IX. Six Months in Andjra

After a two-month stay in Tangier, I had had enough of city life. The rain had stopped at least for the time being, and the gentle rays of the March sun had tempted forth the first greenery from the grey stems and branches of the fig trees. It felt like when the birch trees at home burst into leaf.

Ever since my Christmas visit to [Andjra] I had yearned to spend a longer time among its free and upstanding people. And now the right moment had come. Could there be anything more delightful than spring in Andjra’s mountains and valleys? I contacted one of the area’s leaders, [Sîdi ʿAbdrráḥman], of the shereef family [Bulʿáish], and he immediately declared himself willing to allow me to use one of his houses in the small village of [l-ʿAzíb dĕ Bulʿáish].

The house was made of grey stone and clay, and the roof was made of straw. It consisted of a single room which stood in perpetual twilight; for there was no window and the doorway was only just large enough for a full-grown man to go in and out of. But in the garden grew lush fig trees, and in the shadow of their foliage I had a tent pitched, which would serve as an office. Another tent was placed in the courtyard and furnished as a kitchen. And my servants, [Sîdi ʿAbdsslam], his cousin [Sîdi ʿAbdsslam II] and Tousi, were housed in the storeroom in the way of ”character building”. Soon, the company grew by a fourth shereef, a man from [Andjra] commonly called [Sîdi Ráḥḥal], whom I employed as my teacher; he was a scribe and the cousin of my host. One of the brothers of my host, naturally also a shereef, served as the night watchman, and another of the brothers, just like [Sîdi ʿAbdrráḥman] himself when he found himself in the area, visited me almost daily. Besides, shereefs from other villages would often visit me, presumably out of curiosity or to enjoy the green tea that flowed unendingly day and night. All of this holiness could naturally not leave me unaffected; holiness is infectious, as we know. They soon began to talk about my ”lucky ankles”. And they had every reason to do so, for when my ankles had left the village, robbers came the following night and ran riot in my host’s flock of sheep. And later something even more significant occurred: when the governor in Tangier sent a company of soldiers to burn the village as punishment for the inhabitants’ insubordination, the hut in which I had lived was the only one left unharmed. We know that fire has no power over holiness. My modesty has allowed me to speak of it, as holiness has nothing to do with character, but can pass onto a person just as undeservedly as the dividends from a war bond.1

I had never seen so many flowers in one spot as in the garden outside of my hut. Where the sunlight was not blocked by the treetops, the flowers were packed together as though in a colossal bouquet. It seemed as if the space was fully occupied; but still, each morning there appeared a number of new species which had thrust their way up and blossomed. And the springtime cornucopia had so much more to offer. It gifted us with milk and butter galore, it brought life and colour to the herder’s life. In the evenings, when the sheep and goats were driven home from the pasture, the quiet village came to life. In an open area, the ewes were arranged in long rows for milking, while the lambs could only watch their mothers from a distance while the milking took place. They let out mournful cries, which the ewes answered in the same sorrowful tones. But the longer the milking took, the more hopeful the call-and-response song. And when finally the ewes’ legs were freed from the ropes holding them and the lambs rushed wildly to their mothers to suck the small amount of milk that still remained in the udder, the village echoed with an ear-splitting cry of joy, which did not die down before each lamb had found its mother and each mother its lamb.

The small village is located on the slope of a hill with a view across a river valley. Directly across from us, on the other side of the valley, lives Raisūli, who later earned an international reputation and riches by abducting a wealthy American while the latter sat eating dinner in his villa outside of Tangier. Raisūli’s next big exploit was to kidnap Kaid Maclean, who had come to conduct negotiations with him on behalf of the Moorish government; and once again he made a splendid deal – the ransom came to hundreds of thousands of marks. At the time of my visit to Andjra, he had not yet come up with the idea to conduct business of this kind, but not long after my departure, he began his career by abducting a Times correspondent. And according to what I have been told, the correspondent spent the first night of his captivity in the exact hut where I now lived.

Outside the village lies a gloomy olive grove with a small shrine, consisting of an enclosure made of stone. It is [Sîdi Talḥa]’s []. It is told that during his lifetime, the saint would pray in the grove, which thereby became part of his holiness. His grave is in Tetuan, but the is connected with the grave through a hollow iron ball that in some mysterious way carries letters to the saint. The shrine is visited by patients and supplicants on Fridays, which is the day Sîdi Talḥa receives visitors. Another of the village’s sights is [Sîdi Mäimūn]’s [] with a lone bush on top of a hill

Life in the village passes quietly and peacefully. The shereefs [Bulʿáish] lead a very leisurely existence: they mostly sit still and talk. My host, [Sîdi ʿAbdrráḥman], is a large and prosperous man with a bushy, grizzled beard, a white complexion and a masterful countenance, awe-inspiring, serious and reserved, obviously used to commanding his surroundings and scheming against his enemies. He lives in a small house near to my hut, the only white-washed house in the village. What it looks like inside I do not know, as I may not, naturally, set foot over the threshold of the house where his wife lives. However, we become good friends, she and I. She sends me milk and butter and kind greetings daily, and I repay her kindness with small gifts of coffee and sugar and musk, the preferred perfume of Moroccan women. But during the six months that she was my hostess, I did not see her once. She was to me the great unknown, on whose goodwill my subsistence depended, but whose existence I could only vaguely perceive.

One day, a wedding was held in a neighbouring village and I was invited as a guest. The bridegroom, who was a poor man, was allowed to borrow my mule, and I was congratulated for being allowed to benefit from his holiness in this way. At the wedding, I saw my old friend [ʿAbdŭlkrim]. He showed off a new turban, a new cloak and shiny new sandals of yellow leather. He had always been a man of large dimensions, but it surprised me that his girth had increased so considerably since I had last seen him. An explanation was forthcoming as the sun set and the air began to cool. He asked to lend me his cloak, to which I answered that he needed it himself. With the face of an immensely rich man, he, however, handed me the thick woollen garment and showed me that he had another cloak underneath the first. Smiling with delight he also took off this one and pressed it on another of his friends. But ʿAbdŭlkrim was just as well-dressed as before, even if slightly thinner, for he had a third and a fourth cloak under the others. He had come to the wedding in the scorching heat of the sun dressed in all of his new clothes so that he could show the people how wealthy he had become.

Time passed. The showers of rain that had every so often invigorated the vegetation in April and May became more and more rare and stopped altogether in due time. The grass began to dry, the flowers to wither, the barley and wheat in the fields fell before the sickle. The fruit ripened on the trees; I only needed to stretch my hand out of the tent where I worked to grab juicy, dark brown figs. At the start of July was the celebration [], Midsummer according to the old calendar. The morning after Midsummer Day, a ring of fresh cow dung mixed with water [] – in other words rainwater that had fallen on 27 April – was smeared around the trunk of each fig tree. This was done to prevent the fruit from falling from the tree; and for the same purpose, some notches were cut into the trunks to allow the sap to trickle out. Just before sunset, a small pile of dried herbs and grass was lit under each fig tree, as the smoke from a Midsummer fire is thought to have a purifying effect. Small fires are also lit among the cattle, and a larger fire in the courtyard where men, women and children jump back and forth over it. In this way they free themselves from illnesses, infertility and all types of evil seed; and they do not need to fear burning themselves as the Midsummer fire is not ordinary fire. On the morning of Midsummer Day people also take a bath, preferably in the sea or in a river, if this is possible; for on this day not only fire, but water too, is a magical means of purification. Similar Midsummer customs are found in other parts of Morocco, in particular among the Berbers, among whom they have probably existed since ancient times. The Church Father Augustine is known to have said that on the Nativity of John the Baptist, the Libyans would bathe in the sea or in rivers, and that this was an old heathen custom. It is not unlikely that the Midsummer customs of the Berbers and various European peoples, which are largely identical, share a common origin; for we have reason to conjecture that the Berbers may descend from a race that once also inhabited the northern shores of the Mediterranean. Concerning the origins of the Midsummer fires, Mannhardt has presented the hypothesis that their function was to provide warmth to the sun; but everything indicates that both the fire and water customs have been purification ceremonies from the beginning, as they still are in Morocco and some parts of Europe today. Frazer, who earlier accepted Mannhardt’s explanation, has in the latest edition of his major work The Golden Bough discarded it and affiliated himself with the purification theory that I have put forward.1 That the purification ceremonies are conducted around Midsummer can, in my opinion, be explained by them originally having been protectives against evil forces that were assumed to be at large particularly around that time – the summer solstice – however, effects of a more lasting nature have gradually come to be attributed to them. Even today in Morocco, Midsummer is seen in many respects to be a dangerous time.

The days grew hotter, and the wells began to dry out. One fine day, Sîdi ʿAbdrráḥman suggested that we should change our place of residence. Further into the mountains, a day’s journey away, lay his actual home in the village of [Dār l-Ḥjar], where there was water in abundance. One morning in the middle of July, the mules were saddled and we headed off, accompanied by Sîdi ʿAbdsslam and [Tousi]. It is hard to imagine a more rugged riding trail. We had only just made it to the top of a mountain ridge with great effort, when it again began to slope downwards until we came to the bottom of a new valley; and so we rode uphill and downhill. Nor had my host chosen the least miserable of the trails leading to [Dār l-Ḥjar]. In fact, he was compelled to keep a suitable distance from a village where he had enemies, whose bullets would have found his large body a welcome and easy target.

The landscape surprised me with its lushness. The mountain slopes were covered with maize or sorghum fields, which were now at their most verdant. A blood-red ribbon of flowering oleander wound its way along the valley floors, growing along the shores of the river. In the afternoon, we came to a myrtle forest, which was clad in the fairest, snow-white bridal gown. And on the other side of the forest stood the village Dār l-Ḥjar, our journey’s destination. I became immediately taken with the place, returned after a couple of days to [l-ʿAzíb] to fetch my things and then settled down indefinitely in my new-found paradise.

Dār l-Ḥjar is one of the most beautiful places I have seen in Morocco. It is located just underneath a mountain pass with fantastically shaped cliffs, buried among the trees and small, lush fields, and watered by countless springs and streams that spill down the slopes. My host gave me as a residence an old white-washed house which was built at barely a metre’s distance from a sheer cliff face, from inside of which a cool spring gushed straight into the dwelling. Its water filled a small pool, then ran under the floor and out through a portal (which can be seen in the photograph [on page 243), threw itself down the slope outside the house, subsequently combined itself with other streams and thus swelled into a river, which eventually found its way to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. My house consisted of two floors; on the lower one was a kitchen and a stable where my mule was housed, the upper one contained three small rooms, just high enough to allow me to stand upright in them. One of the rooms was lit by two iron-barred windows, without glass naturally, while the two others were in semi-darkness. By making a hole in the wall, I altered one of them to serve as an office, the other was given to Sîdi ʿAbdsslam and Tousi. Sîdi Ráḥḥal, who during the day served as my teacher, was obliged to spend the night outside the hole in the wall. He was supposed to be the night watchman, but I often heard him snoring before I had fallen asleep.

I did not suffer for a lack of food. My invisible hostess, who had also moved to the village, provided me with milk and butter as before; and access to these goods was plentiful as the pastures had remained very green the entire summer thanks to the abundant water. One day, she let me know that she had given me a cow that I could take back to my own country if I happened to leave Dār l-Ḥjar at some time in the future.

My hosts had two sons – [Sîdi Muhammed], who was about fifteen years of age, and [Sîdi Mokhtsar], who was about ten – as well as two daughters. The elder of these, who was still a young girl, was almost as decorous as her mother, for if we ever happened to meet, she would always draw her scarf down over her face. A score of other families also lived in the village, and I soon made many new friends. One evening, I held a large party in my house. When we had eaten the sheep that had been slaughtered for the occasion, we began a wild game. A cripple was made sultan, another man was named governor; the other guests divided themselves into two groups of which the first played the governor’s soldiers and the other insubordinate subjects. The kitchen on the lower floor was transformed into a prison, and one rebel after another was haphazardly flung in, head or feet first. Finally, the governor himself was captured and thrown out the door.

Dār l-Ḥjar had in its possession a treasure, which was invaluable especially at this time of the year: a spring which through damming had been made so wide and deep that one could comfortably swim in it. The spring lies in a hollow; on three sides it is surrounded by high walls, but on the fourth side it flows out into a stream. Its background consists of a steep cliff with a small waterfall, while the two other walls are adorned with bay and fig trees, the tops of which form a leafy roof over the spring. In the summer, the crystal-clear water remained at a temperature of sixteen or seventeen degrees, even when the air temperature clearly exceeded thirty. We swam in the spring both morning and night, and on hot days I would often sit beside it and enjoy its wonderful coolness. The place came to be a veritable shrine for me. Early in the morning, before the village youths had had time to splash in the spring, a large eel could be seen moving about in the water. It was the spring’s guardian spirit.

The village’s patron saint is [Sîdi l-Makhfi], who is buried in an olive grove. No-one knows who he was; his name means ”the hidden one”. The people claim that his shrine glows in the evenings; but I never saw this – presumably because I was an infidel. The village also has a small, picturesque, white-washed mosque with a minaret – a church and school in one. Several of the older boys study there to become scribes, a class of society that is relatively numerous among these mountain dwellers. The profession is a profitable one. Scribes are schoolmasters, physicians, priests, saints – all at once. Often, they can be seen wandering about in larger flocks, and they are then welcomed guests. During my stay in Dār l-Ḥjar, the village was visited by just such a group, who went from house to house, accepting gifts of sheep and goats and food and money, and calling on Allah’s blessing in return. When the scribes had left, I remarked that they must have been very expensive guests. ”Of course not,” I was told. ”If we gave them a sheep, they gave us ten in its place. For everything we gave them, they paid us back tenfold through their blessings.”

One day, I bought the schoolboys a day off for a piece of silver so that we could go on an outing together among the mountains. We marched forward in a long line along the narrow trails between bushes and brushwood, over cliffs and stones. Each of them carried something, as we were going to stay away an entire day, and it was doubtful that the appetites of the youths would be satisfied with small crumbs. We ate dinner in a cave – a veritable robber’s den. On the journey home, we spotted wild boars, but our hunt was unsuccessful.

There was a hum of activity in Dār l-Ḥjar that summer. Much of the Andjra tribe had cut all ties with its governor and demanded his removal. The governor lived in Tangier and, during the many years he had held the post, had never shown himself within the tribal district. He had, in fact, no power over his subjects, but had angered them by giving his moral support to a sheik who had many enemies. My host and his large family were among these, and Dār l-Ḥjar became one of the main centres of this rebellion. The village was frequently visited by hordes of armed men who went from market to market to persuade the governor’s followers to join the rebellion; Andjra is divided into smaller districts, each with its own weekly market held on a different day of the week, where rather bloody battles were now being fought. One evening, I treated some fifty mountain people, who were on the warpath, to half a kilogramme of tea and seven kilogrammes of sugar.

One of the most enthusiastic troublemakers was a cousin of my host, commonly known as [l-Valiente]. When he came to the village, he always honoured me with a visit. He once took off his shirt to show me the scars from the many injuries he had suffered. In four places a bullet had gone in and out through the flesh. Is it any wonder then that he had gained a reputation for being a person immune to his enemies’ bullets? But he also bore on his body powerful amulets that prevented lead from entering the body; only silver bullets could wound such a man, as there are no charms against them. He told me that he had not slept a single night in two weeks. He was a restless soul, always on the move, a highwayman widely known and notorious for his deeds, untrustworthy, boisterous, rowdy and boastful. He later gained a reputation in Europe after kidnapping two English officers who had disembarked in Andjra. And, in one of London’s illustrated magazines, I once saw a picture of a man said to be [l-Valiente].

One day in August, I received an unexpected letter which bore the seal of the Russian legation in Tangier. I was urged to leave Dār l-Ḥjar and Andjra immediately, as the Moorish government could not guarantee my safety in this rebellious area. The order seemed to me to be quite unwarranted as it was the rebels who were my best friends; but in any case, I had to travel to Tangier in order to explain the situation. Besides, my journey had another purpose. I felt that the war between the rebels and their governor was relatively meaningless and proposed therefore to act as a mediator. Sîdi ʿAbdrráḥman did not appear unwilling to agree to my proposal, but said that the decision belonged to [Dûas] who was the leader of the rebels. Early the next morning, I therefore sent a message to Dûas with the request that he should meet me on the road; and an hour later I left, followed by [Sîdi ʿAbdsslam] and the man who had brought the letter from Tangier. After we had ridden for a couple of hours, I heard gunshots and two men appeared by the roadside. It was Dûas and his cousin. I knew him of old; our friendship went back to the time that he came to [l-ʿAzíb] after he had used up all of his ammunition and I gave him some cartridges so that he could defend himself against his enemies. He was a handsome man: strong build, with supple movements, regular features, a curved nose and two dark eyes, at times sharp as an eagle’s, at others shooting fire and flame. We sat down near some cliffs so that no-one would see us and held a half-hour’s deliberation, during which Dûas explained that he could not decide on the matter alone but must confer with his friends. With the promise to see each other again soon, we separated and I continued my journey with my two companions – first over a high ridge and then along a long river valley.

One gunshot volley after the other could be heard from the villages we passed. It was probably not as dangerous as it sounded, as it was wedding season at the time, and a rural wedding involves an unbelievable amount of banging and gunpowder smoke. It began to get dark, and we still had a good distance to go before [l-ʿAzíb] where we were to spend the night. We dared not travel along the main path that followed the course of the river, out of fear of robbers, and took ourselves therefore along byways to the large village of [Rumman], where we had many friends who had joined the rebellion. The villagers had already gone to bed and only the dogs appeared to be awake. We also avoided [Sîdi Talḥa]’s grove, which, despite its holiness, had a bad reputation at that time of the night, and we steered straight ahead, up one hill and down the next, and let the mules manage in the dark as best they could.

The next day, we arrived in Tangier and our stay there became longer than I had anticipated. At times I heard that the rebels were willing to settle with the governor, at others the tidings were less hopeful. An old influential shereef who lived in Tangier and whom I often met, worked devotedly to achieve peace – but in vain. Finally came the definitive news that a settlement with the government would not come into question as long as the governor was allowed to remain in office. I then decided that I would not wait any longer. I took myself to the Russian legation in order to declare my intention of returning the next morning to Dār l-Ḥjar, but was naturally met with opposition. I was told that the Moorish government had complained that my stay in Dār l-Ḥjar had impeded its military operations, and that it now intended to send four hundred soldiers to burn the village to ash. To which I responded that if the government were to carry out such plans, I could only pity the poor soldiers; I was certain that not a single one of them would come back alive. In Dār l-Ḥjar I had nothing to worry about; the troublemakers were my friends after all, and besides, I surely had the right to live where I wished. The legation’s secretary, who during the minister’s summer holiday was in charge of Russian policy in Morocco, demanded from me a written declaration that I had returned to Andjra entirely at my own risk; and the letter was sealed ceremoniously with the legation’s seal and locked in its fireproof safe. As for me, all I asked as a favour was that the legation would not inform the Moorish authorities of my departure before I had made it to Dār l-Ḥjar, and that if they should get wind of my departure from Tangier and ask where I had gone, the legation should convince them that I had travelled to Tetuan. Otherwise, they could easily send a rider to capture me and take me back to Tangier.

Early the next morning, I headed off together with Sîdi ʿAbdsslam and Sîdi Ráḥḥal, who had arrived from the countryside. We arrived in Dār l-Ḥjar in the middle of the night. Everything there was as usual. Once during my absence, the villagers had feared an attack by a neighbouring village and had therefore taken all of their valuables to the biggest house in the village, which was built like a fortress; but now the danger had passed. My belongings had been guarded by Tousi, and so conscientious had he been that, during the three weeks of my absence, he had not left the house a single time, not even when the other boys had tried to persuade him to come and swim with them in the spring.

It was now the end of August. In September, the air grew cooler and the first rains fell. The grass began to green again and the wild crocuses blossomed. In Morocco, there are essentially only two seasons: the spring, which in the country’s northern parts lasts from October to April, and the summer, which lasts from April to October.

Week after week passed and nothing more disturbed my peace and quiet. My tutor, Sîdi Ráḥḥal, had plenty to do, and I also had to engage other teachers; for it was now time for me to complete my research on the people of Andjra. I had hoped to be able to spend the entire winter in Dār l-Ḥjar, but circumstances of a personal nature obliged me to return to my homeland already that autumn. One day midway through October, I said farewell to my friends in the village. When, after three or four hours of riding, I cast my final glance upon Dār l-Ḥjar from the top of a mountain ridge – embedded in the dark green vegetation, basking in the sun across the broad valley – I was gripped by that wonderful feeling one experiences when seeing for the last time a place one has come to love. And I felt thankful towards the simple people who had treated the foreign Nazarene as a friend and brother and always tried to convince both him and themselves that he truly ”had the mouth of an infidel, but the heart of a believer”.

Due to intervening circumstances, I could not begin the journey to my homeland until November. By that time, my travel funds had shrunk significantly, but friends came to my assistance. Sîdi ʿAbdsslam offered me his savings, as did [ʿAbdŭlkrim]. It was very kind of him as he was currently considering marriage and now had to postpone the wedding by one or two months.

And so the journey north began, across Gibraltar and Genoa, Switzerland and Germany. This time, I had stayed in Morocco for more than two years without having set foot on European soil once, and I had not been to Finland for over four years.

It may interest the reader to hear a little about the later fortunes of my friends. Dûas and his followers achieved complete victory over their opponents, the objectional governor was deposed, and Dûas himself was appointed governor of Andjra. I met him a couple of times on my later visits to Tangier, once when the German Emperor famously went on shore there and the mountain dwellers gathered on the beach outside of the town in a closely packed throng to salute the enemy of the Frenchman. One year later, Dûas was murdered by his enemies. L-Valiente is also dead. I met him as well during the Emperor’s visit; he acted as a mounted policeman for the mountain dwellers and bragged with delight about having only recently driven away a familiar Englishman – the Times correspondent – who had been busy taking photographs on the beach. Sîdi ʿAbdsslam’s cousin – the other [Sîdi ʿAbdsslam] – died shortly after my departure. Tousi, who, when I left Tangier, stepped onto a steamboat with a lump in his throat in order to return to his parents in Casablanca, later became a wandering saint, who excelled in the trick of drinking boiling water without scalding his throat. [ʿAbdŭlkrim] established a small coffee-house by the marketplace outside of Tangier for mountain people who travelled into town; there you can buy a glass of sugar-sweet tea or coffee for five pennies, and if you drink two glasses, it also buys you a night on a straw mat in the coffee-house. My host [Sîdi ʿAbdrráḥman], one of his brothers and my teacher [Sîdi Ráḥḥal] were captured as rebels on a visit to Tangier and were punished with half a year in prison for sympathising with [Mûläi Ḥâfid̮], before he became sultan. The former is still alive and is, I have recently heard, the caliph of [Raisûli], a powerful man in other words, as the [Raisûli] are – for the time being – the true rulers of the mountain tribes in northern Morocco. [Sîdi ʿAbdrráḥman]’s younger son, [Sîdi Mokhtsar], visited me one summer when I lived in a garden outside of Tangier; he had grown so big I hardly recognised him. He had come the long distance from Dār l-Ḥjar to invite me to his older brother’s wedding, but I was unfortunately not able to accept the invitation. In recent years, I have often gazed longingly at Andjra’s distant blue mountains, but have not seen Dār l-Ḥjar again

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IX. Six Months in Andjra

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