Once more we urge our nine-knot course, and now find time to observe our fellow-passengers. In the cabin a German lady and her daughters are enduring agonies of sea-sickness, on the way to join her husband at Rabat. { 11} The husband, known as the “mojandis,” that is, engineer to the Sultan, proves, when we meet him, to be a cheery polyglot blasphemer, charged with the erection of some forts at the entrance to the harbour of Rabat. For a wonder the bar of the river Bu-Regeh proves passable, and the German lady and her husband can land, which is, it seems, a piece of luck, for the bar is known as the most dangerous of all the coast. Rabat, perhaps the most picturesquely situated of any city in Morocco, stands on a hill underneath which the river runs, and the spray from the bar is drifted occasionally into the houses like a shower of snow. Here is the richest colony of the Spanish Jews, and here the best Morisco { 12a} families took refuge after the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. The town is estimated to contain some 20,000 inhabitants, and it is one of the four official capitals; { 12b} the Sultan has a palace with enormous gardens on the outskirts of the town. Just opposite is built Salee, called by the Moors “Salá,” famous for having given its name to the most enterprising of the pirates of the coast in days gone by. To-day it is a little white, mouldering place, baked in the fierce sun, or swept by south-west gales, according to the season and the time of year. The inhabitants are still renowned for their fanaticism, and the traveller who passes through the place is seldom able to dismount, but traverses the place trying to look as dignified as possible amid a shower of curses, a sporadic curse or two, and some saliva if he ventures within range of mouth. Many a poor Christian has worked his life out in the construction of the walls, and the superior whiteness of the inhabitants would seem to show that some of the Christian dogs have left their blood amongst the people of the place. Men still alive can tell of what a scourge the pirates were, and I myself once knew a venerable lady who in her youth had the distinction of having been taken by a Salee rover; an honour in itself to be compared alone to that enjoyed by ladies who are styled peeresses in their own right. Robinson Crusoe, I think, once landed at the place, and the voyages of imaginary travellers make a place more authentic than the visit of the unsubstantial personages of real life. A little up the river is the deserted city of Schellah, and on the way to it, upon a promontory jutting into the stream, is built the half-finished tower of Hassan, an enormous structure much like the Giralda at Seville, and by tradition said to be built by the same architect who built that tower, and also built the tower of the Kutubich, which, at Morocco city, serves as a landmark in the great plain around. The Giralda and the Kutubich spring from the level of the street, but the Hassan tower excels them both in site, standing as it does upon a cliff, and “looming lofty” { 13} as one passes in a boat beneath. Schellah contains the tombs of the Sultans of the Beni Merini dynasty. El Mansur (the victorious) sleeps underneath a carved stone tomb, over which date palms rustle, and by which a little stream sings a perpetual dirge. The tomb is held so sacred that till but lately neither Christians nor Jews could visit it. Even to-day the incursions of the fierce Zimouri, a Berber tribe, render a visit at times precarious. The walls of the town enclose a space of about a mile circumference; sheep, goats, and camels feed inside them, and a footpath leads from one deserted gate-house to the other, a shepherd boy or two play on their reeds, and though the sun beats fiercely on the open space, it looks forlorn and melancholy, and even the green lizards peering from the walls look about timidly, as if they feared to see a ghost. On gates and walls, on ruined tombs and palaces, the lichens grow red after the fashion of hot countries, and the fine stonework, resembling the stucco work of the Alhambra, remains as keen in edge and execution as when the last stroke of the chisel turned it out.