Tangier (3 page)

When we were still about twenty feet from shore the entire rabble fell upon us, and screaming in Arabic and Spanish, until we finally understood that, the water being too shallow to take the boats in any further, we were expected to effect a landing upon theirs backs; news which while it quietest our fears of losing any of our belongings, aroused no less lively ones of acquiring some of theirs in the form of vermin. The ladies were taken off in chairs, in a sort of triumphal procession, while I made my entry into Africa astride of an old mulatto, my chin resting on the crown of his head and my toes trailing through the water.

The astonishing Amelia Perrier, whose caustic and delightful book puts to rout de Amicis, that representative of 'Italian literature', beating him soundly about the ears with a parasol perhaps, had a similar disembarkation. First the transfer from steamer to long-boat, and then:

Suddenly I was alarmed by a hideous yelling and screaming close at hand, which was responded to by the boatmen. We stopped, and with some difficulty the boat was turned stern-on to the land, which was, however, not yet visible. Then I perceived that we were surrounded by a swarm
of brown half-naked monsters, of the wildest aspect, who clung to the boat, shouting and yelling in the most frightful mariner. These proved to be amphibious Moors and Jews, who make it their employment to walk out through the surf to the boats, and carry ashore the goods and passengers, boats not being able to approach, sometimes in bad weather, within a hundred yards of the shore. Two of these, with frantic cries and gesticulations, held aloft a chair, into which I was informed I was
to entrust myself to be carried ashore. It was an almost exact repetition of the getting from the steamer to the boat. In the rolling surf it was impossible to keep the boat steady for an instant, so I had to stand on the gunwale held by my fellow-passengers, and wait until the boat rolled to within sufficient proximity of the chair, when there was a general shout, I was let go, and dropped backwards into it. The bearers of
the chair then turned, and waded through the surf to the shore, They were stalwart fellows (Jews — Moors will only carry good and True Believers), but still the waves rushed in with such violence, that it was with difficulty they kept their footing: and though they held the chair high above their shoulders. I enjoyed a cold foot bath all the way. . . . At last we reached
the beach, up which they ran, and deposited me beyond the reach of the waves: then they seized she chair again, rushed back into the sea, and disappeared in the darkness.

Tangier today has a small modern harbour, though until very recently the largest cruise liners still anchored off in the bay. Entry is effected simply down an orthodox gangplank, and the Moors who swarm on board a docking ship are nothing more romantic than brass-badged porters.

I found a taxi in Gibraltar's Main Street rank, collected my baggage, and drove to the waterport. It was a curious experience. I had distinctly the impression that the old Gibraltarian who drove me shouldn't have been doing so and was really some species of parking attendant pensioner. He entered the cab with a sort of surreptitious glee, was uncertain of the gears, turned into one-way streets, and executed an elaborate three-point turn in Main Street, which is only a few metres wide. However we arrived at the ferry, my driver crouched with furious concentration over the wheel of the vast Mercedes, and with an ecstatic, almost drugged, grin on his face.

Already in possession of a ticket, I had timed my arrival before that of the Moroccan police. No one may board the ferry until he has first been inspected by the Moroccans Ob Gibraltar's quay. I queued perspiring at the relevant desk, my immigration card neatly typed, passport opened at the right page, ready to deferentially remove my sun-glasses and answer the maddest questions. There are two decades when a passport stays embarrassingly young. My second still said 'schoolboy' when I was twenty. This current one has 'undergraduate' Foreign Office amended to 'author'. With the fourth I shall opt unshakably for 'admiral'. Who knows but the fifth may not simply be a computer card.

The policeman has arrived. He's not going to remove
his
dark glasses. I hand him the papers with a French greeting.
'Touriste
,'
I
say brightly.

He looks up.
'Acteur
?'

'
Non—auteur
.' I mumble. '
Ecrivain
.'

'Undergraduate finished?' In English, insulting my French.

'Undergraduate finished,' I agree.

For which newspapers do you write?' French again.

'I don't write for newspapers,'

'Just books?'

'Yes.'

'About Morocco?'

'
Non, non.
Je suis en vacances
." I
manage that strained little laugh the British have inbuilt But foreigners, and especially Moroccans, produce neither alarm nor condescension in me.

'Then you are a tourist,' the policeman announces, as though it were I who had initiated a tiresome inquisition.

'Yes,' I say brightly.

He slams shut and shoves me my passport, with that finest innuendo of insult one does best to ignore. Most often Moroccan immigration is charming.

The Scot was right, and the Mons Calpe is 'a lovely wee thing'. The comforts of leather armchairs and iced drinks were not available when the intrepid Miss Perrier made her crossing, spreadeagled for purchase on a hatch-cover of the
Wolf
, and surrounded by 'Moors and Jews . . . most of them apparently of the lowest class, and indescribably filthy and wretched in their aspect'. But the weather was more kind to me as well. It was a still, golden evening, and the Mediterranean shone piercingly. Even God's British cloud had evaporated. Although we should dock at Tangier in darkness, an advantage of
the evening crossing was that the Rock was lit at its most striking, from the sea. One could see the finely tiled roofs of the little town shining in the sun, where it huddled at the base of the soaring grey massif. This particular quay lies parallel with, and only some twenty-five metres distant from the end of the airstrip. A commercial jet dropped down on to it, its every aligning manoeuvre fascinatingly close, and braked with a bellow of reverse thrust. Offshore lay a couple of Russian tankers. There was a flotilla of NATO destroyers in the naval dock, and the tiny, bright yellow submarine, alongside its French mother frigate, that was Commander Cousteau's latest, and deepest-diving bathyscaphe. But then Gibraltar, and more so Tangier, is rather like one of those self-conscious pictures pinned to the blackboard to instruct young children in languages, 'Where is the yellow submarine . . .? 'What is the aeroplane doing . . .? Everything is brightly, busily there. On the boatdeck there was being enacted something superb. As Gibraltar stood sunlit astern, a Moroccan in a white
djellaba
was slipping bright yellow
barboosh
from his feet and preparing to pray. The image of East meeting West was too splendid for niceties. I brought up my camera and shot shamelessly with chattering teeth.

As the friends with whom I was going temporarily to stay had young children and ate at midday, I decided to have something to eat. Taking the meal slowly in the near-deserted saloon, I noticed only that the captain and three of his officers had also
sat down to eat. The captain was a very large man in white ducks. Suddenly there was
a blare of Moroccan music, Munching steadily as I watched the hypnotic sunlight on the Mediterranean, I thought no more than that we were to be treated to canned mood music, and that some fault in the earsplitting speaker system would at once be corrected, Not so, I looked up. The source of the sound was the transistor radio of two rather hairy hippies sprawled on the other side of the salon beyond the captain's table, and wearing not very clean Moroccan
djellabas
.

'Turn that thing off!' snapped the captain.

The volume dropped, but the captain was unsatisfied, and simultaneously the head hippie was on his feet and ambling towards him.

'Listen,' he addressed the captain. 'I paid seven dollars to ride on this crummy boat, and nobody's going to tell me what to do.'

I stiffened straight as Miss Amelia Perrier.

'Turn it off at once!' said the very stout captain.

'I'm not a British citizen and you can't order me,' said the hippie. 'So don't you throw your weight around.'

That did it. The word 'weight' had been subtly loaded. Very quietly the captain said: 'I am the Master of this ship, sir, and aboard her I am the law, and can have you arrested.' For a second his face registered self-annoyance as it occurred to him that the American hippie might not understand this particularly English usage of the word 'sir'.

'I'm not a British citizen,' the hippie said again. His companion had turned off the radio; and the captain was on his feet. He said something to a steward. As the man hesitated a second, I supposed he must have been sent for a revolver and irons. In fact it proved to be the Moroccan policeman. I made a gesture. Nervous lest the Moroccan policeman saw me in conference with the hippies, I gazed out of a window near them and muttered aside: 'The captain can. How well do you know Morocco?'

'Second trip,'

'Don't aggravate the Moroccan police. It's not worth it.' Feeling melodramatic and foolish, I sidled off. The Moroccan policeman arrived and took the hippies' passports. I didn't feel happy for them. The group moved off to conference in the purser's office, Later I met the chief hippie in the gents, He was having some difficulty with his
djellaba
, which is a garment designed to facilitate urination only in the orthodox squatting position. 'What happened? Have you got your passports back okay?' He smiled, charming and relaxed. 'Sure! I went along an' apologized. It's all fine,'

The
Mons
Calpe
steamed on imperturbably towards Tangier.

In July of 1969, 98000 miles distant from Earth, an Apollo astronaut depressed the release of a modified Hasselblad camera to produce another sample of what for some years had been a rapidly developing and dramatic new science, The result is a colour photograph which shows the entire continent of Africa with, to the east, the whole of Arabia; to the north, the Mediterranean, Italy and the
Aegean; to the west, the Spanish peninsula. Obscured only by cloud are northern Europe and the British Isles. Night had fallen over Tibet; and the beginnings of Mongolia, hidden by the globe's curve.

Intriguingly the photograph vividly confronts one with what schematic representations of orthodox cartography can only suggest, and then less clearly: the entire world of the Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Visigoths, Arabs, Europeans and Moors whose movements over the centuries, whether as conquests, colonizations or withdrawals, make up the history of the city of Tangier.

Set at the western end of the Mediterranean, and on the most north-westerly promontory of the African littoral, it was of vital interest to the seafaring, trade-conscious Phoenicians, whose nucleus was Carthage, where today stands Tunis. The pre-Phoenician cities of Cotta and Pontion are thought to have occupied the site of Tangier; the Phoenicians establishing trading posts in the vicinity in 1450 B.C.; and a more permanent settlement, owing allegiance to Carthage, flowering in 570 B.C. on the site itself, the city of Tingis.

Much the same preoccupations governed the policy of imperial Rome, and so the strategic city became Tingitana, declared capital of all Rome's North African colonies, or Mauretania, by the Emperor Claudius in A.D. 42, only to be sacked, after the fall of metropolitan Rome and the nearer empire, by the Vandals: hordes from Asia, showing on the colour photograph as cloaked by darkness. Byzantines followed them, and were in turn replaced by the Visigoths. Subsequent lords of the Mediterranean, the European seafaring powers, Portugal, Spain and Britain in particular seized, or were presented with, the city; held it in turn, and finally in concert, establishing, together with other powers, the Free Port and International Zone of Tangier, which was only returned to its indigenous people with Moroccan independence in 1956.

But Tangier has too a prehistory, based first upon legend; then the testimony of early writers, Hanno of Carthage (c. 460 B.C.), Herodotus the historian (485-425 B.C.), the Elder Pliny in the first century of Christ, and Ptolemy in the second; and more lately and definitively upon the diggings in 1936 of the Americans, Professor Carleton S, Coon and Doctor Hugh Heneken, and other members of an archaeological team sponsored by Harvard University. In legend Hercules wrenched Europe and Africa apart peculiarly to protect Tingé, the city founded by his son Sophax, and named after his wife. The resulting rift in the mountain chain which once joined the two continents, and between which the Strait of Gibraltar has since lain, are still known as the Pillars of Hercules, as has been mentioned. Excitingly, if unsurprisingly in the warm Mediterranean nucleus of pre-civilization, the Harvard team unearthed the remains of two Neanderthal men, and much evidence of the Stone Age.

Little or no documentation or physical evidence remains of Tangier in the early Middle Ages, but the city cannot have escaped the influence of the extraordinary flowering of Moorish civilization and scientific discovery of this era, which pervaded the entire Mediterranean and beyond, drawing scholars from all over Europe to the great Karaouine University at Fes. With the late Middle Ages, this civilization appears to have suffered eclipse contemporaneous with that in Europe. This was the unchecked heyday of the Barbary pirates - the Sallee Rovers. Tangier was affected too; and comes into prominence again only with the expansionist conquests of Portugal, practically inspired as protecting her shipping, but lent additional dynamism by the spirit of Christian crusade.

The era of the seafaring powers brings the city's fortunes to its accession to Britain: and is both a convenient and relevant point in time to break this sketch of its early history. In 1640 it was Portugal which captured. Tangier once more but, under constant siege by the Moors, it was an uneasy possession. In 1661 it was added to the dowry of Catherine of Braganza upon her marriage to Charles II of England. There was subtlety in the gift. Where infidels and Sallee Rovers were concerned at least, the interests of European maritime powers coincided. England and her navy were left holding a far from manageable baby.