f the second
visit which alone makes it possible to carry away a definite and
detailed impression.

These drawbacks were more than offset by the advantage of making my
quick trip at a moment unique in the history of the country; the brief
moment of transition between its virtually complete subjection to
European authority, and the fast approaching hour when it is thrown open
to all the banalities and promiscuities of modern travel.

Morocco is too curious, too beautiful, too rich in landscape and
architecture, and above all too much of a novelty, not to attract one of
the main streams of spring travel as soon as Mediterranean passenger
traffic is resumed. Now that the war is over, only a few months' work on
roads and railways divide it from the great torrent of "tourism"; and
once that deluge is let loose, no eye will ever again see Moulay Idriss
and Fez and Marrakech as I saw them.

In spite of the incessant efforts of the present French administration
to preserve the old monuments of Morocco from injury, and her native
arts and industries from the corruption of European bad taste, the
impression of mystery and remoteness which the country now produces must
inevitably vanish with the approach of the "Circular Ticket." Within a
few years far more will be known of the past of Morocco, but that past
will be far less visible to the traveller than it is to-day. Excavations
will reveal fresh traces of Roman and Phenician occupation; the remote
affinities between Copts and Berbers, between Bagdad and Fez, between
Byzantine art and the architecture of the Souss, will be explored and
elucidated, but, while these successive discoveries are being made, the
strange survival of mediaeval life, of a life contemporary with the
crusaders, with Saladin, even with the great days of the Caliphate of
Bagdad, which now greets the astonished traveller, will gradually
disappear, till at last even the mysterious autocthones of the Atlas
will have folded their tents and silently stolen away.

II

Authoritative utterances on Morocco are not wanting for those who can
read them in French, but they are to be found mainly in large and often
inaccessible books, like M. Doutte's "En Tribu," the Marquis de
Segonzac's remarkable explorations in the Atlas, or Foucauld's classic
(but unobtainable) "Reconnaissance au Maroc", and few, if any, have been
translated into English.

M. Louis Chatelain has dealt with the Roman ruins of Volubilis and M.