the
city where women are allowed to pray, but only upon one night in the
whole year in El-Jama-el-Kebeer--a field-day among the wives and
concubines, who flit like white moths through the darkness in flocks to
worship, carrying red-and-blue lanterns.

At last we reached the house of the Moor upon whom Mr. Bewicke intended
us to call--a specimen of the best Moorish houses.

Alarbi Abresha has been nicknamed "the Duke of Westminster"--the
wealthiest man in Tetuan. A slave responded to the hammer of the great
knocker, demanded who knocked, and then opened the door. Alarbi Abresha
was out; but his son, a youth badly marked with small-pox, received us,
dressed in a jellab of pale blue, tasselled, and worked in white. Mr.
Bewicke asked after _the house_. No one in Morocco inquires after the
wife or family distinctively.

[Illustration: _Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._]

ALARBI ABRESHA'S HOUSE.

[_To face p. 54._]

A long passage led us into a large _patio_ (courtyard), in which
orange-trees were growing. It was open to the sky, the floor tiled
with shining tesselated tile-work; a marble fountain rippled in the
middle: the dado round the four walls, the three rows of pillars which on
all sides supported the gallery above--all were tiled in the same mosaic
of small saffron-yellow, powder-blue, and white tiles, which are baked,
coloured, and glazed in primitive potteries outside the city, and made
only in Tetuan and Fez. A Moorish house is the essence of purity and
light, with its whitewashed walls, its absence of all stifling furniture,
and its capability of being sluiced down from top to bottom every day
with rivers of water by barefooted slaves.

"The Duke" had spared no dollars to make his house beautiful. Of the
triple row of arches, supported by the pillars round the patio, the
outside row was a plain horse-shoe, the inner toothed, the inmost carved.
Through an avenue of pillars the rooms all round the patio look out upon
the fountain and the orange-trees. Slaves occupied them. The kitchen also
and the hummum are always on the ground floor. We were taken up to the
first floor by the tiled staircase, with a plaster fan-shell ceiling, and
were shown into the best room--the room belonging to the master of the
house. The tiled floor was hidden by an ugly modern French carpet in
strips: white and coloured mattresses were laid all round the walls upon
the floor instead of chairs. Two immense brass bedsteads stood in
rec