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Updated: June 23, 2025
"Nay, friend, I speak truly. May I never drink at the White Pond of the Prophet if I have not told thee even that which I have heard." Abdullah swallowed his wrath, listened to Mulai Hamed's story, and was convinced. Notwithstanding Mrs. Haxton's prohibition, it was now essential that he should see her without delay, so he accompanied the deputy assistant hall-porter in the direction of the hotel.
"Now, where is the good man and true who reveres the name of this holy one? Who will say a prayer to Mulai Abd el Káder?" Here the narrator extends his palms as before, and all follow him in the motion of drawing them down his face. "In the name of the Pitying and Pitiful! Now another!" The performance is repeated. "Who is willing to yield himself wholly and entirely to Mulai Abd el Káder?
Mulai Hamed checked the list carefully. "It must be," said he at last, "that the Hakim Effendi is in jail, for the others I have seen, but not him." Abdullah was annoyed. He, a pure-blooded Bedouin of the desert, had already made a great concession In using the word "brother" to one of mixed race. "I asked not for folly," he muttered. "That is the answer of a drunken Frank."
He happened to be crossing a tiny square at the moment, and a bearded moullah was entering a mosque which filled one whole side of it. The unbeliever's mirth doubtless disturbed a pious meditation, and the moullah turned and muttered something. The words might be a verse of the Koran, but they had the ring of a malediction. Mulai Hamed was abashed and angry.
As they went, they met a rickety closed carriage being driven at a furious rate down a side street, and both men thought it was making for the mile- long causeway which connects the island of Massowah with the mainland. "Who travels in such a hurry?" asked Abdullah, looking after the swaying vehicle. "Perchance a kafila starts for the interior to-night," said Mulai Hamed.
Mulai Hafid, Sultan of Morocco, was reported to be torturing his rebel prisoners according to ancestral custom, and rumours came that he had followed a French king's example in keeping the rebel leader, El Roghi, in a cage like a tame eagle, or had thrown him to the lions to be torn in pieces before the eyes of the royal concubines.
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.
In the distant provinces the story as reported by natives therefrom ran that the Nazarene had been shot by a saint while attempting to enter and desecrate the sacred shrine of Mulai Idrees, and that by executing him the Sultan showed himself an Unbeliever.
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.
They were hurried up, and the whole party seen safely through the city gates; but once outside, the camel was so slow that we left them behind, R. and myself jogging ahead with Mulai Omar and Saïd, trusting that the heavy baggage would catch us up at lunch-time.
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