In Morocco | Page 4

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.]

III

EL-KSAR TO RABAT
A town at last--its nearness announced by the multiplied ruts of the trail,
the cactus hedges, the fig-trees weighed down by dust leaning over
ruinous earthen walls. And here are the first houses of the European
El-Ksar--neat white Spanish houses on the slope outside the old Arab
settlement. Of the Arab town itself, above reed stockades and brown
walls, only a minaret and a few flat roofs are visible. Under the walls
drowse the usual gregarious Lazaruses; others, temporarily resuscitated,
trail their grave-clothes after a line of camels and donkeys toward the
olive-gardens outside the town.
The way to Rabat is long and difficult, and there is no time to visit
El-Ksar, though its minaret beckons so alluringly above the
fruit-orchards; so we stop for luncheon outside the walls, at a canteen
with a corrugated iron