The TruantsMason, A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley)
General
The Truants
Mason, A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley)
Fiction
It was an awkward moment, but the men of Warrisden's party assumed,
with what skill they could, an air of unconcern. Trouble was very near
to them. It needed only that one of those wild tribesmen should reach
out his hand and seize the bridle of a horse. But no hand was reached
out. The Z'mur were caught in a moment of indecision. They sat upon
their horses motionless. They let the Europeans pass.
Ibrahim, however, drew no comfort from their attitude.
"It is because they wish rifles and ammunition from the Government,"
he said. "Therefore they will avoid trouble until they have got them.
But with the next party it will not be so."
There are three waterfalls in Morocco, and of those three one falls in
a great cascade between red cliffs into a dark pool thirty feet below,
close by the village of Medhuma. By this waterfall they lunched, the
while Ibrahim bared his right arm to the shoulder, stretched himself
full length upon the ground, and, to the infinite danger of the
bystanders, practised shooting with his revolver. They lunched quickly
and rode on. Towards evening, above a group of trees on a hill, they
saw here and there a minaret.
"Mequinez," exclaimed Ibrahim. "Schoof! Mequinez!"
In a little while fragments of thick wall began to show, scattered
here and there about the plain. Brown walls, high and crumbling to
rain, walls that never had been walls of houses, but which began and
ended for no reason. They were all that was left of the work of Mulai
Ismail, who, in the seventeenth century, had built and planned
buildings about this town until death put an end to all his
architecture. There was to be a wall across the country, from Fez to
Morocco city far away in the south, so that the blind, of which this
kingdom still has many, and then was full, might pass from one town to
another without a guide. Part of that wall was built, and fragments of
it rise amongst the oleanders and the bushes to this day.
The travellers entered now upon a park. A green mossy turf spread out
soft beneath the feet of their horses, dwarf oaks made everywhere a
pleasant shade; Stretton had lost sight now of the minarets, and no
sign of Mequinez was visible at all. The ground sloped downwards, the
track curved round a hill, and suddenly, on the opposite side of a
valley, they saw the royal city, with its high walls and gates, its
white houses, and its green-tiled mosques, and its old grey massive
palaces stretch along the hillside before their eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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