proached them. Their street costume was not
elaborate a voluminous linen mantle, appar-
ently covering nothing but a wide-sleeved che-
mise reaching to the instep and caught at the
waist. Their bare feet were thrust into half-
slippers, and their finger-tips stained with henna.
Some had only one eye visible. In the younger
women, that one pensive black eye peering out



\



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 155

from the snowy coif was very piquant. The
Hebrew maidens were not so avaricious of
themselves, but let their beauty frankly blos-
som in doorways and at upper casements.
Many of the girls were as slender and graceful
as vines. In their apparel they appeared to
affect solid colors blues, ochres, carmines,
and olive greens. They have a beautiful na-
tional dress, which is worn only in private.
The Jewesses of Tangier are famous for their
eyes, teeth, and complexions, and for their
figures in early maidenhood. At thirty -five
they are shapeless old women,

" Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

The increasing number of passers-by, and a
confused buzz of voices that grew every mo-
ment more audible, indicated that we were
nearing some centre of traffic or pleasure.
Leaving a fearful alley behind us an alley
where heaps of refuse were piled in the middle
of the footpath, and the body of a collapsed cat
or dog was continually blocking the way we
issued upon the place of the bazaars a narrow
winding hillside thoroughfare, paved with cob-
blestones, and lined on either hand by a series
of small alcoves scooped in the masonry.

In each of these recesses a Jew or an Arab
merchant sat cross-legged upon a little counter,
with his goods piled within convenient reach



156 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

on shelves at his side and over his head. The
counter, which rose to the height of the cus-
tomer's breast, was really the floor of the shop.
In one booth nothing was sold but steel-work
Damascus blades (manufactured round the
corner) with richly wrought hilts ; slim Moorish
guns with a profusion of mother-of-pearl and
tortoise-shell inlay on the breeches ; shields,
chains, spurs, bits, and the like. In an angle
of the wall, near this booth, was a half-naked
sword-grinder serving a Bedouin, who leaned
on a spear-handle, and with critical eye watched
the progress of the workman. Here was a
tobacconist, with fragrant Latakia to dispose
of, and snake-stemmed nargilehs in which to
burn it ; there, a fruiterer, buried in figs and
dates and sweetmeat confections ; farther on,
a jeweller, or a dealer in knickknacks, or a sad-
dle-maker. The smartest shops were those of
the cloth merchants. At their doors were dis-
played rose-colored caftans, rivulets of scarfs
shot with silver thread, broidered towels,
Daghestan rugs, bright fabrics from Rabatt
and Tetuan.

There was no lack of color or animation in
the crowd ; no lack of customers beating their
bosoms and exploding with incredulity at the
prices demanded (I saw an old Berber in front
of one bazaar tear off his turban and trample



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 157

on it, to show he would give no such price) ; no
lack of peripatetic venders interfering with
legitimate trade ; no lack of noisy water-sellers,
each with his sprig of scented shrub laid over
his water-skin ; there was, in brief, no lack of
anything proper to the scene and the moment ;
yet I had a sense of disappointment, and prob-
ably expressed it in my face.

" Then you would be disappointed in the
bazaars at Damascus," said the Hadji sadly, for
he had the honor of Tangier at heart. " This
is Damascus, or any Eastern city, in small. In
the great capitals you would see more, but no-
thing different. The bazaars at Constantinople
are gay, yes ; of European gayety, you under-
stand only half national. These are the
shops of the people such as you will see through
the East. But there are other establishments
of richer merchants, to which the wise go. I
will take you to one. It is not far."

Before quitting the mart, I entered into a
slight mercantile transaction with the fruiterer,
which resulted in filling both my pockets to the
top with copper coins the surprising change
due me out of a two-franc piece. These coins
are worth about a dollar a bushel. The five-
pointed star, or Solomon's ring, stamped on
one side, is supposed to be a talisman against
the evil eye ; but it can scarcely reconcile the



158 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

Moors to the fact that the government pays
its debts in this wretched currency, called y?#,
and will receive nothing for imposts and taxes
but silver or gold. I was glad, later on, to de-
posit that copper with a necromancer in the
Soc-de-Barra, to see what he could do with it.

The shop of one of the richer merchants to
which the wise go, and where the Hadji incon-
tinently took me, was located on the second
floor of a private house in an adjacent side
street. As it was the sole house that was
likely to show me its penetralia, I noted that it
had a square court in the centre open to the
sky, and that all the apartments in the second
story gave upon a gallery overlooking this court-
yard. Here were three large rooms packed
from floor to cornice with a little of everything
on earth arms, jewelry, costumes, bronzes,
Moorish fai'ence, sandalwood boxes, amber
beads, old brass lamps (for which any Aladdin
would have been glad to exchange new ones),
and bale upon bale of silks and fairy textures
from looms of Samarcand and Bokhara. Here,
also, was a merchant who pulled a face as
smooth as a mirror while he demanded four
times the value of his merchandise. Neverthe-
less, I purchased, on reasonable enough terms,
a chiselled brass cresset and an ancient Moor-
ish scent-bottle in silver. But the possession



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 159

of these did not console me for all the tantaliz-
ing drapery and golden bric-a-brac I was unable
to purchase.

" Not to desire or admire, if a man could learn it, were more
Than to walk all day like the Sultan of old in a garden of
spice."

The truly wise would n't go to the shop of
Selam-Ben-Rhaman !

Passing out into the open air again, we
threaded several tortuous lanes, which clearly
had not been visited by a scavenger's cart within
the present century, and struck the main street
at a point near the double gates leading to the
Soc-de-Barra. Speaking of carts, there is not
one of any description in Tangier. If the
pedestrian gets himself run over there, it must
be by a donkey pure and simple.

A dozen steps brought us outside the tur-
reted wall of the town to the foot of the hill
called Soc-de-Barra, upon a slope of which was
the market-place a barren stretch of sun-
scorched earth, broken at intervals by dunes
of reddish-gray sand. In the middle fore-
ground was the caved-in mausoleum of some
forgotten saint, and on the ridge of the slope
an old cemetery, so dreary with its few hope-
less fig-trees and aloes that it made the heart
ache to look at it. Nothing ever gave me such
a poignant sense of death and dusty oblivion



160 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

as those crumbling tombs overshadowing the
clamorous and turbulent life on the hillside.

At first the spectacle was bewildering, and it
was only by concentrating my attention on de-
tached groups and figures that I was able to
form any distinct impression of it. One's eyes
were dazzled by the innumerable purple caftans
and red fezes and snowy turbans, mingling and
separating, and melting every instant into some
grotesque and harmonious combination, like the
bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. The
usual hurly-burly of a market-day had been
added to by the unexpected arrival of a caravan
from Fez.

The unloading of the packs was now go-
ing on amid the incessant angry disputes of
the Arab porters and occasional remonstrative
groans from the gaunt camels kneeling in the
hot sand. Near by, on a lean horse, sat a Bed-
ouin, with his gun slung over the pommel. He
was dirty and ragged, but his crimson saddle-
cloth was worked with gold braid, and metal
ornaments dangled from his bridle. Bending a
trifle forward in the saddle, the son of the desert
seemed to be intently observing the porters,
but in reality he was half listening to an elderly
Arab who sat on the ground a few paces distant,
surrounded by a wholly absorbed circle of lis-
teners. It was curious to watch their mobile



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 161

faces reflecting, like so many mirrors, the vari-
ous changes in the expression of the speaker.
He was telling a story a story that required
much pressing of the hand against the heart
and many swift transitions from joy to despair,
and finally involved a pantomime of a person on
horseback carrying off somebody. A love-
story ! Perhaps one of Scheherezade's. The
spirit, though not the letter of it, reached me.
I noticed, with proper professional pride, that
neither the mountebank near the saint's tomb,
nor the snake-charmer farther up the slope, had
so large an audience as the story-teller.

The snake-tamer, however, honestly earned
his hire by letting an ugly cobra de capello
draw blood from his cheek to the slow music of
a reed pipe and a tambourine played by a couple
of assistants. After wondering at the man, I
began to wonder at the serpent for biting so
hideous an object. Only less hideous was his
neighbor, the necromancer, who did some really
clever feats of fire-eating, and became the re-
cipient at my hands of about two pounds of
copper flu. The gratuity seemed to have the
effect of putting an end to his performance, for
he abruptly disappeared after this accession of
wealth.

Both these men, as well as the several men-
dacious " saints " who were collecting tribute of



162 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

the crowd, belonged to that fanatical sect known
as the Aissawa, whose periodic incursions in
force into Tangier must be more picturesque
than agreeable, if the Hadji gave me a true
account of them. His description did not ma-
terially differ from that which I find in an
admirable work on Morocco by Edmondo de
Amicis, from which I quote : " The Aissawa
are one of the principal religious confraternities
of Morocco, founded, like the others, under the
inspiration of God, by a saint called Sidi-Mo-
hammed-ben-Aissa, born at Mekinez two cen-
turies ago. . . . They have a great mosque at
Fez, which is the central house of the order,
and from thence they spread themselves every
year over the provinces of the empire, gather-
ing together as they go those members of the
brotherhood who are in towns and villages.
Their rites, similar to those of the howling and
whirling dervishes of the East, consist in a
species of frantic dances, interspersed with
leaps, yells, and contortions, in the practice of
which they grow ever more furious and fero-
cious, until, losing the light of reason, they
crush wood and iron with their teeth, burn
their flesh with glowing coals, wound themselves
with knives, swallow mud and stones, brain ani-
mals and devour them alive and dripping with
blood, and finally fall to the ground insensible."



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 163

If I had chosen my day in Africa a week
earlier, I should have witnessed one of those
edifying festivals ; but I missed that, as well as
the fete of the birth of Mohammed, on which
occasion the Soc-de-Barra is a very gay spot.
At all times, I fancy, it is little more than a
barbaric playground.

So far as I could observe, its special claims
as a market were sustained this day only by
four or five isolated clusters of aged crones,
who squatted under striped awnings, and sold
bread, pottery, and a kind of grain called durm,
which forms the staple food of the lower classes.
I have seen few specimens of Tangier pottery
in collections. It is very rude, and utterly
wanting in most of the qualities usually prized ;
but its brilliant glaze and the barbaric fancy of
some of its designs entitle it to consideration.
I am speaking of the ware used by the common
people. The only lively trade I saw carried on
in the market was done in those gaudily tinted
jars and vases.

The majority of the crowd seemed to have no
purpose whatever beyond wandering from point
to point and indulging in as many gesticulations
as possible. From time to time a mysterious
hush fell upon the throng, a breathless silence
broken an instant afterward by universal chat-
ter. Neither the sudden silence nor the sudden



164 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

clamor explained itself. Underlying it all was
a profound melancholy. Here, three or four
half-grown Soudan negroes lay on their backs,
blinking at the sky ; there, a squad of venerable
Rifans leaned apathetically against a white-
washed wall in the strong sunshine meagre,
dry old men, looking like mummies, that had
warmed into a semblance of life, and had par-
tially thrown aside their cerements. The mo-
ment a person ceased speaking and moving, he
became a statue of weariness. It was a relief to
watch a score or two of comical little Arab boys
the exact pattern of ^axiagpa. figurines dart-
ing in and out among the confusion of legs, and
making up impertinent faces under their peaked
hoods, as some irate bystander from time to
time gave one of them an impromptu taste of a
lance-handle.

Suddenly I caught a glimpse of my fellow-
voyager the Dutch artist, with his easel planted
in a shadow of the wrinkled wall, sketching
away like mad. I envied him, for to a painter
this Soc-de-Barra should be a mine of wealth.
Indeed, all Tangier is that. Fortuny and Henri
Regnault have taught us how rich it is. The
latter, after receiving the Prix de Rome, re-
sided a long time in Tangier. It was here he
painted his magnificent Execution sans Juge-
ment sous les Rois maures de Grenade ; and



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 165

it was from his Arabian dreams in the old
Moorish town that he awoke at the fall of Se-
dan, and hurried to give his life, as freely as he
had given his genius, to France. Regnault
met his death, futilely, in almost the last en-
gagement of the war if it is futile to be a
hero.

He was still in my thought as I turned back
to the city gate, for my next excursion was to
the hill of the Kasba a spot associated with
his memory. The treasury building in the
Kasba furnished him with the background of
his Sortie du Pacha one of Regnault's mas-
terpieces.

Without this fact the citadel itself would
poorly have rewarded me for the hot climb
up the hillside. The governor, or bashaw, has
his residence in the castle, which is garrisoned.
I believe there was a horrible prison hidden
somewhere in its depths, but I did not attempt
to visit it. Doubtless the stucco-work of the
innumerable apartments I looked into was once
as gorgeous with gold-leaf and pigment as the
mezquita at Cordova, or the hall of the Aben-
cerrages in the Alhambra ; but nothing of the
past richness remained. In places, on a mould-
ing or at the base of a column, a line in Cufic
characters or an embossed sentence from the
Koran tamely wriggled out from the white-



1 66 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

wash. That was all. The sacrilegious brush
of man had done as much damage there as the
hand of time.

The architecture did not pay me for my pains,
but I was amply paid by being allowed to assist
at a Moorish court of justice, upon which the
Hadji and I stumbled by chance. The judge, or
cadi I am not positive as to the cadiship was
seated on a Persian rug in the middle of a room
small enough and gloomy enough to be a cell.
Behind him was ranged a row of barefooted
soldiers ; in front of him stood plaintiff and de-
fendant, alike abject. Each in turn delivered
himself of a long speech containing frequent
allusions to Allah, and relapsed into silence.
When the pair had finished, the flabby judge
sat awhile, ruminative, with his chin buried in
his beard ; then he lifted his face and pro-
nounced sentence. Without more ado, one of
the men the plaintiff, likely enough was
hauled into the courtyard, just outside, and
preparations were making to give him a dozen
lashes with a cat-o'-nine-tails, when we hastened
our departure. I expected nothing but to see
his head snipped off before we could get out of
the place. A vision of that splash of blood on
the white marble stairs in Regnault's picture
danced in front of my eyes.

The Hadji laughingly remarked that the fel-



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 167

low had met with no more than his deserts.
The laws of Morocco are extremely severe ; it
is seldom that either the guilty or the innocent
escape. The penalty for petty larceny is so
rigorous that the offence is comparatively un-
known, except in the interior, where robbery
and murder are recognized professions. The
nomads and the people of the duars live by
plundering caravans and straggling travellers.
But at Tangier, under the flags of the lega-
tions, a stranger's life and property are more
secure than in one of our American cities. In
a community where a man loses his right hand
if he helps himself to somebody else's hen, the
love of poultry, for example, becomes discreet
and chastened. The door of my bedroom at
the hotel had no fastening on it, and needed
none.

It was now three o'clock, and time for me
to return to the inn. My twenty-four hours
of Africa were drawing to a close. The little
steamer that was to take me back to Gibraltar,
immediately after an early dinner, was already
spreading some coquettish sooty curls over
her smoke-stack. Before descending to level
ground, and plunging once more into the intri-
cacies of the lower town, I lingered a few min-
utes on the heights of the Kasba to take a fare-
well look.



1 68 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

It is a very ancient city, the oldest city but
one in the world. The Moors of Spain in the
time of Aboo-Abdallah made pilgrimages to it
on account of its antiquity. The cloth-mer-
chants, and the swarthy money-changers, and
the shrill water-carriers were plying their trade,
and all the indolent, feverish life we witness to-
day was seething, in these narrow streets when
Christ was a little child in Nazareth.

Founded in some unknown period, by the
Carthaginians it is supposed, Tangier the
Tingis of the Romans has always been a
bone of bloody contention among the nations.
In the reign of Claudius it became the capital
of the province Mauritania Tingitana, and was
an important city. Wrested from the Romans,
it passed successively under the rule of the
Vandals, Greeks, Saracens, and Arabs. In
1471, Tangier fell into the possession of the
Portuguese, who, in 1662, ceded it to England
as a portion of the dower of the Infanta Cathe-
rine of Braganza, queen of Charles II. The
English, finding that the occupation was not
worth the cost, abandoned the place in 1684,
after demolishing the Mole. Here a quaint and
incongruous figure appears for an instant on
the scene the figure of Mr. Samuel Pepys.
I think it was a conception of high humor on
the part of Charles II. to send Mr. Pepys



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 169

among the M^ors, for it was by the king's order
that he accompanied Lord Dartmouth with the
fleet despatched to destroy the sea-wall. This
precautionary piece of engineering left the bay
of Tangier in such a plight as to render the
town impossible of approach by large vessels,
except in the rarest weather. The ruins of
the old Mole are still visible at low tide, ragged,
honeycombed blocks of masonry, looking, when
seen through the transparent emerald of the
Mediterranean, like ledges of silver.

The water in the harbor is so shallow that
until the present emperor projected a landing
for small boats, the visitor arriving there by
sea was forced to go ashore on the back of a
native. This has been the emperor's sole con-
cession to the spirit of modern progress. Dur-
ing the last hundred years But my strong
interest in the historic part of Tangier ends
with Mr. Pepys.

From any point of view the hoary little town
is vastly interesting : the remoteness and ob-
scurity of its origin, the sieges, pestilences, and
massacres it has undergone, and the tenacity
with which it clings to primitive customs and
beliefs, are so many charms. To walk its
streets is to breathe the air of Scriptural times.
There, to-day, fishermen costumed like Peter
are dragging their nets on the sandy shingle



i;o FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

outside the gates ; at the fountain stands Re-
bekah with her water-jar poised on her head,
and a hand's breadth of brown bosom lying
bare between the green and yellow folds of her
robe. To-day, as eighteen hundred years ago,
a pallid, hook-nosed man shuffles by counting
some coins in his palm the veritable thirty
pieces of silver, possibly. If it be not Judas
Iscariot himself, then it is a descendant, and a
striking family likeness. In brief, Tangier is a
colossal piece of bric-a-brac which one would
like to own.

A countryman of ours, a New Yorker if I
remember, once proposed to purchase Shake-
speare's house at Stratford, and transport it
bodily to Central Park. I had a like impulse
touching Tangier. Perhaps I may be per-
mitted to say that in a certain sense I have
brought it home with me, and set it up on the
edge of Ponkapog Pond.



IX



ON GETTING BACK AGAIN

As I write the concluding pages of this
fragmentary and inadequate record, a few red
leaves are still clinging to the maple bough,
and the last steamer of the year from across
the ocean has not yet discharged on our shores
the final cargo of returning summer tourists.
How glad they will be, like those who came
over in previous ships, to sight that phantom-
ish, white strip of Yankee land called Sandy
Hook!

Some one that anonymous person who is
always saying the wisest and most delightful
things just as you are on the point of saying
them yourself has remarked that one of the
greatest pleasures of foreign travel is to get
home again. But no one that irresponsible
person forever to blame in railroad accidents,
but whom, on the whole, I vastly prefer to his
garrulous relative quoted above no one, I
repeat, has pointed out the composite nature
of this pleasure, or named the ingredient in it



172 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH

which gives the chief charm to this getting
back. It is pleasant to feel the pressure of
friendly hands once more ; it is pleasant to
pick up the threads of occupation which you
dropped abruptly, or perhaps neatly knotted
together and carefully laid away, just before
you stepped on board the steamer ; it is very
pleasant, when the summer experience has been
softened and sublimated by time, to sit of a
winter night by the cheery wood-fire, or even
at the register, since one must make one's self
comfortable in so humiliating a fashion, and let
your fancy wander back in the old footprints ;
to form your thoughts into happy summer pil-
grims, and despatch them to Aries or Nurem-
berg, or up the vine-clad heights of Monte
Cassino, or embark them at Vienna for a cruise
down the swift Danube to Buda-Pesth. But in
none of these things lies the subtile charm I
wish to indicate. It lies in the refreshing,
short-lived pleasure of being able to look at
your own land with the eyes of an alien ; to see
novelty blossoming on the most commonplace
and familiar stems ; to have the old manner
and the threadbare old custom present them-
selves to you as absolutely new or if not
new, at least strange. After you have escaped
from the claws of the custom-house officers
who are not nearly so affable birds as you once



FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 173

thought them and are rattling in an oddly
familiar hack through well-known but half-un-
recognizable streets, you are struck by some-
thing comical in the names on the shop signs
are American names comical, as English-
men seem to think ? by the strange fashion
of the iron lamp-post at the corner, by peculiar-
ities in the architecture, which you ought to
have noticed, but never did notice until now.
The candid incivility of the coachman, who
does not touch his hat to you, but swears at
you, has the vague charm of reminiscence.
You regard him as the guests regarded the
poor relation at table, in Lamb's essay ; you
have an impression that you have seen him
somewhere before. The truth is, for the first
time in your existence, you have a full, unpre-
judiced look at the shell of the civilization from
which you emerged when you went abroad. It
is not altogether a satisfactory shell. Far from
it indeed. It has strange excrescences and
blotches on it. But it is a shell worth examin-
ing ; it is the best you can ever have ; and it is
expedient to study it very carefully the two or