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Date-coloured boys passed us, wearing red fezes and dirty-white turbans. Countrymen passed us in great, coarse, brown woollen cloaks jellabs the hood pulled right on over the head, short wide sleeves, the front joined all down, and having scarred bare legs and feet coming out from underneath.
A dense throng of the poor passed between them in torn jellabs and soiled turbans, and haggled and bought. Asses and mules crushed through amid shouts of "Arrah!" "Arrah!" and "Balak!" "Ba-lak!" It was a lively scene, with more than enough of bustle and swearing and vociferation. There was more than enough of lying and cheating also, both practised with subtle and half-conscious humour.
But we, in the innocence of our hearts, would "lunch at a café" in Tetuan, after calling at the British Consulate and leaving our letters of introduction: this, with signs and a Spanish word or two, was brought home to Cadour, and we turned back, skirted the white city wall, reached a gate built in an angle, and rode in under the archway, passing a few figures in jellabs reclining and talking beside a great stone water-trough, which was running with fresh water.
It was not a close and dense crowd of white-hooded forms such as gathered on that spot on market morning a seething, steaming, moving mass of haiks and jellabs and Maghribi blankets, with here and there a bare shaven head and plaited crown-lock but a great crowd of dark figures in black gowns and skull-caps.
In each shop a man and boys at work: the white turbans and dark faces bending over the leather, the coloured jellabs which they wear, the busy hard-white-wood mallets in the deft brown hands, even the waxed thread, the red jelly which glues the soles together, the gimlets, the sharp scissors, have a passing fascination for the wandering Moor himself, who sits down lazily in front and talks to the workers.
Others next him were again cutting out shapes; and three potters were hard at work, one moulding the bodies of pots, another the necks, another the lids, while a fourth put all three together. And thus they laboured on. Their slippers lay in the mouths of the caves beside their brown jellabs; and the smell of the moist clay and the drip of water up amongst the green fern mixed with the cool air.
Miss Hanbury, who did her best to institute reforms in Moorish prisons, and succeeded in Tangier, left at her death a sum of money, out of which £5 came to Tetuan to be spent on their behalf. It fell into the hands of the lady missionaries, and they spent it in making jellabs for the prisoners to wear, whose garments are worse than filthy.
Mule-drivers cried "Balak" in tones that seemed to sing; gunsmiths and saddle-makers sat idle at their doors, greeting every one that passed; solemn Talebs stood in knots, with faces that shone under the closed hoods of their dark jellabs; and the bareheaded Berbers encamped in the market-square capered about like flighty children, grinned like apes, fired their long guns into the air for love of hearing the powder speak, often wept, and sometimes embraced each other, thinking of their homes that were far away.
The origin of this striking "badge" is not known, but the jellabs themselves looked absolutely in keeping with the lawless ruffians, on whose shoulders they hung, and the wild blotch of bizarre colour was "just themselves."
Then passages of the Koran chanted by a group of Moorish boys in their jellabs, purple and chocolate and white, peaked above their red tarbooshes. Then a psalm by a company of Jewish boys in their black skull-caps a brave old song of Zion sung by silvery young voices in an alien land.
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