And when we were fairly afloat my Mahometan youth would be so weak from fasting that his oar would be almost useless; and when we did, after an hour or so of the most ignominious zigzaging, reach our anchorage on one of the fishing-grounds, then would he speedily become sea-sick, and instead of helping me by preparing bait and landing fish, he would lean despairingly over the side in abject misery, and implore me to go home promptly--a piteous illustration of the anguish caused by an empty stomach contracting on itself. Nor were these the only discomforts under which we groaned and grumbled. From the evening when the eager lookers-out from minarets of mosques and towers of the fortifications first descried the new moon which ushered in the holy month of fasting, every sunset, as it flushed the far-off waves with purple and crimson and gold, and turned the fleecy cloudlets in the western sky to brightest jewels, and suffused the white houses and towers of Mogador with sweetest glow of pink, and gilded the green-tiled top of each tall minaret, had been accompanied by the roar of a cannon from the battery just below our windows. "What the deuce is that?" asked a friend of mine, lately arrived from England, as we strolled homewards one evening through the dusty streets, and the boom of the big gun suddenly fell upon his astonished ear. "Only sunset," I replied. "Queer place this," said J. "Does the sun always set with a bang?" "Always during Ramadan." "Does it rise with a bang too? I hate to be roused up early in the morning!" "No, there is no gun at sunrise; but there is a very loud one at about three in the morning, or sometimes half-past, or four, or later." "Shocking nuisance!" remarked J. "My bedroom window's just over that abominable battery." The early morning gun was a great trial, certainly. I would not have minded being _reveille en sursaut_, as a Frenchman would say, and then turning comfortably over on the other side, and going to sleep again. But somehow or other I always found myself awake half an hour or an hour before the time, and then I _could not_ get to sleep again, but lay tossing about and fidgettily listening for the well-known din. At length I would hear a sound like the hum of an enormous fiendish nightmarish mosquito, caused by a hideous long tin trumpet, the shrill whistle of a fife or two, and the occasional tom-tomming of a Moorish drum. "Ha, the soldiers coming along the ramparts; they will soon fire now."