The bare fringe alone of Morocco, its coast towns, and the choice, let us
say, of two roads connecting them with its capitals, Fez and Morocco
City, are open to travellers; beyond these limits it is difficult and
dangerous for Europeans to venture. Of even its coasts towns England
knows little enough: a daily paper printed in 1902 describes one
flourishing seaport of thirty thousand inhabitants as "a village." There
is more vagueness, in fact, about a country three times the size of Great
Britain and four days' journey from London than of many a remote corner
in the heart of Asia.

The reason is at hand. An old Arabic proverb, "The earth is a peacock:
Morocco is the tail of it," typifies the entire satisfaction of its
inhabitants with their native land. What is, is good; why "civilize" and
"progress"? As far as possible there shall no European enter therein.
Realizing that, were new blood allowed to come into Morocco, its own
effete and uneducated people would have no chance in the race of life,
and end by hopelessly knuckling under to the European, the country
isolates itself; nor is it likely that the jealous Powers of Europe will
allow any one of their number to disturb that isolation and pluck the
tempting fruit.

And so to-day Morocco drowses in an atmosphere of _laissez faire_, a
decadent nation, a collection of lawless tribes, who have changed little
for the last two thousand years, living still much after the manner of
Old Testament days. They are devout Mussulmans. They believe the world to
be flat, and to come to an end with the west coast of Morocco. Their
country they call _El Moghreb el Aksa_, which means, "The Extreme West,"
or "The Land of the Setting Sun": "Morocco" and "Moors" are entirely
European words, and never used by the Moors themselves--the one being a
corruption of the name of their capital city, the other having been
given them by the Spaniards.

Morocco should be fascinating on the face of it: a great country running
into hundreds of thousands of square miles, the only independent
Mussulman state of North Africa, with six million followers of the great
Prophet, and a perfect climate, soil, and water-supply to boot, needs no
extolling. And yet its chiefest fascination lies in things which, from
some points of view, ought not to be.

Its remote removal from all appertaining to the twentieth century, its
strangely simple, untaught life, the solemn, stately men, the veiled
women and their e