"True," he said, "but if I get into trouble among them it will not be my amusements but my liberty or my life that will be in danger." "Then in such a case you will stick at nothing to plow your way out?" "Nothing." I laughed, for my mind refused to believe him, and we laughed noisily together, with visions of bloody daggers before the eyes of both. Father, my _heart_ believed: silently, secretly, unconsciously, it drank in the poison of his thought--drank it in--ay-- Next day, about noon, we sailed for Tangier. Our ship was the "Jackal," a little old iron steam-tug, battered by time and tempest, clamped and stayed at every side, and just holding together as by the grace of God. The storm which we had outraced from Finisterre had now doubled Cape St. Vincent, and the sea was rolling heavily in the Straits. We saw nothing of this until we had left the bay and were standing out from Tarifa; nor would it be worthy of mention now but that it gave me my first real understanding of the tremendous hold that the faith or the fanaticism of the Moorish people--call it what you will--has upon their characters and lives. The channel at that point is less than twenty miles wide, but we were more than five hours crossing it. Our little crazy craft labored terribly in the huge breakers that swept inward from the Atlantic. Pitching until the foredeck was covered, rolling until her boats dipped in the water, creaking, shuddering, leaping, she had enough to do to keep afloat. With the American I occupied the bridge between the paddle-boxes, which served as a saloon for first-class passengers; and below us in the open hold of the after-deck a number of Moors sat huddled together among cattle and sheep and baskets of fowl. They were Pilgrims, Hadjis, returning from Mecca by way of Gibraltar, and their behavior during the passage was marvelous in its callousness to the sense of peril. They wrangled, quarreled, snarled at each other, embraced, kissed, laughed together, made futile attempts to smoke their keef-pipes, and quarreled, barked, and bleated again. "Surely," I said, "these people are either wondrously brave or they have no sense of the solemnity of death." "Neither," said the American; "they are merely fatalists by virtue of their faith. 'If it is not now, it is to come; if it is not to come then it is now.'" "There is a sort of bravery in that," I answered. "And cowardice, too," said the American. The night had closed in when we dropped anchor by the ruins of the Mole at Tangier, and I saw no more of the white town than I had seen of it from the Straits. But if my eyes failed in the darkness my other senses served me only too well. The shrieking and yelping of the boatloads of Moors and negroes who clambered aboard to relieve us of our luggage, the stench of the town sewers that emptied into the bay--these were my first impressions of the gateway to the home of Islam.