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Updated: June 26, 2025
Previously Spain and Portugal had held the principal Moroccan seaports, the twin towns of Rabat and Salli alone remaining always Moorish, but these two in their turn set up a sort of independent republic, nourished from the Berber tribes in the mountains to the south of them. No Europeans live in Salli yet, for here the old fanaticism slumbers still.
The Merinid Sultans of Rabat had a terribly troublesome neighbour across the Bou-Regreg, and they built Chella to keep an eye on the pirates of Salé. But Chella has fallen like a Babylonian city triumphed over by the prophets; while Salé, sly, fierce and irrepressible, continued till well on in the nineteenth century to breed pirates and fanatics.
Clinics have been opened at Fez and Rabat for the treatment of skin diseases of the head, from which the native children habitually suffer. The French Department of Health distributes annually immense quantities of quinine in the malarial districts.
Other courier distances are as follows: Tangier to Rabat 4 days Rabat to Fez 2 days Fez to Mickas 12 hours Rabat to Morocco 8 days Mogador to Morocco 2½ days Mogador to Santa Cruz 3 days Mogador to Wadnoun 8 days Santa Cruz to Teradant 1½ days A notice of the interesting, though now abandoned part of Aghadir, may not be out place here. It is the Gurt Luessem of Leo Africanus.
Salé, the fierce old pirate town, where Robinson Crusoe was so long a slave, lay before us, snow-white in its cheese-coloured ramparts skirted by fig and olive gardens. Below its gates a stretch of waste land, endlessly trailed over by mules and camels, sloped down to the mouth of the Bou-Regreg, the blue-brown river dividing it from Rabat.
Our way led along the highroad from Rabat to the modern port of Kenitra, near the ruins of the Phenician colony of Mehedyia. Range after range these translucent hills rose before us, all around the solitude was complete. Village life, and even tent life, naturally gathers about a river-bank or a spring; and the waste we were crossing was of waterless sand bound together by a loose desert growth.
The sand was scored with tracks and ruts innumerable, for the road between Rabat and Fez is travelled not only by French government motors but by native caravans and trains of pilgrims to and from the sacred city of Moulay Idriss, the founder of the Idrissite dynasty, whose tomb is in the Zerhoun, the mountain ridge above Volubilis.
The unfinished Hassan Tower at Rabat having at one time become a place of evil resort, the reigning ameer ordered the way up to be destroyed, but it was found so hard that only the first round was cut away, and the door bricked up.
Fez, for two centuries and more, was in a double sense the capital of Morocco: the centre of its trade as well as of its culture. Culture, in fact, came to northwest Africa chiefly through the Merinid princes. The Almohads had erected great monuments from Rabat to Marrakech, and had fortified Fez, but their "mighty wasteful empire" fell apart like those that had preceded it.
My thermometer marked only one degree above zero when we retired to rest, and the wood was too damp to light a fire. But we are in Persia! It is only fair, however, to say that the road we were now travelling is not the regular post-road, which lies some distance to the eastward of Rabat Kerim, but was now impassable on account of the snow. The smaller track joins the main road at Koom.
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