Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/311

Rh their silver-handled shashka from Damascus—all of them well skilled in the use of the sword.

The following morning we left Safi and continued northward a hundred miles along the coast, until we again picked up a silvery-white and dazzling town contrasting with the dark-blue field of the sea—Mazagan, distinctly European in character, with its French buildings, churches, lighthouse and docks, all dazzling under the streaming rays of the sun save the somber, towering walls of the old fortress that dominated everything.

When we later visited these powerful embattlements, we passed along the crenelated walls, through the galleries where ancient cannon still stretched toward the sea and land, into the vaults which had previously served as magazines for powder and ball and even down into the cisterns, where the Portuguese stored their watersupply against the time of siege. There was the tower also from which the coming of the enemy was pealed forth during those three hundred years from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, when the Portuguese maintained a long and constant struggle against the natives and used this stronghold as their sallying point from which to drive excursions into the land. To the north they made expeditions that resulted in the capture of Asemmur and the little town of Tit, which, however, they could not long hold against the Dukkala and Rehamna tribes, as they had not their impregnable walls and destructive cannon to breast the attacks of the Berbers.

Judging from the subterranean cisterns, immense