Chapter V

From Pillar to Pillar--Historic Souvenirs--Off to Africa--The
Sweetly Pretty Albert--Gibraltar by Moonlight--The
Chain-Gang--Across the Strait--A Difficult Landing--Albert is
Hurt--"Fat Mahomet"--The Calendar of the Centuries Put
Back--Tangier: the People, the Streets, the Bazaar--Our Hotel--A
Coloured Gentleman--Seeing the Sights--Local Memoranda--Jewish
Disabilities--Peep at a Photographic Album--The Writer's Notions on
Harem Life.

I WAS gradually getting into the mood of Pistol, and cried a foutra for the world of business and worldlings base. My soul was longing for "Africa and golden joys." Here I was at the elbow, so to speak, of the mysterious Continent, where the geographers set down elephants for want of towns. Why should I not visit it? I might never have such a chance again. I stood in the shadow of one Pillar of Hercules. Why not make pilgrimage to the other? Having notched Calpe on my staff, I resolved to add Abyla to the record.

I was the more inclined to this, as I had recollection that Tangier had been part of the British dominions for one-and-twenty years. In 1662 Catharine of Braganza, the "olivader-complexioned queen of low stature, but prettily shaped," whose teeth wronged her mouth by sticking a little too far out, brought it as portion of her dowry to Charles II. The 2nd, or Queen's Own Regiment, was raised to garrison the post, and sported its sea-green facings, the favourite colour of her Majesty, for long in the teeth of the threatening Moors. The 1st Dragoons still bear the nickname of "the Tangier Horse," and were originally formed from some troops of cuirassiers who assisted in the defence of the African stronghold for seventeen years; and the 1st Foot Regiment owes its title of "Royal" to the distinction it gained by capturing a flag from the Moors in 1680. That was the year when old John Evelyn noted in his diary that Lord Ossorie was deeply touched at having been appointed Governor and General of the Forces, "to regaine the losses we had lately sustain'd from the Moors, when Inchqueene was Governor." His lordship relished the commission so little--indeed, it was a forlorn errand--that he took a malignant fever after a supper at Fishmongers' Hall, went home, and died. In 1683 the Merry Monarch caused the works of Tangier to be blown up, and abandoned the place, declaring it was not worth the cost of keeping. The Merry Monarch was not prescient. A century afterwards Gibraltar was indebted for a large proportion of its supplies, during the great siege, to the dismantled and deserted British-African fortress. For many reasons Tangier was not to be missed.

By a happy coincidence a party of three in the Club-House Hotel--a retired army captain, his wife, and a lady companion--were anxious to take a trip to Africa. We agreed to go together, and had scarcely made up our minds, when another retired captain, who habitually resided in Tangier, gratified us by the information that he was returning there, and would be happy to give us every assistance in his power. Retired Captain No. 1 was a jolly fellow, fond of good living and not overburdened with aestheticism--a capital specimen of a hearty Yorkshireman. He looked after the provand. His wife, portly and short of temper, was as good-natured as he. She insisted on discharging the bills. The lady-companion was thin, accomplished, and melancholy. She kept us in sentiment. Retired Captain No. 2 was a fellow-countryman of mine, bright-brained and waggish. He was the walking guide-book, with philosophy and friendship combined. I was nigh forgetting one, and not by any means the least important, member of the party--Albert. Mrs. Captain introduced him to me as a sweetly pretty creature. At her request I looked after him. Tastes vary as to what constitutes beauty, but I candidly think a broad thick head, crop ears, a flattish nose, and heavy jowls could not be called sweetly pretty without straining a point; and all these Albert possessed. He was a bull-dog (I believe his real name was Bill, and that he had been brought up in Whitechapel). As a bull-dog he had excellent points, and might be esteemed a model of symmetry and breeding by the fancy, or even pronounced a beauty and exquisitely proportioned by connoisseurs; but sweetly pretty--never! I could not stomach that, especially when Albert growled and laid bare his ruthless set of sound white teeth.

Before leaving Gibraltar I had two novel sensations, nocturnal and matutinal. The first was a view of the Bay by moonlight, the white crescent shining clearly down on a portion of the inner waters brinded by shipping, and on the outer spread of sleepy, cadenced wavelets rippling phosphorescently under the pallid rays. By the Mole were visible the outlines of barques, steamers, coal-brigs, and xebecs; away to the left were the _Catapult_ and a few of her mosquito companions; and far out rode at anchor a stately frigate of the United States' fleet. The twinkling lamps of the city afloat sending out reddish lines, and the fuller, clearer, luminous pencillings of the gas-lamps of the city ashore, made a not ungrateful contrast to the quivering chart of poetic moonbeams. Bending over their edge were the deep shadows of the massive Rock; and bounding them, at the other side, the barren foot-hills of Algeciras mellowed into a phantom softness by distance and the night.

Next morning, as I strolled by the sea-wall towards the Ragged Staff Battery, I saw a sight that took away my appetite for breakfast. Pacing slowly to their work to the music of clanking chains was a column of wretched convicts.[A] What haggard faces, with low foreheads, sunken eyes, and dogged moody expression or utter blankness of expression! Purely animal the most of that legion of despair and desperation looked, and sallow and sickly of complexion. They were a blot on the fresh sunshine. How hideous their coarse garb of pied jackets branded with the broad arrow, their knickerbockers and clumsy shoes! Wistfully they moved along, hardly daring to glance at me, through fear of the turnkeys with loaded rifles marching at their sides. I almost felt that, if I had the power, I would demand their release, as did the Knight of La Mancha that of the criminals on their way to the galleys, although they might have been as ungrateful as Gines de Passamonte; but those hang-dog countenances banished impulses of chivalry.

The little steamer, the _Spahi_, which conveyed us across the Strait, was seaworthy for all her cranky appearance, and made the passage of thirty-two miles quickly and comfortably for all her roughness of accommodation. She was a cargo-boat, but her skipper was English, and did his best to make the ladies feel at home. Besides, Captain No. 1 had brought a select basket of provisions and a case of dry, undoctored champagne. One of our first experiences as we cleared Algeciras, with turrets like our martello-towers sentinelling the hills, and the three-masted wreck--"Been twenty-one days there," said the skipper, "and not an effort has been made to raise it yet, and not even a warning light is hung over it at night"--was to sight a bottle-nosed whale puffing and spewing its predatory course.

"What are those ruins upon the Spanish shore for?" asked the accomplished lady.

When she was informed that they were the beacons raised in the days of old, when the Moorish corsairs haunted that coast, and that the moment the pirate sail was descried in the offing (I hope this is correctly nautical) the warning fire blazed by night, or the warning plume of smoke went up by day, to summon Spain's chivalry to the rescue, she was enchanted, and recited a passage from Macaulay's "Armada."

We made the transit in a little over three hours, and, rounding the Punta de Malabata, cut into the Bay of Tangier, and eased off steam at some distance from the Atlantic-washed shore. There is no pier, but a swell and discoloration, projecting in straight line seawards, marks where a mole had once stood. That was a piece of British handiwork; but the Moor, who is no more tormented by the demon of progress than the Turk, had literally let it slide, until it sank under the waters.

The Sultana of Moorish cities Tangier is sometimes called, and truly she does wear a regal, sultana-like air as seen from afar, cushioned in state on the hillside, her white flat roofs rising one above another like the steps of a marble staircase, the tall minarets of the mosques piercing the air, and the multitudinous many-coloured flags of all nations fluttering above the various consulates. But in this, as in so many other instances, it is distance which lends enchantment to the view.

We went as near to the shore as we could in small boats, and when we grounded, a fellowship of clamouring, unkempt, half-naked Barbary Jews, skull-capped, with their shirts tied at their waists and short cotton drawers, rushed forward to meet us, and carry us pickaback to dry land. The ladies were borne in chairs, slung over the shoulders of two of these amphibious porters, or on an improvised seat made by their linked hands, but to preserve their equilibrium the dear creatures had to clasp their arms tightly round the necks of the natives. This would not look well in a picture, above all if the lady were a professional beauty. But there was nothing wrong in it, any more than in Amaryllis clinging to the embrace of Strephon in the whirling of a waltz. Custom reconciles to everything. On stepping into the small boat I had my first difficulty with Albert. I trod on his tail. The dog looked reproachfully, but did not moan. His mistress scowled, and warned me to take care what I was about for an awkward fool. Her husband, with a pained look on his face, mutely apologized for her, and I humbly excused myself and vowed amendment. I am not revengeful, but I did enjoy it when one of the porters, tottering under the weight of the fat lady, made a false step and nearly gave her a sousing. I clambered on my particular Berber's back, dear Albert in my arms, and we splashed merrily along; but Captain No. 1, who turned the scales at seventeen stone two pounds, had not so uneventful a landing. Twice his bearer halted, and the warrior, abandoning himself to his fate, swore he would make the Berber's nose probe the sand if he stumbled.

As I was discharged on the beach, I was confronted by a majestic Moor. His grave brown face was fringed with a closely-trimmed jet-black beard, and his upper lip was shaded with a jet-black moustache. He wore a white turban and a wide-sleeved ample garment of snowy white, flowing in graceful folds below his knees; and on his feet were loose yellow slippers, peaked and turned up at the toes. This was Mahomet Lamarty, better known as "Fat Mahomet," who had acted as interpreter to the British troops in the Crimea, and who, at this period, was making an income by supplying subalterns from Gib with masquerade suits to take home and horses to ride. Mahomet in his sphere was a great man. He was none of your loquacious _valets de place_, no courier of the Transcendental school. He had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and was a Hadji; he was a chieftain of a tribe in the vicinity, and had fought in the war against the Spanish infidels; he could borrow his purest and finest Arab from the Kadi; he was free to the sacred garden of the Shereef, or Pope-Sultan, one of the descendants of the Prophet, Allah be praised!

Mahomet, who was known to both the Captains, passed our small impedimenta through the custom-house--there is an orthodox custom-house, though there is no proper accommodation for shipping--and we trailed at his heels up the close, crowded, rough alleys which did duty as streets. It would be hard to imagine a more thorough-going change than our scurry across the waves had effected. We were in another world completely. We had been transported as on the carpet of the magician. It was as if the calendar had been put back for centuries, and the half-forgotten personages of the "Thousand-and-One Nights" were revivified and had their being around us.

Tangier is a walled and fortified town; but Vauban had no hand in the fortifications, and it is my private opinion the walls would go down before a peremptory horn-blast quicker than those of Jericho. It swarms with a motley population much addicted to differences in shades of complexion. The Tangerines exhaust the primitive colours and most of the others in their features. There are lime-white Tangerines, copper and canary-countenanced Tangerines, olive and beetroot-hued Tangerines, Tangerines of the tint of the bottom of pots, Tangerines of every--no, I beg to recall that, there are no well-defined blue or green Tangerines; at least, none that came under my ken. The town is as old as the hills and courageously uncivilized. There is no gasholder, no railway-station, no theatre, no cab-stand, no daily paper, and no drainage board to go into controversy over. It is unconsciously backward, near as it is to Europe--a rifle-shot off the track of ships plying from the West to the ports of the Mediterranean. It preserves its Eastern aroma with a fine Moslem conservatism. Its ramparts of crumbling masonry are ornamented with ancient cannon useless for offence, useless for defence. There is said to be a saluting-battery; but the legend runs that the gunners require a week's clear notice before firing a salute.[B] There is no locomotion save in boxes and on the backs of quadrupeds; and quadrupeds of the inferior order are usually, when overtaken by death, thrown in the streets to decompose. But if the irregularity of the town would galvanize the late Monsieur Haussmann in his grave, its situation would satisfy the most exacting Yankee engineer. It is huddled in a sheltered nest on the fringe of a land of milk and honey; it has the advantage of a spread of level beach, and rejoices in the balmiest of climes.

The streets are so narrow that you could light a cigar from your neighbour's window on the opposite side; but there is no window, neither at this side nor the other. A hole with a grating is the only window that is visible. Moors are jealous, and to be able to appreciate their household comforts you must first succeed in turning their houses inside out. Those who have dived into the recesses say the fruit is as savoury as the husk is repulsive. The windowless houses with their backs grudgingly turned to the thoroughfares are low for the most part, and the thoroughfares are--oh! so crooked--zigzag, up and down, staggering in a drunken way over hard cobble-stones and leading nowhere. There are mosques and stores entered by horse-shoe arches, a bazaar dotted over with squatting women, cowled with dirty blankets, selling warm griddle-cakes; moving here and there are the same spectral figures, similar dirty blankets veiling them from head to foot; over the way are cylinders of mat, with nets caging the apertures at each end, to hold the cocks and hens, rabbits and pigeons, brought for sale by Riffians, descendants of the corsairs of that ilk, stalwart, brown, and bare-legged, with heads shaven but for the twisted scalp-lock left for the convenience of Asrael when he is dragging them up to Paradise. Hebrews have their standings around, and deal in strips of cotton, brass dishes, and slippers, or change money, or are ready for anything in the shape of barter. Seated in the shade of that small niche in the wall, as on a tailor's shop-board, is an adool, or public notary, selling advice to a client; in the alcove next him is a worker in beads and filigree; from a dusty forge beyond comes the clang of anvils, where half-naked smiths are hammering out bits or fashioning horse-shoes. Mules with Bedouins perched, chin on shin, amid the bales of merchandise on their backs, cross the bazaar at every moment; or files of donkeys, stooping under bundles of faggots, pick their careful way. By-and-by--but this is not a frequent sight--a Moslem swell ambles past on a barb, gorgeous in caparisons, the enormous peaked saddle held in its place by girths round the beast's breast and quarters, and covered with scarlet hammer-cloth. If we move about and examine the stalls, we see lumps of candied sweetmeats here; charms, snuff-boxes made of young cocoanuts and beads there; and jars of milk or baskets of dates elsewhere. At the fountain yonder, contrived in the wall, mud approached by rugged, sloppy steps, water-carriers, wide-mouthed negro slaves, male and female, with brass curtain-rings in their ears, and skins blacker than the moonless midnight, come and go the whole day long, and gossip or wrangle with loafers in coarse mantles and burnous of stuff striped like leopard-skin. Beside the silent, gliding, ghost-like Mahometan women and the Hottentot Venus, you have Rebecca in gaudy kerchief and Dona Dolores in silken skirt and lace mantilla from neighbouring Spain. In the mingling crowd all is novelty, all is noise, all is queer and shifting and diversified.

The hotel where we put up was owned by Bruzeaud, formerly a messman of a British regiment. It was approached by a filthy lane, and commanded a prospect of a square not much larger than a billiard-table. In the middle of this square was the limp body of a deceased mongoose. At the opposite side of it was a Mahometan school, where the children were instructed in the Koran, and their treble voices as they recited the inspired verses in unison kept up drone for hours. The build and surroundings of the hostelry left much opening for improvement, but we had no valid ground for complaint. The beds were clean, Bruzeaud was a good cook, the waiter was attentive and smiled perpetually, which made up for his stupidity; we had a single agreeable fellow-guest in a Frenchman, who spoke Arabic, and had lived in the city of Morocco as a pretended follower of the Prophet; and, besides, there was that dry undoctored champagne, which it is permissible to drink at all meals in Africa.

There was another hotel in Tangier, a more pretentious establishment, owned by one Martin--surname unknown. Martin was a character. He was an unmitigated coloured gentleman, blubber-lipped and black as the ace of spades, with saffron-red streaks at the corners of his optics. He was a native of one of the West India Islands, I believe, but I will not be positive. Mahomet Lamarty pressed me to tell him in what English county Englishmen were born black, and when I said in none, he gravely ejaculated that in that case Martin was a liar, and habitually ate dirt. To avert possible complications into which I might have been drawn, I had to hasten to explain that Martin might possibly have been born in a part of England known as the Black Country. He had served in the steward's department on the ship of war where the Duke of Edinburgh, then Prince Alfred and a middy, was picking up seamanship. Hence his Jove-like hauteur. He had rubbed-skirts with Royalty, and to his fetter-shadowed soul some of the divinity which hedges kings and their relatives had adhered to him. I never met a darkey who could put on such fearful and wonderful airs. Where he did not order he condescended. He showed me an Irish constabulary revolver which he had received from "his old friend, Lord Francis Conyngham--'pon honour, he was delighted to meet him. It was good for sore eyes--who'd a-thought of his turning up there!" Splendidly inflated Martin was when he spoke of "his servants." This thing was entertaining until he grew presumptuous. If you are polite to some people they are familiar, and want to take an ell for every inch you have conceded. And then you have to tell them to keep their place. But Martin, with the instincts of his race, saw in time when it was coming to that. What a misery it must be for a coloured gentleman of ambition that the tell-tale _odor stirpis_ cannot be eliminated! Martin spent extraordinary amounts of money on the purchase of essences, but to no effect; he could not escape from himself; the scent of the nigger, _che puzzo!_ would hang round him still. He was a great coward with all his magniloquence, and when cholera attacked Tangier, left it in craven terror, and sequestered himself in a country house a few miles off.

The two captains and I "did" Tangier conscientiously, with the zest of Bismarck over a yellow-covered novel, and the thoroughness of a Cook's tourist on his first invasion of Paris. We crawled into a stifling crib of a dark coffee-house, and sucked thick brown sediment out of liliputian cups; we smoked hemp from small-bowled pipes until we fell off into a state of visionary stupor known as "kiff;" we paid our respects to the Kadi, exchanged our boots for slippers, and settled down cross-legged on mats as if we were the three tailors of Tooley Street; we almost consented to have ourselves bled by a Moorish barber--Mahomet Lamarty's particular, who lanced him in the nape of the neck every spring--for the Moorish barber still practises the art of Sangrado, and also extracts teeth. But in my note-taking I was sorely handicapped by my ignorance of the language. Arabic is spoken in the stretch extending from Tetuan to Mogador by the coast, and for some distance in the interior; Chleuh is the dialect of the inhabitants of the Atlas range, and Guinea of the negroes. Spanish is slightly understood in Tangier and its vicinity, and is well understood by the Jews. The houses are generally built of chalk and flint (_tabia_) on the ground-floor, and of bricks on the upper story. Moorish bricks are good, but rough and crooked in make. The houses inhabited by Jews are obliged to be coated with a yellow wash, those of natives are white, those of Christians may be of any colour. The Jews are made to feel that they are a despised stock, and yet with Jewish subtlety and perseverance they have managed to get and keep the trade of the place in their hands. That fact may be plainly gathered from the absence of business movement in the bazaars and public resorts of Tangier on the Jewish Sabbath. Your Hebrew does not poignantly feel or bitterly resent being reviled and spat upon, provided he hears the broad gold pieces rattling in the courier-bag slung over his shoulder. He nurses his vengeance, but he has the common sense to perceive that the readiest and fullest manner of exacting it is by cozening his neighbour. At this semi-European edge of Africa he enjoys comparative license, although he is forced to appear in skull-cap and a long narrow robe of a dark colour something like a priest's soutane. But the son of Israel when he has a taste for finery (and which of them has not?) compensates for the gloom of his outer garment by wearing an embroidered vest, a girdle of some bright hue, and white drawers.

The daughters of Israel--but my conscience charges me with want of gallantry towards them in a previous chapter, and now I can honestly relieve it and win back their favour. They are the only beautiful women who mollify the horizon of Tangier: the Mahometan ladies are not visible, those of Spanish descent are coarse, and of English are washed-out; while their lips are against the negresses. I have a batch of photographs of females in an album--aye, of believers in the Prophet amongst them, for it is a folly to imagine you cannot obtain that which is forbidden. Hercules, I fancy, must have overcome with a golden sword the dragon that watched the gardens of the Hesperides--which, by the way, were in the neighbourhood of Tangier, if Apollodorus is to be credited. On looking over that album, the majority of the faces are distinctly those of Aaronites, and most favourable specimens of the family, too There are melting black orbs curtained with pensive lashes, luxuriant black hair, regular features, and straight, delicately chiselled noses. These Jewesses generally wear handkerchiefs disposed in curving folds over their heads, and are as fond of loudly-tinted raiment and the gauds of trinketry as their sisters who parade the sands at Ramsgate during the season. There is a photograph before me, as I write, of a Jewish matron, fat, dull, double-chinned, and sleepy-eyed, who must have been a belle before she fell into flesh. She wears massy filigree ear-rings, two strings of precious stones as necklaces, ponderous bracelets, edgings of pearls on her bodice, and rings on all her fingers. Her shoulders are covered with costly lace, and the front of her skirt is like an altar-cloth heavy with embroidery. I dare say, if one might peep under it, she has gold bangles on her ankles. It would surprise me if she had an idea in her head beyond the decoration of her person. As we turn the leaf, there is a full-blooded negress with a striped napkin twisted gracefully turban-wise round her hair, and coils of beads, large and small, sinuously dangling on her breast, like the chains over the Debtor's Door at Newgate. A very fine animal indeed, this negress, with power in her strong shiny features; a nose of courage, thin in the nostrils, and cheek-bones high, but not so high as those of a Red Indian. If she were white, she might pass for a Caucasian, but for that gibbous under-lip. She lacks the wide mouth and the hinted intelligent archness of the Two-Headed Nightingale, and has not the moody expression and semi-sensuous, semi-ferocious development of the muscular widows of Cetewayo; but for a negress she is handsome and well-built, and would fetch a very good price in the market. The slave-trade still flourishes in Morocco. On the next page we meet two types of young Moorish females: one a peasant, taken surreptitiously as she stood in a horse-shoe archway; the other a lady of the harem, taken--no matter by what artifice. The peasant, swathed from tip to heel in white like a ghost in a penny booth, and shading her face with a cart-wheel of a palm-leaf hat looped from brim to crown, and with one extremity of its great margins curled, is a prematurely worn, weather-stained, common-looking wench, with a small nose and screwed-up mouth. She is a free woman, but I would not exchange the dusky bondswoman for five of her class. Centuries of bad food, much baby-nursing, and field-labour sink their imprint into a race. The harem lady, whose likeness was filched as she leaned an elbow against a low table, is in a state of repose. She squats tailor-fashion, her fingers are twined one in another in her lap, her eyes are closed, and her expression is one of drowsy, listless voluptuousness. She is fair, and her dress (for she is not arrayed for the reception of visitors) is simple--a peignoir, and a sash, and a fold of silk binding her long rich tresses. A soft die-away face, with no sentiment more strongly defined than the abandonment to pleasure and its consequent weariness. By no means an attractive piece of flesh and blood, and yet a good sample of the class that go to upholster a seraglio.

I have never had the slightest anxiety to penetrate the secrets of the Moslem household, and I consider the man who would wish to poke his nose into its seclusion no better than Peeping Tom of Coventry--an insolent, lecherous cad. I would not traverse the street to-morrow to inspect the champion wives of the Sultan of Turkey and Shah of Persia amalgamated; and I deserve no credit for it, for I know that they are puppets, and that more engaging women are to be seen any afternoon shopping in Regent Street or pirouetting in the ballets of half-a-dozen theatres.

Your lady of the harem is an insipid, pasty-complexioned doll, nine times out of ten, and would be vastly improved in looks and temperament if she were subjected to a course of shower-baths, and compelled to take horse-exercise regularly and earn her bread before she ate it.

How do I know this? it may be asked. Who dares to deny it? is my answer.

But here is a digression from our theme of the condition of the Jews at Tangier, and all on account of a few poor photographs! In one sentence, that condition is shameful. It is a reproach to the so-called civilized Powers that they do not interfere to influence the Emir-al-Mumenin to behave with more of the spirit of justice towards his Jewish subjects. In Fez and other cities they have to dwell in a quarter to themselves--"El Melah" (the dirty spot) it is called in Morocco city; and when they leave the Melah they have to go bare-footed. They are not permitted to ride on mules, nor yet to walk on the same side of the street as Arabs.

The late Sir Moses Montefiore, a very exemplary old man in some respects, visited Morocco in his eightieth year to intercede on behalf of his co-religionists, and promises of better treatment were made; but promises are not always kept.