In Morocco | Page 3

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.

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