ng before. Wet through, it set as hard as a stone in the
sacks, and was useless: it lay like rocks on the beach. The bar at
Martine has been tolerated for unknown ages: there is no reason to think
that the Moor will rouse himself into making an effort and trying to
facilitate the landing of passengers and cargo.

We left upon our right as we rode along, some hundreds of yards from the
sea, the remains of what years upon years ago was a fort, built somewhat
as forts will be built in the near future--with a view to concealment.
The outside wall facing the Mediterranean was crescent-shaped, and but
four feet high at most, the sand sloping up nearly to the top, and
overgrown with vegetation, so that little or no fort showed at all. There
were a few loop-holes, through which men could shoot from the inside
lying down; there was a well in the centre of the fort, and a small
bomb-proof building, with an arched roof many feet thick, where powder
had been kept. A primitive construction, this harmless-looking little
crescent facing the sea--once upon a time bristling with dare-devil Moors
and their long guns.

Half-way to Tetuan we passed _the_ cart, the first and last I saw in the
place: its antediluvian body was set on two demented wheels, which rolled
out of the upright like a tipsy sailor. The cart was Government property:
five mules of different sizes, drew it up in a string from the sea to the
city, through the quagmire, laden with flour and kerosene oil and stores
of all descriptions, a couple of Moors toiling alongside.

R.'s "rat" was not too surefooted, and some of the floods were deep: once
it came on its nose, but a second time sat down in a hole in the middle
of a sheet of water, leaving nothing for its rider but to slip off and
wade out, walking afterwards wherever the track allowed, to raise a
little circulation underneath drenched clothes. A certain melancholy
possessed the flats as well as our vexed selves that stormy and
ill-fortuned morning. In places the tops of the grass-blades alone showed
in a green watery waste, except where tall dark rushes made a heavier
mass, or where the tufts of red-brown tangle lay in warm lines. The sea
behind us was an angry purple; the Riff Mountains were steel-blue; the
nearer hills now black, now gold in fitful sun-gleams, now crossed by a
rainbow. Only in the north there was a great break, and a light like
brass, behind Ape's Hill. Tradition has it that a subterranean passage