This empire which has come under the shadow of the tricolour is, above all else, a white man's country. Unlike India and Tripolitania and Rhodesia and the Sudan, Morocco is a country which is admirably adapted for European colonisation, being blessed with every natural advantage that creation has to offer. Its only objectionable feature is its people. Lying at the western gateway of the Mediterranean, where the narrowed sea has so often proved a temptation to invasion, its Atlantic ports within striking distance of the great lanes of commerce between Europe and South America and South Africa, Morocco occupies a position of enormous strategic, political, and commercial importance. The backbone of the country is the Great Atlas, which, taken as a whole, has a higher mean elevation than that of any other range of equal length in Europe, Africa, or western Asia, attaining in places an elevation of nearly fifteen thousand feet. Snow-clad, this mighty and isolated wall rises so abruptly from the plain that it needs but little stretch of the imagination to understand how the ancients believed that on it rested the heavens—whence, indeed, its name. Personally, the thing that surprised me most in Morocco was the total absence of desert. Either because of its proximity to the Sahara, or because of its camels, or the two combined, I went to Morocco expecting that I should find vast stretches of sun-baked, yellow sand. As a matter of fact, I found nothing of the kind. Traversed from east to west, as I have already said, by the strongly defined range of the Atlas, the greater part of its surface is really occupied by rolling prairies, diversified by low hills, and not at all unlike Ohio and Indiana. Though admirably adapted to the growing of cereals, the strict prohibition against the exportation of grain has naturally resulted in discouraging the native farmers, so that immense tracts of fertile land remain uncultivated. The alluvial soil, which is remarkable for its richness, frequently reaches a depth of fifteen feet and could be brought to an almost incredible degree of productiveness by the application of modern agricultural methods. What greater praise can be given to any soil than to say that it will bear three crops of potatoes in a single year and that corn is commonly sown and reaped all within the space of forty days?