Page:Sixteen years of an artist's life in Morocco, Spain and the Canary Islands.djvu/20

Rh Silent City, Protected of the Lord, is so short that one is hardly prepared for a scene so entirely new in all its aspects. A new world is literally disclosed to the traveller, and as the strange pictures of a life which is as yet so foreign to all his sympathies pass before him, new and vivid sensations are awakened, and the circle of his experience is greatly enlarged.

Tangier, from the sea, looks like a City of the Dead, a vast cemetery, a Kensal Green laid bare on the slope of a hill. The houses are square white blocks, without windows or chimneys, or anything to break the monotony of the four sides. Here and there, the eye rests upon a mosque, or upon some fragments of fortification, vestiges of what, in the time of our Charles II., counted among the foreign possessions of the English crown. We had soon an opportunity of witnessing some of the more striking scenes which greet the visitor on his approach to this strange land. As we drew near to the shore, a squabble and fight took place between two vagabond Jews, who in the rivalry of the profession, had plunged into the water to carry me ashore. In their zeal to secure the prize of which they were emulous, each one for himself, the two sons of Abraham quarrelled, and lost no time in proceeding to a liberal