It is no light task to which France has pledged herself in agreeing to effect the regeneration of an empire so decrepit and decadent as Morocco, but that she will accomplish it is as certain as that the leaves come with the spring. The changes which the coming of the French will effect in Morocco stretch the imagination almost to the breaking-point. Already the wireless crackles and splutters from a mast erected over the French Residency in Fez. With the proclamation of the protectorate the waiting railway-builders jumped their rail-heads across the Moroccan border as homesteaders, hearing the signal gun, jump their horses over the border of newly opened lands. Two or three years more and the traveller will be able to purchase through tickets to Fez and Marrakesh as easily as he can now to San Francisco or Milan. At Tangier, Rabat, El Araish, Mogador, and Agadir harbours will be dredged, break-waters built, and wharves constructed, while the filthy, foul-smelling cities will be made as clean and sanitary as Tunis and Algiers. Under French control Tangier, with its ideal climate, its picturesque features, and its splendid situation, will rival Cairo and the Riviera as a fashionable winter resort. The Moorish peasantry will be permitted to till their farms in peace, undisturbed by devastating armies, while the warlike Riffs can have their fill of fighting in French uniforms and under the French flag. This is no empty vision, remember. Peace, progress, and prosperity are bound to come to Morocco, just as they have come to those other African regions upon which the Frenchman has set his hand. Just how soon they come depends largely upon the Moors themselves. CHAPTER III SIRENS OF THE SANDS Zorah-ben-Abdallah was a perilously pretty girl, judged by any standard that you please. She was unveiled—a strange thing for an Eastern woman—and the clearness of her _café-au-lait_ complexion was emphasised by carmine lips and by blue-black hair, bewilderingly becoiffed and bewitchingly bejewelled; her eyes Scherazade would have envied. She was leaning from the window of a second-class compartment in the ramshackle train which plies between Constantine and Biskra and was quite openly admiring the very tight light-blue tunic and the very loose scarlet riding-breeches of my companion, a young officer of _chasseurs d'Afrique_ who was rejoining his regiment at El-Kantara. “She's a handsome girl,” said I. “Not for an Ouled-Naïl,” said he, adjusting his monocle and staring at her critically, very much as though he were appraising a horse. “An Ouled-Naïl's face is her fortune, you know, and in the Ziban, where they come from, she wouldn't get a second look.” “She would get several second looks on Broadway,” said I, taking another one myself. “I once travelled twelve thousand miles to see some women not half as pretty.”