Such an adventure initiates one at the outset into
the stern facts of desert motoring. Every detail
of our trip from Tangier to Rabat had been carefully
planned to keep us in unbroken contact with civilization.
We were to “tub” in one European hotel,
and to dine in another, with just enough picnicking
between to give a touch of local colour. But let
one little cog slip and the whole plan falls to bits,
and we are alone in the old untamed Moghreb, as remote
from Europe as any mediaeval adventurer. If one
lose one’s way in Morocco, civilization vanishes
as though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a Djinn.
It is a good thing to begin with such a mishap, not
only because it develops the fatalism necessary to
the enjoyment of Africa, but because it lets one at
once into the mysterious heart of the country, a country
so deeply conditioned by its miles and miles of uncitied
wilderness that until one has known the wilderness
one cannot begin to understand the cities.
We came to one at length, after sunset on that first
endless day. The motor, cleverly patched up,
had found its way to a real road, and speeding along
between the stunted cork-trees of the forest of Mamora
brought us to a last rise from which we beheld in the
dusk a line of yellow walls backed by the misty blue
of the Atlantic. Sale, the fierce old pirate
town, where Robinson Crusoe was so long a slave, lay
before us, snow-white in its cheese-coloured ramparts
skirted by fig and olive gardens. Below its gates
a stretch of waste land, endlessly trailed over by
mules and camels, sloped down to the mouth of the Bou-Regreg,
the blue-brown river dividing it from Rabat.
The motor stopped at the landing-stage of the steam-ferry;
crowding about it were droves of donkeys, knots of
camels, plump-faced merchants on crimson-saddled mules,
with negro servants at their bridles, bare-legged water-carriers
with hairy goat-skins slung over their shoulders, and
Arab women in a heap of veils, cloaks, mufflings,
all of the same ashy white, the caftans of clutched
children peeping through in patches of old rose and
lilac and pale green.
Across the river the native town of Rabat lay piled
up on an orange-red cliff beaten by the Atlantic.
Its walls, red too, plunged into the darkening breakers
at the mouth of the river, and behind it, stretching
up to the mighty tower of Hassan, and the ruins of
the Great Mosque, the scattered houses of the European
city showed their many lights across the plain.
THE KASBAH OF THE OUDAYAS
Sale the white and Rabat the red frown at each other
over the foaming bar of the Bou-Regreg, each walled,
terraced, minareted, and presenting a singularly complete
picture of the two types of Moroccan town, the snowy
and the tawny. To the gates of both the Atlantic
breakers roll in with the boom of northern seas, and
under a misty northern sky. It is one of the
surprises of Morocco to find the familiar African pictures
bathed in this unfamiliar haze. Even the fierce
midday sun does not wholly dispel it—the
air remains thick, opalescent, like water slightly
clouded by milk. One is tempted to say that Morocco
is Tunisia seen by moonlight.
