‘Coffee, you chaps,’ sounded from below, and we went down to breakfast with good old ‘Blood-stained Bill.’ CHAPTER III DEAD MEN AND DOGS Though at times unpleasant, it is always interesting to come upon the scene of a recent battle. Casablanca had been a battlefield of unusual order. The fight that had taken place was not large or momentous, but it had peculiarities of its own, and it left some curious wreckage. Windowless Moorish houses with low arched doors now lay open, the corners knocked off or vast holes rent in the side, and any man might enter. Several ‘Saint Houses’ were also shattered, and a mosque near the Water Port had been deserted to the ‘infidels.’ The French guns had done great damage, but how could they have missed their mark at a range of less than a mile! A section of the town had taken fire and burned. One cluster of dry brush kraals had gone up like so much paper and was now a heap of fine ash rising like desert sand to every breeze. Another quarter of a considerable area was untouched by fire, though not by the hand of the Arab; and what he had left of pots and pans and other poor utensils the Spaniard and Jew had gathered after his departure. At the time that we came poking through the quarter only a tom-tom, and that of inferior clay with a broken drum, was to be found. Hut after hut we entered through mazes of twisting alleys, the gates down everywhere or wide ajar; and we found in every case a heap of rags picked over half-a-dozen times, a heap of earthenware broken to bits by the Moors in order that no one else might profit. So silent was this quarter, once the living place of half the Moorish population, that the shimmering of the sun upon the roofs seemed almost audible. Twice we came upon Algerians of the French army, in one case two men, in the other a single stalwart ‘Tirailleur.’ We came to a street of wooden huts a little higher than the kraals, the _sok_ or market-place of the neighbourhood. Invariably the doors had been barricaded, and invariably holes hacked with axes had been made to let in the arm, or, if the shop was more than four feet square, the body of the looter. In front of the holes were little heaps of things discarded and smashed. What fiends these Moors and Arabs are, in all their mad haste to have taken the time to destroy what they did not want or what they could not carry off! They had hurried about the streets robbing each others’ bodies and dressing themselves, hot as the season was, in all the clothes they could crowd on, shedding ragged garments when they came to newer ones, always taking the trouble to destroy the old. And I have heard that in collecting women they acted much in the same way, leaving one woman for another, ‘going partners,’ one man guarding while the other gathered, driving the women off at last like cattle, for women among Mohammedans have a definite market value.