"Is That Mulatto Really What He Pretends To Be?" Said I To Joanna;
"Is He A Descendant Of The Moors Of Granada?"
"He always talks about the Moors of Granada when he is mad with
majoon or aguardiente," interrupted, in bad French, the old man
whom I have before described, and in the same croaking voice which
I had heard chanting in the morning.
"Nevertheless it may be true,
and if he had not heard something of the kind from his parents, he
would never have imagined such a thing, for he is too stupid. As I
said before, it is by no means impossible: many of the families of
Granada settled down here when their town was taken by the
Christians, but the greater part went to Tunis. When I was there,
I lodged in the house of a Moor who called himself Zegri, and was
always talking of Granada and the things which his forefathers had
done there. He would moreover sit for hours singing romances of
which I understood not one word, praised be the mother of God, but
which he said all related to his family; there were hundreds of
that name in Tunis, therefore why should not this Hammin, this
drunken water-carrier, be a Moor of Granada also? He is ugly
enough to be emperor of all the Moors. O the accursed canaille, I
have lived amongst them for my sins these eight years, at Oran and
here. Monsieur, do you not consider it to be a hard case for an
old man like myself, who am a Christian, to live amongst a race who
know not God, nor Christ, nor anything holy?"
"What do you mean," said I, "by asserting that the Moors know not
God? There is no people in the world who entertain sublimer
notions of the uncreated eternal God than the Moors, and no people
have ever shown themselves more zealous for his honour and glory;
their very zeal for the glory of God has been and is the chief
obstacle to their becoming Christians. They are afraid of
compromising his dignity by supposing that he ever condescended to
become man. And with respect to Christ, their ideas even of him
are much more just than those of the Papists, they say he is a
mighty prophet, whilst, according to the others, he is either a
piece of bread or a helpless infant. In many points of religion
the Moors are wrong, dreadfully wrong, but are the Papists less so?
And one of their practices sets them immeasurably below the Moors
in the eyes of any unprejudiced person: they bow down to idols,
Christian idols if you like, but idols still, things graven of wood
and stone and brass, and from these things, which can neither hear,
nor speak, nor feel, they ask and expect to obtain favours."
"Vive la France, Vive la Guadeloupe," said the black, with a good
French accent. "In France and in Guadeloupe there is no
superstition, and they pay as much regard to the Bible as to the
Koran; I am now learning to read in order that I may understand the
writings of Voltaire, who, as I am told, has proved that both the
one and the other were written with the sole intention of deceiving
mankind. O vive la France! where will you find such an enlightened
country as France; and where will you find such a plentiful country
as France? Only one in the world, and that is Guadeloupe. Is it
not so, Monsieur Pascual? Were you ever at Marseilles? Ah quel
bon pays est celui-la pour les vivres, pour les petits poulets,
pour les poulardes, pour les perdrix, pour les perdreaux, pour les
alouettes, pour les becasses, pour les becassines, enfin, pour
tout."
"Pray, sir, are you a cook?" demanded I.
"Monsieur, je le suis pour vous rendre service, mon nom c'est
Gerard, et j'ai l'honneur d'etre chef de cuisine chez monsieur le
consul Hollandois. A present je prie permission de vous saluer; il
faut que j'aille a la maison pour faire le diner de mon maitre."
At four I went to dine with the British consul. Two other English
gentlemen were present, who had arrived at Tangier from Gibraltar
about ten days previously for a short excursion, and were now
detained longer than they wished by the Levant wind. They had
already visited the principal towns in Spain, and proposed spending
the winter either at Cadiz or Seville. One of them, Mr. -, struck
me as being one of the most remarkable men I had ever conversed
with; he travelled not for diversion nor instigated by curiosity,
but merely with the hope of doing spiritual good, chiefly by
conversation. The consul soon asked me what I thought of the Moors
and their country. I told him that what I had hitherto seen of
both highly pleased me. He said that were I to live amongst them
ten years, as he had done, he believed I should entertain a very
different opinion; that no people in the world were more false and
cruel; that their government was one of the vilest description,
with which it was next to an impossibility for any foreign power to
hold amicable relations, as it invariably acted with bad faith, and
set at nought the most solemn treaties. That British property and
interests were every day subjected to ruin and spoliation, and
British subjects exposed to unheard-of vexations, without the
slightest hope of redress being afforded, save recourse was had to
force, the only argument to which the Moors were accessible. He
added, that towards the end of the preceding year an atrocious
murder had been perpetrated in Tangier: a Genoese family of three
individuals had perished, all of whom were British subjects, and
entitled to the protection of the British flag. The murderers were
known, and the principal one was even now in prison for the fact,
yet all attempts to bring him to condign punishment had hitherto
proved abortive, as he was a Moor, and his victims Christians.
Finally he cautioned me, not to take walks beyond the wall
unaccompanied by a soldier, whom he offered to provide for me
should I desire it, as otherwise I incurred great risk of being
ill-treated by the Moors of the interior whom I might meet, or
perhaps murdered, and he instanced the case of a British officer
who not long since had been murdered on the beach for no other
reason than being a Nazarene, and appearing in a Nazarene dress.
He at length introduced the subject of the Gospel, and I was
pleased to learn that, during his residence in Tangier, he had
distributed a considerable quantity of Bibles amongst the natives
in the Arabic language, and that many of the learned men, or
Talibs, had read the holy volume with great interest, and that by
this distribution, which, it is true, was effected with much
caution, no angry or unpleasant feeling had been excited.
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