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قراءة كتاب In the Tail of the Peacock
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
CHAPTER I
Tangier—Country People—The Pilgrimage to Mecca—Moorish Prisons—We Ride to Cape Spartel—Decide to Leave Tangier and Push Inland.
CHAPTER I
The vague and hazy ideals which the white light of an English upbringing relegates to dreamland and dismisses as idle fancies, rise up in the glare of African sunlight, alive, tangible, unashamed; the things that are, not the things that might be:—the vivid colouring, the hot crowding, the stately men and veiled women, the despotism and stoicism, the unchanging picturesqueness of the Thousand and One Nights, the dramatic inevitability of the Old Testament.—A. J. D.
There was no desert in Morocco.
If a country has not been "read up" beforehand, the imagination has free play and forms many false conclusions: yet though it suffer on the one hand rude awakenings, it is on the other compensated by certain new lights—indelible and unique impressions—which come only in the train of things inconnu. So though we found no desert, there are other things in Morocco.
It is one of the few countries in the world, and they grow fewer each year, which is still unexplored—unknown. Thousands of square miles in Morocco have never been crossed by a European, or at any rate none have returned to tell the tale: maps mark only blank spaces, and have no names for villages, no records of mountains or rivers: there are no roads, still less railways, in the country: the only means of transport along the wild, worn tracks is by camels, mules, and donkeys: he who will not ride perforce walks.
The bare fringe alone of Morocco, its coast towns, and the choice, let us say, of two roads connecting them with its capitals, Fez and Morocco City, are open to travellers; beyond these limits it is difficult and dangerous for Europeans to venture. Of even its coasts towns England knows little enough: a daily paper printed in 1902 describes one flourishing seaport of thirty thousand inhabitants as "a village." There is more vagueness, in fact, about a country three times the size of Great Britain and four days' journey from London than of many a remote corner in the heart of Asia.
The reason is at hand. An old Arabic proverb, "The earth is a peacock: Morocco is the tail of it," typifies the entire satisfaction of its inhabitants with their native land. What is, is good; why "civilize" and "progress"? As far as possible there shall no European enter therein. Realizing that, were new blood allowed to come into Morocco, its own effete and uneducated people would have no chance in the race of life, and end by hopelessly knuckling under to the European, the country isolates itself; nor is it likely that the jealous Powers of Europe will allow any one of their number to disturb that isolation and pluck the tempting fruit.
And so to-day Morocco drowses in an atmosphere of laissez faire, a decadent nation, a collection of lawless tribes, who have changed little for the last two thousand years, living still much after the manner of Old Testament days. They are devout Mussulmans. They believe the world to be flat, and to come to an end with the west coast of Morocco. Their country they call El Moghreb el Aksa, which means, "The Extreme West," or "The Land of the Setting Sun": "Morocco" and "Moors" are entirely European words, and never used by the Moors themselves—the one being a corruption of the name of their capital city, the other having been given them by the Spaniards.
Morocco should be fascinating on the face of it: a great country running into hundreds of thousands of square miles, the only independent Mussulman state of North Africa, with six million followers of the great Prophet, and a perfect climate, soil, and water-supply to boot, needs no extolling. And yet its chiefest fascination lies in things which, from some points of view, ought not to be.
Its remote removal from all appertaining to the twentieth century, its strangely simple, untaught life, the solemn, stately men, the veiled women and their eyes, the steely blue cactus, the white cities and the glaring light, the mystery and the fatalism which intensify the air, are alike oddly inevitable and incomprehensible to a European. The other side of the closed door has always constituted, for the wandering vagrants among mankind, their hearts' desire. For them there is still Morocco; and the door will be shut in their faces again and again by a people and a faith and customs which they can never understand. And though it be useless they will still go on, because it seems the best thing.
About six weeks before 1902 was due, Rose A. Bainbridge and myself left behind us the last outpost of England—Gibraltar—with its cluster of civilization round the bottom of the great Rock. Four hours brought us across the Straits; and seen from the deck of the dirty little Gibel Musa, on to which we had changed from a P. & O. at Gibraltar, Morocco shaped itself into a rugged country, ridge behind ridge of low hills and jagged mountains cutting the sky-line. A long white sand-bank lying back in a bay on the African shore, broken at one end by irregular vegetation, gradually developed upon its slopes a yellowish-white, fantastic city, which resolved itself into Tangier.
Landing at Tangier among vociferating Moors has been described often enough, and needs no further enlargement.
The next morning, November 13, 1901, found us sitting over coffee and an omelette out of doors, on a little balcony opening off the hotel Villa Valentina, over-looking the road to Fez, and facing the broad, blue Straits which divided us from Europe.
It was like a June morning at home, soft and balmy: the city dropped from us down to the beach, and the sun poured upon the flat-roofed houses, coloured yellow to pale cream or washed-out blue, alternating with a lavish coat of glaring whitewash.
Tangier is an example of structure without architecture; at the same time there is a certain fitness in the crude Moorish buildings, whose flat expanse of wall is