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Updated: June 13, 2025
The price of corn, eggs, and chickens was amazingly high, and the Maalem explained that the n'zala was kept by some of the immediate family of Mahedi el Menebhi, who had put them there, presumably to make what profit they could. I looked very carefully at our greedy hosts.
Eggs, on the other hand, are cheap; we can buy a dozen for twopence or its equivalent in Spanish or Moorish money, and chickens cost about fivepence apiece. If Salam, M'Barak and the Maalem were travelling alone they would pay less, but a European is rarely seen, and his visit must be made memorable.
We had not far to go then before the view opened out, the haze in the far distance took faint shape of a city surrounded by a forest of palms on the western side, a great town with the minarets of many mosques rising from it. At this first view of Red Marrakesh, Salam, the Maalem, and M'Barak extolled Allah, who had renewed to them the sight of Yusuf ibn Tachfin's thousand-year-old city.
Ropes and palmetto baskets refused to fit at the last moment, two mules were restive until their "father," the Maalem, very wide awake and energetic, cursed their religion, and reminded them that they were the children of asses renowned throughout the Moghreb for baseness and immorality.
"Have a care," he said to me one evening, "for this place is peopled by djinoon, and if they are disturbed they will at least kill the horses and mules, and leave us to every robber among the hills." Doubtless the Maalem prophesied worse things than this, but I have no Arabic worth mention, and Salam, who acts as interpreter, possesses a very fair amount of tact.
Even the birds had ceased to sing, the cicadas were silent in the tree tops, and when one of the mules rolled on the ground and scattered its pack upon all sides, the Maalem was too exhausted to do more than call it the "son of a Christian and a Jew." Down the track we had followed came a fair man, of slight build, riding a good mule.
Certainly no sense of shame, or duty, or even compassion, ever moved the Maalem. By night he would repair to the kitchen tent and smoke kief or eat haschisch, but the troubles of preparing beds and supper did not worry him. "Until the feast is prepared, why summon the guest," he said on a night when the worthy M'Barak, opening his lips for once, remonstrated with him.
I parted with him with no little regret, and look forward with keen pleasure to the day when I shall summon him once again from the bakehouse of Djedida to bring his mules and guide me over the open road, perchance to some destination more remote. I think he will come willingly, and that the journey will be a happy one. The shareef drew the heavy bolt behind the Maalem, and we sought our beds.
Even the hobbled animals are at rest, and we enter into the enveloping silence for five or six dreamless hours. The horses stir and wake me; I open the tent and call the men. Our guards rouse themselves and retire to their huts. The Maalem, no worse, to outward seeming, for the night's debauch, lights the charcoal.
He was a busy man in these days, was the Maalem. When he was not baking bread or smoking kief he was securing mules and bringing them for our inspection. To Mr. T. Spinney, son of the British Vice-Consul in Mazagan, we owed our salvation.
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