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A fool is said to have once presented the Sultan with a bowl of skimmed and watered milk, and on being remonstrated with, to have declared that His Majesty received no more from any one, as his wazeers and governors ate half the revenue cream each, and the sheïkhs drank half the revenue milk. The fool was right.
All this is said with a quiet dignity, as though to remind me that I have fallen among people of some distinction, and the effect is only spoilt by the recollection that nearly every headman has the same tale to tell. Sultans, pretenders, wazeers, and high court functionaries are passed in critical review, their faults and failings noted.
The few impartial individuals who had access to the Sultan were outnumbered by the horde of politicians, diplomats, adventurers, and schemers who surrounded him, the latter at least freely bribing wazeers to obtain their ends.
He told me on another occasion that the great wazeers who had opposed the Sultan's reforms were influenced by fear, lest Western ideas should alter the status of their womenkind.
A picturesque figure, passionate yet a philosopher, patiently tolerant of blinding heat, bad roads, uncomfortable sleeping quarters and short commons, the Maalem will remain alive and real in my memory long after the kaids and wazeers and other high dignitaries of his country are no more than dimly splendid shadows, lacking altogether in individuality. I learned to enjoy Djedida by night.
At the first private audience there were many matters of importance to be brought before the Sultan's notice, afterwards to be relegated to the consideration of his wazeers.
"The unrivalled diplomatic talents of our ambassador proved, in fact, too much for the Moorish Government, and though the discovery of the way in which a Nazarene was obtaining his desires from the Sultan may have aroused the inherent obstinacy of the wazeers, and thus produced the recoil which we have described, it is far more likely that this was brought about by the officious interference of one or two other foreign representatives at Tangier.
And your Sultan's wazeers said to him, 'Tell the Lord of the Moghreb to rule as we rule, to gather his taxes peaceably and without force, to open his ports, to feed his prisoners, to follow the wisdom of the West.
The great mansions of the wazeers and the green-tiled palace of Mulai Abd-el-Aziz Our Victorious Master the Sultan seemed unsubstantial as one of those cities that the mirage had set before us in the heart of the R'hamna plains. Salam, the untutored man from the far Riff country, felt the spell of the silent morning hour.
But so soon as the kaid has amassed sufficient wealth, the governor of his province, or one of the high wazeers in the Sultan's capital, will despoil him and sell his place to the highest bidder, and in the fulness of time the Sultan will send for that wazeer or governor, and treat him in similar fashion. "Mektub," it is written, and who shall avoid destiny?
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