In the morning the little city appeared unlike other Moorish towns; where they are mostly grey or white, with here and there a green-tiled mosque, Laraiche affects all manner of colour. Among the white and blue houses there may be green or orange, yellow or brown or red, and likewise the inhabitants, curiously, go in for gaily coloured cloaks. On one side of the river this brilliant city rose from the ancient walls; on the other a cluster of sand dunes sloped back to the hills a mile or more away, and behind them, far in the distance, towered the Red Mountain, which Raisuli has made famous. Great lighters, things like Noah’s arks, rowed by fifteen, sometimes twenty, turbaned men, pushed off from the little quay to bring our cargo, and smaller craft began to cross the river to ferry over country people and their animals, along with one or two poor, fagged-out letter carriers, who had come afoot from Tangier, forty miles, overnight. By one of the smaller boats which came alongside we went ashore, to remain three days awaiting a further belated shipment of grain that came by camel train from the interior. We went to the only hotel, kept of course by a Spaniard, though designed specially to attract the British tourists of the Forwood line. The walls of the tiny, wood-partitioned rooms (spacious Moorish halls cut to cubicles) are papered like children’s playrooms, with pictures from old _Graphics_ and other London weeklies, planned no doubt to amuse the visitor when it rains, for on such occasions the streets of Laraiche are veritable rapids. The room which I occupied hung over the city walls and looked down on the banks of the river, dry at low tide. Being waked early one morning by some hideous sounds and muffled voices, we peered cautiously out of the window and in the dim light discerned a crowd of black-gowned Jews not twenty feet below, killing a cow. This bank at low tide is the slaughterhouse, where a dead beast of some kind lay continually. Fortunately the rising waters carried off the few remains that Jews and Moslems left; and fortunately, too, the place was not used also as the boneyard, where animals that have died of natural causes are dragged and heaped uncovered. Such a spot there is outside the walls of every Moorish town.