To step on board a steamer in a Spanish port, and
three hours later to land in a country without
a guide-book, is a sensation to rouse the hunger
of the repletest sight-seer.
The sensation is attainable by any one who will take
the trouble to row out into the harbour of Algeciras
and scramble onto a little black boat headed across
the straits. Hardly has the rock of Gibraltar
turned to cloud when one’s foot is on the soil
of an almost unknown Africa. Tangier, indeed,
is in the guide-books; but, cuckoo-like, it has had
to lays its eggs in strange nests, and the traveller
who wants to find out about it must acquire a work
dealing with some other country—Spain or
Portugal or Algeria. There is no guide-book to
Morocco, and no way of knowing, once one has left
Tangier behind, where the long trail over the Rif
is going to land one, in the sense understood by any
one accustomed to European certainties. The air
of the unforeseen blows on one from the roadless passes
of the Atlas.
This feeling of adventure is heightened by the contrast
between Tangier—cosmopolitan, frowsy, familiar
Tangier, that every tourist has visited for the last
forty years—and the vast unknown just beyond.
One has met, of course, travellers who have been to
Fez; but they have gone there on special missions,
under escort, mysteriously, perhaps perilously; the
expedition has seemed, till lately, a considerable
affair. And when one opens the records of Moroccan
travellers written within the last twenty years, how
many, even of the most adventurous, are found to have
gone beyond Fez? And what, to this day, do the
names of Meknez and Marrakech, of Mogador, Saffi or
Rabat, signify to any but a few students of political
history, a few explorers and naturalists? Not
till within the last year has Morocco been open to
travel from Tangier to the Great Atlas, and from Moulay
Idriss to the Atlantic. Three years ago Christians
were being massacred in the streets of Sale, the pirate
town across the river from Rabat, and two years ago
no European had been allowed to enter the Sacred City
of Moulay Idriss, the burial-place of the lawful descendant
of Ali, founder of the Idrissite dynasty. Now,
thanks to the energy and the imagination of one of
the greatest of colonial administrators, the country,
at least in the French zone, is as safe and open as
the opposite shore of Spain. All that remains
is to tell the traveller how to find his way about
it.
Ten years ago there was not a wheeled vehicle in Morocco,
now its thousands of miles of trail, and its hundreds
of miles of firm French roads, are travelled by countless
carts, omnibuses and motor-vehicles. There are
light railways from Rabat to Fez in the west, and to
a point about eighty-five kilometres from Marrakech
in the south, and it is possible to say that within
a year a regular railway system will connect eastern
Morocco with western Algeria, and the ports of Tangier
and Casablanca with the principal points of the interior.
