CHAPTER VIII.

This is royal! 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. All the

houses nearly are one-and two-story, made of thick walls of stone,

plastered outside, square as a dry-goods box, flat as a floor on top, no

cornices, whitewashed all over--a crowded city of snowy tombs! And the

The Innocents Abroad