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Updated: May 16, 2025
There lay the black hull of the steamer at anchor: the wind of the night before had dropped; a flaring sunrise and stormy sky lowered behind the Riff Mountains, which were black. Dressing was short work. The Moor handed us in at the door a tin basin of water, and in a short time we were ready for the next move. At that point R. craned up to look out of the high window.
Conducted through the queer, intricate city, we wound along maze-like alleys three or four feet wide, ever the old aromatic smell of the East, almost impossible to recall, yet recognized again in an instant's flash, and born of the Oriental world we jostled against of Berbers, Arabs, negroes, men from the Sahara, men from the mountains of the Riff, Turks, Greeks, Levantines, Syrians, even an occasional Hindoo, all wanderers up and down the earth, unable to resist the call of the open road, engendered by nomadic habits of old.
I suppose that the Riff tribe is more or less an anomaly.
But he may not marry her the third time unless she has meanwhile been married by another man and divorced from him. Many of the Moorish husbands leave their wives the Riffis, for instance, going back into the Riff.
From personal experience let this ryder be added: that they make good servants, faithful up to a certain point, to be trusted up to a certain point; but they are rascals. In Tetuan many more Berbers are to be met with than Arabs: the Riff tribe is Berber, and Tetuan is full of Riffis.
Some day, when he came their way, they would put a bullet into him. Only women die in their beds in the Riff. "Sudden death, Good Lord, grant us."
He said, too, that when he came back from Morocco City he should go straight off to the Riff and get work there; and Tahara would be left again. Such is the custom of the country: the husband may go off for a year, at intervals returning to his wife, whom he leaves generally under some sort of supervision.
The bottle, she said, had been taken away by S`lam and his mother. It belonged to his mother. It was poison to poison people in the Riff. A little later on she said it had nothing whatever to do with S`lam, and that it had only water in it that S`lam had told her so. That she had never seen him put anything into her food. That he was "good." That she only had a bad pain last night.
Shopping in a foreign city tends towards the accumulation of white elephants, which, safely landed in England, work havoc in an English home. Long flint guns from the Riff, and old blue dishes from Fez, and orange-striped rugs from Rabat look strangely out of place with wall-papers and oil paintings. The East will never sit down with the West, and the adjuncts of either are bound to "fight."
Guns from the Riff, eight feet long; brass powder-horns, knives, daggers, pistols, engraved and inlaid with silver, ivory, and coral; a long brass horn, once blown from the top of the mosque, sacred and difficult to get; copper vessels, pots, pans, jugs, bowls; blue china from Fez; quaint Jewish candelabra and lamps; brown and white native pottery, all found a place.
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