Our tent was set for the night in a valley that we reached by a path half-buried in undergrowth and known only to the head muleteer.  It was a spot far removed from the beaten tracks of the travellers.  In times past a great southern kaid had set his summer-house there:  its skeleton, changed from grey to pink in the rosy light of sun-setting, stood before us, just across a tiny stream fringed by rushes, willows, and oleanders.  When the Court Elevated by Allah left Marrakesh for the north some years ago, the sorely-tried natives had risen against their master, they had captured and plundered his house, and he had been fortunate in getting away with a whole skin.  Thereafter the tribesmen had fought among themselves for the spoils of war, the division of the china and cutlery accounting for several deaths.  All the land round our little camp had been a garden, a place famous for roses and jessamine, verbena and the geraniums that grow in bushes, together with countless other flowers, that make the garden of Sunset Land suggest to Moors the beauties of the paradise that is to come.  Now the flowers that had been so carefully tended ran wild, the boar rooted among them, and the porcupine made a home in their shade.  As evening closed in, the wreck of the great house became vague and shadowy, a thing without outline, the wraith of the home that had been.  Grey owls and spectral bats sailed or fluttered from the walls.  They might have been past owners or servitors who had suffered metamorphosis.  The sight set me thinking of the mutual suspicions of the Bedouins and the Susi traders, the raiding of Sidi el Muktar, the other signs of tribal fighting that had been apparent on the road, the persecution of the Moor by his protected fellow-subjects,—­in short, the whole failure of the administration to which the ruin that stood before me seemed to give fitting expression.  This house had not stood, and, after all, I thought Morocco was but a house divided against itself.

[Illustration:  MOONLIGHT]

In the face of all the difficulties and dangers that beset the state, the Sultan’s subjects are concerned only with their own private animosities.  Berber cannot unite with Moor, village still wars against village, each province is as a separate kingdom, so far as the adjacent province is concerned.  As of old, the kaids are concerned only with filling their pockets; the villagers, when not fighting, are equally engrossed in saving some small portion of their earnings and taking advantage of the inability of the central Government to collect taxes.  They all know that the land is in confusion, that the Europeans at the Court are intriguing against its independence.  In camp and market-place men spread the news of the French advance from the East.  Yet if the forces of the country could be organised,—­if every official would but respond to the needs of the Government and the people unite under their masters,—­Morocco might still hold Europe at bay, to the extent at least of making its subjection too costly and difficult a task for any European Government to undertake.  If Morocco could but find its Abd el Kadr, the day of its partition might even yet be postponed indefinitely.  But next year, or the next—­who shall say?