unbroken either by windows or ornament: they are simple and "reserved." Gleaming in high light under an equally light sky, they huddle almost one on top of the other, built upon every available square yard inside the "papery" old city wall, which looks as if cannon would blow it away. Patches of blue sea break the white city outline, and the towers of the mosques rise above it all: their tesselated surfaces, tiled in shades of green and polished by the years, shimmer in the sunshine like peacocks' tails.

The Road to Fez.

Two or three gateways pierce the drab-coloured city wall, their horseshoe-shaped arches washed over with salmon-pink. The same plaster-work arch repeats itself occasionally in the rough stone- and mortar-work of the houses, all of an inferior quality, short-lived and rebuilt again and again on the débris of successive years, until they stand in time right above the cobble-stones of the narrow streets.

Outside the city wall a few private houses and two hotels lie back among eucalyptus, palms, and bushy stone-pines: several of the legations which represent the European Powers have modern houses, lost in greenery of sorts. Behind these, again, a suburb of jerry-built Spanish houses, with the scum of Spain, is inclined to grow, which offshoot of fifth-rate Europe gives at last upon the rolling pastures and windswept hills of the open country.

Our breakfast-table brought us face to face with every traveller who passed along the great sandy track leading eventually to Fez, which people in Morocco call a road, beaten to-day and for the last two thousand years by the feet of generations of camels, mules, donkeys, horses, cattle, and mankind.

Though the wayfarers, plodding through the dusty hoof-marks, were desultory, it was quiet for few hours even at night, and under our windows we waked to an eternal shuffling in the soft sand, the champing of bits, and guttural Arabic tones.

R. and I leaned over the balcony. Women passed us wrapped in voluminous whity-yellow garments—haiks—black eyes and red slippers alone showing. Date-coloured boys passed us, wearing red fezes and dirty-white turbans. Countrymen passed us in great, coarse, brown woollen cloaks—jellabs—the hood pulled right on over the head, short wide sleeves, the front joined all down, and having scarred bare legs and feet coming out from underneath. These drove strings of diminutive donkeys, a couple of water-barrels balanced across the back of each—supplies of water for Tangier when the rain-water tanks are giving out: there are few wells in the city.

More women, veiled to the eyes, passed us, in delightful shoes—milk-coloured leather, embroidered with green: an African woman, black as a boot, with thick negro lips and yellow metal bracelets on her charcoal-sticks of arms. More donkeys passed us, carrying vegetables to market, driven by countrywomen in yellowish-white haiks, vast straw hats, and the inevitable veil. Two men passed us with an immense open box containing thousands of eggs, hung between them by a pole on the shoulder of each—export for England: forty-eight millions were sent off in 1902, and this morning's omelette might not be our first Morocco egg. A Moor of some means came by, riding at a hard-held ambling walk his star-gazing white mule: the high-peaked saddle and bridle were of scarlet cloth, the stirrup-leathers of scarlet twisted wool; he wore a creamy woollen haik, falling in soft folds down to his yellow slippers, a turban whose snowy disc of enormous size framed his cinnamon-coloured face in symmetrical folds of spotless white, and the top of a scarlet fez showed in the centre of it.

Almost opposite us a beggar had sat himself down at the edge of the road, under the shelter of the high cane fence—a grimy old greybeard, tanned and worn like a walnut, in a tattered jellab and shady turban. "For the love of God; for the love of God," he rolled out incessantly in Arabic, ending in a throaty gobble like a turkey; and the country people threw him, as they passed, of their bundles—here an orange, there a lump of charcoal—whatever it might be it was crammed into the hood of the jellab; and the sing-song and the gobble began again. In a Mohammedan country it is counted a duty as well as a holy deed to encourage beggars: almsgiving represents to the faithful Mussulman equivalent gain in Paradise; and no one starves in Morocco, though occasionally dismissed with a wave of the hand and "God provide for you." Mad people are regarded as saints, and credited with the gift of prophecy. It is an exceedingly holy thing to walk about naked. A holy man in Fez was in the habit of sitting at a missionary's gate stark naked; eventually this proceeding had to be put a stop to, because the holy man would insist upon holding the horses of the missionary's afternoon callers.

Our beggar sat in the same spot day after day, hour after hour, fatuitously happy, blissfully content. "God is great, and what is written is written": remorse, regrets, are alike unknown to Mussulmen; and it is this which dignifies their religion and themselves. Life passes lightly over them, and chisels few lines and puckers in the serene patriarchal faces—they may be scamps of the first water, for all one can tell; it sits lightly upon them.

A small boy in a white tunic and red fez, who called himself Larbi, was playing about near the beggar: being able to speak a little English, he made himself useful to visitors, and was rapidly exchanging his good qualities for the drawbacks of the hanger-on: he came out with us for a day or two, smoked several cigarettes in the course of the afternoon, and picked us useless bunches of ordinary flowers. Remonstrance was futile, but when no more little silver coins were forthcoming he left off shadowing us.

We found our own way down to the great sok, or market-place, in the wake of some donkeys carrying live cackling fowls, fastened by a bit of string and their feet to any part of the donkey and its baskets which came handy. On each side of the road and everywhere in Tangier the obstinate steely-grey cactus, or prickly pear, dominates the landscape: its fat fleshy leaves make as good a protection as the sharp-pointed aloe round the irregular plots of cultivated ground. Alternating with them, tall bound cane fences swish and rattle in the wind.

Steely-grey and a yellow-bleached white describe the vegetation of Tangier, set in its white sand-dunes. Morocco is far from having lot or part in the gorgeous East, as tradition says. To begin with, from the end of August to the end of April hazy days greatly predominate, and thirty inches of rain are put in: naturally the country and people take their cue from the general colour of the sky, from its white-yellow light, in which a wan sun is yet able to produce a glare. Morocco is yellow-white, and the Moors themselves run from the colour of cinnamon, through shades of coffee and old gold, to biscuit and skim-milk. Their houses and their clothes take on the same whites and greys, yellows and browns, and the sand and the scrub again and again repeat the tale. Perhaps it has a saddening effect, borne out in the colourless monotone of the lives of its countrywomen.

Presently we passed a skin-yard, salted goat-skins, drying by the hundred under the sun, spread upon the ground, upon the flat roofs, wherever a skin could lie, curling with dryness, the empty legs of the late owners standing stiff and upright, like petrified stockings, pointing dismally to heaven.

We overtook a string of camels as we neared the sok,