VIRTUAL TANGIER: Visions of the City


 
c. 1870: EDMONDO DE AMICIS (excerpt from One Day in Morocco)
   The sun came out, spectators crowded around us, the horsemen scattered in all directions, the air resounded with shouts and the rapid reports of firearms, and everything became suddenly bright, animated, full of life and color, while the autumnal cold was succeeded, as is always the case in that climate, by the burning heat of summer. 
   Among my notes of that morning I find one which says laconically: "Grasshoppers, sample of Selam's eloquence." I remember, in fact, to have noticed a field some distance off that seemed to be in motion, an effect produced by an enormous number of green grasshoppers coming towards us in leaps. Selam, who happened to be riding beside me just then, gave me an admirably picturesque description of the incursions of those terrible insects, which I remember word for word; but how can I possibly render the effect of his gestures, his expression and the tones of his voice, which really told more than the words themselves.
  "It is frightful, Signor; they come from over there," pointing to the south, "like a black cloud; the noise is heard from afar. They come, they come, and at their head their sultan, the Sultan Jeraad, who leads them on; they cover the roads, the fields, houses, dears, forests. The cloud grows; larger and larger, on, on, on, gnawing and consuming; over rivers, over ditches, over walls, through fire; the grass is destroyed, the flowers, the leaves, the fruit, the grain, the bark of the trees; on and on, no one can stop them, 
 not flaming tribes, not the Sultan with his army, not all the people of Morocco assembled together. Heaps of dead grasshoppers. Forward go the living. Do ten die? A hundred are born. Do a hundred die? A thousand are born. Such sights at Tangier! streets covered, gardens covered, seashore covered, sea covered, everything green, everything in motion; living, dead, decayed, offensive; a plague, a pestilence, a curse from God!"
   When the advance guard of the invading army appears the Arabs go forward to meet it, in parties of four or five hundred, with sticks, clubs, and firebrands, but only succeed in forcing the enemy to deviate somewhat from its course; and it occasionally happens that when one tribe drives them back thus from their own into the district of a neighboring tribe, the grasshopper war is converted into a civil war. The only thing that frees the country from this curse is a favorable wind; this blows them into the sea, where they drown and are swept up on the beach for days afterwards in great heaps. When the favorable wind still delays, the only possible consolation left the inhabitants is to eat their enemies; this they do before they have laid their eggs, boiling them and adding a seasoning of salt, pepper, and vinegar. They taste a little like seacrabs, and as many as four hundred can be eaten in a single day.
    About two miles from camp we overtook that part of the caravan which was bearing Victor Emmanuel's presents to Fez. White camels were harnessed together, two by two, in tandem fashion, by long poles attached to either side of the saddle, from which swung the cases; they were in charge of some Arabs on foot and some mounted soldiers, and at their head was a wagon drawn by two oxen, the only wagon we had seen in Morocco! It had been especially made at El Araish upon the model, I should say, of the first vehicle that ever appeared on the earth's surface; squat, heavy, ill-formed, with wheels composed of solid blocks of wood, and the most curious and absurd-looking harness that could possibly be imagined. But to the inhabitants of the duars, most of whom had in all probability never seen a wheeled vehicle before, it was a marvel…. Selam himself regarded it with a certain complacency, as though saying, "That was made in our country"; and this was excusable, seeing that in all Morocco there are very likely no more wagons than pianos, which, if the estimate of a French consul is correct, would reduce the number to about a dozen. 
    There seems, indeed, to be a certain antipathy to vehicles of every kind. The Tangier authorities, for example, forbade Prince Frederick, of Hesse-Darrnstadt, when he was there in 1839, to ride out in a carriage. The Prince wrote to the Sultan offering to have the principal streets paved at his own expense, provided the permission refused by the authorities were granted him. "I will grant it most willingly," replied the Sultan, "but upon one condition---that the carriage shall have no wheels, since as Protector of the Faithful I cannot permit my subjects to be exposed to the risk of being run over by a Christian." Whereupon the Prince, to turn the whole thing into ridicule, took him at his word, and there are people in Tangier now who remember seeing him going about the town in a carriage without wheels, suspended between two mules! 

You can view ALTERNATIVE TRANSLATIONS by holding your MOUSE CURSOR over the little DOWN ARROWS in the translated web page.
 
Source:
From: The World's Story: A History of the World in Story, Song and Art, Vol. III:
           Egypt, Africa, and Arabia.  Eva March Tappan, ed.

This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook.
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