There can be no mistake about the records of history, which state that thousands of Christian slaves, many of them British, were sold on the great white market at Salli. The faces of many of the people to-day are distinctly European. Here there seemed to me to be less mixture of black blood than in the other towns, many of the people being as white as Europeans. We saw among the children a boy of five or six years who would not have looked unnatural in Ireland, and later, in the _mella_ we came across a little girl with golden hair. At this last we puzzled our brains--for our inquiries brought no explanation--finally surmising that some rich Jew, a hundred years ago, had bought her ancestor. In the centre of the town is a cone-shaped hill crowded with white, square houses of the best class, which range themselves round a mosque and minaret upon the summit. The massive tower, inlaid with tiles of many colours, once served as beacon for the pirates, though now, like all the Moorish coast, it sheds no light for Christian ships. When we asked to see the great mosque, our soldiers made excuses and would have led us another way, but we adopted the method of turning at the corners that we chose, leaving the man in the lead to double back from the way he would set. Of course he always protested, but from experience with other escorts we knew that to see what is to be seen in Mohammedan countries one must lead the way oneself, and the greater the protest of the guard the more one can be certain that one is on the proper track. The soldiers were anxious to take us promptly to the _mella_, where we might stay, they said, as long as we pleased; but first we searched out the mosque and later the market-place. The Sok here is in itself by no means so imposing as at Laraiche or even at Rabat, and there are to be seen no characters that are not also at the open ports; but here there gather Moors and Arabs and Berbers of an intenser religious ardour, who follow closer the customs of the ages past and whose very faces show their greater hatred of the Nazarene. The people of Salli--largely for their intolerance of Christians and their glorious rover ancestry--hold a social position second only to that of the people of Fez and the holy city of Ouzzan, and they are wealthier as a rule than the inhabitants of other towns; and these are reasons that holy men and maimed creatures flock here to beg. But at the time of our visit the presence of the Sultan at Rabat had drawn all wanderers, beggars, saints, minstrels, and itinerant tradesmen, across the river, and on the Sok of Salli there was but one poor bard to stop his story at sight of our unholy apparition. He stopped and refused to go on, and the people murmuring began to move off, while our soldiers urged us to pass on with them. [Illustration: SHAWIA TRIBESMEN.]