By the Franco-Spanish agreement of 1912 the frontiers of Ifni were extended southward along the Moorish coast to the River Dra’a, where they join up with those of the large Spanish territory of Rio de Oro, which has an area of 109,000 square miles but whose utter worthlessness is emphasized by the paucity of its population, which numbers less than five hundred souls. Rio de Oro, which is under the governorship of the Canary Islands but is administered by a sub-governor residing at Villa Cisneros, consists of three zones: the colony proper; the protectorate; and the occupied territory, whose northern boundary is the Dra’a, which likewise forms the southern boundary of Morocco, so that Rio de Oro is not within the confines of the Shereefian Empire. [Illustration: THE PRICE OF EMPIRE Riffi bringing their wounded down from the mountains on improvised stretchers Blood-stained blankets take the place of Red Cross ambulances in the roadless Riff] Though France’s active rôle in the Riff was brought to an end in the spring of 1926 by the submission of the Riffian chieftain, Abd-el-Krim, the events which have been occurring in that portion of Morocco during recent years are of such deep political significance, and so thickly sown with the seeds of future trouble, as to require more than perfunctory mention. Spain’s interests in northern Morocco are of long standing. Her first foothold on the African mainland was secured at Melilla, seven score miles to the east of Gibraltar, which she seized from the Moors two years before Columbus set sail for the west. In 1580, upon the subjugation of Portugal by Philip II, Spain obtained possession of Ceuta, the immensely strong fortress city which crowns the rocky promontory marking the eastern end of the Strait of Gibraltar, the two great rocks being known to the ancients as the Pillars of Hercules. Larache, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, was held by the Spaniards throughout the greater part of the seventeenth century. (Incidentally, tradition identifies Larache—El Araish, the natives call it—with the Garden of the Hesperides, ’Arasi being the Arabic for “pleasure-gardens,” and the “golden apples” being perhaps the oranges for which the place has long been famous.) In 1860, Spain seized Tetuan, an important town near the mouth of the Wadi Martil, forty miles southeast of Tangier. Between Tetuan and Melilla a Spanish fortress crowns one of the islands, occupied in 1673, in the fine semicircular Bay of Alhucemas, which forms the seaward end of one of the most beautiful valleys in the Riff, and within recent years the Spaniards have also appropriated the group of dry and barren islands known as the Zaffarines, or Saffron Islands, off the eastern extremity of the Spanish zone, by the seizure of which the French were cleverly forestalled. Most of these Spanish holdings are utterly worthless, Ceuta and Melilla alone being worthy of consideration.