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A little farther on and a magnificent Riffi passed us, walking along at a smart pace into the city, his face "old oak" colour, framed in a turban of dark red-brown strings of wool.
Hadj Riffi provided a donkey and pack, which of all substitutes for saddles is most foolish, intended only for loads of all sorts to be slung across them; but packs are easy to slip off and on, and have answered their purpose in Morocco since the days when in Judæa Mary rode on one to Bethlehem.
We had a fairly intelligent boy Mohammed, a Riffi and managed to understand a word or two he said. It had been explained to him by S`lam that we wished to get to the Blue Pool if possible. Arrived at the river, we found nobody not being market day, it was utterly deserted.
The law of the vendetta, is the law and the ten commandments of the Riffi, which, if he fail to keep, renders him in the eyes of his country-folk damned to all eternity, to be ostracised among men. A widow will teach her baby-son to shoot, and studiously prepare him for his one great duty, that as early as possible he may put a bullet into the murderer of his father.
She felt, probably, that she was past one danger there was no more to fear in that direction for the present; but that if her Riffi husband ever suspected she had "given him away," he would soon dispose of so troublesome an incubus. And so we found the matter had come to a deadlock: more we shall not know. It was typical of the Moors and their ways.
Berber is of course their common origin, and they are identical with the Kabyles of Algeria, the Touariks of the Sahara, and the Guanches of the Canary Isles. Yet in one great point, like the Arabs, the Riffi, in common with the Berber race, lacks the power of cohesion and the spirit of patriotism, which should have welded all Berbers into one powerful people.
Having kissed the Black Stone and performed other rites, the Moors went three days' journey to the Prophet's Mountain to pray; then they took themselves back to Morocco, but on their way, missing a steamer, were obliged to travel by land through Tunis, which took them five months, and, running short of money, lived, Hadj Riffi said, largely on roots.
Farther on stands the forge of the fortress: "for the slippers for the horses," Hadj Riffi explained. The blacksmith wore an apron of a whole goat-skin; he pared down the hoof with an instrument like a shovel, helped by the horse's owner or any chance onlooker, for Moors "hunt in packs," and only a mere Christian does anything by himself.
Muley Hafiz sat drinking his coffee at midnight, listening to the strains of an ornate gramophone, which stood in a corner of his square tent. A voice outside the silken fold of his tent greeted him, and he stopped the machine. "What is it?" he asked. "Lord, we have captured a man and a woman walking along by the sea." "They are Riffi people let them go," said Muley in Arabic.
It is a fact that cursing and swearing, so common among Moors, and polygamy and adultery, are seldom, if ever, met with in the Riff: for if one Riffi insults another, it is at the peril of his life; while the stain of immorality is wiped out at once by death. The gun, pistol, or dagger is the Riffi's summary judge and jury. He submits to no authority.
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