d eat opium for the purpose of intoxicating their senses. _Kif_,
a herb something like hemp, produces this effect on the brain. He
therefore forbade both.

When a Moorish "swell" wants to amuse himself, instead of passing the
time at a cafe he goes out for the day into the country. There is
generally an expression of perfect satisfaction with life as he finds it,
on his lineless biscuit-coloured face and in his brown agate eyes--a
content seldom expressed under the top-hats in the Park. Time is to him
no "race": he drifts easily down the years; knows no other home than, it
may be, Tetuan; nor is conscious that Tetuan sleeps, as it has slept for
ages, curled up, underneath the towering hills, white, petrified, like
Lot's wife.

Still down more streets, and on towards the Belgravia of the city we
walked, leaving steaming little hot-fritter shops, where _sfins_ are
fried in oil and eaten with honey, where cream tarts may possibly be made
and honeyed cakes, and crisp pastry prepared with attar of roses, and
candied musk lemons, and dates mixed with almond paste. We left the
fried-fish shops and fried spitted-meat shops behind, whence emerge
_kabobs_--second only to _coos-coosoo_--and a smell indescribable; and we
wound down tortuous alleys, past quiet windowless houses, whose great
painted doors, yellow and brown, studded with enormous nails and
knockers, spoke respectability.

Never a straight street for six yards. Here an angle with a door; turn
down under an archway: there a tiny branching alley, which we follow:
here another door; plunge down the opposite way. A woman passes us with
a friend, walking as only women in Morocco walk--figures in creamy haiks
of the finest wool, which swathe them entirely from top to toe like a
sheet, a pair of eyes barely showing between the folds. At the bottom of
the haiks a flash of colour obtrudes, tomato in one, beetle-green in the
other, and filmy muslin over both, which in their turn allow a glimpse of
ankles wrapped round in snowy linen folds--rose-pink, gold-embroidered
slippers completing the whole, suggestive of a tea party.

A yard farther and we pass _El-Jama-el-Kebeer_ (the Big Mosque), which,
unlike that at Tangier, stands with its doors wide open, but in front of
which no infidel may linger. There was a vision of a cool tiled courtyard
and splashing fountains of white marble and clean yellow matting, of
endless tiled pillars vanishing into shade. There are saint-houses in