long neck of cedar is elaborately chased. Often he brings in some of his friends, and they give me what we would call a "classical concert." Only one of these men is at all "cultured." He teaches little boys to recite the Koran in the little school back of the zawia of the Derkawa. He beats a twofoot tambourine. The player on the r'bab is a carpenter. His instrument is the strangest of all. It has a round body like a large banjo, but instead of strings it has a wisp of horse-hairs, like that of our own violin bow. He fingers this and saws across it with a bow of one string. It has a very plaintive and sometimes an exceedingly sweet and poignant tone. A Negro porter plays a shrill reed flageolet. And with this strangely assorted orchestra they play for me such songs as they know by rote.

I have already learned to distinguish the more common forms of composition. The keemjad is a sort of address of welcome or eulogy to the patron. They always begin with one of these as a sort of duty to me in payment for the pot of tea. The kaseeda, in quite a different key and rhythm, is more or less like our ballad. Most of these deal with the brave days in Spain, sometimes of a more modern intertribal feud.

Their songs

of the open road, the lyrics of the cameldrivers in the great wastes of the desert, are the ones which would make the most direct appeal to Western ears. The Wanderlust is international. It is very rarely that they know the name of the authors of these songs; they are the work of anonymous persons whose music has somehow survived. Some few of the kaseeda dealing with the wars in Andalusia may be old, but the most, I think, are only ephemeral. For a decade or so they will be sung, and then will be forgotten. The one exception seems to be the abada, a hymn of praise to God which they sing without instruments and which they always ascribe to some saint-the "abada of Muley Abd ul-Kader;" as we say, "Luther's Hymn." These, the natives claim, are very old. It is probable that one who was familiar with the music of the later Roman Empire might find echoes of it in these old religious songs.

But for several days Muley Khamedo has been working over his ginbri with a tentative touch. He would repeat a few notes several times and then add one. As like as not it would displease him, and he would begin all over again. When at last he had a few

measures which suited him, he would try to find words for them. At first I thought he was recalling some half-forgotten song. But as he kept at it night after night and it gradually grew in length I realized that he was composing.

Now it does not often happen that your servant who brushes your clothes, blacks your boots, and runs errands—all for $8.30 a month-spends his evenings composing the words and music of a song. As my own trade is humble prose, I began to find it difficult to ask menial services of Muley Khamedo. Last night he completed it. He sang it over and over again, with increasing sureness of touch and voice. As I turned out my light he was still at it. I could see him across the court, sitting cross-legged in his doorway, looking up at the great pale moon overhead and singing softly to himself this thing which he had created. It has not often been my good fortune to see a person who seemed perfectly happy. So I watched him for some time. When Leonardo looked at his completed "Mona Lisa," I think the same spirit must have shone in his eyes which illumined the face of my servant.

rassed.

This morning I asked him to translate the song for me. He was unfeignedly embar"It is not a fine song,' " he said. "I am not a poet. I will write down for you a very beautiful kaseeda about the wars of our Lord the Sultan Yakûb el Mansur, who built the great Kutubuya Tower in Monakesh. It is very old."

"Dried peas have never turned to pearls in my mouth," he said as a further protest, when I insisted.

This was an allusion to the legend of Sidi Hamo, the greatest of the Berber poets. Desiring passionately the gift of song that he might worthily defend the beauty of Fatua in an a'hidous, or tournament of poesy, he made a pilgrimage to the tomb of a holy miracle-worker, and, having sent up his prayer, he fell asleep before the shrine. dreamed that some dried peas in his mouth had turned to pearls. And so, knowing that he had been blessed with the benediction of music, he returned to his people and made Fatua the Beatrice of the Berbers.

He

changed to pearls in my mouth. I cannot give the rhythm, nor any hint of the intricate, interlaced rhyme of Muley Khamedo's verses. But, in one element at least, the lyrics of all races can be compared. Deeper than the mechanism of prosody lies the poetic imagination, the trick of conjuring up vivid pictures and apt comparisons in compressed space. The song, as it dealt with love, was a moheba. It is a form as rigid in number of lines and infinitely more complex in rhyme than our sonnet. All I can hope to do is to put into intelligible English some suggestion of its rich coloring:

1. "Rock Pigeon-thou bird of swift and tireless wing-take this my message.

2. Haste with my greetings to Bakht, the large-eyed maiden,

3. Speed to the banks of the river Aït Mezal. Search out the house of my mistress. Heed my words carefully.

4.

5. Tell her, 'Thy lover strays in the wastes of the desert. Passion consumes him like the breath of the south wind.'

6. Tell her: 'The seasons change the earth's colors. Rains follow the dryness. Love comes to the lonely.'

7. Tell her: 'I pray Allah to send me south in the winter, that my heart may find cooling waters.'

8. Bird of swift wing, you will know her by the hair which hangs down to her girdle of silver.

9. The holy letters of the phrase, 'The Compassionate, the Merciful,' cannot rival the grace of her eyebrows. They are like two of the Most Beautiful Names of God written by an expert penman. 10. Her eyes are like the mouths of murderous cannon. The moisture of her tongue like molten lead.

11. Her mouth is like a rare jewel in the tray of a merchant to one who collects precious stones. The dealer in wild honey has no sweets like the perfume of her breath.

12. Her body is white as the light of a candle shining through its own wax-yea, it is white as the moon on its thirteenth night. 13. Her thighs are like columns carved by a great architect, carved of white marble to sustain the dome of a mosque. 14. The white arm of this woman gleams like a scimitar in the hand of a charging warrior. When she comes forth, the anklets about her feet make pleasant musicanklets of carved silver about feet white and fragrant as the white narcissus."

The ninth verse sounds far-fetched and labored to Western readers. We have that contempt for the written word which comes from our familiarity with universal education. We can all scribble. Penmanship is no longer an art. Not so in the East. Here writing" is a highly respected craft. And

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the expert scribes of Islam spend their greatest skill, their most loving care, in copying the Holy Books and in illuminating these Most Beautiful Names. Muley Khamedo's simile is common in Mohammedan poetry.

This, in fact, is a criticism which his verses cannot escape-they are not original. The whole composition bears a marked resemblance to a poem by Ahmed ben bou Aroua, which is given, along with a French version, by M. Alexandre Joly in his Remarques sur la Poésie moderne chez les nomades algériens."

Muley Khamedo seemed much pleased with his twelfth verse, and even lit a candle to show me how very white it looks at the top, where the wax is illumined by the flame. He gave me an intricate astronomical explanation of the phases of the moon, and how it always reaches its greatest glory on the thirteenth night, when it sets a few minutes after sunrise.

"Is not the sun the lover of the moon?" he added. "Of course she shines brightest when she sees him face to face. All the great poets say the same."

He made no bones about admitting his plagiarism. But when some of his musical friends came in and I suggested that he sing his song for them, he was covered with confusion and absolutely refused. He had been willing to tell it to me, he said—was not I his father and his mother, his cool shade in the desert-but these men would laugh at him. A rhyme in the third line was forced, and in another place the music was wrong. He would not submit it to native critics.

But, admitting that the song of Muley Khamedo is a mosaic of phrases adapted from the classics, that the rhyme in the third line is faulty, the wonder of the matter is hardly decreased. Here in Morocco you can hire a servant for ten duros the month who will be familiar with the best poetry of his people, and will compose beautiful, if not wholly original, verses.

And this group of Moors who come in now and then to play for me are not exceptional. If you wander through the city at nightfall, you hear music on every side. At home I know two or three circles that come together when possible to play and sing, without thought of reward or applause, for the pure joy of the music. But I do not know any one of my own race who can improvise as some of these Arabs and Berbers can.

Almost every traveler in Northwest Africa

has recorded his amazement at the facility with which the native bards extemporize. I recall from my own experience a never-to-beforgotten night on the edge of the desert in southern Algeria.

There had been a long day's ride. My comrade, a Frenchman, had tried to relieve the monotony of the road by singing and resinging a doggerel chanson, of which the senseless refrain ran :

"Sur le bi, sur le bon, sur le bi le bon le banc."

It was a resplendent North African day. The air had been cleaned by the sun's heatas we sometimes feel it cleaned by rain at home; every breath was a profound caress. The intense white light on the sand, the creak of the sweaty saddles, the jackal that watched us furtively from behind a parched cactus, the ache of tired muscles which somehow the surroundings changed into an almost voluptuous pleasure, all mingled in a weird and endlessly fascinating phantasmagoria.

At nightfall we came to an Arab encampment and were hospitably received. After the couscous one of the young men sang. There were only a plaintive reed and handclapping for accompaniment. There was an address of welcome to the guests whom Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful, had sent to their tents-there was praise of hospitality. On and on went the improvisation. There was a long list of rhyming localities which the singer had visited, and glorification of nomad life. There were richly colored figures involving the gold of the desert sand unstained by vile commercial use, the false genii of the mirage, the life-saving wells. There was the inevitable plaint over the large-eyed maiden who had been left behind. There was a detailed catalogue of her charms.

The verses were threaded together hodgepodge, mixing up the first person and the third unaccountably. The transitions were startling. One moment he sang of the beauty of his beloved when her girdle was unclasped, the next of the horror of an unclasped girthbuckle of a war horse in action. The moon was, I think, in its thirteenth night. The black camel's-hair tents threw fantastic, grotesque shadows. On and on, exhaustlessly, went the improvisation. If a hyena laughed somewhere off in the night, the young man worked it somehow into his song. If a horse neighed or a camel grunted, it suggested a new simile. And over all was the poetic glamour of the moon.

The

Although one can find such extemporizing bards anywhere in North Africa, here in southern Morocco is their true home. The greatest of all the wandering troubadours are Berbers from the Great Atlas. patron of their guild is Sidi Hamed ou Mousa, whose shrine is in the south country near Tazerwalt. There all aspiring poets make pilgrimages. They kill a sheep before the ancient shrine, and spend weeks in fasting and prayer. If their hearts are pure, if their passion for song is untainted with hope of gain, if they are free from pride, the old miracle of Sidi Hamed is repeated, the dried peas turn to pearls in their mouths, and they go forth as Meistersingers. The natives call them raïs the same honorable title they give to a commander of soldiers.

These troubadours occupy a position in Moorish society that has no counterpart in our land, which is saved from tonelessness only by extravagantly paid professionals and gramophones. Everywhere they are welcomed guests-in the fortress of the kaïd, in the tent of the nomad, in the palaces of the Sultans, in the mud huts of the fellaheen. They are great travelers-wayfarers in the deepest sense of the word. Almost all of them have made the hadj to Mecca; some go farther and visit the shrines of Bagdad and Persia. One whom I met in Tangier had been to Samarcand, in Russian Turkestan. And as they always end their songs with prayer and praise to Sidi Hamed ou Mousa, the name of their patron is known throughout the length and breadth of

Islam.

A talent for music is to these people a direct gift from God, and this baraka, as they call it, carries with it strict and heavy responsibilities. If a Sultan, stirred by the magic of their " gift," showers them with rich raiment, they must part with it to the first needy beggar they meet. If a rich kaid, charmed by their fulsome praise, invites them to make their home in his castle, they must refuse. The road is their home. If they stopped overlong in one place because it offered them ease and luxury, the pearls in their mouths would change again to worthless peas. If they sang only for the rich and never brought the cheer of their music to the abodes of poverty, their throats would become parched, their voices harsh and displeasing. So also would they lose their baraka if they became puffed up with pride, if ever they sang for their own glory, and

In

The Berbers are a race entirely apart from the Arabs. They have, a distinct language, they are monogamous, and their women are unveiled and mingle freely with the men. fact, the a'hidous is primarily a woman's fête. While de Segonzac was exploring the Atlas one of his Berber scribes, wrote down a quaint account of one of these performances. Muley Khamedo tells me earnestly that there is no pleasure this side of the gardens of paradise to be compared with an a'hidous. I have very freely translated some of de Segonzac's text, but most of the following description comes from my

servant :

་་

When the women of a village are very glad-perhaps it is a baby, perhaps somebody comes home from a long journey-they make a'hidous. They send out everywhere to find a raïs. If a rich man marry his daughter, he send very far for great raïs. Then the women cook a very fine dinner for many people. The raïs comes with his musicians. For a'hidous they make music only with tambourines. After everybody has eaten, the raïs and his musicians sit down in a line and make signal to commence. Then the women laugh very much and push each other forward. And all of them pretend they do not want to play. You see, no woman dare to play a'hidous unless she is clever. She must know how to make singing and poetry. And also she must have a sharp tongue to make people laugh. All the while the men make music and say, ' Hurry! Hurry!' And at last five, six clever women, perhaps ten, sit down in line opposite the raïs and musicians. Two lines, men and women, sitting in courtyard, faces to each other, and very much public standing round to hear. Oh, it is a very fine sight! The Berber women very beautiful, and all have on fine clothes and earrings and bracelets and necklaces. And there are many candles and lamps, all very fine. And first the raïs make a prayer to Sidi Hamed ou Mousa, and then everybody still while the rais beats his tambourine

"As paradise is life with one beloved;

But better far is death than life unloved.
The Son of Song must tramp the path alone;
Oh, make this place a spot where he was
loved!'"

The improvised dialogue goes on thus amorously for a while, but soon the tone changes and the two begin to exchange rhyming riddles. The answers are given with extravagant invective, which seems quite inane to me, but is, Muley Khamedo assures me, greatly appreciated by a Berber audience : "Tell me what is this, 'A sea without a wave?' Answer me and I will be your slave."

"It is an 'eye.' May God blind thine!
If you are intelligent you ought to divine
And explain to me, A beast in motley gown.'
Answer me and I will be your clown.'
"A leopardess.' May she eat your mother's
heart!

If you are intelligent and think yourself smart,
Explain to me, 'A garden of flowers planted
Without laborers,' and your desire. will be
granted."

"The heaven at night.' Let us cease
Blackguarding one another

And unite in friendship, that release
May come to our imprisoned love.

O Allah, lord of keys and locks, assist us!"

But after a few more rounds of lovemaking they begin again on mutual abuse. This part of the performance stirs noisy applause from the audience, roars of laughter for each witty jibe, and jeers for the one who comes off discomfited in the duel.

And so they alternate in fantastic lovemaking (which is tempered by the presence of the audience, very probably including the lady's

husband), an exchange of childish charades, and picturesque, if venomous, abuse.

“And when they have no more breath in their hearts," Muley Khamedo says, "the raïs spins his tambourine on his thumb as sign to stop singing. Then everybody gets up, and all the women clap their hands and sing. Perhaps they sing a very pretty song, 'Where are the flowers of March?' [The Berbers must have had a François Villon.] Or perhaps they sing some other song. And when they have all some more tea they all begin to dance.

"Seven, eight men-perhaps twelve, if it is a big house-make a line, and as many ladies. The raïs and his musicians begin making music again. The men and women all make waves with their bodies and sing and clap the hands, and the men come towards the ladies, and the ladies go back. When they come to the wall of the house, the ladies all say, 'You, you,' and then the men go back, and the ladies come after them-all night. When one man or one lady is tired, he sits down, and another begins-all night. Once, when a sheik got married, they began making a'hidous after noon prayer, all day, and at night they began again with a new raïs-all night. And in the morning the first raïs made another a'hidous. Oh, very fine!"

De Segonzac's scribe, after describing the dance much as Muley Khamedo does, says:

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They continue so until the break of day, when each one goes his own way. So terminates the a'hidous, the pastime and dance of the Berbers, such as the forefathers established it in ancient times."

The Berbers of the coast and of the Sus Valley call this celebration the 'ah-wash, but it varies very little from the a'hidous of the high Atlas.

It is part of the duty of the raïs to take part in such rustic merrymaking. But they are always on the move. Sometimes one of them comes to Mogador, and then always Muley Khamedo announces the fact with great impressiveness. Partly, I suppose, because he is a Shareef, and partly perhaps because I am generally spoken of as "the tall Christian who is a friend of Hadje Omar," he often succeeds in persuading one of them to come to my house. It is a great occasion, to which I invite all my Moorish friends.

I have been especially impressed by the religious tone they give to the proceedings. As soon as the raïs arrives everybody stands up and recites the Fatihak. It is the pater

noster of the Mussulmans, and in itself a. choice example of Arabic verse:

"Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures!
The Compassionate, the Merciful!
King of the Day of Judgment!

Thee we worship and Thee we ask for help.
Guide us in the True Path,

The Path of those to whom Thou art gra-
cious,

Not of those upon whom is Thy wrath
Nor of those who go astray."

And when the performance is over, they again rise and pray.

The first time one of these raïs came to sing for me I took Muley Khamedo aside and asked him how much I was expected to pay the performer. My servant was shocked at the way I put it.

Oh, sir," he protested, "you do not give money to him, but to Sidi Hamed ou Mousa; may Allah grant him peace! Give what you like—it is to God, not to man."

This cloak of religion which the raïs throw about their craft is surprising, as Mohammed had small friendliness for versifiers. He regarded his own poetic gift as an especial dispensation from Allah. He and his followers felt it to be the supreme sign of his mission, his one miracle. And it was indeed remarkable that, not knowing how to read or write, he could dictate the Koran-generally accepted as the consummation of Arabic literature. The other bards of his day spent their talent in glorifying wine and licentiousness or in composing hymns to false gods. His judg ment on them was severe. I do not find any direct reference to the matter in the Koran itself. But authentic tradition credits the Prophet with these two sayings :

"Those who have never made nor listened to music here below will enjoy in the Future Gardens a supplementary bliss which is impossible to describe."

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The singers and players on instruments will have to suffer frightful torments in the seven hells."

But the spirit of poesy is so strong among these people that, in spite of formal religious interdiction, they regard their singers as saints, they open and close their concerts with prayer. The dictum of Mohammed had sufficient weight to kill the plastic arts. A word of his could accomplish more than all the temperance societies of Christendom. He could prevent usury and eradicate a dozen other deep-seated customs. But he could not suppress music.

Mogador, Morocco.