Laraiche is off the great trade routes, and the district round about is unproductive. For these reasons its poor inhabitants, unable to own guns and riding horses, are peaceable and submissive. The town as well as the surrounding country is safe for any Christian, and even insults for him are few. We went with our ragged old guide, who bore the fitting name of Sidi Mohammed, up through the Kasbah, as fine a ruin of Moorish architecture as I have seen, and out through a long tunnel to the quaint old market-place, broad and white, flanked on each side by long, low rows of colonnades, the ends, through which the trains of camels come, sustained by several arches, none the same, opening in various directions. Certainly the Moors who built this town were architects and artists too. But the poverty and the degradation of the place! The houses, dark and wretched; the tea-shops foul and small and crowded much like opium dens; the people lean and miserable and cramped with hungry stomachs, dirty and diseased. Though clad in rags of brightest colours, the average human being is marked over with pox or something worse, and his head is scaly, the hair growing only in blotches. Children follow you, with paper patches, the prayers of some mad saint, tied about their running, bloodshot eyes; old men hobble by, one lean leg covered with sores, the other swollen huge with elephantiasis, both bare and horrible. Laraiche is beautiful and awful. We saw a funeral here, and I thought we Christians could learn something from these Moors. In this sad country a man is hardly dead before they bury him. As soon as the grave can be dug the corpse is taken on the shoulders of friends, and quickly, to the music of a weird chant, borne to the grave. Without a flood of agony and an aftermath of long-extended mourning, the body is consigned to earth, and the soul that has departed, to the tender mercy of almighty God. An unmarked sandstone is erected; and if a relative wore a cloak of green or red before the parting, green or red is his colour still. The day we left Laraiche a heavy breeze blew from the sea, white-capped rollers broke upon the shore, and we knew that Rabat was not to be reached. We passed on to Casablanca, where, the harbour being better, we were able to land. Now after all these disappointments we were resolved to get to Rabat at any cost. If it were necessary, we would go by land and run the gauntlet of the Shawia tribes, professing to be Germans deserting from the Foreign Legion; but the French consul saved us this. From him we obtained permission to go back by torpedo-boat and to be transhipped, so to speak, to the cruiser _Gueydon_, where we might stay as long as was necessary, as the ship was permanently anchored off Rabat. In two days after boarding the _Gueydon_ the Atlantic calmed, and we left, bidding adieu to our French hosts, to cross the bar of the Bu Regreg in a twenty-oared Moorish boat. CHAPTER XI AT RABAT