o mark a reef or shoal, nor is there any harbour, and no
steamer dares to lie close in-shore off a port at night. Therefore, as
there are several ports at which cargo has generally to be landed or
taken on board, steamers go on the line of steaming all night, and lying
outside a port in the daytime, while boats carry cargo between them and
the shore. Rabat, Casablanca, Mazagan--we stopped at them all, and got
accustomed to the eternal clank of the crane hoisting bales in and out
of the boats; to rolling on to the backs and down into the troughs of
the Atlantic combers.

Finally, we reached Mogador early on the morning of Good Friday, 1902,
and said good-bye to the uneasy _Arpad_ and its primitive _menage_
without regret: irregular, white-walled Mogador, set in its rock-locked
harbour, lay in front of us. It was the hot south--there was no doubt
about that. The Riviera is called "the sunny south," and Tangier is
warmer than the Riviera; but penetrate inland into Africa, go down as far
as Mogador, and it is another thing altogether. Here there is no _trace_
of Europe, but a great sense of being far away in letter and spirit from
England--farther away than Bombay, and many another place, which
out-distances it in miles again and again.

We saw Mogador first in a grey light: heavy thunder-clouds hung above;
dim and visionary hills lay behind; a regiment of camels paraded the wet
sands in front, and lay in the sun underneath the battlemented walls;
black flags floated from the mosque-tops, for it was the Mussulman
Sunday. For the rest Mogador is a city of sea and sand--sand, sand, and
yet more sand: it takes two hours' riding to get to anything else except
sand.

With the grey waves washing round two sides of it, and two sides blown
and sanded by desert wastes, white-walled Mogador has a somewhat saddened
aspect, as of lifeless bleached bones, apart from the fact that it is so
far removed from the outer world.

And infinitely remote, it certainly is. A telegram takes about a
fortnight to reach England; so that an answer by wire to a wire can be
expected in about a month. A letter sent by a special courier to Tangier
takes eight days--a distance of four hundred miles: by this means a wire
could be sent to England in nine days. The steamers to Mogador are most
irregular, because, in view of there being no safe anchorage, a boat will
not put in in bad weather. Cargo, passengers, and mails are often and
often enough not land