I
RABAT AND SALÉ
I
LEAVING TANGIER
To step on board a steamer in a Spanish port, and three hours later to
land in _a country without a guide-book_, is a sensation to rouse the
hunger of the repletest sight-seer.
The sensation is attainable by any one who will take the trouble to row
out into the harbour of Algeciras and scramble onto a little black boat
headed across the straits. Hardly has the rock of Gibraltar turned to
cloud when one's foot is on the soil of an almost unknown Africa.
Tangier, indeed, is in the guide-books; but, cuckoo-like, it has had to
lays its eggs in strange nests, and the traveller who wants to find out
about it must acquire a work dealing with some other country--Spain or
Portugal or Algeria. There is no guide-book to Morocco, and no way of
knowing, once one has left Tangier behind, where the long trail over the
Rif is going to land one, in the sense understood by any one accustomed
to European certainties. The air of the unforeseen blows on one from the
roadless passes of the Atlas.
This feeling of adventure is heightened by the contrast between
Tangier--cosmopolitan, frowsy, familiar Tangier, that every tourist has
visited for the last forty years--and the vast unknown just beyond. One
has met, of course, travellers who have been to Fez; but they have gone
there on special missions, under escort, mysteriously, perhaps
perilously; the expedition has seemed, till lately, a considerable
affair. And when one opens the records of Moroccan travellers written
within the last twenty years, how many, even of the most adventurous,
are found to have gone beyond Fez? And what, to this day, do the names
of Meknez and Marrakech, of Mogador, Saffi or Rabat, signify to any but
a few students of political history, a few explorers and naturalists?
Not till within the last year has Morocco been open to travel from
Tangier to the Great Atlas, and from Moulay Idriss to the Atlantic.
Three years ago Christians were being massacred in the streets of Salé,
the pirate town across the river from Rabat, and two years ago no
European had been allowed to enter the Sacred City of Moulay Idriss, the
burial-place of the lawful descendant of Ali, founder of the Idrissite
dynasty. Now, thanks to the energy and the imagination of one of the
greatest of colonial administrators, the country, at least in the French
zone, is as safe and open as the opposite shore of Spain. All that
remains is to tell the traveller how to find his way about it.
Ten years ago there was not a wheeled vehicle in Morocco, now its
thousands of miles of trail, and its hundreds of miles of firm French
roads, are travelled by countless carts, omnibuses and motor-vehicles.
There are light railways from Rabat to Fez in the west, and to a point
about eighty-five kilometres from Marrakech in the south, and it is
possible to say that within a year a regular railway system will connect
eastern Morocco with western Algeria, and the ports of Tangier and
Casablanca with the principal points of the interior.
What, then, prevents the tourist from instantly taking ship at Bordeaux
or Algeciras and letting loose his motor on this new world? Only the
temporary obstacles which the war has everywhere put in the way of
travel. Till these are lifted it will hardly be possible to travel in
Morocco except by favour of the Resident-General; but, normal conditions
once restored, the country will be as accessible, from the straits of
Gibraltar to the Great Atlas, as Algeria or Tunisia.
To see Morocco during the war was therefore to see it in the last phase
of its curiously abrupt transition from remoteness and danger to
security and accessibility; at a moment when its aspect and its customs
were still almost unaffected by European influences, and when the
"Christian" might taste the transient joy of wandering unmolested in
cities of ancient mystery and hostility, whose inhabitants seemed hardly
aware of his intrusion.
