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Nor have the Riffis, in common with the Moors, reached the point of discarding "petticoats and drapery" that is to say, they wear the brown, hooded, woollen jellab, and the white woollen haik a sheet of material without seam, which they cast round themselves something like a Roman toga. Perhaps a cotton tunic is worn underneath.
Miss Banks and I seated ourselves on a wooden rail, which was part of a manger or a sheep-pen. These Riffis had been forced by famine to abandon their home and come down into Tetuan, where at first they had lived in a cave, on roots principally. The father would go out and hoe when he could get work every land-owner has hoeing to be done; but lately he had had fever.
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.
The Riffis are an indomitable race, one which has never been conquered, magnificent raw material out of which to shape a battalion of infantry. Though acknowledged as the Kaliph of the Prophet and their religious head, the Sultan, as has been said, has never dared to put his head in this independent hornets' nest.
There are many legends about the Riffis: they boast one tribe among themselves who are said to be descended from the Romans; and there is no reason against the assumption, since the Romans were in Morocco after Cæsar's day. Another family claims to be descended from the inhabitants of Sodom. Some of them are quite fair regular "carrots": Vandal blood may run in their veins.
"S`lam no good; S`lam no good," Tahara kept repeating. And, to tell the truth, our long-legged ruffian rose before my eyes as no mean embodiment of a stage villain. The Riffis are notoriously treacherous and put no value whatever on life; at the same time I knew that they made good and faithful servants up to a certain point, and I shrank from distrusting a man who had so far served us well.
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.
They both of them knew something of European ways, and were scrupulously honest. They brought a few oddments, a little looking-glass, a mattress on which they slept upon the floor of the room near the kitchen, and a few cooking-pots and pans of their own. They were both of them Riffis, and their own home was in the Riff country, two days' journey into the mountains from Tetuan.
S`lam could say nothing but good of the Riff: how cheap living was, and how abundant food, except when rain failed, and then there followed disastrous famine, and starving Riffis would come down to Tetuan, and lie in the caves outside the city, and live on roots, doing any work which offered; and some of them would die, in spite of the missionaries' kindness and unremitting efforts.
This acquisition to the larder had to be applauded perforce, in spite of its being shot sitting, and on some one else's acres. As luck would have it, S`lam's great bullet, about the size commonly used for big game, had gone through its head: he naïvely explained the advantages of shooting birds through the head. But I think he was a fair shot. Most Riffis are.
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