stitute the vans and railway-trucks of
Morocco, substituting over the face of the land a dilatory calm in the
place of speed and bustle.

But at first it was a real effort to take in a tenth part of surroundings
so different from those of England; and when we found ourselves in the
sok--the _hub_ of Moorish life--it was to be jostled by donkey-drivers
shouting "Baarak! Baarak!" by black water-carriers from the Sus country,
by veiled women, by negroes from Timbuctoo, by mules and camels, by men
walking, men riding, without one sight or sound familiar, in a
dream-world of intense life, recalling nothing so much as the Old
Testament. It was worth the journey out from home to see this sok--an
open space crawling with brown-and-white, cloaked and hooded humanity,
mixed up with four-legged beasts, also brown, and the whole more like a
magnified ant-hill on the flat than anything human. In front of the
squatted country people their stock-in-trade lay in piles, gorgeous in
tone: oranges and oranges and more oranges, selling at one thousand seven
hundred for a shilling; scarlet chillies--hot blots of colour; pink
onions; red carrots; white salt, collected down on the beach; green
pumpkins blotched with yellow; besides grain of all sorts, basketsful of
charcoal, bundles of wood, dried fruit, flat round loaves of bread,
cabbages, and what not. The sound of a perpetual muffin-bell was ringing
backwards and forwards--the _bhisti_ of Tangier, with his hairy
goatskinful of water across his back, and two bright brass bowls hung by
a chain round his neck, a bell in one hand, with the other dealing out
drinks of water for a Moorish copper coin of which a penny contains
fifteen.

We elbowed our way through the _Bab-el-Sok_, or Gate of the Market-place,
into the city, and found ourselves in a long, narrow, straight street,
dropping down to the _marsa_, or harbour. The irregular, light
colour-washed houses jut out promiscuously over the minute cupboard-like
shops crammed with oddments of every sort and hue, and leaving scanty
room for the owner to squat on some carpet or mattress, until it strikes
him that it is time to eat or go to prayers, and he locks up the double
doors of his "store cupboard" and strolls away.

Looking down this attenuated Piccadilly of Tangier, over the white
turbans and red fezes of the multitude, right away at the far end a field
of blue sea was to be seen: half-way between, the faithful were beginning
to pass in