Mark Twain describing Morocco in THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

l!  Let those who went up through Spain make the best of it
--these dominions of the Emperor of Morocco suit our little party well
enough.  We have had enough of Spain at Gibraltar for the present.
Tangier is the spot we have been longing for all the time.  Elsewhere we
have found foreign-looking things and foreign-looking people, but always
with things and people intermixed that we were familiar with before, and
so the novelty of the situation lost a deal of its force.  We wanted
something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign--foreign from top to
bottom--foreign from center to circumference--foreign inside and outside
and all around--nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness
--nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun.
And lo!  In Tangier we have found it.  Here is not the slightest thing
that ever we have seen save in pictures--and we always mistrusted the
pictures before.  We cannot anymore.  The pictures used to seem
exaggerations--they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality.  But
behold, they were not wild enough--they were not fanciful enough--they
have not told half the story.  Tangier is a foreign land if ever there
was one, and the true spirit of it can never be found in any book save
The Arabian Nights.  Here are no white men visible, yet swarms of
humanity are all about us.  Here is a packed and jammed city enclosed in
a massive stone wall which is more than a thousand years old.

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Tangier has been mentioned in history for three thousand years.  And it
was a town, though a queer one, when Hercules, clad in his lion skin,
landed here, four thousand years ago.  In these streets he met Anitus,
the king of the country, and brained him with his club, which was the
fashion among gentlemen in those days.  The people of Tangier (called
Tingis then) lived in the rudest possible huts and dressed in skins and
carried clubs, and were as savage as the wild beasts they were constantly
obliged to war with.  But they were a gentlemanly race and did no work.
They lived on the natural products of the land.  Their king's country
residence was at the famous Garden of Hesperides, seventy miles down the
coast from here.  The garden, with its golden apples (oranges), is gone
now--no vestige of it remains.  Antiquarians concede that such a
personage as Hercules did exist in ancient times and agree that he was an
enterprising and energetic man, but decline to believe him a good,
bona-fide god, because that would be unconstitutional.


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What a funny old town it is!  It seems like profanation to laugh and jest
and bandy the frivolous chat of our day amid its hoary relics.  Only the
stately phraseology and the measured speech of the sons of the Prophet
are suited to a venerable antiquity like this.  Here is a crumbling wall
that was old when Columbus discovered America; was old when Peter the
Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first
Crusade; was old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted
castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden
time; was old when Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where
it stands today when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and
sold in the streets of ancient Thebes!

The Phoenicians, the Carthagenians, the English, Moors, Romans, all have
battled for Tangier--all have won it and lost it.  Here is a ragged,
oriental-looking Negro from some desert place in interior Africa, filling
his goatskin with water from a stained and battered fountain built by the
Romans twelve hundred years ago.  Yonder is a ruined arch of a bridge
built by Julius Caesar nineteen hundred years ago.  Men who had seen the
infant Saviour in the Virgin's arms have stood upon it, maybe.

Near it are the ruins of a dockyard where Caesar repaired his ships and
loaded them with grain when he invaded Britain, fifty years before the
Christian era.

Here, under the quiet stars, these old streets seem thronged with the
phantoms of forgotten ages.




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