By forced marches the army at last arrived at Rabat, and those of the tribesmen who cared to halt pitched their camp on the hills outside the walls. Promptly that night the Sultan’s body, accompanied by a single shereef and surrounded by a small contingent of foot-soldiers, was passed into the town through a hole in the wall--a dead man, it is said, never going in through the gates--and was entombed, as is the custom with Sultans, in a mosque. In the morning, when the people bestirred themselves to see the entry of the dead Hassan, they saw instead the new Sultan, then sixteen years of age, led forth on his father’s great white horse, and, shading him, the crimson parasol marking his authority. The secrecy that had been maintained was not intended only to keep the _m’halla_ intact; primarily the object was to ensure the succession of the youth then at Rabat, the nearest capital. Had the Maghzen been in the proximity of Fez or Marakesh, in spite of the Moorish law that passes on the succession to the Shereef of the dead man’s choice, Abdul Aziz might not have been the Sultan of Morocco. Uncles and rival brothers he had many, and high pretenders of other shereefian families might soon have risen. It was therefore important for the viziers themselves that the succession should come as a _coup d’état_, and that they should be on hand to support it with as much of the army as they could hold together. [Illustration: A PRINCELY KAID.] [Illustration: THE ROYAL BAND.] There were, of course, many heads to be cut off, both politically and physically. Mulai Omar (a son of Hassan by a negro slave and therefore half-brother of Abdul Aziz) secured the acknowledgment of Aziz in the great mosques at Fez, where he held the authority of Khalif, but later behaved in a most suspicious manner. A black boy whom he sent to stop the bands from celebrating the accession, being defied, drove his knife into a drum; and for this the hand that did the work was flayed and salted and the fingers bound together closed, until they grew fast to the palm and left the hand for ever a useless stump. Mulai Omar himself was made a royal prisoner, as was his brother Mulai Mohammed, Khalif of the southern capital (who has been released only within the past few weeks in order, it is reported, that he might take command of the army against Hafid, the trusted brother who became Khalif of Marakesh and governed there for many years, until recently, after the affair at Casablanca, when he essayed to become Sultan himself).