What, then, prevents the tourist from instantly taking
ship at Bordeaux or Algeciras and letting loose his
motor on this new world? Only the temporary obstacles
which the war has everywhere put in the way of travel.
Till these are lifted it will hardly be possible to
travel in Morocco except by favour of the Resident-General;
but, normal conditions once restored, the country
will be as accessible, from the straits of Gibraltar
to the Great Atlas, as Algeria or Tunisia.
To see Morocco during the war was therefore to see
it in the last phase of its curiously abrupt transition
from remoteness and danger to security and accessibility;
at a moment when its aspect and its customs were still
almost unaffected by European influences, and when
the “Christian” might taste the transient
joy of wandering unmolested in cities of ancient mystery
and hostility, whose inhabitants seemed hardly aware
of his intrusion.
THE TRAIL TO EL-KSAR
With such opportunities ahead it was impossible, that
brilliant morning of September, 1917, not to be off
quickly from Tangier, impossible to do justice to
the pale-blue town piled up within brown walls against
the thickly-foliaged gardens of “the Mountain,”
to the animation of its market-place and the secret
beauties of its steep Arab streets. For Tangier
swarms with people in European clothes, there are English,
French and Spanish signs above its shops, and cab-stands
in its squares; it belongs, as much as Algiers, to
the familiar dog-eared world of travel—and
there, beyond the last dip of “the Mountain,”
lies the world of mystery, with the rosy dawn just
breaking over it. The motor is at the door and
we are off.
The so-called Spanish zone, which encloses internationalized
Tangier in a wide circuit of territory, extends southward
for a distance of about a hundred and fifteen kilometres.
Consequently, when good roads traverse it, French
Morocco will be reached in less than two hours by
motor-travellers bound for the south. But for
the present Spanish enterprise dies out after a few
miles of macadam (as it does even between Madrid and
Toledo), and the tourist is committed to the piste.
These pistes—the old caravan-trails
from the south—are more available to motors
in Morocco than in southern Algeria and Tunisia, since
they run mostly over soil which, though sandy in part,
is bound together by a tough dwarf vegetation, and
not over pure desert sand. This, however, is
the utmost that can be said of the Spanish pistes.
In the French protectorate constant efforts are made
to keep the trails fit for wheeled traffic, but Spain
shows no sense of a corresponding obligation.
After leaving the macadamized road which runs south
from Tangier one seems to have embarked on a petrified
ocean in a boat hardly equal to the adventure.
Then, as one leaps and plunges over humps and ruts,
down sheer banks into rivers, and up precipices into
sand-pits, one gradually gains faith in one’s
conveyance and in one’s spinal column; but both
must be sound in every joint to resist the strain of
the long miles to Arbaoua, the frontier post of the
French protectorate.
