nto the great fiery
furnace underneath, a man is thrusting dry brown bushes, and dried
prickly pear, and whatever rubbish will burn. Much of it has been hacked
off the hillside by women, and has come on their backs many a mile. There
is a crackling sound, smoke comes out, and a pink flame glows behind the
man's body. The tiles ought to bake all right.

Meanwhile, the same boy inside the cave has got his clay into good
order--it is about two inches thick, and something the size of a big
round table; then he stoops down, and, with a knife held in both hands,
scores the clay across, much as toffee is scored; which done, each
square, about a foot in diameter, is carried off to be cut up into little
shapes or to go upon the potter's wheel.

The potter sat in his little pit, working the wheel with his foot--as
Carlyle says, "one of the venerablest objects, old as the Prophet Ezekiel
and far older. Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere
quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes."

The potter thumped his wet clay; then, as the wheel turned, pressed and
moulded it with clever clay-encrusted hands: the sleeves were turned back
from his bony chocolate-coloured arms. He had a grey goatee and a quiet
smile, a dirty turban round his head, a white tunic mostly clay, and
underneath a claret-coloured garment showed at the neck.

He was a spare, wizened old man: perhaps his work, like Dante's, had made
him "lean for many years." The faster his wheel revolved, the truer
apparently was the shape of the vessel he turned out. His country might
accept the lesson--that labour, like the wheel, conduces towards a good
end. I fancy that a decadent people, who will neither work nor spin, but
choose to rest and lie at ease, give the potter Destiny no chance. He has
no wheel, this potter--for Morocco will not labour, nor be broken, nor
disciplined; and so he is reduced to a mere kneading and baking, without
the means he fain would employ; and he turns out a mere makeshift--his
production at best is "not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked,
shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch--a mere enamelled vessel of
dishonour."

[Illustration: SELLING EARTHENWARE POTS.

[_To face p. 178._]

The great pot which the potter slowly evolved out of the soft brown clay
under our eyes was not perfect: he made it entirely by eye, and it
matched the rest of the group to the ordinary observer; yet it had a
distinct "lean." Did it g