to the big mosque one by one for midday prayers, each leaving
his shoes behind him and stepping over the high doorstep barefoot on to
the marble floor beyond, thence disappearing behind the ponderous green
iron doors, where the great line is drawn between Europeans and Asiatics,
debarring from entry any except Mussulmen.

The Villa Valentina breakfasted at 12.45, and cut the morning short. We
were out again later with a guide--Hadj Riffi he called himself--bent on
a visit to the _Kasbah_, or fortress of the city.

Hadj Riffi provided a donkey and pack, which of all substitutes for
saddles is most foolish, intended only for loads of all sorts to be slung
across them; but packs are easy to slip off and on, and have answered
their purpose in Morocco since the days when in Judaea Mary rode on one to
Bethlehem.

Conducted through the queer, intricate city, we wound along maze-like
alleys three or four feet wide, ever the old aromatic smell of the East,
almost impossible to recall, yet recognized again in an instant's flash,
and born of the Oriental world we jostled against--of Berbers, Arabs,
negroes, men from the Sahara, men from the mountains of the Riff, Turks,
Greeks, Levantines, Syrians, even an occasional Hindoo, all wanderers up
and down the earth, unable to resist the call of the open road,
engendered by nomadic habits of old.

[Illustration: R. ON A PACK.

[_To face p. 12._]

One word on the inhabitants of the country. The Berbers are the
aborigines of Morocco, and live more or less in the hills and
mountains, into which they were driven by the Arabs in the seventh
century, when they overran Morocco. The Arabs, on the other hand, live in
the plains; and Arabs and Berbers practically halve the country between
them. Both peoples divide into numerous tribes, of which the men from the
Riff are a Berber tribe. The negroes in Morocco are merely slaves
imported from the south. One and all the Arab and Berber tribes are
called indiscriminately by Europeans "Moors." The other wanderers in
Tangier filter through the land from their own countries: who can tell
why or wherefore? Hadj Riffi himself had obeyed his Prophet Mohammed in
so far as to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. A journey the prospect of
which would horrify a tradesman at home is undertaken by an
earnest-minded shop-keeping Moor as a matter of course. What are the
twelve uncomfortable days by sea to Jeddah? Or the journey thence to
Mecca, lying stretched in a