d after a
six-months' siege was forced to fly to Marrakesh, where he died in
prison, the tribesmen demolishing the castle for hidden treasure, till
every wall had yielded its secret. Probably he oppressed his province
like every other kaid, and was well hated. We went inside, and it was a
foregone conclusion that we should camp there upon the grass. The
governor's own halls were in a block in the centre, room after room, most
intricate. Our tents were pitched in the vast sunny courtyard. We
wandered about, exploring the odd corners, all the afternoon: not a
vestige of timber or decoration remained. Handsome little red-brown
kestrels with grey heads hovered over us and sat on the old walls,
uttering their querulous cry: a beautiful blue jay, with cinnamon back
and black-tipped wings and tail, was nesting in a hole among the bricks,
and let us come close to him. A _sib-sib_ scampered along an old
window-ledge, a little animal like a squirrel, grey with striped back,
the stripes running from head to tail: it ruffled out its tail at will.

The camel turned up at five, having been nine hours on the road. Later on
a _mona_ (a present) was brought us, consisting of butter, in a lordly
dish set round with pink roses. So in the deserted walls of the kasbah we
passed the night. Ghosts ought to have haunted those horrible
death-traps, the _matamors_, of which there are said to be a hundred. The
ground seemed riddled with these "wells," intended for the storage of
grain, but used by sheikhs and kaids as their private prisons, whence at
their will they draft on luckless captives to the public gaols: an old
enemy is quite harmless in a matamor, with a square stone over the top,
for the rest of his life.

The wonderful cisterns were another feature of the kasbah, immense tanks
underground, concreted and still water-tight--at the end of every dry
season cleaned out and whitewashed, now half full of stinking rain-water
and decay.

We got off at seven the next morning, struck the main road from Mogador,
left it, and found ourselves in quite an agricultural country, green
barley-fields, planted all over at intervals with figs and pomegranates,
even hedges of a sort. Then again we were in the argan forest--the last
of it, and the best: beautiful trees, with their knarled, twisted
branches. I thought of yews on the Surrey hills. Here coarse grass grew
between, something like a park at home: goats clambered up into the
forks, feasting on