THE COUNTRY OF THE MOORS.* Tuts work contains the record

of three visits to Marocco, the latest having been made in 1883. Certain changes have taken

place since then, notably the retirement of Sir John Drummond Hay from the post which he filled for so long that ho is identified with Tangier ; but we may safely accept the writer's account of Marocco, or, to use the Arabic name, El Maghreb, as a picture of its actual condition. Mr. Stutfield does not claim to have entered on any entirely new ground, though in many places he quitted the ordinary caravan routes to the interior. He says :-

" Dr. Gerhard Rohlfs, who travelled wearing the garb, and pro- fessing the faith, of a Mussulman, no doubt preceded us not only at Wazan, but also along the road thence to Fez ; to the best of our belief, however, we were the first Europeans to follow in his footsteps along that road." Mr. Stutfield was so fascinated by the country of the Moors that he prolonged his first visit which was to have been a mere flying trip to Tangier, into a four months' stay, returned there the next year, and, in 1883, achieved the feat—a ride of 1,200 miles through the country— which forms the chief subject of this volume.

We put the book down, wondering why the writer was so fascinated with El Maghreb. A more depressing, more disen-

chanting description of any distant land, concerning which one has indulged in visions, we cannot remember ever to have read. On Mr. Stutfield's own evidence, we pronounce Marocco a country to be severely left alone by all who dislike the spectacle of human degradation and brute suffering. If for no other reason, the author's account of the hideous cruelty to animals that prevails among the Moors, would destroy any wish to visit them which might be inspired by a fine climate and a picturesque country in decay. Although it may be presumed that a taste for " pig-sticking " is not likely to be allied with very fine feelings, one wonders that a place where what the author himself calls the "beastly spectacle " of the Feast of Mahommed (witnessed by him in 1881) is a recognised institution, could possibly attract a civilised being to return to it. But there is much more than their cruelty and the shocking profanity of their religious festivals to render the people of Marocco repul- sive. Of Tangier the author has nothing new to tell us, and we do not care about his bags of game. Of Tetuan he gives a miserable enough account, and he mentions in it the intolerable manner of Moorish speech :-

"What a clatter of barbarous and quarrelsome tongues, mingled Riffian and Maghrebbin, and what throats of brass these people must have, to utter such unmelodious sounds ! And then the frightful amount of muscular energy they expend, even in ordinary conversa- tion. The traveller, new to the country, thinks his interlocutor is threatening to cut his throat, when he is merely wishing him good morning, or saying that it is a fine day. As Leo Africanus wrote three hundred years ago, abounding exceedingly with choler, they speake alwaiea with an angrie and loud voice. Neither shall you walke in any of their streetes in the daytime, but yon shall see two or three of them by the eares.' In this, as in all other respects, they have changed little since his day."

In Tetuan the writer saw a black slave following his master like a sheep, being hawked through the town for sale. The traffic

in human flesh is carried on actually in Tangier. One cannot read this book without wishing that a whole fleet of such craft as the renowned Holy Terror of the Moors' were cruising off that • El Maghreb: Twetre Hundred Mita Ride through Manteca. By Hugh E. M. Stutfield. London: Sampson Low and Co.

coast again, and a Gordon with his men routing out the dark places of the interior. We come upon a little touch of romance when we read of the rich Moor whom the writer visited at Tetuan, a personage of very ancient lineage,—in fact, a direct descendant of Boabdil. His uncle still keeps the keys of the gate in the Alhambra by which the Moorish sovereign went out to Ferdinand and surrendered to him Granada. " It is said," adds the author, "that several of the Moors in Tetuan still retain the keys of their ancestors' houses, and the title-deeds to their estates in Granada,—that earthly paradise to which, every Friday, they devoutly pray that they may one day be restored." It is, how- ever, with Spain that all that is romantic and poetic about the Moors is associated. It is in the heart of a Spanish mountain that Boabdil sits by the side of his steel-clad barb, with his silent army all around him, and waits for the day when the mystic hand shall grasp the magic key, and the Moor shall tread the halls of the Alhambra, a king in his palace once more.

Meantime, in 1883, no traveller's life would have been safe beyond ten miles outside the town, and Mr. Stntfield might long in vain to penetrate into that terrible unknown Riff country which extends eastward of Tetuan to the Eastern frontier. One of the most striking passages in the book gives the following account of the Riff :-

" Within sixty miles of Gibraltar, and in full sight of Europe, there is a large, unexplored country, where no Christian can venture, or has ventured for centuries. The Sultan is powerless to deal with these turbulent hillmen, and the Moors themselves dare not trust themselves in their midst. These Ruffians, who are almost identical with the Kabyles of Algeria, are a branch of the great Berber or aboriginal stock of North Africa. So fierce and fanatical as to be unapproachable even in these late days, in history they have ever been known as robbers and brigands and bloodthirsty pirates, whose audacity and the barbarities they inflicted on their captives, rather than their actual power, caused them to be a terror to all mariners, and who extended their depredations to every corner of the Mediter- ranean, and even as far as the English Channel."

The author's description of Alcazar is revolting ; and he asserts that the Sultan will not permit the removal of the filth with which the place is smothered. It seems that his Majesty has a rooted aversion to exports :-

" A short time ago he prohibited the exportation of bones, in which a considerable trade used to be done. His reason was that as bones became an article of commerce, it was found that the graves of the Moors were secretly opened, and the last relics of the faithful deported to be used in the manufacture of sugar for the Nazarenes over the seas."

Concerning that variously celebrated person, the Shereef of Wazan, who is in a sense the head of the Moslem religion in Marocco, Mr. Stntfield has nothing new to say ; but he dwells

emphatically upon the meaning of the Shereef's adoption of French nationality, and the use which may be made of his influence, now at the service of France. " Finding, no doubt," says the author, "his influence decreasing, and that the saint

business is less remunerative than in former days, he has cast in his lot with that Power to which the march of events seems to point as the arbiter of the future destinies of Marocco." And then the author says we—England—ought to be on our guard. We do not follow him there, and as his narrative progresses through a long indictment of the Moors as a semi-barbarous people, with little of civilisation except its vices, we diverge more widely from his opinions. If the Empire of Marocco is ever to be raised from the degradation of its present state, it must be by an exterior hand. The author knows this so well that be urges England to undertake the task ; but that is a pre- posterous idea ; the work already cut out for her is as much as she can do. Then why should not the exterior hand be that of France P The sights which the author witnessed in his adventurous ride, the cruelty, injustice, ignorance, dishonesty, indolence, and brutishness ; the frightful oppression of the Government, the merciless taxation, the inhuman punishment, the terrible poverty and peculiarly loathsome forms of disease (especially leprosy), with the remarkable indifference to both of the latter "which is," says the author, "one of the results of the conditions of existence in all countries like Marocco ;" the frequent recurrence of famine in the far interior, the reckless disregard of human life, and the shameless mal- administration of what is miscalled "justice;" the absence of any progressive energy, so that there are no roads in many places, and the people starve in one district while in another corn is selling cheap, bat transport is so slow and difficult that one cannot help the other,—may well make him declare that the sight of all this misery detracts from the pleasure of travelling.

That there should be any pleasure at all remaining is a wonder to the reader. The following passage puts the woeful case of the country of the Moors in a truly pitiable light :-

"Where the food resources of a country quadruple the needs of its scanty population, it does seem scandalous that sufferings like these [which he has described] should continue. . . . . . It is the interest of the scoundrels who are over the people that things should remain as they are, for ignorance, poverty, and misery are the main- stays of Moorish government. Men whose whole energies are centred in earning their scanty daily bread have little left for sedition and revolt ; and the Sultan pursues the enlightened policy of grinding down his subjects in order to keep himself on the throne."

Considerable interest attaches to that portion of the work which treats of the Berbers, in whose hands the greater part of the flourishing slave-trade with the Soudan is at present. " Once stop the trade in Marocco, and the chief inducement to kid- napping will be gone." But how to do this ? We think the French could supply a satisfactory answer to that question, and put an end to the open sale and purchase of slaves within twelve hours of the shores of Europe.

Mr. Stutfield's work is full of information ; he has neglected nothing, overlooked nothing, that bears upon the actual state of the country and the people, and the book is instructive and valuable. It possesses, however. singularly little picturesque- ness, and we gather from it only a vague idea of the physical aspects of the region comprised within his ride of 1,200 miles. The author's idea is that a collective European Protectorate might be established over Marocco, rather than that the country of the Moors should be regenerated "by a single Power whose former colonising efforts had been notoriously unsuccessful."

Such an expedient strikes us as being as romantic as the Crusades were in their time, as impracticable as a new Crusade would be in ours,—it puts human nature and political conditions out of account. But the concluding sentences make it abundantly clear that there is a fine field for the exploitation of the mixed motives which inspire and direct all great enterprises :-

"Five centuries of uninterrupted decay have reduced a people, once the most enlightened, as well as the most formidable in the world, to a state of degradation from which of themselves they can never recover. All ideas of reforming the corrupt and effete Moorish administration by any means abort of pressure from without may be cast aside. The fruits of their role are apparent in the waste lands and ruined towns and houses, the misery of the scanty and poverty- stricken population, the like of which is not to be seen in any other country of corresponding wealth and natural resources. At present, Marocco is a monstrous anachronism, and the condition of her people a disgrace to humanity. God made it a garden, man made it a wilderness,' and the time has come for the hand of civilised man to be called in, and by utilising the gifts Nature has bestowed upon it with so lavish a hand, to render it a garden once more."

The time is full, indeed, but is not the weary Titan too weary, in all his limbs, to set himself to the task ?