he years, shimmer in the
sunshine like peacocks' tails.

[Illustration: THE ROAD TO FEZ.

[_To face p. 6._]

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 _debris_ 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