nd the britching, put all to
rights for the time being. Later on a stirrup-leather broke.

Following our winding path, we reached at last a white saint-house, which
dominated a little hill overgrown with gnarled grey olives, and acted
guardian over a large and flourishing village which lay below,--at least
it was a collection of mud huts, and more of them than usual, but, like
so many of these "villages," seemed to all intents and purposes
deserted--a city of the dead. Many of the inhabitants were out no doubt,
but those who were in were not tempted by curiosity to stare at us:
without windows there can be no signs of the rites which are carried on
inside the houses. All we saw were dogs, fierce brutes, which stones
alone kept at a distance, where they sat showing their teeth and
bristling their crests ominously.

The saint-house, of course, was forbidden ground: we went as close as
common sense permitted, and from under the shady olives looked back at
Tetuan down below us, a snow-white streak in the valley.

Some rags were hanging upon a bush near us. It is an interesting and
curious practice, that of hanging votive rags upon the bushes around
chapels and holy shrines: no less venerable is the performance of
pilgrimages to the same. Both practices go back into the dim ages. They
are in use to this day amongst the Shintoists of Japan, and the
inhabitants of Northern Asia, India, the Orkneys, and remote corners of
Ireland, where sickly children are dipped in streams, or passed through
holes in stones or trees so many times running, going against the way of
the sun, in order to produce the effect of making the sick child as
strong as a lion. Then an offering must be made to the saint, and a rag
is torn off somebody's garment, and tied to a bush near his grave, to
show that they would have done more for the good saint if they had had
the power.

Rag-trees, burdened with the tattered offerings of the devout and
impecunious tribes-people, flourish throughout Morocco,--signs hanging
out, and blown by the wind, in the face of travellers; warnings of the
deep-rooted superstition entangled in the innermost heart-cells of its
people, to be disturbed at imminent peril.

Leaving the saint-house and village, we struck a path upwards into a wild
gorge, at the bottom of which a brawling torrent was tumbling. It turned
many rude mills, and there were lush fields of corn on its banks. Far
away in the grey distance now, to the north