Perhaps there is a little too
much about the pipal-tree, but when we have a proper sense of Imperial
unity, no doubt the pipal-tree will be as dear and as familiar to us as
the oaks and elms of our own woodlands.

(1) Low Down: Wayside Thoughts in Ballad and Other Verse. By Two Tramps.
(Redway.)

(2) Rhymes and Renderings. By H. C. Irwin. (David Stott.)

A RIDE THROUGH MOROCCO

(Pall Mall Gazette, October 8, 1886.)

Morocco is a sort of paradox among countries, for though it lies westward
of Piccadilly yet it is purely Oriental in character, and though it is
but three hours' sail from Europe yet it makes you feel (to use the
forcible expression of an American writer) as if you had been 'taken up
by the scruff of the neck and set down in the Old Testament.' Mr. Hugh
Stutfield has ridden twelve hundred miles through it, penetrated to Fez
and Wazan, seen the lovely gate at Mequinez and the Hassen Tower by
Rabat, feasted with sheikhs and fought with robbers, lived in an
atmosphere of Moors, mosques and mirages, visited the city of the lepers
and the slave-market of Sus, and played loo under the shadow of the Atlas
Mountains. He is not an Herodotus nor a Sir John Mandeville, but he
tells his stories very pleasantly. His book, on the whole, is delightful
reading, for though Morocco is picturesque he does not weary us with word-
painting; though it is poor he does not bore us with platitudes. Now and
then he indulges in a traveller's licence and thrills the simple reader
with statements as amazing as they are amusing. The Moorish coinage, he
tells us, is so cumbersome that if a man gives you change for
half-a-crown you have to hire a donkey to carry it away; the Moorish
language is so guttural that no one can ever hope to pronounce it aright
who has not been brought up within hearing of the grunting of camels, a
steady course of sneezing being, consequently, the only way by which a
European can acquire anything like the proper accent; the Sultan does not
know how much he is married, but he unquestionably is so to a very large
extent: on the principle that you cannot have too much of a good thing a
woman is valued in proportion to her stoutness, and so far from there
being any reduction made in the marriage-market for taking a quantity,
you must pay so much per pound; the Arabs believe the Shereef of Wazan to
be such a holy man that, if he is guilty of taking champagne, the
forbidden wine is turned into milk as he quaffs it, and if he gets
extremely drunk he is merely in a mystical trance.

Mr. Stutfield, however, has his serious moments, and his account of the
commerce, government and social life of the Moors is extremely
interesting. It must be confessed that the picture he draws is in many
respects a very tragic one. The Moors are the masters of a beautiful
country and of many beautiful arts, but they are paralysed by their
fatalism and pillaged by their rulers. Few races, indeed, have had a
more terrible fall than these Moors. Of the great intellectual
civilisation of the Arabs no trace remains. The names of Averroes and
Almaimon, of Al Abbas and Ben Husa are quite unknown. Fez, once the
Athens of Africa, the cradle of the sciences, is now a mere commercial
caravansary.