The walls of the _mella_ were but a few hundred yards away, and there we repaired at last, where crowds who followed us were beaten back only to prevent annoyance. We could stop and speak with the Jews and enter their synagogues and even their houses, and they would pose for photographs, though many of them now saw a camera for the first time. Having taken refuge here from the Spanish Inquisition of the fifteenth century the Jews of Morocco might be expected to harbour prejudices against the Christian world, but, strangely, nowhere, not in the heart of the closed country, are they at all fanatic. A drove of boys and men, with women trailing on behind, followed us as we left their walled reservation, and would have come beyond but for the Moorish keeper of their gate, who raised his stick and shouting drove them back. It is the law at night that all Jews must be inside the _mella_ when the gates are closed at seven or eight o’clock; and this good rule is for their safety, that they may not suffer robbery and abuse. The Jews of Morocco, oppressed and often robbed, pay the country’s fighting men for their protection; in Moorish towns they pay the basha, in the country they pay the kaid or other chief of the strongest neighbouring tribe. They are protected too by the Government, because they are thrifty and can be made to pay, under pressure, heavy taxes. CHAPTER XIII MANY WIVES We were up on the Kasbah, the high rocky citadel that rises nearly two hundred feet straight above the notorious bar of the Bu Regreg, taking in a splendid view of the river’s winding course together with the city of Salli. When a caravan of unusual size twisted out of Salli’s double gate and came across the sands to the water’s edge, where a score of ferry boats nosed the bank, their owners began jumping about like madmen, frantic for the promised trade that could not escape them. On market days at Rabat there are always camel trains and pack trains of mules and horses crossing these sands of Salli to and from the barges that ferry them over the river for a farthing a man and two farthings a camel, but they seldom come in trains of more than twenty. This winding white company, detached in groups of sometimes four, sometimes forty, stretched from the wall to the water’s edge, a distance of half a mile; it spread out on the shore, and still kept coming from the gate. Neither Weare nor I had heard that the Sultan’s harem would arrive this day, and we had to reproach our faithful Driss Wult el Kaid, to whom we had given standing orders to move round among his countrymen and let us know when things of interest were happening.