Page:Sixteen years of an artist's life in Morocco, Spain and the Canary Islands.djvu/71

60 rest with pleasure. A high white wall, singularly bare and monotonous in appearance, runs along on both sides, completely concealing the houses behind. At every step we are compelled to turn aside with disgust from the most disagreeable and forbidding objects; here from a heap of foul refuse, and there from the decomposed bodies of dogs and other animals, all festering in the sun, and almost sickening one by their loathsome appearance. The Moors appear to have no idea of any effective way of keeping their towns clean; the streets are seldom swept; and the stagnating air is purified only when a strong and penetrating east wind disperses the ill-odoured and poisonous miasma which has been floating in the atmosphere for days and weeks. It is only some very particular occasion that can rouse the authorities from their inertness, and stir them up to provide a remedy for so happen to be raging in the immediate vicinity, and to be threatening themselves with the scourge that shall certainly lay many of their townsmen low, they then become sensible of the necessity of exertion, and set about removing those hotbeds of corruption which generate or attract the most deadly forms of disease. But even in so serious a case, their sluggish apathy is only roused to action by