The travellers saw it some while before they came to it--four high, smooth, castellated walls crowning a low hill. It stands upon the road from Fez to Rabat, and close to the road from Rabat to Larache, and a garrison guards it. For you could almost throw a stone from its walls into the trees of Mamura. Stretton and Warrisden rode round the walls to the gate, and as they passed beneath the arch both halted and looked back. Outside was a quiet country of grey colours; the sun was near to its setting; far away the broken walls of the old Portuguese town of Mediyah stood upon a point of vantage on a hillside, like some ruined castle of the Tyrol. Inside the caravanserai all was noise and shouting and confusion. In the thickness of the walls there were little rooms or cells, and in these the merchants were making their homes for the night, while about them their servants and muleteers buzzed like a hive of bees. And the whole great square within the walls was one lake of filthy mud, wherein camels, and mules, and donkeys, and horses rolled and stamped and fought. A deafening clamour rose to the skies. Every discordant sound that the created world could produce seemed to be brayed from that jostling throng of animals as from some infernal orchestra. And the smell of the place was fetid. "Let us pitch our camp outside!" said Warrisden. But the captain of the garrison came hurrying up. "No," he cried excitedly. "The Z'mur! The Z'mur!" Stretton shrugged his shoulders. "I am getting a little bored with the Z'mur," said he. "They have sent in word to us," the captain continued, "that they mean to attack us to-night." Stretton looked perplexed. "But why send in word?" he asked. The captain of the garrison looked astonished at the question. "So that we may be ready for them, of course," he replied, quite seriously; for life in Morocco has some of the qualities of _opera-bouffe_. "So you must come inside. You have a letter from my lord the Basha of Fez, it is true. If the letter said you were to sleep outside the walls of El Kantra, then I would kiss the seal and place it against my forehead, and bring out my five hundred men to guard you, and we should all get killed. But it does not say so." His five hundred men were really short of fifty. Stretton and Warrisden laughed; but they had to go inside the caravanserai. This was the last day on which they ran any risk. To-morrow they would cross the Sebou at Mediyah, and beyond the Sebou the road was safe.