Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/232

216 along the seashore affords a short and direct route on which his emissaries would not be threatened by the warlike mountaineer tribes. This ocean road is well guarded and defended not only from Rabat to the Atlas country but northward to the frontiers of the Rif.

For a long time the masters of Fez and Meknes had turned their eyes toward the mouth of the Bu Regreg, but it was only after a long period and with great difficulty that they finally succeeded in gaining this important post with its dominated land route along the shore and its point of embarkation for war or commerce with Spain, as the mood of the moment dictated. The independent tribe of Beni Ifrem had been in control here, and before them the powerful "sea panthers" of pirates ruled the two towns of Rabat and Sali, from where they set out on daring expeditions and beat off all attacks until the seventeenth century, having formed the "Republic of the Two Shores" and combined in a general federation with the pirates of Algeria. But this is a story of rather modern times, and before the pirates, before the Beni Ifrem, this strategic point was in the hands of the Berghwata tribe, who were pagans and who, as I was informed by some learned Berbers and Arabs in Marrakesh and Sail, preserved for a long time the tenets of the cult of the Phoenician goddess, Astarte. The emblem of this goddess, a moon between the horns of a bull, is even now tattooed on the faces of some of the Berber women. These same Berghwata later accepted Islam but soon fell away into heresies and during nearly two centuries fought with the orthodox Moslems of the country.

Going back into earliest times, we find that the region