Though the country has, unfortunately, become largely deforested—for what Moor would ever think of planting trees, which could only be of value to another generation?—a wealth of timber still remains in the more remote valleys of the Atlas, the pines and oaks often attaining enormous size. Though Spanish concessionaires are profitably working gold mines in the Riff country, and the great German firm of Mannesmann Brothers has acquired extensive iron-ore-bearing properties in the Sus, and though large deposits of silver, copper, lead, and antimony have been discovered at various points in the interior, the mineral wealth of Morocco is still a matter for speculation. It is not likely to remain so long, however, for history has shown that it is the miners who form the real advance-guard of civilisation. To the stranger who confines his investigations to the highways which connect the capitals with the coast, Morocco gives the impression of being very sparsely settled. This is due to the fact that the natives take pains to avoid the highroads as they would the plague, the continual passage of troops and of travellers, all of whom practise the time-honoured custom of living on the country and never paying for what they take, having had the natural result of driving the inhabitants into less travelled regions, though traders and others whose business takes them into the back country find that it is far more densely populated than most foreigners suspect. Heretofore it has been possible for almost any foreigner, by the judicious use of bakshish, to obtain from the authorities an official order which required the people living along the roads to supply food both for him and his escort and fodder for their horses. Now, this was a very serious tax, especially among a people as poverty-stricken as the Moorish peasantry, and as a result of it the heedless traveller often caused much misery and suffering. But if the occasional traveller proved so serious a burden, imagine what it meant to these poor people when the Sultan himself passed, for, able to move only with an army, without any commissariat or transport, and feeding itself as it went, he devastated the land of food and fodder as though he was an invader instead of a ruler, sweeping as ruthlessly across his empire as the Huns did across southern Europe, and leaving his subjects to starve. Is it any wonder, then, that the desperation of the wretched, half-starved peasantry has vented itself in repeated revolutions? The coming of the French is bound to change this deplorable and demoralising state of affairs, however, for, once assured of protection for their crops and justice for themselves, the fugitive country folk will quickly flock back and resume the cultivation of their abandoned lands.