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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
Set in the medieval city of Marrakesh and the majestic kasbahs of the High Atlas mountains, Lords of the Atlas tells the extraordinary story of Madani and T'hami el Glaoui, warlord brothers who carved out a feudal fiefdom in southern Morocco in the early twentieth century. Quislings of the French colonial administration, they combined the aggression of gangland mobsters with the opulence of hereditary Indian princes, and ruled with a mixture of flamboyance and terror. On returning from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, T'hami ordered the severed heads of his enemies to be mounted on his gates. Yet in 1956, when the French left Morocco, the Glaoua regime toppled like a pack of cards.
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Lords of the Atlas
The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua 1893–1956
GAVIN MAXWELL
For queries on an empty page;
For rams and expiated sin;
For desert dust and falcon’s cry.
For tempest in a ruined inn.
For sunrise, and the mountain’s age
A vulture on the sky.
Contents
Title Page
Author’s Foreword
Table of Principal Events
Map
Genealogical Table of the House of Glaoua from the 1960s
BOOK ONE MADANI EL GLAOUI
1 The Castle
2 The Cannon
3 Whose King is a Child
4 The Time and the Country
5 The Defeat of Abd El Aziz
6 Madani’s Sultan – Moulay Hafid
7 The Hostages
8 The Beginning of the Great Caid Era
BOOK TWO T’HAMI EL GLAOUI
9 The Golden Years
10 The Glaoui Empire Completed
11 The Image
12 Towards Independence
13 The First March of the Berber Warriors
14 The Deposition of Mohammed V
15 T’hami’s Hour
16 The Submission of T’hami
17 The Hand of Allah
APPENDICES
IThe Aftermath – Marrakesh in 1956
IIWalter Harris’s Description of his Dealings with Moulay Hafid after his Deposition
IIIExtract from With Mulai Hafid at Fez by Lawrence Harris (1909)
IVComments on Son Excellence by Members of the Old Regime
The Documents in Reply
About the Author
Copyright
Author’s Foreword
THE PREPARATION OF THIS BOOK has involved a great deal of research over a period of several years. What written information is available is scattered throughout a very large number of French books and documents, most of them not easy of access; the references are fragmentary, too, so that the production of a narrative has been like collecting and assembling widely dispersed pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The literature in English is meagre and for the most part trivial, (with the exception of Rom Landau’s Moroccan Drama), but early on in my reading I chanced upon the late Mr Walter Harris’s Morocco That Was, published by Blackwood’s in 1912. Mr Harris was Times correspondent in Morocco from before the turn of the century until after the establishment of the French Protectorate; he could, and often did, pass as an Arab, and enjoyed the personal friendship of several Sultans. While his book covers a period of less than twenty years, and is mainly anecdotal and episodic, I realised at once that to use his information while changing his words would be unthinkable; for his style, both moving and hilariously satirical, must have been unique in his epoch. I therefore approached his nephew and literary executor, Mr Peter Harris, who has been generous enough to allow me to reproduce long extracts verbatim. This I have done, not always in sequence, cementing them, as it were, by factual material from other sources. Thus all passages in Book One that are placed between inverted commas are his unless otherwise acknowledged. It has, in fact – since the book was short – proved possible to use the greater part of his text, and I am sure that many will share my pleasure in the republication after so many years of a neglected virtuoso.
A select list of published sources is given at the end of this book. Beyond this I have relied upon a great bulk of verbal communication and unpublished notes that have been made available to me; these, at the request of the donors, I have not acknowledged to individuals, but I express my great appreciation of the time and trouble they have given to my project.
Any biography of a ruler necessarily involves consideration of much of his country’s contemporary history, and it is difficult for the biographer to determine at what point to arrest examination of an outside sequence of events that may have affected his subject. Thus, for example, the Istiqlal or Moroccan Independence Movement merits a separate volume at least as long as the present one, and discussion of the Arab Berber problem in Morocco has had to be kept to the minimum for understanding of the narrative. The select bibliography is crammed with tangential fact, which may be described as ‘further reading’.
I am indebted to Lord Brockway for allowing me to reproduce his letter published in the Manchester Guardian on 10 June 1953; and to the Trustees of the late Agnes, Lady Grove for permission to quote extracts from her Seventy-one days’ Camping in Morocco.
The decorations in the text were drawn for this book by Ahmed Ben Lahcen Tija, a Berber from Marrakesh, originally of the Haha tribe.
Table of Principal Events
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
Morocco in the 1930s
BOOK ONE
Madani El Glaoui
Tighremt’n Oughzen, Dadès valley
1
The Castle
THE CASTLE STANDS at an altitude of more than 8,000 feet in the High Atlas mountains of Morocco. It and its scattered rookery of crumbling predecessors occupy the corner of a desert plateau, circled by the giant peaks of the Central Massif, all of them rising to more than 10,000 feet, and some, such as the great Jebel Ghat to the eastward, reaching 12,500. When in the spring the snows begin to thaw and the river below the castle, the Oued Mellah, becomes a torrent of ice-grey and white, the mountains reveal their fantastic colours, each distinct and contrasting with its neighbour. The hues are for the most part the range of colours to be found upon fan shells – reds, vivid pinks, violets, yellows, but among these are peaks of cold mineral green or of dull blue. Nearer at hand, where the Oued Mellah turns to flow through the valley of salt, a cluster of ghostly spires, hundreds of feet high and needle-pointed at their summits, cluster before the face of a precipice; vultures wheel and turn upon the air currents between them.
Apart from a sprinkling of evergreen shrubs upon the lower slopes, the mountains are bare of vegetation, for only close round the castle walls are there real trees; the tenderness of new leaf and the glory of blossoming almond intensified by the mighty desolation of the backcloth.
Even in this setting the castle does not seem insignificant. It is neither beautiful nor gracious, but its sheer size, as if in competition with the scale of the mountains, compels attention as much as the fact that its pretension somehow falls short of the ridiculous. The castle, or kasbah, of Telouet is a tower of tragedy that leaves no room for laughter. The double doors to the forecourt are twenty feet high. A giant Negro slave opens the lock with a key a foot long and sets his shoulder to the iron-bossed wood; the door gives way reluctantly, inch by inch, creaking and rasping upon rusty hinges. A kestrel hawk, disturbed from its nest in the wall above, flies out scolding with sharp staccato cries. The surface of the courtyard is an uneven rubble, sloping sharply to the left, down to the curtain wall, where row upon row of dark doorways lead to the stable quarters. Above them are castellated look-out posts facing the Jebel Ghat. There is sheep-dung scattered among the rubble, and the reddish curling horn of a Moroccan ram. To the right rises the whole mass of the kasbah, tower and rooftop: ill-ordered, ill-planned, but majestic in its proliferation and complete absence of symmetry. There are three colours only – whitewash, red stone or clay, and brilliant green roof tiles. Above these the ever-present birds of prey, the vultures, ravens and kites, weave slow and intricate patterns upon the hard blue sky. There is no sound but their calling, and the clacking bills of the storks which nest on every tower.
The slave unlocks an intricately carved door in the white wall to the right of the forecourt. The number and weight of keys that he carries is so great that in order to support them he wears a heavy silk rope about his shoulders, concealed by his djellabah, an ankle-length white woollen garment with a hood, and further hidden by his selham, a black woollen cloak, also with a hood, which envelops all.
He carries sixty-seven keys. He has been in sole charge of Telouet for three years, but even now he does not know his way through the labyrinth that was constructed intentionally as such. He can find his way to the kitchens (I counted two hundred and thirty-eight paces and twenty-two doors unlocked), but he cannot find his way from these to the harem without going back to the main reception quarters and looking out of the windows to re-orientate himself.
It was to these reception rooms that he wanted always to return; they were the outward and visible sign of ultimate physical ambition. They were all on one floor, but three hundred men had worked on them for three years, plasterworkers, carvers, and one painter, who covered inches rather than feet daily. This man had been paid, by Moroccan standards, an enormous wage – about £22 a week. The owner of the castle had intended that it should become the most fabulous palace in the world, a Château de Coucy, an Xanadu. It had already been called ‘The Palace of a Thousand and One Nights’.
The décor was in the main based upon the stalagmite theme of the Saadien tombs (the Saadiens were an earlier dynasty of Moroccan Sultans who reigned from 1554 to 1659), but it embraced, also, every style that was luxurious, however debased, and made use of every traditional motif. A (comparatively) small salon in which the occupant entertained intimate guests incorporated continuous three-foot-high panels of silks and brocades from Lyons, rugs from Rabat, Persia, Turkestan and the High Atlas, comparatively crude work and bastard design alternating with high craftsmanship of all nations.
The harem is paved and walled with painted tiles that seem, for the most part, to be of modern Italian origin, though some have the detailed beauty of the ancient Hispano-Mauresque. The carved and painted yew wood ceilings of the reception rooms are Moorish in concept, as is the Saadien plasterwork of the noble alcoves. But deep invading cracks cut crudely through the intricate elaboration of years of work, for Telouet is empty now; only the Negro slaves, almost destitute, linger on to tend the relics of a dead dynasty.
I have various images of Telouet. The last and most enduring is after a great snowfall when more than four thousand sheep and goats in the surrounding mountains were buried and killed by suffocation. When the snows thawed and the carcases were exposed every vulture, kite and raven congregated on Telouet. As the sun went down the air was dark with them as with a swarm of locusts; they homed for Telouet in their thousands, like starlings to Trafalgar Square, till the branches of the trees broke under them, till the battlements of the castle were foul with their excreta, and still, as the last of the light went, the black wings were thronging in to alight and jostle their neighbours. It was on that night that, listening to the jackals howling, I became lost in the castle, and found my torch shining upon white but manacled bones in a dungeon. With the turbulent history of Telouet they could have been either a hundred or less than five years old.
‘In every governor’s Kasbah, deep in damp dungeons – as often as not holes scooped in the earth for storing grain – there lay and pined those who had committed, or not committed, as the case might be, some crime; and still more often, those who were rich enough to be squeezed. In such suffering, and in darkness, receiving just sufficient nourishment to support life, men were known to have existed for years, to emerge again long after their relations had given up all hope of seeing them. But there was always a chance – a chance that the Governor might die or fall into disgrace; and then the dungeons in his castle would be opened and the wrecks of his prisoners be released. And what prisons! what horrors of prisons they were, even those above ground and reserved for the ordinary class of criminal. Chained neck to neck, with heavy shackles on their legs, they sat or lay in filth, and often the cruel iron collars were only undone to take away a corpse.’ ‘The whole life in those great Atlas fortified Kasbahs was one of warfare and of gloom. Every tribe had its enemies, every family had its blood feuds, and every man his would-be murderer.’
Work on Telouet was still in progress when the regime fell ten years ago, the only event that could logically bring it to a halt. The plasterers and tilers and mosaic-workers had a programme lasting for years ahead. There are windows still unglazed, others awaiting the addition of the elaborate wrought iron work with which they were all to be embellished. Many walls carry the bold charcoal outlines for an ambitious mosaic that was never begun, for the whole vast palace and all its uncountable rooms were to have been decorated with the same disregard for time or money. Builders were at work on further extensions to the castle itself, here a new wing, here a lofty gallery from which guests might watch feats of horsemanship on the green sward below.
Telouet presented, in fact, a picture that was almost unique, for it was not a medieval survival, as are the few European castles still occupied by the descendants of feudal barons, but a deliberate recreation of the Middle Ages, with all their blatant extremes of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, elegance and violence, power and fear – by those who had full access to the inventions of contemporary science. No part of the kasbah is more than a hundred years old; no part of its ruined predecessors goes back further than another fifty. Part of the castle is built of stone, distinguishing it sharply from the other kasbahs that are made of pisé, or sun-dried mud, for no matter to what heights of beauty or fantasy these may aspire they are all, in the final analysis, soluble in water.
Kasbah of Telouet
From this desolate group of ruins in the High Atlas, so far from the seat of government at Fez, there arose by a strange chain of coincidence a generation of kingmakers. They were two brothers, chiefs of an insignificant mountain tribe, and they rose in that one generation to depose two Sultans, to become the true rulers of Morocco, to shake the whole French political structure; and, with their downfall, to add a new and uncomfortable word to the French language. The name of the tribe was Glaoua, and glaouisé now means, in French political jargon, betrayed. Neither France nor Morocco is over-anxious to recall the tale behind the word; and for this reason, if for no other, a true reconstruction presents the historian with formidable difficulties.
A hundred years ago very few contemporary Europeans had ever visited Morocco. There were no more than a handful resident in the country, and fewer still had ever penetrated into the savage territories of the High Atlas, where wild tribes skirmished amid the barren peaks, or into the palm oases of the Pre-Sahara beyond them. The country, despite its geographical position as a neighbour to Europe, remained as unknown as Tibet, xenophobe and mysterious, guarding splendours and horrors that the wildest travellers’ tales could not exaggerate. The Corsair pirates still patrolled the coasts; in the greater towns the Jews salted for public display the heads of the innumerable executed; every sizeable city held its slave market three times a week, on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays; there was neither a railway nor a true road in all the land. Yet the splendour of its palaces, the majesty of its mosques, rivalled anything in all Islam.
In fact, Morocco at the end of the last century was little different in any external respect from what it had been at the end of the century before – or, indeed, the end of any other century for a thousand years or more. Since the seventh century, when the Arabs conquered and Islamised the country from the indigenous white Berbers, it had remained an independent state for thirteen hundred years, ruled over from the sixteenth century onward by Sultans who combined both temporal and spiritual power – each was both king and imam. The Sultans were Chereefs; that is to say that they were or claimed to be direct descendants of the Prophet Mohammed.
The historical development of the whole country parallels and underlines the paradox of Telouet; Fez had achieved a medieval richness of culture and scholarship long before northern Europe reached the same point, but there she had remained. The reasons were numerous and complex, but the most easily understood was the influence of successive assaults of Portuguese, Spaniards and Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, disrupting through dislocation of trade routes a merchant economy which had promised stability. In any country a characteristic of absolute monarchy was an almost unbelievable disparity between the cultural standards of the court and of the general life of the people, and in Morocco this was to the last degree accentuated by the character of the terrain.
There have been many attempts to divide Morocco into convenient sections for discussion, but most of them appear unnecessarily complex; it is easier to consider an inner Morocco and an outer Morocco, the two being divided by the whole mass of the Atlas mountains running from the south-west to the north-east of the country, and the Rif mountains which turn at right angles to these and form the Mediterranean wall. From the point of view of a central government, or mahkzen, at Fez the governable territory of inner Morocco reached barely to the foothills of the mountain ranges; beyond this line wild tribes acknowledged no allegiance to the throne. The same rough geographical division into an inner and outer Morocco covered the terms bled el mahkzen – country under government control – and bled es siba – literally the ‘lawless country’, where force was the only criterion – of the infinitely greater territories of unsubdued tribes. It was from the bled es siba, and more especially the land of desert and palm oasis lying to the east of the Atlas, that almost every new dynasty of Sultans rose to conquer and replace the last.
The pomp and pageantry of the Sultans was unequalled anywhere in the world, but their hour was often proportionately brief; at one point there had been six Sultans in ten years. At best, the geographical extent of their rule embraced little more than half the land nominally enclosed by the frontiers of Morocco. Much of the unconquered territory was unworthy of a Sultan’s attention except as a possible cradle for a new pretender to the throne, but the vast white ramparts of the High Atlas contained a greater challenge, for they guarded the rich and fertile oases that lay between them and the Sahara Desert. Sultan after Sultan led punitive forces against the unconquered tribes of the south; but, no matter what the fortunes of war, there could be no final decisive battle, for once the imperial army had withdrawn the tribes settled back into their old insolent disregard of central authority.
The present ruling dynasty, the Alaouites, have occupied the throne of Morocco for an uninterrupted three hundred years. They celebrated their tricentenary in 1964; and King Hassan II, who succeeded his father Mohammed V in 1960, is the twenty-second rightful Alaouite Sultan.
The second Sultan of the dynasty, who reigned for no less than fifty-five years (1672–1727) remained until recently the only one whose name – Moulay Ismael – was familiar to many Europeans, and familiar in a most unsavoury context, a name to be bracketed with those of Gilles de Rais or de Sade. Moulay Ismael was, in what may be described as his personal life, an ogre for whom there can be few parallels in the history of any country. Like a fox in a hen-run, he killed for sport, not occasionally, but as a matter of personal and daily satisfaction like the pleasures of the table or of the harem. There was no pretence at pretext; with his own sword he would strike off the head of the slave who held his stirrup as he mounted his horse, or several heads of his own Black Guards as he rode down their ranks; he disembowelled the living and organised displays of torture for the titillation of his senses; there was, in fact, no imaginable atrocity of cruelty and bloodlust in which he did not habitually indulge. Yet as a ruler he was one of the great figures of Moroccan history. By the maintenance of a permanent army of black slaves he did much to unify and extend the bled el mahkzen (though he was at civil war throughout almost his whole reign, and latterly with his own sons). He eliminated many of the foreign enclaves in his country, ejecting the British from Tangier in 1684 and the Spanish from Larache; he forced the attention of France by demanding in marriage a natural daughter of Louis XIV, the young widowed Princesse de Conti; he built with the labour of thousands of Christian captives, whose bodies were simply built into the walls as they died, his new capital of Meknès. He left, however, the greatest of Morocco’s internal problems untouched, for he made no attempt to integrate temporarily defeated Berber tribes into an Arabised Morocco.
The Eagle’s Nest, Telouet
After the death of Moulay Ismael in 1727 the whole of Morocco fell into total anarchy, while for a full thirty years his sons struggled for the throne. It was like a game of musical chairs, but a singularly bloody and noisy one. One of the sons reigned twice, another achieved four times; in between, five other Sultans scrambled briefly on to the throne before being pushed off again. Deserters from the armies of all factions formed roving brigand bands, and no life nor property was safe anywhere in the country; the bled es siba crept back from the mountains on to the plains.
The period ended with the exhaustion that characterises the close of an hysterical attack. Both the country and the imperial palace were utterly impoverished. Every subsequent Sultan was faced with the necessity of leading tax-collecting punitive armies against the numerous rebellious tribes of a now established bled es siba, tribes who preferred the chances of war to the certainty of destitution. It was to one of these repressive sorties, more than a century and a quarter later, that the House of Glaoua owed its sudden but vertiginous rise.
2
The Cannon
IN 1893 the reigning Alaouite Sultan, Moulay Hassan, decided upon a tax-collecting expedition to the desert oases beyond the High Atlas, with its ultimate aim as the restoration of law and order at Tafilelt, the great palm oasis that had been the cradle of his dynasty, and which was now, as so often before, in a state of anarchy. It was creeping with his own blood relations, for it had always been the custom of the Alaouites to send home to Tafilelt unwanted members of their families. As these families numbered literally hundreds of children, and as the majority were unwanted, the descendants of the Prophet in Tafilelt were legion. It was an unusual state of affairs if there were not a few stirring up trouble.
The expedition would have meant, had all gone well, a return journey for his army of something over a thousand miles, but he was well used to this peripatetic existence. Moulay Hassan was, by the standards of his day in Morocco – and it is necessary to emphasise the qualification – an intelligent ruler. He saw the necessity of reducing the bled es siba, the lands of rebellious tribes, to unity with the government at Fez, but he was essentially an exponent of the tradition summed up by the dicta of his predecessors, and more especially by the cynical aphorism ‘an empty sack cannot stand upright’. This implied the emptying of the sacks (destitution by tax and pillage of the potentially dissident tribes) and he never looked beyond this to a more permanent solution.
‘He was no fanatic, and had he been able to break down some of the great reserve which encircled him, he probably would have been content to do so. In appearance he was extremely handsome, dark, but showing no trace of black blood, with straight regular features, and a most dignified bearing. His most remarkable feature was, however, the sadness of his expression.
‘Moulay Hassan’s energy was never-failing, and he maintained order amongst his lawless tribes and stamped out the constantly occurring revolts by an almost unceasing “progress” through the country, accompanied by his rabble of an army. He seldom spent six months together in any of his several capitals, and the Moors had a saying “The Imperial tents are never stored”.
‘The great labour, the enormous transport that these journeyings necessitated, is difficult to appreciate. Not only was the Sultan accompanied by his numerous ladies and all his viziers and their families and suites, but he had with him as well some ten thousand soldiers and a rabble of camp-followers. A large number of native merchants also joined the throng, for trade flowed to the region in which the Court was residing.
‘Some idea of the results upon the country passed through can be imagined from the fact that the very name of these expeditions in Arabic is “harka”, “the burning”. No matter whether the tribes were in incipient rebellion, in open revolt, or in peace, they had to provide the food and fodder of this great horde, whose ravages more nearly resembled those of a flight of locusts than the passing by of human beings. Not only such “legal” taxation as could be extorted was collected, but the viziers and the Sultan’s entourage had to be bribed and paid as well, while every soldier and every camp-follower pillaged on his own account. On receiving the news of the coming of one of these Imperial expeditions, as many of the population as could, or as dared, fled to other regions; and the Sultan often passed through a deserted country, except that the Governor and tribal representatives had to be there to pour the little wealth of the countryside into the royal coffers.’
The following description of the routine of such an expedition refers to a later march and another Sultan, but of it Walter Harris writes, ‘Sultan after Sultan, ever since the empire of Morocco first came under the dominion of the Arabs, had travelled in exactly the same manner … in no detail had it changed. The very shape and decoration of the tents had never varied.
Sultan Moulay Hassan, 1873–94
‘Long before daylight the great camp was astir, and when, soon after 3 a.m., the morning gun was fired, a number of tents had already been struck, horses saddled, and mules and camels packed for the march. In the moonlight and early dawn the scene was one of great beauty – an indistinct medley of white tents, here silvery in the moonlight, there ruddy with the glow of campfires, whose tall red columns of smoke rose pillar-like into the still air. In and about the tents passed the shadowy forms of men and animals. As if by magic the scene was ever changing, as tent after tent silently fell to the ground, until with the first glow of dawn there remained of the great encampment only the canvas-walled enclosure containing the Sultan’s tents, and a plain covered with horsemen and thousands upon thousands of baggage mules and camels. Already the cavalry were massed near the Sultan’s enclosure, the horsemen forming an open square, in the centre of which, surrounded by the Ministers of State, lay a crimson-curtained palanquin with its couch of turquoise blue. From the entrance of the Sultan’s tents to the square of cavalry a double line was formed by white-robed, red-capped officials, awaiting His Majesty.
‘A bugle sounds clear in the still atmosphere, and a moment later a great cry rends the air. There is a beating of drums and a sound of trumpets, as a solitary white figure, erect and dignified, walks slowly through the bowing lines of officials, enters the square of horsemen, and seats himself upon the blue divan. Again arises the cry of welcome, as, bending forward, the tribes greet their Sultan with the salutation, “May God prolong the life of our Lord”.
‘The sun has risen now, his first rays falling upon the gold-orbed banners, heavy with brocades and silks that wave high above the heads of the cavalry; then upon the wild horsemen themselves, their saddles of brilliant reds and greens, half-hidden in the heavy folds of their long white garments, and the scene becomes one of indescribable beauty. One by one the Sultan’s tents are struck, and the great canvas-walled enclosure vanishes under the hands of hundreds of skilled tent-pitchers. Sometimes His Majesty gives an audience to an official, a local governor of a tribe, who, barefoot, approaches the Sultan, falls upon his knees, and three times touches the ground with his forehead, remaining crouched before his lord and master during the few seconds that such audiences last. Again a bugle; and through the line of horsemen run dusky soldiers leading saddled horses, trotting them past the Sultan that he may choose upon the back of which he will perform the day’s march. With a slight motion of his hand the choice is made, and the honoured steed is led up to the palanquin. Sometimes it is a white, saddled and trapped in turquoise blue; sometimes a grey, decked in rose-coloured silks; sometimes a black, his head half hidden in primrose-yellow tassels.
‘As the Sultan mounts, the scene becomes for a few minutes one of wild confusion. The banner-bearers, the spear-bearers, the cavalry, the scarlet-and-blue mounted infantry, the high officials on their saddle-mules, the artillery, even the Sultan himself, seems hopelessly mixed in a struggling crowd. It is only for a very little while, and then from the medley emerges the royal procession, forming into order as it proceeds. The vanguard is formed of an escort of cavalry, headed by the standard-bearers, carrying flags of every hue and colour, the poles topped with glittering balls. Next come the artillery, the guns carried upon the backs of mules, and after them a troop of mounted infantry. Two mounted men, carrying long slender spears, precede the led horses, five or six of which, trapped in rich silks, always form a feature of the procession. Riding alone is the Grand Master of the Ceremonies, a dark man of fine presence, wand of office in hand. Then, after a space of some forty yards, the Sultan, a solitary white figure on horseback. At his side run Negroes, waving long white scarves to keep the dust and the flies off his holy person. Immediately behind His Majesty rides a soldier, bearing aloft, so as to shade the Sultan from the rays of the sun, the Imperial parasol of crimson and gold. The red palanquin, borne by sturdy mules, follows, and behind it a long wide line of standard-bearers, the banners rich in gold thread and brocaded silks, and the poles of one and all crowned with gilded orbs. Immediately behind the flags ride the viziers and great officers of State, followed by a rabble of smaller officials and soldiery, of black slaves and tribesmen from all over Morocco.
‘There are no roads, and the procession of men and animals spreads widely out over the plains and undulating hills. Often as far as the eye can reach one can trace the great migration stretching from horizon to horizon, a rainbow of colour upon the green plains. Sometimes to cross a valley the procession narrows in, to spread out again in the open country beyond, till the whole land is dotted with horsemen and mules, and slow-gaited lumbering camels.
Berber warrior
‘Now and again a tribal governor, with his escort of horsemen, comes to salute his sovereign. Drawn up in a long line they await the Sultan’s approach. At his approach the governor dismounts from his horse and prostrates himself before his lord, to rise again at a signal from His Majesty. Bending low, he approaches and kisses the Sultan’s stirrup, then mounts again, and with a hoarse cry of welcome the tribesmen dig their spurs into the flanks of their barbs and gallop pell-mell hither and thither, now singly, now in line, firing their guns the while, until the horses are brought to a sudden standstill in a cloud of smoke and dust. These tribesmen are not the only people who come from afar to greet the Sultan on his march. There are beggars and representatives of all the dervish sects, from cymbal-beating Negroes from the Sudan to the Hamacha of Meknès, who cut open their heads with hatchets. There are snake-charmers and acrobats, and men with performing apes; little deputations of country Jews and Jewesses; groups of white-robed scholars from local mosques, bearing white flags; veiled Arab women, uttering shrill trembling cries of welcome, and offering bowls of milk; lepers with their faces swathed and wearing great straw hats, bearing bowls of wood to collect alms in, for none may touch them – a thousand scenes of human life, with all its pleasures and all its tragedies.
‘Usually a ride of about four hours brings the Sultan to his next camping-ground. A quarter of an hour before reaching the selected spot the bands commence to play, and the tribesmen, the cavalry, and mounted infantry gallop ahead, forming into two lines, between which His Majesty rides into a square of horsemen drawn up in the same formation as that of the early morning. The crimson palanquin is quickly unharnessed, the blue divan arranged, and the Sultan seats himself in solitary state to await the pitching of his encampment.
‘No tent might be raised in the camp until the gilded globe which surmounts the Sultan’s principal tent is in position; but it required only a very short time for the skilled tent-pitchers to pitch the great mass of canvas crowned with its glittering orb. It is a signal to the rest of the camp, and almost as if growing from the ground arose the white canvas town. There was no confusion, no noise. Everyone knew the right position to pitch in, and the whole system worked without a hitch. Probably the Moors are alone in the pitching of these great camps; it seems a hereditary trait in their characters.
‘The Sultan’s principal tent once up, the tent-pitchers turned their attention to the remainder of his camp, consisting of some half-dozen large marquees, the whole – an acre perhaps of ground – being enclosed with a nine-feet wall of white canvas, decorated in patterns of dark blue. This private encampment of His Majesty formed the centre of the camp, which stretched away on all sides, often for nearly half a mile in every direction. At the outer extremity were pitched the tents of the infantry, so close to one another that entrance and exit to the camp was only possible at certain intervals, where spaces were left for the purpose.
‘The greatest interest naturally attached to the immediate surroundings of the Sultan’s tents. No one but his ladies and their female slaves might enter the walled enclosure, with the exception of one small portion of it divided off from the rest, retained for unofficial audiences. His Majesty transacted all his affairs of State outside the enclosure, in a tent of scarlet and green cloth, pitched at the end of a large open square and visible from a considerable distance. Here before the eyes of the public His Majesty received his Ministers, attended to his correspondence, and sealed official documents. Near this tent, known as the “Siwan”, were two large marquees, one used as a mosque, the other the office of the viziers. In this quarter, too, were the offices of the other Ministers of State and high officials. Behind these were the private encampments of the more important personages, often consisting of several very large tents leading to one another by covered passages of canvas. Directly opposite, on the farther side of the Sultan’s enclosure, were the royal stables, where a quantity of fine barbs were tethered, their number constantly being added to by the presents brought to His Majesty by the tribal governors.
‘As soon as his tents were ready, the Sultan remounted his horse, and amidst the playing of bands and the shouts of the tribesmen, rode into the seclusion of his private camp. It was generally not long after His Majesty’s disappearance from view that a long line of white-robed and veiled women, mounted upon mules, passed silently amongst the tents and entered the royal precincts. As they filed through the camp every man turned his head away from the mysterious white procession. Usually the whole camp was pitched by midday, and not long after that hour the neighbourhood of the Government quarters became astir with life. The white-robed viziers sought their offices, while soldiers kept order amongst the throng of people that were always crowding near the tent doors awaiting audiences with the Ministers of State. Only the “Siwan” was deserted, but not for long. A bugle sounds. There is a hurrying to and fro of officials and soldiers, and again the cry, “God prolong the life of our Lord,” is heard, and the solitary white figure, round whom all this great camp revolves, is seen slowly entering under the shadow of the tent of scarlet and green.
‘At sunset gunfire, His Majesty prayed, and retired to his tents for the night, though almost every evening he gave unofficial audiences to his friends in the divided-off portion of his private encampment reserved for this purpose. As night fell the camp became dotted with the little lights of lanterns, often gaily decorated with coloured glass, while here and there a campfire showed up ruddily amongst the tents. Now and again could be heard the tinkling of stringed instruments and the soft murmur of a singer, who seemed afraid to raise his voice in the stillness that pervades everything, – a stillness only broken now and again by an order to the guards and sentries – of whom four hundred, shoulder to shoulder, encircled the Sultan’s enclosure – or by the long-drawn accents of the mueddin as he called the Faithful to prayer.
‘The “last post” – and as the note of the bugle dies away, a wonderful silence fell upon the moonlit camp.’
‘In 1893 Moulay Hassan determined to visit the desert regions of Morocco, including far-off Tafilelt, the great oasis from which his dynasty had originally sprung, and where, before becoming the ruling branch of the royal family, they had resided ever since their founder, the great-grandson of the Prophet, had settled there, an exile from the East.’
With the Sultan at Tafilelt, though not in his official role of Commander-in-Chief of the Chereefian army, was one of the most curious figures of the day, a tubby little man commonly called Caid Maclean. His real name was Sir Harry Maclean, and he had been seconded to the Sultan’s Court as an artillery instructor, and had captured the Sultan’s fancy so greatly that a few years later he was offered – and, after official permission, accepted – the supreme command. He habitually wore a white turban, highly polished English hunting boots, and a Berber cloak or selham of his clan tartan. To his men he was known as ‘El Kronel’, the nearest their speech could approach to ‘colonel’.
‘Leaving Fez in the summer, the Sultan proceeded south, crossing the Atlas above Kasbah-el-Maghkzen, and descended to the upper waters of the Oued Ziz. An expedition such as this would have required a system of organisation far in excess of the capabilities of the Moors, great though their resources were. Food was lacking; the desert regions could provide little. The water was bad, the heat very great. Every kind of delay, including rebellion and the consequent punishment of the tribes, hampered the Sultan’s movements; and it was only toward winter that he arrived in Tafilelt with a fever-stricken army and greatly diminished transport.
‘Moulay Hassan returned from Tafilelt a dying man.’
The Sultan’s return from Tafilelt was like the retreat of Napoleon’s armies from Moscow. He did not try to return to Fez, but made for the southern capital of Marrakesh, separated from Tafilelt by the mighty wall of the High Atlas. By the time his army had reached the foothills the winter snows had begun; as they climbed higher into the main massif more and more of the camels, mules and horses, weak with starvation, stumbled into deep snowdrifts and died. Little but their carcases stood between the remnants of the harka and starvation, and the surviving beasts staggered on and upwards laden with what little meat could be salvaged from the corpses of their companions. The army was attended by clouds of ravens, kites and vultures. Hundreds of men died daily, they were left unburied in the snow, stripped of whatever rags they had still possessed.
