ady
with handkerchiefs to receive it. His beard is thin and very white, his
eyes seem to have been sparkling, but their vigor decayed through age,
and his cheeks very much sunk in."

Such was the appearance of this extraordinary man, who deceived,
tortured, betrayed, assassinated, terrorized and mocked his slaves, his
subjects, his women and children and his ministers like any other
half-savage Arab despot, but who yet managed through his long reign to
maintain a barbarous empire, to police the wilderness, and give at
least an appearance of prosperity and security where all had before been
chaos.

The English emissaries appear to have been much struck by the
magnificence of his palaces, then in all the splendor of novelty, and
gleaming with marbles brought from Volubilis and Sale. Windus extols in
particular the sunken gardens of cypress, pomegranate and orange trees,
some of them laid out seventy feet below the level of the palace-courts;
the exquisite plaster fretwork; the miles of tessellated walls and
pavement made in the finely patterned mosaic work of Fez; and the long
terrace walk trellised with "vines and other greens" leading from the
palace to the famous stables, and over which it was the Sultan's custom
to drive in a chariot drawn by women and eunuchs.

Moulay-Ismael received the English ambassador with every show of pomp
and friendship, and immediately "made him a present" of a handful of
young English captives; but just as the negotiations were about to be
concluded Commodore Stewart was privately advised that the Sultan had no
intention of allowing the rest of the English to be ransomed. Luckily a
diplomatically composed letter, addressed by the English envoy to one of
the favorite wives, resulted in Ismael's changing his mind, and the
captives were finally given up, and departed with their rescuers. As one
stands in the fiery sun, among the monstrous ruins of those tragic
walls, one pictures the other Christian captives pausing for a second,
at the risk of death, in the rhythmic beat of their labor, to watch the
little train of their companions winding away across the desert to
freedom.

On the way back through the long streets that lead to the ruins we
noticed, lying by the roadside, the shafts of fluted columns, blocks of
marble, Roman capitals: fragments of the long loot of Sale and
Volubilis. We asked how they came there, and were told that, according
to a tradition still believed in the country,