We passed on our way to the Bab Dukala, the gate that opens out upon Elhara, the leper quarter.  There we caught our morning view of the forest of date-palm that girdles the town.  Moors say that in centuries long past Marrakesh was besieged by the men of Tafilalt, who brought dates for food, and cast the stones on the ground.  The rain buried them, the Tensift nourished them, and to-day they crowd round Ibn Tachfin’s ruinous city, ‘their feet in water and their heads in fire.’  ’Tis an agreeable legend.

[Illustration:  A WANDERING MINSTREL]

Market men, half naked and very lean, were coming in from Tamsloht and Amsmiz, guiding their heavy-laden donkeys past the crumbling walls and the steep valley that separates Elhara from the town.  Some scores of lepers had left their quarters, a few hiding terrible disfigurement under great straw hats, others quite careless of their deplorable disease.  Beggars all, they were going on their daily journey to the shrine of Sidi bel Abbas, patron of the destitute, to sit there beneath the zowia’s ample walls, hide their heads in their rags, and cry upon the passers to remember them for the sake of the saint who had their welfare so much at heart.  And with the closing of the day they would be driven out of the city, and back into walled Elhara, to such of the mud huts as they called home.  Long acquaintance with misery had made them careless of it.  They shuffled along as though they were going to work, but from my shaded corner, where I could see without being seen, I noted no sign of converse between them, and every face that could be studied was stamped with the impress of unending misery.

The scene around us was exquisite.  Far away one saw the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas; hawks and swallows sailed to and from Elhara’s walls; doves were cooing in the orchards, bee-eaters flitted lightly amid the palms.  I found myself wondering if the lepers ever thought to contrast their lives with their surroundings, and I trusted they did not.  Some few, probably, had not been lepers, but criminals, who preferred the horrid liberty of Elhara to the chance of detection and the living death of the Hib Misbah.  Other beggars were not really lepers, but suffered from one or other of the kindred diseases that waste Morocco.  In Marrakesh the native doctors are not on any terms with skilled diagnosis, and once a man ventures into Elhara, he acquires a reputation for leprosy that serves his purpose.  I remember inquiring of a Moorish doctor the treatment of a certain native’s case.  “Who shall arrest Allah’s decree?” he began modestly.  And he went on to say that the best way to treat an open wound was to put powdered sulphur upon it, and apply a light.[22] Horrible as this remedy seems, the worthy doctor believed in it, and had sent many a True Believer to—­Paradise, I hope—­by treating him on these lines.  Meanwhile his profound confidence in himself, together with his knowledge and free use of the Koran, kept hostile criticism at bay.[23]