“That is the sultan,” whispered de Trémaudan. “Now don’t forget what I told you about bowing.”

“All right,” I responded. “As citizens of a true democracy we’ll do our best to make an impression on royalty. Here goes.... One ... two ... three....”

We stepped out with the precision of Prussian guardsmen. When half-way down the court de Trémaudan whispered a word of command, at which we came to a sudden halt, clicked our heels together, and bowed as a single man. Ten yards on we repeated the performance. And, arriving opposite the waiting figure, we did it all over again. Whereupon a French officer, who had been watching us with considerable amusement, called out to de Trémaudan:

“But this isn’t the sultan, mon vieux. This is the master of ceremonies, who is waiting to conduct you to his Majesty.”

De Trémaudan’s face turned to the color of the ribbon which he wore upon his breast, and I felt as once I did when, taking part in amateur theatricals, I got too far down-stage and found myself outside the descending curtain. But I had made all the obeisances I intended to; I had no more flummeries left in my system; so, when we were shown into an inner court and from a small pavilion Mulai Yusef himself advanced to greet us, I bowed with the respect which is due to the head of any government, be it Moroccan or American, whereupon the Prince of True Believers shook me most democratically by the hand and pressed me into a chair beside him.

I don’t know how old Mulai Yusef is, but I should guess that he is somewhere in the middle forties, though it is difficult to tell the age of an Oriental. As might be expected, he has none of the characteristic features of the Moor, for he is not a Berber but an Arab. He is a man of medium height, his portliness emphasized by his voluminous garments, with a full, almost bloated face, sleepy-looking, kindly eyes which have a glint of humor in them, full red lips, a wonderfully clear olive skin, and, like all Moors of the upper class, a scraggly fringe of beard along the line of the chin. He wore a djellaba of some finely woven creamy white material, the hood of which was drawn up so as to cover his head and partly shield his features; beneath the hem of his garment showed slippers of soft yellow leather. About his dress, in fact, there was nothing whatsoever to distinguish him from any other Moorish gentleman.

The little kiosk, or pavilion, in which the sultan received us was exquisitely decorated in the Moorish style, his Majesty sitting on a broad divan in the native fashion, though we were provided with incongruous-looking French chairs upholstered in yellow satin. During the audience, which lasted perhaps three quarters of an hour, the conversation touched on many things—the sultan’s hope of some day visiting the United States (which, I have found, is a stock remark of monarchs in talking to Americans), the beneficence of French rule in Morocco, what I had seen in the empire, and where I was going. All mention of political questions was noticeably avoided. So innocuous was the conversation that I had the feeling that I was talking to a puppet and that I could almost see the French official who stood in the background dexterously manipulating the strings. Negro slaves served us with tiny cups of thick black Arab coffee and Turkish cigarettes; the sultan placed his hand upon my shoulder in a sort of benediction and expressed the pious wish that Allah watch over us on our journey; and we sidled from the presence in what strove to be a dignified compromise between American informality and Eastern etiquette.

It was one of those glorious days of blue and gold, so rarely found anywhere outside of Morocco and southern California, when we set out from Marrákesh on the last lap of our long journey, our final objective the forbidden Sus. The sky was an inverted bowl of bluest Chinese porcelain, and before us a burnt-umber plain, flat as the top of a table, stretched away, away, to where the Atlas Mountains “stand up like the thrones of kings.” As we left the Red City behind us and took the ancient road by which conquerors and caravans have come up from the Sahara since ever time began, I found myself humming those lines of John McGroarty’s:

It was late spring, the ideal season in which to see any country, and the land was as gay with flowers as a woman’s Easter bonnet. Nowhere else have I seen flowers grow as they do in Morocco; for, instead of being interspersed, the various species hold aloof from one another, each confining itself to certain ground, which gives to the landscape the appearance of a vast, old-fashioned coverlet. Dark blue, purple, yellow, white, and scarlet—iris, bugloss, marigold, lily, and poppy—occurred in patches of several acres; as we approached the lower slopes of the mountains whole hills and valleys were blue with borage and convolvulus. At times the road wound across a carpet of green and yellow mignonette; at others it was banked by drifts of asphodel, white lilies, daisies, lavender, thyme, and broom. On one occasion, while Tomine was repairing a puncture, Mrs. Powell and my daughter picked thirty varieties of wild flowers in half as many minutes. After seeing this amazing floral splendor one understands whence the Moors obtained the inspiration for their chromatic art; but, like most really beautiful things, it is of brief duration, and under the scorching sun of Africa it soon sinks into the russet monotony of withered herbage.

It is said that when Sidi Okba made his great march from the Nile to the Atlantic he and his warriors rode in the shade of trees all the way. But even if this statement once were true—and the Arabs are fond of exaggeration—it is true no longer. Nevertheless, Morocco is by no means destitute of arboreal beauty. The cork-tree, which once provided the country with an important industry, has lost ground enormously, the Moroccans being unable to keep pace with Portuguese and Spanish competition; but it is still found in great numbers in the Ma’mora forest, twenty miles in length, which lies between the Sebu and the Bou Ragrag, and there is a similar and even larger forest not far from Mequinez. I have already spoken of the vast argan forest, nearly five thousand square miles in extent, to the east of Mogador; while on the lower slopes of the mountains the mimosa, the aloe, and the prickly pear are abundant, and higher up evergreens, pines, and junipers, cypresses and cedars, clothe the mountain valleys in mantles of vivid green. Of the individual trees, none is more remarkable than the arar, a cypress-like tree which is found both in the Moroccan and the Algerian Atlas. From its beautiful and enduring timber was built the roof of the famous cathedral at Cordova; it has been identified with the citrus-wood of the ancient Romans; and it furnishes a valuable variety of gum.

For some reason most people think of Morocco as an extremely hot country, yet, save in the far south, it is not even a subtropical one, having, in fact, much the same climate as the lands on the opposite side of the Mediterranean, to which its flora and its general physical character bear a striking resemblance. It has been described as a cold country with a hot sun, and this is true on the whole, though it is manifestly unsafe to generalize regarding a region so extensive in area and so varied in altitude. The coast, shielded by the maritime ranges from the hot winds of the Sahara and fanned by cool breezes from the sea, has a climate akin to that of the Riviera, but without the chilling mistrals and the sudden changes in temperature which make life on the Côte d’Azur so trying at times. Inland Morocco becomes extremely disagreeable, however, during the summer heat and winter rains, the best times for visiting the interior being from late September to early December and from the end of April to mid-June. Like California, it is a country of extremes, for, looking across the orange-groves from the windows of my room in Marrákesh, when the thermometer stood at nearly 100 in the shade, I have seen snow gleaming on the Atlas, less than a score of miles away.

The Atlas, which forms the backbone of the country, is known to the Moors as Idráren Dráren—Mountains of Mountains. And it is appropriately named, for as I have remarked elsewhere, it has a greater average height than the Alps, its series of tremendous peaks culminating in Mount Tinzar, which has an estimated height of fifteen thousand feet, being higher, therefore, than any peak in the United States outside of Alaska. The Moroccan Atlas consists of five distinct ranges varying in length and height but running more or less parallel to one another. Southernmost of the five is Djebel Saghru, or Anti-Atlas, which forms Morocco’s first line of natural defense against the Sahara. Since the dawn of history caravans of slaves, spices, ostrich-feathers, ivory, and gold from Central Africa and the Niger countries have entered Morocco by the passes of the Anti-Atlas, one of them being a gap barely five paces in width, the strata of variegated marbles which form its walls having been polished to a gleaming brilliancy by the camels and bales of merchandise which have rubbed against them through countless centuries.

The main range, known as the High Atlas, which we were now approaching, is by far the longest and loftiest of the five chains. Its southern flanks, being exposed to the hot, dry winds of the Sahara, are almost totally destitute of vegetation; but the slopes facing toward the north are covered with splendid forests of oak, cedar, cork, and pine and inclose numerous well watered valleys of great fertility, in which half-savage Berber tribes, their miserable villages clinging precariously to the hillsides, cultivate tiny irrigated fields with the implements used in the days of Abraham.

For a distance of a hundred miles or more that portion of the High Atlas lying to the south of Marrákesh is a huge blank wall, unpierced by any passes practicable for motor-cars or even caravans; but further to the west a road of sorts crosses the Bibawan Pass at a height of 4150 feet and drops down into the valley of the upper Sus; while beyond it the Goundafi Pass, considerably lower but more rugged and difficult, gives access to the Susi capital of Tarundant.

Perhaps I have not made it sufficiently clear that our destination was the valley between the High Atlas and the Anti-Atlas traversed by the River Sus, from which it takes its name and whose ever-flowing stream is sufficient to turn the whole district into a garden. Once an independent kingdom, peopled by a race of warlike and highly fanatical Berber mountaineers, believed to be immensely rich in mines of gold and copper, long closed to trade by imperial decree, and still too unruly to be opened to Europeans, the Sus is one of the most inaccessible, picturesque, and interesting regions in the empire. Caravans laden with copper-ware, olive-oil, butter, saffron, wax, goatskins, dates, dried roses, gold-dust—how their mere enumeration stirs the imagination!—regularly make the four days’ journey over the rugged Goundafi Pass from Tarundant to Marrákesh; and a handful of French officials are now scattered through the district, which is gradually becoming pacified, but it is still regarded as unsafe for foreigners and is officially forbidden to colonists or travelers, permission to visit it being obtainable only from the French resident-general at Rabat, who passes the request on to the Grand Caïds who are the real masters of the country.

It is a region of savagery and grandeur; the soaring, snow-capped peaks, the ramparts of purple rock, the narrow roads bordered by dizzy precipices, the dark and gloomy forests of cypress, pine, and cedar, the leafy glens, the tumbling streams and sparkling waterfalls, the stone villages perched each on its mountain-top, all reminded us of the Grand Kabylia, which the Sus resembles, though on a vastly greater and more impressive scale. The Susi, who speak a Berber dialect called Shillah, are a hard-bitten, wiry race, distinguished in dress by their short cloaks of a brown and white striped homespun and by the fact that they do not as a rule wear turbans. Fierce fighters, shrewd traders, skilled workers in the copper mined from their native mountains, they lead hard, squalid, and frugal lives, being prodigal only in powder and human life.

Now we were in the dominions of the Caïd Goundafi, the great feudal chieftain who is overlord of the Sus; and it was thanks to him that, at the request of General Daugan, the French commander at Marrákesh, our journey was made not only safe but reasonably comfortable. For there are no hotels in the Sus, and, unless Gandoufi makes arrangements for the traveler to be put up at his kasbahs, one is faced with the alternatives of passing a sleepless night in a vermin-infested hovel or of making himself as comfortable as he can in the open.

These kasbahs, which are to be found not only in the fastnesses of the High Atlas but throughout central and southern Morocco, are in reality feudal strongholds, half-palace and half-fortress. They are usually situated far from the beaten paths of travel, occupying positions of great natural strength; for, like the French and English castles of the Middle Ages, they were originally designed with a view to defense against the incursions of the border tribes. With their crenelated ramparts and keeps and bastions, their drawbridges and courtyards, their loopholed walls and massive towers, they are immensely imposing and frequently of astounding size, one of those which we visited bearing a striking resemblance to Windsor Castle. To emerge from a gloomy defile, whose rocky walls rise sheer on either hand, and be confronted by one of these stupendous strongholds frowning down from its lofty site upon the valley below, produces an impression not far removed from awe. The traveler has the feeling that he has been magically transported back into the dim and distant past, “when knights were bold and barons held their sway,” the impression of an earlier age being heightened when he sees a cavalcade of brilliantly garbed horsemen issuing from the bastioned gate and catches on the battlements the glint of steel.

And so, following the winding Sus, we swung down through the green and ever-broadening valley to where, set on a lofty eminence above the river’s mouth, the white battlements of Agadir—the Santa Cruz de Berbería of the Spaniards, the Gate of the Sudan—look out upon the broad Atlantic. Barbary lay behind us; our long journey was at an end. As I stood upon the hill-slopes looking down upon the cluster of square white houses which form the little town, it struck me that Agadir, remote as it is, was in a way symbolic of all North Africa. Its Berber inhabitants converted by the Arabs to Islam, it has been occupied in turn by Portuguese, by Spaniards, and by French, yet the Arabs alone have left any lasting impression. Coveted by the Germans because of its mineral wealth, it almost precipitated a great European war. Whether it will remain isolated, barbarous, and forbidden, or whether it will be opened up to civilization, only the future can determine. But I was too tired to speculate on African problems, so I left the Dark Continent to settle its own troubles and turned my attention to the evening meal. When darkness had fallen we climbed to the ancient fort atop the hill, my wife and I, and, ensconcing ourselves in an angle of the seaward ramparts, gazed out across the silent, star-lit ocean to where, four thousand miles away, lay America—and home. At our backs the ghostly bulk of the High Atlas reared itself skyward in a mighty and mysterious wall. From somewhere amid the shadows of the sleeping town below came the throb of desert drums.