I remained silent, conscious that I could not hope to see life through my host's medium. It was as though we looked at his garden through glasses of different colour. And perhaps neither of us saw the real truth of the problem underlying what we are pleased to call the Moorish Question.
[Illustration: A GLIMPSE OF THE ATLAS MOUNTAINS]
"When the days of the Grand Wazeer were fulfilled," the Hadj continued gravely, "his enemies came into power. His brother the War Minister and his brother the Chamberlain died suddenly, and he followed them within the week. No wise man sought too particularly to know the cause of their death. Christians came to the Court Elevated by Allah, and said to my Lord Abd-el-Aziz, 'Be as the Sultans of the West.' And they brought him their abominations, the wheeled things that fall if left alone, but support a man who mounts them, as I suppose, in the name of Shaitan; the picture boxes that multiply images of True Believers and, being as the work of painters,[34] are wisely forbidden by the Far Seeing Book; carriages drawn by invisible djinoon, who scream and struggle in their fiery prison but must stay and work, small sprites that dance and sing.[35] The Christians knew that my Lord was but a young man, and so they brought these things, and Abd-el-Aziz gave them of the country's riches, and conversed with them familiarly, as though they had been of the house of a Grand Shareef. But in the far east of the Moghreb the French closed the oases of Tuat and Tidikelt without rebuke, and burnt Ksor and destroyed the Faithful with guns containing green devils,[36] and said, 'We do all this that we may venture abroad without fear of robbers.' Then my Lord sent the War Minister, the kaid Maheddi el Menebhi, to London, and he saw your Sultan face to face. And your Sultan's wazeers said to him, 'Tell the Lord of the Moghreb to rule as we rule, to gather his taxes peaceably and without force, to open his ports, to feed his prisoners, to follow the wisdom of the West. If he will do this, assuredly his kingdom shall never be moved.' Thereafter your Sultan's great men welcomed the kaid yet more kindly, and showed him all that Allah the One had given them in his mercy, their palaces, their workplaces, their devil ships that move without sails over the face of the waters, and their unveiled women who pass without shame before the faces of men. And though the kaid said nothing, he remembered all these things.