_basha_ (governor) of Tetuan, and to offer him presents.

They had fired off a good deal of blank powder, and a stray bullet or two
into the Consul's garden door; had rushed about the _feddan_
(market-place), discharging their guns; and had thrown stones at some
one. On their way to Tetuan the thousand odd had pillaged right and left,
stealing fruit and robbing houses. Finding some women washing, they stole
the clothes, and report said two women as well. At last twenty of them
were caught and put into prison, after which the nine hundred and eighty
marched back to their own country.

Lunch over, we walked with Mr. Bewicke into the city. While Tangier might
be called an anaemic copy of a Moorish town, Tetuan has the strength of a
_bona-fide_ life-study, and all that is curiously beautiful, strangely
obscure, is unsparingly suggested. The longer a European lives there, the
more the paradoxes in Moorish life force themselves upon him, and the
more tangible grow certain intuitions which his surroundings convey.

It is not only such contradictions as lie on the surface--the squalor of
some filthy fondak, the emaciated raw-skinned donkeys, the bent-backed
women, rubbing shoulders with the white-scented robes, the sleek mules,
the luxurious tiled houses--these a blind man could see: the
under-currents which will puzzle an Englishman more the longer he lives
there are known to those only who have dwelt much in Morocco, and they
belong by every right to a life which is drawn to the letter in "The
Arabian Nights."

The ramifications of the narrow streets in Tetuan would take a quarter of
a lifetime to master, and then an unexplored alley might be found, though
it is easy to walk across the entire length or breadth of the city in ten
minutes. Down a dozen intricacies we dived with Mr. Bewicke, through a
labyrinth, half dark in places, where houses built overhead shut out the
sun. Looking along the narrow streets, the buildings jostle one another,
and the flat blank walls slope backwards out of the upright, at every
turn a haphazard colour-scheme in white and mauve and chocolate, in blue
and ochre and cream.

Here a long dark tunnel opens into sunlight and shops on each side, with
great vines trailed on trellis-work--like a pergola--overhead, and
sunlight in blotches on the cobbled paving below: there, just beyond, the
_Slipper Quarter_, and we find ourselves in the thick of the tap-tap of
the mallets on the hard-hammered leat