Morocco
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Morocco

Pierre Loti

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eBook - ePub

Morocco

Pierre Loti

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About This Book

First Published in 2002. Pierre Loti was a member of a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco at Fez, and in this book he gives us
an extraordinarily fascinating account of the journey. The departure of the caravan from Tangier, the encampments, the nightly arrival of the Mouna, the crossing of the Oued-M'Cazen in flood, the fantasies and 'powder-play' of the Arab horsemen, and the magnificent state entry into Fez, are described in a succession of vivid vignettes.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781136889974

MOROCCO

CHAPTER I

26th March 1889.
FROM the southern coast of Spain, from Algeciras, from Gibraltar, one may descry in the distance, on the farther shore, Tangier the White.
It is quite near our Europe, this first of Moroccan towns, posted like a sentinel on the most northern point of Africa; one may reach it by steamboat in three or four hours, and every winter it becomes the resort of a great number of tourists. It is very commonplace to-day, and the Sultan of Morocco, for his part, has half abandoned it to its foreign visitors, averting his eyes from it as from a town unfaithful.
Viewed from the sea, it looks almost smiling, jvith its neighbouring villas, built in the European manner in gardens ; though still perhaps a little strange, and much more Mussulman in aspect than our towns of Algeria, with its walls of snowy whiteness, its high embattled kasbah, and its minarets decorated with old faience.
It is curious, too, how the impression on arrival is more penetrating here than in any other of the African ports of the Mediterranean. Despite the tourists who disembark with me, despite the stray French signs which here and there are displayed before the hotels and bazaars, I experience, as I land to-day on this quay of Tangier in the bright noon sunshine, a sense of translation into anterior times. How far away all at once seem the Spain in which I was this morning, the railway, the swift, comfortable steamboat, the epoch in which I thought I lived ! Here, it is as if a white shroud impended over everything, shutting out the sounds that exist elsewhere, stilling all the modern activities of life: the old shroud of Islam, which in a few days no doubt, when we shall have advanced farther into this sombre land, will envelop us more closely, but which even now, here on the threshold, casts a spell upon us, freshly come, as we are, from Europe.
Two attendants in the service of our Minister, Selem and Kaddour, like Biblical figures in their long, flowing, woollen robes, are waiting at the landing stage to lead us to the French legation.
They precede us gravely, clearing from our path, with sticks, the innumerable little donkeys which take the place of barrows and carts, here quite unknown. By a kind of narrow road we climb to the town, between crenellated walls, which rise in steps one above the other, mournful and white like dead snows. The people we meet, white, too, like the walls, trail their slippers through the dust with a majestic heedlessness, and merely to see them pass is to divine how little they are holden of the business of our century.
In the main street, which we have to traverse, are a number of Spanish shops, a number, too, of French and English placards, and with the white-robed crowd is mingled, alas! a number of gentlemen in cork helmets and elegant tourist misses, whose cheeks bear witness to the burning of the sun. But, for all that, Tangier is still very Arab, even in the quarter of its traders.
And, farther on, as we approach the French legation, where hospitality has been offered me, begins the labyrinth of little narrow streets swathed in white chalk, which remain intact, even as in the olden times.

CHAPTER II

ON the evening of this same day of arrival, at the setting of the sun, I pay my first visit to our encampment, which is being made ready outside the walls, on a somewhat lonely height overlooking Tangier.
It is quite a little nomad town, already set up, already inhabited by the Arabs of our escort. Around, our horses, our camels, our pack-mules, tethered by ropes, are cropping a short and very fragrant grass; it might be an encampment of any tribe you please, a douar; the whole exhales a strong odour of Bedouin, and from the tent of the camel-drivers issue mournful songs in falsetto and thin twangings of guitars.
All this, men, beasts and material, has been sent by the Sultan to our Minister. I watch for a considerable time this congeries of men and things, which presently will accompany us in our plunge into this unknown country with which we shall have to live and share our days.
The oncoming night, the wind which rises at twilight, accentuate, as is their wont, the impression of strangeness in a strange land which this Morocco made upon me from the start.
In the west the pale yellow sky, intensely cold, has an extraordinary clearness ; below me, in the distance, is Tangier, looking at this hour like a scattering of cubes of stone on the slope of a mountain; its whitenesses, in the gathering dusk, assume the bluish tint of ice; beyond, stretches the deeper blue of the sea; and beyond that again, a silhouette of slate-coloured grey, is the coast of Spain, of Europe, a near neighbour with which this country, it would seem, has as little as possible to do. And this point of the world which is my world, which I left no more than a few hours ago, seen from here, seems to me all at once to have become astonishingly remote.
I return to Tangier by way of the marketplace, which lies a little above the town, outside the old crenellated walls and the old ogival gates. It is nearly dark. On the ground, covering a space some hundred yards square, is a layer of brown things which grumble feebly : kneeling camels, on the point of sleeping, pellmell with Bedouins and bales of merchandise; caravans that have set out perhaps from the confines of the desert, by routes dangerous and unmapped, to reach their journey’s end here at the end of old Africa; here, in the face of the foreland of Europe, at the threshold of our modern civilisation. Sounds of raucous human voices and gruntings of beasts rise from the confused masses which cover the ground. Before a little fire, which burns yellow, in the midst of a squatting circle of men, a negro sorcerer sings softly and beats his drum. The night air, freshening more and more, toys with reddish-yellow exhalations. In its limpid depths the sky is cove ed with stars. And, at this moment, an Arab bagpipe begins to wail, dominating all other sounds with its harsh, squeaking note. I had forgotten this sound ; years not a few have passed since last it harrowed my ears. It sets me shuddering and leaves me with a very vivid, very thrilling impression of Africa ; one of those impressions of the days of arrival which are not to be renewed in the succeeding days, when the faculty of comparison has been blunted by contact with new things.
The bagpipe continues, with a kind of swelling exaltation, its monotonous, heart-rending air. I stop and listen to it. It seems to me that the song it sings is the hymn of ancient days, the hymn of dead pasts. And I feel for a moment a strange pleasure in thinking that I am yet only on the threshold, only at the entrance, profaned by all the world, of this empire of Al Moghreb into which I am soon to penetrate, that Fez, which is the goal of our journey, is far away, under the burning sun, in the heart of this closed, unchanging country, where life remains the same to day as it was a thousand years ago.

CHAPTER III

EIGHT days of waiting, of preparations, of delays.
During this week passed at Tangier we have made numerous journeys to and fro, to examine tents, to choose and try horses and mules. And many times we have climbed the height beyond, where our camp has been gradually augmented by the addition of a considerable number of men and things—in the face always of the distant coast of Europe.
The departure is fixed at last for to-morrow morning.
Since yesterday, the approaches to the French legation have resembled a place of emigration or of pillage. The little streets, tortuous and white, of the immediate neighbourhood are encumbered with enormous bales, with hundreds of packing-cases ; all covered with Moroccan cloth striped in many colours and tied with ropes of reed-grass.

CHAPTER IV

4th April.
TO guard our innumerable packages, our men have slept in the street, buried each in his burnous, head hidden in hood, looking like so many heaps of grey wool.
At break of day this dormant world emerges from its crouching torpor, awakens and begins to move. First, a few tentative cries, the unsteady steps of men still half-asleep ; then, almost in a moment, shouting, wrangling. The Arab language, indeed, with its harshness and panting aspirations, gives always the impression, in the mouth of men of the people, that it is the vehicle of a torrent of abuse.
And this general uproar, which increases as the minutes pass, drowns the customary sounds of the morning: the crowing of cocks, the neighing of horses, the grunting of camels in the nearest caravanserai.
Before sunrise the din has become a thing infernal: shrill cries, such as monkeys utter; a savage hurly-burly that might well strike terror. As I lie half-awake I could imagine, if I were not used to these uproars of Africa, that a fight, and one of a most barbarous kind, was proceeding under my window ; that throats were being cut, that destruction was afoot. But I tell myself, simply: “Our beasts are arriving and the muleteers are beginning to load them”
It is an awkward business, truly, to load some five score obstinate mules and stupid camels, in little streets that are barely two yards across. Some of the animals, no longer finding room to turn, neigh in distress ; some of the loads, larger than the rest, foul the walls in passing; there are obstructions, collisions, kickings.
At about eight o’clock the tumult is at its height. From the terrace of the legation, as far as one can see in the neighbourhood, the streets are thronged with a confused mass of men and beasts, bellowing with all their might. Besides the pack-mules, there are the mules of the Arabs of our escort, harnessed in a thousand colours, with high Arab saddles on their backs, and housings of red, blue and yellow cloth, which serve them as robes. Brown-visaged, whitecloaked cavaliers are already astride them, their long, slender guns s’ung across their shoulders. And the whole of this caravan, which is to pre-cede us under the conduct and responsibility of a kaid sent by the Sultan, gets under way little by little, laboriously, individually; by dint of cries and blows it all winds towards the gate of the town, leaving at last the little streets around us empty.
Then comes the turn of the beggars—and they are many at Tangier. The fools, the idiots, the cripples, the eyeless folk with bloody sockets in place of pupils, besiege the legation to bid us good-bye. And, following custom, the Minister, appearing on the threshold, scatters some handfuls of silver coins, that he may merit for us the prayers that will bring good fortune to our caravan.
The time of our own departure is fixed for one o’clock in the afternoon. The point of rendezvous is the market-place, there where on the evening of my arrival I had a first and unforgettable audition of the Arab bagpipe.
This vast esplanade of earth and stones lies above the town and is for ever encumbered with a compact layer of kneeling camels, for ever thronged by a cloaked and hooded crowd, which itself partakes of the dun colour of earth. Eve ything that arrives from the interior and everything that leaves to return thither is grouped and huddled in this market-place. And here, from morning till evening, resound the drums and pipe the flutes of the sorcerers, the casters of lots, the fire-eaters and snakecharmers.
To-day the formation of our caravan brings to the place an increase of movement and tumult. Soon after midday, in the bright sunshine, the first of our cavaliers arrive, our escort of honour, our kaids and the standard bearer of the Sultan, who, throughout the journey, will march at our head.
To-day is a market day : hundreds of camels, bald and hideous, are on their knees in the dust, stretching from right or left, with the undulations of a caterpillar, their long hairless necks; and the crowd of peasants and of poor, in grey burnouses, in sayons of brown wool, moves confusedly among these masses of recumbent beasts. It is an immense medley in one same dull and neutral shade, which makes all the more resplendent, in the glorious light of the distance, the town all white, surmounted by green minarets, and the Mediterranean all blue. And, against the monotonous background of this crowd, stands out more vividly, too, the Oriental colouring of the cavaliers of our suite, the caftans pink, the caftans orange, the caftans yellow, the saddles of red cloth, the saddles of velvet.
Our mission consists of fifteen persons, of whom seven of us are officers; our uniforms, also, contribute to this picture of departure a note of diversity, of colour, of gold. Five blue-cloaked African guards accompany us; and, in addition, the whole of the European colony has come on horseback to swell our train : foreign ministers, attaches of the embassy, artists, all kinds of pleasant people.
And here, too, is the Pasha of Tangier, come to conduct us out of his territory : an old man with the head of a prophet, white bearded, clothed all in white, on a red-saddled white mule led by four servants. The whole cavalcade, in its motley confusion, has an air of festive pageantry, of joyous carnival.
Let us return for a last tim...

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