Though scarcely forty hours of travel by train and boat separate the departure platform at the Quai d'Orsay station in Paris from the landing-beach at Tangier, though its coast is skirted by the tens of thousands of American tourists who visit the Mediterranean each year, less is known of Morocco than of many regions in central Asia or inner Africa. Though a few daring travellers have made scattering crow's-feet upon its map, there are regions as large as all our New England States put together which are wholly unexplored. It is almost the last of the unknown countries. As its women draw their veils to hide their faces from the men, so the Moors have attempted to draw a veil of mystery and intolerance over the face of their country to hide it from the stranger. What strange tribes, what ruins of an earlier civilisation, what wealth in forests or minerals lie behind its ranges can only be conjectured. Its maps are still without the names of rivers and mountains and towns—though the rivers and mountains and towns are there; the sole means of travel are on camels, mules, or donkeys along the wild, worn paths, it being the only country of any size in the world which cannot boast so much as a mile of railway; its ports and the two highways leading from the coast to its capitals, Fez and Morocco City, were, until the coming of the French, alone open to the traveller—and none too safe at that; the foreigner who has the hardihood to stray from the frequented paths is taking his life in his hands. Few of the maps of Morocco are, so far as accuracy is concerned, worth the paper they are printed on, being largely based on unscientific material eked out by probabilities and conjectures, there being less accurate information, in fact, about a country larger than France, and only two days' journey from Trafalgar Square, than there is about Abyssinia or Borneo or Uganda. Even the names which we have given to the country and its inhabitants are purely European terms and are neither used nor recognised by the people themselves, who call their country _El Moghreb el Aska_, which means literally “Sunset Land,” the term Morocco being a European corruption of the name of one of its capitals, Marrakesh, or, as it is known to foreigners, Morocco City. A land almost as large as the State of Texas, with snow-capped mountain ranges, navigable rivers, vast forests, a fertile soil, an abundant water supply, and an ideal climate; a land of walled cities and white villages, of domed mosques and slender minarets, of veiled women and savage, turbaned men; a land of strange peoples and still stranger customs; a land of mystery and fatalism, of suspicion and fanaticism, of cruelty and corruption, of confusion and contradiction—that is Morocco, where, as an Arabic writer has put it, a wise man is surprised at nothing that he sees and believes nothing that he hears.