The Fire of Desert Folk/Chapter 21
WHITE SWANS ON AN AZURE SHORE
DURING the early hours of morning our car was already heading westward from Marrakesh over an excellent road through prairies so burned by the powerful sun that they often looked like a desert. Across the Nfis River we carried on through uninteresting country until we came to the military post of Shishawa, set in olive-groves and fruit-orchards. I had visited Shishawa for a boar hunt and, though I had only the satisfaction of seeing one tusker shot at by another member of the party, I did not regret the day or the experience, for it gave me the opportunity to see the animal life in the desert and the conditions in the native Berber villages. Just beyond Shishawa we came upon another river, which was bordered by a thicket of tamarisks and was famed for the great quantity of fish it contributed to the countryside. Searching for a moment in its waters, I made out only an eel, this tramp of the sea.
Some fifty miles before we reached Mogador we ran into a well-peopled region with carefully cultivated fields around the native villages and a busy traffic on the road, which wound like a snake among the wooded hills, with oft-recurring white kubbas and zaouias on their highest points.
Suddenly, after one of the abrupt turns, we saw before us an azure curtain, as it were, hung from the line of the horizon, indistinct and hazy, for it was still behind a morning mist which the sun had not yet chased away. Having covered our one hundred ten miles in less than three hours, we were skirting the shore of the Atlantic before nine o'clock and looking upon the black line of the prison island where criminals and the too-insistent adversaries of the sultan are held in banishment.
Quick to turn our eyes from this line of menacing, unlovely buildings and grim shores, we could not check cries of admiration as we picked up a beautiful peninsula breasting the blue of the sea with its golden sands, its white houses, white minarets and whitened walls.
"A flock of white swans on the azure shore!" exclaimed Zofiette.
It was Mogador, the ancient Roman Thamusiga of which nothing remains except the records of its history. Soon we were at the base of the peninsula and were running out the narrowing neck of land that is being gradually eaten away by the hungry waves. As we entered the town we found its streets exceptionally narrow but very straight, an unusual feature and one attributed to the French architect and Christian slaves who built the city under the orders of Sultan Mohammed ben Abd Allah. But there was little that was unique or curious in the town, if one except the old fortress and the abandoned palace of the sultan.
Near Mogador we saw forests of Argania Sideroxylon, which furnishes a hard yellow wood, leaves that are of use for feeding cattle and nuts that are both eaten by cows and camels and are used for the production of oil. These forests are often interspersed with growths of sandarac-trees (also called arar-trees), which serve more than the ordinary single purpose of supplying material for the carpenter, in that they produce sandarac, a resin that is employed in the manufacture of certain varnishes.
Having still nearly a hundred miles to cover before nightfall, we left Mogador shortly after luncheon and were soon running through the rather fertile lands of the Shiadma tribe. On the way we were overtaken by a cold wind and a terrific rain, whose veritable torrents of water, streaming down from the clouds, transformed the gray and yellowish fruit-trees into lovely greens and raised flowers in the seared and parched grasses, where none seemed to exist before. Then, after but a few moments' duration of the storm, another miracle occurred. The immense puddles and even the little streams that had been formed seeped away into the porous soil quite as though they had never existed, the sun reappeared from behind the clouds, and everything dried off with such rapidity that only the green leaves of the trees and the brilliant spots of color contributed by the flowers remained as witnesses of the passing shower.
At frequent intervals along the road we passed rich kubbas and gleaming, white zaouias. This neighborhood of Safi and Mogador has long been known as the home of numerous religious confraternities and sects, among them the followers of the mysterious prophet Berghwat, who lived in the twelfth century and, among others of his tenets, forbade the killing of cocks, on the ground that the brain and especially the eyes of this bird possessed magical powers. The eyes, which discern the coming of the sun while it is still night, form talismans for prophets, while the brain, when mixed with aloes and vanilla and wrapped in jackal skins, renders a man invisible and inaudible to others.
As we journeyed northward, we came again into a well-peopled and fertile district, where both the main road and the infiltrating arteries carried ever-increasing streams of camel caravans and native riders. Finally the mass of a rocky promontory protruded itself into the sea, and beyond it we beheld the rocky shores on which the former Portuguese stronghold and colony of Safi lay. Though it was abandoned by the invaders in the middle of the sixteenth century, the old citadel of Keshla, with its cyclopean walls, still dominates and menaces the place.
We had no more than reached the hotel before I received the very welcome announcement that Monsieur Maurice Le Glay was awaiting me in the salon. Maurice Le Glay! For me the sound of this name was a whole symphony. That he was the French Administrator of a large district around Safi and one of the keenest political minds in this part of Maghreb meant little or nothing to me as I hurried to meet him, for I knew another Le Glay, a writer whose manner of thinking and impressionability opened to him the romance of the land and the hidden tragedies of its people. I had read some of his works depicting the Berbers and their life and had found them brilliant and illuminating. I think of him as a musician—his Moroccan novels are like the low notes of a violin in the night-time, when everything around is chained in sleep and an invisible sadness seems to be drawing the bow across the strings with the lightness of a spirithand. These books of Le Glay encase within them the soul of the various Berber tribes within his realm—their strange splendor, their undefined, unvoiced longings, their unfulfilled mission and their eternal note of sadness.
"The Emperor of the Berbers" is the name they have given him in Morocco. The Berbers really have a most deep love and respect for him. This is not strange, as these children of the desert, the mountains and the sun feel that this seemingly severe administrator, with his subtle and impressionable character as a writer and with his heart of a poet and great artist, will understand and have sympathy for the aspirations of their hearts and souls.
When Le Glay came forward as I entered the salon, we seemed to meet as old friends who had known each other for a long time. Unfortunately our hours together were short, owing to the fact that Le Glay had to go on an official journey to Rabat the following morning; yet this brief contact and a few other fleeting hours which we later had together in Casablanca were sufficient to enable me to snatch an understanding of this man of deep thought and with a no less deep sadness wrapped in his heart.
As Le Glay took me in his car for a first visit to the town, the sun was already setting in the sea of a thousand opals that shimmered and gleamed in the rays that were bathing the town in every shade of rose and pink. After passing between the rows of young palms, sandaracs and acacias that edged the wide streets of the new French quarter and out past the palace of the local caid, where the sultan rests when he is on his way from Rabat to Marrakesh to receive the tribute and homage of the Atlas tribes, we approached the old town, to which the long shadows of the night were already laying siege from the east and above which the citadel, with its menacing walls, crenelated towers and strongly fortified gates that bear Portuguese coats of arms and mottoes of the sixteenth century, loomed like a monstrous eagle's nest on some rocky crag. From two powerful forts, Skutia on the north and Dar el-Behar on the south, old Spanish and Dutch cannon still protruded their threatening black muzzles toward the sea.
"They will show you Keshla and Dar el-Behar tomorrow," said Monsieur Le Glay; "now I want to give you a rapid glimpse of the whole town—my own little Safi, where, in the early decades of the sixteenth century, the enmity reigning between the various Berber families and tribes allowed Don Manuel, the King of Portugal, to take the town without any great difficulty. Then in 1541, after a struggle of thirty years, the sultans drove the Portuguese out. Just now we are passing through the Rbat quarter, which was the home of the most fervid and energetic defenders of Islam."
It was here in this quarter of Rbat that the story of the Portuguese colonization was written in bloody letters. When the invaders took Safi, most of the old Berber families fled from the Medina, but Rbat remained intact. Among its citizens, and especially among the members of the several strong religious fraternities that gathered round the mosque and zaouias of the quarter, the sultans, who for a long time fought the invaders, finally worked up enough fanatical enthusiasm to raise the quarter in Holy War, so that revolts, treason and unexpected armed attacks became the order of the day, until the foreign overlords were finally driven back to their ships. To this very day bards in the market-places throughout all Morocco sing the stories of this quarter, and those who would prepare magic talismans of great efficacy often mingle with the other weird ingredients some of the soil of Rbat, that earth which was drenched with the blood of its staunch mumeni, so loyal to Islam.
Today here in Rbat Berbers from the Abda, Beni Ait, Dukkala, Shiadma and other tribes no longer carry their long rifles and knives but, in place of these, unmartial staffs to prod the donkeys and camels which bear their products to the merchants of the town; the mokkhadems of the sects no longer occupy themselves with fanning the hate against the white invaders but only strive to extract more contributions from the natives arriving from the country, fooling them with vaunted miracles that occur near the tombs of the saints or selling them water from the Sidi Bu Zid spring, which, when added to ordinary water, gives a special whiteness to wool. Everything has changed, and with the change speculation and exploitation have reached even to the heart of Islam. It is sad but it is only in keeping with the times.
After passing through the crowded principal commercial street of the Medina, we came out upon a place facing a gate that pierced a thick wall. Le Glay stopped the car to explain:
"This is the prettiest spot in Safi and one, moreover, in which all its story and old customs are gathered."
The sight was really most picturesque. Through the black tunnel of the gate, already drowned in a thick, purple darkness, we could see Keshla perched on the top of the great citadel-rock, with its walls and towers seemingly stuck to the face of the cliff. The castle, bathed in a scarlet light as with tire color of blood or fire, standing out on the right, combined with tire big, white, rounded kubbas on a palm-covered hill to the left to revive for me a page in the history of the struggle between the Saadite dynasty and the Portuguese armies; for it was the cult of the kubbas that played a prominent part in the contest, stirring up the religious fanaticism that led the natives on in this conflict between two races and two ideas that culminated in one more triumph for the Law and the Prophet, this time over the severity and cruelty of Portuguese governors.
The place before us was thronged with the white figures of the natives and edged with the small booths and tents, where the manufactured products of the town were being exposed. As I glanced also at the dark-blue and brown bournouses surrounding singers and jugglers, I remarked to Le Glay:
"You have your Jemaa el-Fna here also."
As we watched the throng, Keshla put on its dark robes of night, the kubbas became gray and their guarding palms black, the first stars took their places in the sky, the crowd in the market began to scatter and finally the protracted call of the muezzin floated down from the minaret and seeped into every corner of the town. A beggar near the gate rose quickly, spread a much-worn sheepskin on the ground, tucked his feet under him and began repeating after the muezzin that there is no God but Allah, One and Eternal. As the man pressed his hands to his face and made his obeisances, he heard and saw nothing around him, for he was then in direct contact with the Creator of all men, animals and inanimate things. He did not complain of his lot, since Allah knew what was destined for him and he, a poor meskin, was sure of a recompense for his resignation to Fate and for his faithfulness to Allah. Asking nothing, he performed his acts of adoration and homage, raised his pock-marked face to the darkening sky and repeated:
"Allah the Merciful, the Protector, the Just, the King of Kings, the Chief! …"
Later in the evening, after a delightful dinner in the house of Monsieur Le Glay, the "Emperor of the Berbers" gave me many curious details about Morocco and confirmed once more my strong conviction that man is the product of climate, soil, religious belief and circumstance only in his exterior forms and that the native from the district of Abda or from Erg on the edge of the Sahara is inherently exactly the same as the native from the shores of the Orkhon, of the Behring Sea or of the Yangtze Kiang, the citizen of Winnipeg, New York, Paris, Berlin or Warsaw, in that he possesses a soul that is always unquiet and sad and is longing for wisdom which is beyond his reach and not the direct product of his own brain and for faith in God and in man, the work of His eternal will.
One of the guests who was at the dinner was to be Monsieur Le Glay's locum-tenens, while he was away at Rabat, and invited us to visit him in the Keshla the following morning. As we left the citadel, he gave us as guide an Arab spahi from Algeria to accompany us through the town. Although there in Safi Islam approaches Europe in a more intimate and willing contact than probably at any other point in Morocco and profits by bank credits, post, telegraph and telephone in a most marked degree, it was neither the frequent evidences of this intermingling of the two civilizations nor the contrast of the fortress of Dar el-Behar and its black cannon with the homes and streets of the Berbers or the pottery suk with its many-colored wares that arrested our attention, but rather the life of the bazaars and market-places that again established its sway over us. In one of the squares we found, in addition to the singers and jugglers with whom we had become familiar in Marrakesh and Fez, a good-looking young Berber with an expressive, laughing face and thick curly hair who was playing the part of a clown or town fool.
"He is a Draa," observed the spahi with contempt, "half Berber and half Negro."
Meanwhile the unperturbed Draa was holding forth in a manner which the interpretation of our spahi gave us to understand was a flood of satirical humor against all society around him. He spoke of the hypocrites whom one meets throughout the waking hours of every day—launching his jests at Imams who fulfil the law of the Koran by having only one wife, but maintain a whole bevy of beautiful slaves; mocking mokkhadems, who hoodwink the Faithful by every known means; laughing at the so-called wise men, who were deep in the sciences but yet understood not the simplest of ordinary matters; ridiculing pashas, caids and cadi; and finally imitating women of the harems, singing and dancing with all their mannerisms and showing how they sought to please their lords and masters—and how they betrayed them! Then he began to weep and to complain of gnawing hunger, winking at us as he did so. As the sous that fell into his bowl were welcomed with mocking raillery, I threw him a franc in anticipation of a joke that would rock the crowd with laughter. Instead of this the jester saluted me most politely and, half-closing his eyes, said in excellent French:
"I am boundlessly grateful to the noble foreigner."
Near by, sword-play was being indulged in with wooden staves as substitutes for the lethal blades. The master, after his hands had been kissed by his assistants, was demonstrating a number of passes and blows, in which he used his weapon most skilfully. Then an adversary offered himself from the crowd and enabled us to see a picturesque engagement, full of incredibly rapid twists and turns, with quick transfers of the weapon from one hand to the other and with hard-pressed attacks and most brilliant defence. It became very evident to us that the art of using the sword, which was the pride of the Andalusian Moors on many a field in Europe, had not been entirely forgotten here. The scimitar is the inseparable companion of the followers of the Prophet, who know well the use of it. Everywhere throughout the Moslem countries I have found great artists of the sword: Turkomans with their kleesh, Kurds with their long yataghan, curved at the end, Georgians and Ossetes with their silver-handled shashka from Damascus—all of them well skilled in the use of the sword.
The following morning we left Safi and continued northward a hundred miles along the coast, until we again picked up a silvery-white and dazzling town contrasting with the dark-blue field of the sea—Mazagan, distinctly European in character, with its French buildings, churches, lighthouse and docks, all dazzling under the streaming rays of the sun save the somber, towering walls of the old fortress that dominated everything.
When we later visited these powerful embattlements, we passed along the crenelated walls, through the galleries where ancient cannon still stretched toward the sea and land, into the vaults which had previously served as magazines for powder and ball and even down into the cisterns, where the Portuguese stored their watersupply against the time of siege. There was the tower also from which the coming of the enemy was pealed forth during those three hundred years from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, when the Portuguese maintained a long and constant struggle against the natives and used this stronghold as their sallying point from which to drive excursions into the land. To the north they made expeditions that resulted in the capture of Asemmur and the little town of Tit, which, however, they could not long hold against the Dukkala and Rehamna tribes, as they had not their impregnable walls and destructive cannon to breast the attacks of the Berbers.
Judging from the subterranean cisterns, immense vaults and roofed basins for catching rain-water in the fortress at Mazagan, we could easily surmise that even in this great stronghold they were probably not unfamiliar with the necessities of siege and were so ringed in by a hostile population that they were unable to avail themselves of the fresh water in the river and in the wells and springs near the kubba of Sidi Daoudi.
It would seem that the present inhabitants of the fertile Dukkala country, rich in grain, fruit and cattle, still feel the spirit of the days of Portuguese domination, for they practically never come in except on market days and then remain only so long as is absolutely necessary in this town where so many of their ancestors fell through nearly three centuries of constant fighting. The Dukkala regard Asemmur as their capital, a place which also had its history of strife during those earlier centuries when the Carthaginians first used it to dominate and drain the neighboring country and were then followed by the Romans, who carried with them the inevitable military power that assured the authority of the Caesars.
After our brief survey of these two coastal towns we continued northward and picked up at Casablanca our previous trail.