I carried away with me from that glimpse of the Atlas and of the treeless run of burnt land beyond (for I travelled while the heat was still upon us) vivid pictures in the mind: first of a vast tract of dead upland, utterly bare, between Oudja and the Moulouya (I had come from Oran); this tract had about it the accursed inhuman effect of the great American deserts in the West of the United States; then, next in order, of Taza on the edge of the hill fighting, and of the story I was told there of two Moorish brothers. One of these would fight under the French for six months and then desert. Thereupon the other brother would enlist in his place. So much was the object of each the pleasure of fighting and the advantage of pay, and so little the political idea of independence.
Nor could anyone forget who has seen it (and it is now become or will soon become, a commonplace of travel) that great new road which I saw in its last making, but which was already nearly completed. It is driven right through Barbary like a stay, like a backbone, from the Bay of Carthage to the river-mouth of Rabat on the Atlantic tide; near one thousand miles in its actual trace, and following the great ride which the first Mohammedans took when they overwhelmed the West—when that horseman rode into the sea surf on the sands by the bar of Rabat River and cried out: “Had you not set bounds, O God, to the earth, with this your sea, I would ride forever westward and continue to conquer in Your Name.” A man may take his motorcar on the boat today from Marseilles to Tunis and follow that strict and graded broad way uninterruptedly till he comes to the Atlantic and, turning south to Casablanca, ship it again for Europe.
The surprise of that Moroccan feat was the way in which it was handled during the Great War. When war was already certain in the last days of July, 1914, the Government in Paris, the politicians, sent orders to the Resident-General that all troops should be withdrawn to the coast, the interior to be abandoned, and reconquest (if possible!) to be achieved after the Peace. We who know what those words “after the Peace” have come to mean, know also that it would have been the end of the French in Morocco. It would have been the return to the old pressure upon the Algerian frontier and evidence to all Islam that Europe had failed.
What the soldier did was to maintain his garrisons in spite of the politicians. What was astonishing, he continued the development of Morocco during all those four years of mortal strain, as though the peace had not been broken. Still was the railway laid, and still the new road completed, and still were the buildings set up, and still was the wild hill country contained by its ring of troops; until, when the curtain lifted in ’19, Europe saw, not the Morocco there had been when the Occident entered on its great struggle, but another Morocco, wealthier, stronger and more settled, with great new European towns side by side with the Muslim, and with the whole territory organised.
These new great towns are planned and are built under a military rule—and that is very wise, for the anarchy of individual mercantile effort would have made the experiment break down. No house may be built in the European fashion to jar against the spirit of the place. Everywhere the roofs must be flat and the outline preserved. Also the European town is kept wholly distinct from the Mohammedan. Thus in Meknes you may hear Mass in a chapel which lies within the very thickness of the city wall—it is the old chapel of the Portuguese prisoners during the past of the great Sultans—but you may not enter that chapel from within the city; the door faces outward, upon the country side of the wall. Upon the day before I left Morocco, a soldier who was driving me upon the heights above one of the new cities in his car said to me musingly, as we had halted to look down upon the view of mixed Europe and Africa and of all that vast new wealth: “It is just ten years ago that the Sultan of the day, annoyed with his brother, had him devoured by lions.” Those who love contrast will not find it stronger anywhere than in this strange land.
But these distant memories of Morocco go ill with the presence of a Devon sea under the breaking of a chill dawn. Those African pictures in my mind, hot sand and palm, painted by memory in the night, grew pale and disappeared in the northern daylight, as do the coloured flashes of the headland lights with the coming of the day.
There was still no more wind than would just make the Nona feel her helm. My companion slept below. The heave of the sea grew less; and then, to my disgust and dread, over the sea, already too hazy (so that the high land some three miles away was like a ghost), a fog came drifting up and enveloped us altogether.
I put her up a point more westerly, so as to be on the safe side, for I did not know what current there might be here, and I had to give the land a good offing. I did not want to come up through the fog in such calm weather to hear, close at hand, the treacherous
