Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/233

Rh around the mouth of the river was peopled over two thousand years ago by the Phoenicians, then later by the Romans, who established their post of Salacolonia here. It is evidently a very old abode of man. Pliny writes that in his time elephants still lived to the south of the Regreg and that the villagers in the valley trafficked not only in agricultural products but also in ivory, wild animals, fruit and rare qualities of wood.

In later centuries the Andalusian Moors and the Jews that were banished from Spain began arriving here, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries art and industry began to develop among the mixed population of the two towns. Synchronously Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English ships, returning from India, had to pass near the Moroccan shores, from where the pirates put out to attack the brigantines and frigates in this trade, pillaged the cargo and captured both men and women. In this period new streams of Anglo-Saxon, Indian and Malay blood thus found their way into the veins of the Berber pirate colonies. It was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the Morocco sultans destroyed this nest of freebooters and made a death penalty for any of their subjects to capture Christians. Later, as order under the sultans grew, the population of these towns separated into two distinct bodies, Sali remaining the seat of the former piratical families and of Berbers from everywhere, while Rabat became exclusively the home of Arabs and Andalusian Moors. Some of these Andalusian families, it is said, keep until now the keys of their old houses in Cordova and Granada, from which they were expelled and banished by the Spaniards. I heard