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Updated: May 16, 2025
I thought he did not seem quite so anxious about fighting as he had been when we were off the Riff coast. Indeed, from what I could learn, should the vessel in sight prove to be a Greek pirate, we might find a struggle with her no joking matter. That she was so, I found the captain and officers entertained not the slightest doubt.
The sea behind us was an angry purple; the Riff Mountains were steel-blue; the nearer hills now black, now gold in fitful sun-gleams, now crossed by a rainbow. Only in the north there was a great break, and a light like brass, behind Ape's Hill.
The reasons or excuses which he gave were: first, that his wages were insufficient; and, secondly, that "a courier" had been sent over to him from Tetuan to tell him that his mother and his wife were quarrelling to such a degree that Tahara had threatened to go back to her native Riff country with her brother unless S`lam returned, and if she took that step it would mean a divorce.
The great mansions of the wazeers and the green-tiled palace of Mulai Abd-el-Aziz Our Victorious Master the Sultan seemed unsubstantial as one of those cities that the mirage had set before us in the heart of the R'hamna plains. Salam, the untutored man from the far Riff country, felt the spell of the silent morning hour.
The river Wád Martîl, between Tetuan and the Riff, winds across the seven miles of flats to the sea, and is fordable in two or three places except in heavy rains; and days "in the mountains" safe within sight of the city promised us many an expedition, and opened up another world of heights foreshadowed and gulfs forbidden, where the hours were all too short.
Though Portland stands a league off from the mainland of Britain, yet it is almost joined by a prodigious riff of beach that is to say, of small stones cast up by the sea which runs from the island so near the shore of England that they ferry over with a boat and a rope, the water not being above half a stone's-throw over; and the said riff of beach ending, as it were, at that inlet of water, turns away west, and runs parallel with the shore quite to Abbotsbury, which is a town about seven miles beyond Weymouth.
In the next unjust or unreasonable war the peace party will be stronger still. Something has thus been gained; but the greatest gain ever yet won for the cause of peace was the refusal of the Catalonian reservists to serve in the war against the Riff mountaineers of Morocco in July 1909.
It is but two days' journey eastwards from Tetuan, this select and exclusive country, and it extends about a hundred and fifty miles, with a population, it is reported, of one hundred and fifty thousand souls. Strange to think that no European pioneer, nor gentleman-rover, has ever exploited the Riff.
Men in the Riff who have blood-feuds will not go out of their houses in the early mornings without first sending the women and children to look if the coast is clear: neither will they walk up a hedgerow nor in a wood, but across the fields, keeping well in the open, since murder is always committed out of sight, decently, and in good order.
Lieutenant Gardner, notwithstanding, got hold of the brig, and towed her to the Polyphemus, which steamed off with her to sea. The punishment inflicted on the Riff pirates was soon forgotten, and they continued their depredations on British commerce.
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