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You come to me on this sham errand about the girl, but that is not your purpose, Mohammed of Mequinez! Mohammed the Third! What fool said you were a spy of the Sultan? Abd er-Rahman is here my guest and protector. You are a spy of his enemies, and a revolutionary, come hither to ruin our religion and our State. The penalty for such as you is death, and by Allah you shall die!"
The slavery of Christians in Morocco, once common, has been by treaty abolished since the day when the savage Sultan Mulai Ismael had eleven thousand Christian slaves in Mequinez employed in building his walls, whose bodies, when they succumbed, were mixed in with the stones and mud of the buildings.
The province of Tafilett, the birth-place of the present dynasty of the Shereefs. The royal or capitals of the interior now demand our attention, which are El-Kesar, Mequinez, Fez, and Morocco.
But if Muley Abd Errahman has fifty millions of dollars, or ten millions sterling in the vaults of Mequinez, he may be considered as the richest monarch in Africa, nay in all Europe. It is positively stated that Muley Ismail left this amount, or one hundred millions of ducats in the imperial treasury, which Sidi Mahommed reduced to two millions.
Black cobras and spotted leffa snakes from the Sus are used for the performance. When the charmer allows the snakes to dart at him or even to bite, the onlookers put their hands to their foreheads and praise Sidi ben Aissa, a saint who lived in Mequinez when Mulai Ismail ruled, a pious magician whose power stands even to-day between snake-charmers and sudden death.
These people form a large class of the population of the towns in the north of Barbary, particularly of Tetuan, Mequinez, Fez, and Rhabatt or Sallee. They are scarcely, if at all found residing to the south of the river Azamoor, being confined chiefly to that province of Barbary known by the name of El Gharb.
Whether he fare to Fez, the city of Mulai Idrees, in which, an old writer assures us, "all the beauties of the earth are united"; or to Mequinez, where great Mulai Ismail kept a stream of human blood flowing constantly from his palace that all might know he ruled; or to Red Marrakesh, which Yusuf ibn Tachfin built nine hundred years ago, his own exertion must convoy him.
That was all the answer he got out of his journey, and if any man had come to him in Tetuan with no newer story, it must have been an idle and a foolish errand; but after El Kasar, after Wazzan, after Mequinez, and now after Fez, it seemed to be the sum of all wisdom. "I'll do it," he said; "at all risks and all costs, I'll do it."
The boy could not speak at once. "Whom do you want?" demanded the dame in Spanish. "The engineer Mequinez," replied Marco. The old woman made a motion to cross her arms on her breast, and replied, with a shake of the head: "So you, too, have dealings with the engineer Mequinez! It strikes me that it is time to stop this. We have been worried for the last three months.
The Emperor usually resides for a third portion of his time at Morocco the rest at Fez and Mequinez. Whenever his Imperial Highness has anything disagreeable with foreign European powers, he comes down from Fez to Morocco, to get out of the way.
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