After twenty-four days of city life the caravan impressed me as a new spectacle. And yet nothing was changed, except that beside Mohamed Ducali rode the Moor, Schellal, who although his business had been amicably settled, thought it more prudent to return to Tangiers under the wing of the Ambassador than to remain in Fez under that of his government. An acute observer might also have observed upon our faces, if he were a pessimist, a certain annoyance; if an optimist, a calm serenity, which was derived from a profound consciousness in all, that we had left behind in the imperial capital no pining beauty, no offended husband, no distracted family. On all our faces also shone the thought of return—that is, on as much as could be seen of them under the umbrellas, veils, handkerchiefs, with which most of us had concealed our heads for shelter against the ardent sun and suffocating dust. Alas! here was the great change. The sun of May was changed into the sun of June, the thermometer marked forty-two degrees (centigrade) at the moment of departure, and before us lay two hundred miles of African soil.
To return to Tangiers we had to go to Mechinez, from thence to Laracce, then along the shores of the sea to Arzilla, and from Arzilla to Ain-Dalia, where we had first encamped.
We took three days to go to Mechinez, distant from Fez about fifty kilometres.
The country did not present any marked differences to that which we had traversed in going to Fez: always the same fields of grain and barley, in some of which they were beginning to reap; the same black _duars_, the same vast spaces covered with dwarf palms and lentiscus, those grand undulations of the land, rocky hills, dry beds of torrents, solitary palms, white tombs of saints, splendidly peaceful and infinitely sad. But because of the neighborhood of the two great cities, we met more people than on the way between Tangiers and Fez: caravans of camels, droves of cattle, merchants bringing troops of beautiful horses to the markets of Fez, saints preaching in the desert, couriers on foot and on horseback, groups of Arabs armed with reaping-hooks, and some rich Moorish families going to Fez with their servants and chattels. One of these—the family of a wealthy merchant known to Ducali—formed a long caravan. First came two servants armed with muskets; and behind them the head of the family, a handsome man of a stern countenance, with a black beard and a white turban, riding a richly caparisoned mule; with one hand he held the reins, and sustained a child of two or three years old, seated before him in the saddle; with the other he clasped the hand of a woman completely veiled—perhaps his favorite wife—who rode behind him astride of the mule’s crupper, and who held him round the waist as if she meant to suffocate him, perhaps in fear of us. Other women, all with veiled faces, came riding on other mules behind the master; armed relations, boys, black servants; women with babies in their arms; Arab servants with muskets on their shoulders; mules and asses laden with mattresses, pillows, coverings, plates, and other matters; and, finally, more servants on foot, bearing cages full of canary-birds and parrots.