We turned back into the city, to see it in another aspect.  The rapid rise of the sun had called the poorer workers to their daily tasks; buyers were congregating round the market stalls of the dealers in meat, bread, vegetables, and fruit.  With perpetual grace to Allah for his gift of custom, the stall-keepers were parting with their wares at prices far below anything that rules even in the coast towns of the Sultan’s country.  The absence of my Lord Abd-el-Aziz and his court had tended to lower rates considerably.  It was hard to realise that, while food cost so little, there were hundreds of men, women, and children within the city to whom one good meal a day was something almost unknown.  Yet this was certainly the case.

Towering above the other buyers were the trusted slaves of the wazeers in residence—­tall negroes from the far South for the most part—­hideous men, whose black faces were made the more black by contrast with their white robes.  They moved with a certain sense of dignity and pride through the ranks of the hungry freemen round them; clearly they were well contented with their lot—­a curious commentary upon the European notions of slavery—­based, to be sure, upon European methods in regard to it.  The whole formed a marvellous picture, and how the pink roses, the fresh, green mint and thyme, the orange flowers and other blossoms, sweetened the narrow ways, garbage-strewn under foot and roofed overhead with dried leaves of the palm!

FOOTNOTES: 

[17] “Moghreb-al-Acksa.”

[18] Street cleaners are paid out of the proceeds of a tax derived from the slaughter of cattle, and the tax is known to Moorish butchers by a term signifying “floos of the throat.”

[19] I.e. The Tin House.

[20] Declaration of Faith.

[21] The false dawn.

[22] The Sultan Mulaz-Abd-el-Aziz was once treated for persistent headache by a Moorish practitioner.  The wise man’s medicine exploded suddenly, and His Majesty had a narrow escape.  I do not know whether the practitioner was equally fortunate.

[23] The doctors and magicians of Morocco have always been famous throughout the East.  Nearly all the medicine men of the Thousand Nights and a Night including the uncle of Aladdin, are from the Moghreb.

ROUND ABOUT MARRAKESH

[Illustration:  THE ROOFS OF MARRAKESH]

CHAPTER VI

ROUND ABOUT MARRAKESH

    “Speaking of thee comforts me, and thinking of thee makes me glad.”

    —­Raod el Kartas.

The charm of Marrakesh comes slowly to the traveller, but it stays with him always, and colours his impressions of such other cities as may attract his wandering footsteps.  So soon as he has left the plains behind on his way to the coast, the town’s defects are relegated to the background of the picture his memory paints.  He forgets the dirty lanes that serve for roads, the heaps of refuse at every corner, the pariah curs that howled or snapped at his horse’s heels when he rode abroad, the roughness and discomfort of the accommodation, the poverty and disease that everywhere went hand in hand around him.