plains north of the Atlas. But when they built
cities it was as their ancestors and their neighbours
pitched tents; and they destroyed or abandoned them
as lightly as their desert forbears packed their camel-bags
and moved to new pastures. Everywhere behind
the bristling walls and rock-clamped towers of old
Morocco lurks the shadowy spirit of instability.
Every new Sultan builds himself a new house and lets
his predecessors’ palaces fall into decay, and
as with the Sultan so with his vassals and officials.
Change is the rule in this apparently unchanged civilization,
where “nought may abide but Mutability.”
PHENICIANS, ROMANS AND VANDALS
Far to the south of the Anti-Atlas, in the yellow
deserts that lead to Timbuctoo, live the wild Touaregs,
the Veiled Men of the south, who ride to war with
their faces covered by linen masks.
These Veiled Men are Berbers, but their alphabet is
composed of Lybian characters, and these are closely
related to the signs engraved on certain vases of
the Nile valley that are probably six thousand years
old. Moreover, among the rock-cut images of the
African desert is the likeness of Theban Ammon crowned
with the solar disk between serpents, and the old
Berber religion, with its sun and animal worship, has
many points of resemblance with Egyptian beliefs.
All this implies trade contacts far below the horizon
of history, and obscure comings and goings of restless
throngs across incredible distances long before the
Phenicians planted their first trading posts on the
north African coast about 1200 B.C.
Five hundred years before Christ, Carthage sent one
of her admirals on a voyage of colonization beyond
the Pillars of Hercules. Hannon set out with
sixty fifty-oared galleys carrying thirty thousand
people. Some of them settled at Mehedyia, at
the mouth of the Sebou, where Phenician remains have
been found, and apparently the exploration was pushed
as far south as the coast of Guinea, for the inscription
recording it relates that Hannon beheld elephants,
hairy men and “savages called gorillas.”
At any rate, Carthage founded stable colonies at Melilla,
Larache, Sale and Casablanca.
Then came the Romans, who carried on the business,
set up one of their easy tolerant protectorates over
“Tingitanian Mauretania,"[A] and built one important
military outpost, Volubilis in the Zerhoun, which a
series of minor defenses probably connected with Sale
on the west coast, thus guarding the Roman province
against the unconquered Berbers to the south.
[Footnote A: East of the Moulouya, the African
protectorate (now west Algeria and the Sud Oranais)
was called the Mauretania of Caesar.]
