semblance of a beast, and the Sheikh who was with me blessed him as we passed. “In the great war,” he said, “a German came here by night in disguise. He was the only European to see our town. Perhaps he came on business for the Sherif.” The German, of course, was Mannismann, the evil genius of North Africa.