bserved were now no longer regarded; things
sacred and things prophane had now lost their distinction, and
universal despair pervaded mankind. Young, healthy, and robust
persons of full stamina, were, for the most part, attacked first,
then women and children, and lastly, thin, sickly, emaciated, and
old people.

[Footnote 129: I have been informed that there are still at
Marocco, apartments wherein the dead were placed; and that
after the whole family was swept away the doors were built up,
and remain so to this day.]

[Footnote 130: There died, during the whole of the above
periods, in the city of Marocco, 50,000; in Fas, 65,000; in
Mogodor, 4500; and in Saffy, 5000; in all 124,500 souls!]

After this violent and deadly calamity had subsided, we beheld a
general alteration in the fortunes and circumstances of men; we saw
persons who before the plague were common labourers, now in
possession of thousands, and keeping horses without knowing how to
ride them. Parties of this description were met wherever we went,
171 and the men of family called them in derision _el wuratu_, the
inheritors.[131] Provisions also became extremely cheap and
abundant; the flocks and herds had been left in the fields, and
there was now no one to own them; and the propensity to plunder, so
notoriously attached to the character of the Arab, as well as to
the Shelluh and Moor, was superseded by a conscientious regard to
justice, originating from a continual apprehension of dissolution,
and that the _el khere_[132], as the plague was now called, was a
judgment of the Omnipotent on the disobedience of man, and that it
behoved every individual to amend his conduct, as a preparation to
his departure for paradise.

[Footnote 131: _Des gens parvenus_, as the French express it;
or upstarts.]

[Footnote 132: The good, or benediction.]

The expense of labour at the same time increased enormously[133],
and never was equality in the human species more conspicuous than
at this time; when corn was to be ground, or bread baked, both were
performed in the houses of the affluent, and prepared by
themselves, for the very few people whom the plague had spared,
were insufficient to administer to the wants of the rich and
independent, a