Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/230

214 square miles between the rivers Sbu and Regreg. Not far from Knitra the largest river of Morocco, the Sbu, or the Subur Ammis magnificus et navigabilis described by Pliny, empties into the sea. It was at the mouth of this river in the fifth century that the Carthaginian commercial colony of Thymiatherion was founded and that the Berber tribe of Beni Ifrem later established their little town of Mehediya, which became a nest of daring and relentless pirates. Portuguese came and settled here for a time, followed by Spaniards and Dutch; but they were all forced to leave the shores of the Sbu in 1681 by the warlike Ismail In the earlier centuries of the Christian era the Romans had maintained an outpost near Knitra, attracted there, as was true of all the subsequent foreigners, by the opportunity the river afforded to reach into the heart of the country.

The Carthaginians, who always extracted the various forms of wealth from the country where they had their colonies or trading posts, took slaves from this region and left behind them ethnic traces and some visible influence of their occupation, if only in the form of the stigmas that are to this very day tattooed on the faces of the women from the Gharb and Beni Hassen tribes. Distinct traces were also left by the Romans, who readily married native women here, just as in all the other parts of North Africa, and infused much of their blood into the Berbers, who thus became in part the descendants of the citizens and warriors of the magnificent Caesars.

Turning south along the shore of the Atlantic, we passed through Sali just as the shining, white town and its guardian minarets were being shrouded in the soft