II
THE TRAIL TO EL-KSAR
With such opportunities ahead it was impossible, that brilliant morning
of September, 1917, not to be off quickly from Tangier, impossible to do
justice to the pale-blue town piled up within brown walls against the
thickly-foliaged gardens of "the Mountain," to the animation of its
market-place and the secret beauties of its steep Arab streets. For
Tangier swarms with people in European clothes, there are English,
French and Spanish signs above its shops, and cab-stands in its squares;
it belongs, as much as Algiers, to the familiar dog-eared world of
travel--and there, beyond the last dip of "the Mountain," lies the world
of mystery, with the rosy dawn just breaking over it. The motor is at
the door and we are off.
The so-called Spanish zone, which encloses internationalized Tangier in
a wide circuit of territory, extends southward for a distance of about a
hundred and fifteen kilometres. Consequently, when good roads traverse
it, French Morocco will be reached in less than two hours by
motor-travellers bound for the south. But for the present Spanish
enterprise dies out after a few miles of macadam (as it does even
between Madrid and Toledo), and the tourist is committed to the _piste_.
These _pistes_--the old caravan-trails from the south--are more
available to motors in Morocco than in southern Algeria and Tunisia,
since they run mostly over soil which, though sandy in part, is bound
together by a tough dwarf vegetation, and not over pure desert sand.
This, however, is the utmost that can be said of the Spanish _pistes_.
In the French protectorate constant efforts are made to keep the trails
fit for wheeled traffic, but Spain shows no sense of a corresponding
obligation.
After leaving the macadamized road which runs south from Tangier one
seems to have embarked on a petrified ocean in a boat hardly equal to
the adventure. Then, as one leaps and plunges over humps and ruts, down
sheer banks into rivers, and up precipices into sand-pits, one gradually
gains faith in one's conveyance and in one's spinal column; but both
must be sound in every joint to resist the strain of the long miles to
Arbaoua, the frontier post of the French protectorate.
Luckily there are other things to think about. At the first turn out of
Tangier, Europe and the European disappear, and as soon as the motor
begins to dip and rise over the arid little hills beyond the last
gardens one is sure that every figure on the road will be picturesque
instead of prosaic, every garment graceful instead of grotesque. One
knows, too, that there will be no more omnibuses or trams or
motorcyclists, but only long lines of camels rising up in brown friezes
against the sky, little black donkeys trotting across the scrub under
bulging pack-saddles, and noble draped figures walking beside them or
majestically perching on their rumps. And for miles and miles there will
be no more towns--only, at intervals on the naked slopes, circles of
rush-roofed huts in a blue stockade of cactus, or a hundred or two nomad
tents of black camel's hair resting on walls of wattled thorn and
grouped about a terebinth-tree and a well.
[Illustration: map of Morocco]
Between these nomad colonies lies the _bled_, the immense waste of
fallow land and palmetto desert: an earth as void of life as the sky
above it of clouds. The scenery is always the same; but if one has the
love of great emptinesses, and of the play of light on long stretches of
parched earth and rock, the sameness is part of the enchantment. In such
a scene every landmark takes on an extreme value. For miles one watches
the little white dome of a saint's grave rising and disappearing with
the undulations of the trail; at last one is abreast of it, and the
solitary tomb, alone with its fig-tree and its broken well-curb, puts a
meaning into the waste. The same importance, but intensified, marks the
appearance of every human figure. The two white-draped riders passing
single file up the red slope to that ring of tents on the ridge have a
mysterious and inexplicable importance: one follows their progress with
eyes that ache with conjecture. More exciting still is the encounter of
the first veiled woman heading a little cavalcade from the south. All
the mystery that awaits us looks out through the eye-slits in the
grave-clothes muffling her. Where have they come from, where are they
going, all these slow wayfarers out of the unknown? Probably only from
one thatched _douar_[A] to another; but interminable distances unroll
behind them, they breathe of Timbuctoo and the farthest desert. Just
such figures must swarm in the Saharan cities, in the Soudan and
Senegal. There is no break in the links: these wanderers have looked on
at the building of cities that were dust when the Romans pushed their
outposts across the Atlas.
[Footnote A: Village of tents. The village of mud-huts is called a
_nourwal_.]
