ourtyard beyond: there he sat
down in a corner upon a seat--a great figure, much like some Indian
god--while his underlings came forward, stood in a semicircle, bowed low,
and saluted him; followed by his soldiers, who marched in single file
into the courtyard, round it, past their chief, and out again--this three
times, to the sound of drums; then, headed by the officer in command,
they trooped off to the barracks, the basha's gateway was locked, and
Church Parade was over.

[Illustration: THE BASHA GOING TO PRAY.

[_To face p. 198._]

For half an hour all the gates of the city had been barred and bolted,
while prayers were going on--there being a superstition among the Moors,
arising from an old prophecy, that on a certain morning of a
Mohammedan Sabbath, Christians will gain possession of the cities while
the kaids and bashas are in the mosques.

Two hundred soldiers are allowed by Government to the governor of Tetuan,
by means of which he is to maintain law and order. However, a hundred
only were maintained, and the pay of the remaining half went into
somebody's pocket. There was apparently little for them to do; drill was
a thing unheard of, and they spent most of the day hanging round the
basha's house or doing errands for him.

On the feast days there was _Lab-el-Barod_--the famous "Powder Play" of
Morocco; and then the soldiers all turned out into the _feddan_ (the
great market-square), and showed what Lab-el-Barod meant: to me rather a
foolish game, with but one interesting point--that it is the imitation of
the old Arab tribal battle. To-day the Moors gallop forward, stand up in
their saddles, fire their guns under their horses' necks, over their
tails--all this at full gallop--throw their guns into the air and catch
them, and last of all pull up in an incredibly short space, dragging
their horses right on to their haunches, which evolutions are imitations
of what their ancestors did with spear and javelin. Lab-el-Barod
prevailed in Spain till the middle of the eighteenth century, and it is
still played in the East with reeds. There is of course a picturesque
element in it--white turbans, white garments streaming in the wind,
scarlet saddles, flashing steel, hard-held horses with yards of tail, and
above all, the lithe figures in perfect balance whatever their positions;
but the performance is often too "ragged" to be impressive, and it
strenuously demands flats of desert as a background.

The basha wou