Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 2.djvu/423





MAROCCO.

HE term Marocco, given by Europeans to the triangular region bounded north-east on the Mediterranean by the Wed Ajerud, south-west on the Atlantic by the Wed Nun, is taken in a far more restricted sense by the natives, for whom Marrakesh, the Marruecos of the Spaniards, is one only of the three states subject to the sultan-sherif. His empire is completed in the north by the kingdom of Fez, in the south-east by the Tafilelt oasis, while vast districts occupied by numerous independent tribes are also comprised within the space usually designated on our maps by the appellation of Marocco. The inhabitants have no common term for the whole of this region, which in many places has no definite frontiers, and which is vaguely designated Maghreb-el-Aksa, "The Extreme West."

But notwithstanding its uncertain nomenclature, Marocco constitutes none the less a distinct geographical unit. A certain physical unity is imported to the whole of the region comprised between Algeria and the Atlantic by the lofty Deren ranges, with their parallel foldings, spurs, and valleys merging in the lowland plains which stretch on the one hand seawards, on the other in the direction of the Sabara. The absence of political cohesion is also compensated by a common faith, while the very rivalries of foreign powers, especially England, France, and Spain, serve to impart to the whole of Marocco a certain solidarity, by isolating it from the rest of the continent. Within its conventional limits, as determined by diplomacy, the region defined south-westwards by a straight line running from the Figuig oasis across the desert to the mouth of the Wed Draa (Draha), may have a superficial area of about 200,000 square miles, with a scant population, which in the absence of all official documents can scarcely be even approximately conjectured. The estimates vary from Klöden's 2,750,000 to Jackson's 15,000,000, the actual number being, perhaps, between eight and nine millions.

Marocco has not yet been thoroughly explored by European travellers. three centuries the published accounts of the country were little more than reproductions of the work written by the Arab renegade, Leo Africanus. Till the