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Did a few vessels only wait for the sailing of those small frigates, which are almost all unfit for sea, except only two, nothing would be easier than to prevent them from returning, and to block up the ports of Mogador, Rabat, and Sallee. What would become of his commerce, and, above all, his marine, did the Christian princes cease to assist him, contrary to the interests of humanity!
He wished Morocco to enlarge her commercial relations with France and the other allied countries, and with this object in view he organized and carried out with brilliant success a series of exhibitions at Casablanca, Fez and Rabat. The result of this bold policy surpassed even its creator's hopes.
People once more the knolls and pastures with the turban and the helm, fill in the colours of robe and plume; oh, what a picture it would make! Doubtless similar apartments for the hareem exist in the recesses of the palaces of Fez, Mequinez, Marrákesh and Rabat.
Across the river the native town of Rabat lay piled up on an orange-red cliff beaten by the Atlantic. Its walls, red too, plunged into the darkening breakers at the mouth of the river, and behind it, stretching up to the mighty tower of Hassan, and the ruins of the Great Mosque, the scattered houses of the European city showed their many lights across the plain.
Rabat, Casablanca, Mazagan we stopped at them all, and got accustomed to the eternal clank of the crane hoisting bales in and out of the boats; to rolling on to the backs and down into the troughs of the Atlantic combers.
We may here easily trace the origin of the epithet "Black-a-Moor," and we are not so surprised that Shakspeare made his Moor black; indeed, the present Emperor, Muley Abd Errahman, is of very dark complexion, though his features are not at all of the negro cast. But he has sons quite black, and with negro features, who, of course, are the children of negresses. One of these, is Governor of Rabat.
Their fat lands and fine gardens were ruined; men, women, and children killed and taken prisoners; while six hundred of them were sent to the Tetuan prison, and a great number I do not know exactly went to Rabat. That was eight years ago. Sixty of them are in Tetuan prison now, the remnant of six hundred. There is a kaid among them who is very ill, dying: the eight years have done for him.
And what, to this day, do the names of Meknez and Marrakech, of Mogador, Saffi or Rabat, signify to any but a few students of political history, a few explorers and naturalists? Not till within the last year has Morocco been open to travel from Tangier to the Great Atlas, and from Moulay Idriss to the Atlantic.
The merchant's cooks had taken possession of the kitchens, and toward sunset a sumptuous repast of many courses would be carried into the saloon on covered trays, and the guests would squat about it on rugs of Rabat, tearing with their fingers the tender chicken wings and small artichokes cooked in oil, plunging their fat white hands to the wrist into huge mounds of saffron and rice, and washing off the traces of each course in the brass basin of perfumed water carried about by a young black slave-girl with hoop-earrings and a green-and-gold scarf about her hips.
At Pitché, the midday station, no horses were to be had; so, notwithstanding that deep snow-drifts lay between us and Kushku Baïra, the halt for the night, we were compelled, after a couple of hours' rest, to set out on the ponies that had brought us from Rabat Kerim. More perhaps by good luck than anything else, we reached the latter towards 9 p.m.
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