Morocco | Page 5

feet. Salam turns his head away meanwhile, and looks out across the Atlantic as though anxious to assure himself about the state of agriculture in Spain. At last he wheels about, and with a rapid glance full of contempt surveys the village produce. He has a cheapening eye.
"How much?" he asks sternly.
[Illustration: IN TANGIER]
Item by item the old dame prices the goods. The little group of young married women, with babies tied in a bundle behind them, or half-naked children clinging to their loin-cloths, nods approval. But Salam's face is a study. In place of contemptuous indifference there is now rising anger, terrible to behold. His brows are knitted, his eyes flame, his beard seems to bristle with rage. The tale of prices is hardly told before, with a series of rapid movements, he has tied every bundle up, and is thrusting the good things back into the hands of their owners. His vocabulary is strained to its fullest extent; he stands up, and with outspread hands denounces Mediunah and all its ways. The men of the village are cowards; the women have no shame. Their parents were outcasts. They have no fear of the Prophet who bade True Believers deal fairly with the stranger within their gates. In a year at most, perhaps sooner, "Our Master the Sultan" will assuredly be among these people who shame Al Moghreb,[2] he will eat them up, dogs will make merry among their graves, and their souls will go down to the pit. In short, everything is too dear.
Only the little children are frightened by this outburst, which is no more than a prelude to bargaining. The women extol and Salam decries the goods on offer; both praise Allah. Salam assures them that the country of the "Ingliz" would be ruined if its inhabitants had to pay the prices they ask for such goods as they have to sell. He will see his master starve by inches, he will urge him to return to Tangier and eat there at a fair price, before he will agree to sacrifices hitherto unheard of in Sunset Land. This bargaining proceeds for a quarter of an hour without intermission, and by then the natives have brought their prices down and Salam has brought his up. Finally the money is paid in Spanish pesetas or Moorish quarters, and carefully examined by the simple folk, who retire to their ancestral hills, once more praising Allah who sends custom. Salam, his task accomplished, complains that the villagers have robbed us shamefully, but a faint twinkle in his eye suggests that he means less than he says.
Breakfast over, I seek a hillside cave where there is a double gift of shade and a wonderful view, content to watch the pageantry of the morning hours and dream of hard work. Only the goatherds and their charges suggest that the district is inhabited, unless some vessel passing on its way to or from the southern coast can be seen communicating with the signal station round the bend of the rocks. There a kindly old Scot lives, with his Spanish wife and little children, in comparative isolation, from the beginning to the end of the year.
"I've almost forgotten my own tongue," he said to me one evening when he came down to the camp to smoke the pipe of peace and tell of the fur and feather that pass in winter time. It was on a day when a great flight of wild geese had been seen winging its way to the unknown South, and the procession had fired the sporting instinct in one of us at least.
[Illustration: A STREET IN TANGIER]
Mid-day, or a little later, finds Salam in charge of a light meal, and, that discussed, one may idle in the shade until the sun is well on the way to the West. Then books and papers are laid aside. We set out for a tramp, or saddle the horses and ride for an hour or so in the direction of the mountain, an unexplored Riviera of bewildering and varied loveliness. The way lies through an avenue of cork trees, past which the great hills slope seaward, clothed with evergreen oak and heath, and a species of sundew, with here and there yellow broom, gum cistus, and an unfamiliar plant with blue flowers. Trees and shrubs fight for light and air, the fittest survive and thrive, sheltering little birds from the keen-eyed, quivering hawks above them. The road makes me think of what the French Mediterranean littoral must have been before it was dotted over with countless vulgar villas, covered with trees and shrubs that are not indigenous to the soil, and tortured into trim gardens that might have strayed from a prosperous suburb of London or Paris. Save a few charcoal burners,