y, who, not a hundred
years ago, did her best to defend Tetuan against the Spaniards, fighting
side by side with the Moorish troops, and, in the course of the siege,
accounting for half a dozen Spaniards, thereby earning for herself in due
course a Joan of Arc reputation and a public sepulchre.

[Illustration: A MOHAMMEDAN CEMETERY.

[_To face p. 80._]

The cemetery was overgrown with _ayerna_ root, one of the commonest weeds
in Morocco, poisonous when it is eaten raw, though it is possible, after
boiling the root for ten or twelve hours, spreading it out to dry in the
sun, and grinding it in a mill, to make a sort of bitter bread out of the
flour, and to subsist upon that. This the poor do to a great extent,
whenever corn runs short and they have nothing but roots and grasses to
fall back upon: their pale yellow faces and emaciated bodies tell a tale
of the ayerna root. We grubbed some up with a little difficulty in the
stiff clay soil with nothing but sticks to help. Fifteen inches down we
found the root, a small whitish bulb, the size of a bluebell root.

There is much desolation about the old cemetery, with its crumbling
ruins; but the sun struck a key-note of splendour, and turned the
lichened stones into nuggets of gold.

A black raven sat on a grey rock above us and croaked; below lay the
white city--white beyond all English ideas of whiteness. Two tall
minarets, with simple straight lines, only a mosaic of green tiling let
into their flat faces, cut the peaks of the mountains beyond. At a
quarter past twelve a little white flag slowly mounted to the top of each
mosque; an infinitesimally small black figure appeared against the sky;
then leaning over the parapet and looking down upon the humming city, a
cry broke from the figure, and was carried over to us upon the wind--a
cry which rose and fell, most musical, most sonorous: "Allah Ho
Akbar--Allah Ho Akbar." The black dot moved round the parapet, and east
and west and north and south chanted the great summons to the Faithful to
prayer. And then the little white flag was hauled down.

On the other side of the river the neutral-coloured villages could be
picked out by their white saint-houses. Morocco is stuck as full of
saints' tombs--fuller--than England of dissenting chapels. They stud the
land. Moors rid themselves of much valuable energy in the erection, by
countless thousands, of tombs to the memory of the eccentric or pious
dead; and distances are mea