brought them to their senses; but no sooner had calm been established among the crew than a terrible storm broke upon the ship. The sailors, still under the influence of liquor, were unable to combat it successfully. The Télégraphe, fleeing before the tempest and attempting to take refuge in Cumberland Bay, was shipwrecked. Only Charpentier was saved; he made his way safe and sound to the village of Juan Bautista.

Some time later he was joined by Count Alfred de Rodt, a Swiss who passed for a Frenchman. This gentleman had led a checkered life, whose dominant note was his stubborn dislike of the Prussians. He fought them once as an Austrian soldier at Sadowa. In 1870, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in order to fight them again. No one knows after what strange adventures he finally landed on this lost island in the Pacific Ocean.

Charpentier had no difficulty in persuading de Rodt that at their very feet lay an inexhaustible source of riches: catching and selling langoustes, a species of deep-sea crayfish, roughly equivalent to a lobster. The methods which they had at their disposal, however, were primitive, as were their shipping facilities; and they had no money to find better. It was then that Providence placed in their path another Frenchman, Louis P. Recart.

was provided with a twenty-five horse

power auxiliary motor which could drive her at five and a half knots in a perfect her at five and a half knots in a perfect calm. With these plans in hand, M. Recart returned to Chile. To get the boat built, he turned to still another Frenchman, M. Achille Court. The schooner's keel was finally laid at Constitucion, not far from Valparaiso at the mouth of the river Maule; but the difficulties were tremendous.

All the accessories, large or small, had to be sent from France. One day, for instance, the lamp which heated the

a

175

IN FEBRUARY, 1922, the French Consul at Valparaiso made a pilgrimage to Robinson's island. One may imagine his stupefaction when he found himself welcomed by the Marseillaise sung in French, and greeted in his native tongue by many of the inhabitants. The explanation was that Charpentier and de Rodt had both married. The first had five children and the second six; and these in turn had had children of their own, so that to-day the descendants of the two form the bulk of the population of the village of Juan

Bautista. The descendants of the
Swiss, de Rodt, understand
French but do not speak it;
those of Charpentier speak
French fluently.

Only a little later, the tiny cemetery where the anti-Prussian de Rodt lies came very near being filled with a considerable number of those whom he greatly detested. The raider Dresden, after having escaped from the battle of the Falkland Islands (October 18, 1914), wandered about the Pacific, and early in 1915 took refuge in Cumberland Bay, where she was attacked by the three British cruisers Glasgow, Kent, and Oramawhich were bigger, better armed, and faster than she. Faced by such an unequal struggle, her commander hastened to plead the privilege of neutrality offered by the Chilean territorial waters in which he had just dropped anchor; but the British commander had not forgotten that in the preceding November the Germans had sunk, in these same waters, the French sailing ship Valentine, and he resolved to let the law of retaliation take its course.

story, spoke often of the extraordinary abundance of big crayfish. These sea crayfish are really giant langoustes, called scientifically Palinurus Frontalis. Some of them are more than two and a half feet long and weigh thirteen pounds. They are marvelous eating. M. Recart, realizing the future possibilities of such a business, began by improving Charpentier's methods. He went back to Valparaiso, and persuaded the Chilean Government to give him a fishing monopoly covering the whole archipelago of Juan Fernandez. Then he set out for France to look for a better type of well-boat, designed for the rapid shipping of live langoustes from Mas-aTierra to Valparaiso. His search took him to Boulogne, where he made the acquaintance of the naval architect, S. Soë. Following Recart's instructions, Soë drew the plans for a sixty-ton motor schooner, capable of carrying fifteen hundred live langoustes. As a sailing ship, she could do twelve knots; and she

France for a new one would mean a delay of four months. What was to be done? They were forced to turn to a done? They were forced to turn to a local jeweler, who performed the necessary soldering by the methods which he used on watches, that is to say, by using silver solder!

IN

IN

DECEMBER, 1910, however, the schooner was launched and was christened Gaviota (the Sea Mew). She replaced an old tub of much smaller tonnage, and made it possible to ship langoustes from Mas-a-Tierra to Valparaiso in four days. Her water well, in which the lobsters were to be kept, did not communicate directly with the sea, but was filled and emptied by two pumps. To prevent the langoustes from piling up in the bottom of the hold, and to make certain that they would arrive alive, perches were placed so that the big crayfish could, as their instinct directs, grip them like the wires of

a cage.

Thus the inhabitants of Juan Bautista, at no risk at all, had front-row seats for a naval battle. The Dresden answered the Britishers' first burst of fire; five minutes later, she pulled down the Imperial ensign and raised the white flag of surrender. The converging fire of the three British cruisers had done its work. A fire started on the Dresden; she was badly damaged and fifteen of her crew were seriously wounded. The watchers on the shore were astonished to see the rapidity and the orderliness with which the ship was abandoned. The reason was that a bomb with a time fuse had been placed in the forward hold. The small boats had scarcely drawn away from the ship when the explosion came; the fore part of the Dresden slipped beneath the waves and the rest of the cruiser followed. The

whole crew, however, was picked up by the British squadron, which thereupon moved off under full steam.

TOG

O GET back to the langouste industry, let it be said that it has prospered surprisingly. Taking another Frenchman into business with him, Louis Recart has founded the house of Recart et Doniez. The Gaviota now has a sister ship, the Piquera, and twice the amount of business can be carried. A natural development has been the installation of a factory for canning langoustes on the island.

Some idea of the importance of this French enterprise can be gained from the

following. Thirty whale-boats, twentyseven feet long and provided with outboard motors which give them a speed of eight knots, are used in the langouste fisheries. Each of these handles fifteen traps. These traps are usually anchored at night at a depth of from seven to

seventy fathoms; for bait, almost any fish is used, provided that it is slightly spoiled. Thanks to these intensive methods, six thousand langoustes are shipped each month from Mas-a-Tierra to the South American continent. When they arrive at Valparaiso, they are kept alive in big floating cages until orders come in to be filled. Only twenty-five years ago, langoustes were unknown as a table delicacy in Buenos Aires. To-day, thanks to a special method of packing, they are sent by the trans-Andean railroad and arrive alive in the Argentine capital, where they bring a price close to $1.50 a pound.

THESE present-day Robinsons ob

viously have more resources and more comforts at their command than their British predecessor. Had they been born one or two centuries earlier, and had they found an equally talented biographer, their fame, like Robinson's,

might have been handed down to posterity.

De Rodt is dead, but Charpentier is still alive. The Chilean Government is represented at Juan Bautista by a single officer, who combines the functions of governor and of registrar of births, deaths, and marriages. He answers to the French name of Durand, for he is only a naturalized Chilean, and was born on the verdant plains of Normandy.

Is the savage beauty of Mas-a-Tierra to be ruined? A twin-screw English liner already takes tourists there, and now British newspapers are announcing that a casino is soon to be built. However this may be, this lost island of the

Pacific, discovered by a Spaniard, made famous by an Englishman, and to-day the property of Chile, owes its development to a Frenchman whose initiative alone built up a prosperous industry. And still they say that we French are not a race of colonizers!

Maquillage

By James Laver

From the Spectator, London

LET prigs and primitives delight (Though no one still supposes That prigs and primitives are right)

In shiny cheeks and noses,

For all the moralists have said, (And he who runs may read it)

I rather like a touch of red

On lips that do not need it!

For who is he who would not choose

(Albeit clown or glutton)

His sage and onion with the goose,

His jelly with the mutton?

The Parmesan is in the soup

To make our palate moister;
There's ginger on the canteloupe
There's cayenne on the oyster.

Leave Nature's crudity to those Who'll take it, willy-nilly.

I study to perfume the rose

I like to gild the lily!

And you, my love, as I have said,

(And I've no cause to doubt it) Can safely add a touch of red, Who are so sweet without it.

T

A MOROCCAN GATEWAY

HERE at tea on the hotel terrace lolled a cosmopolitan crowd, Belgian banquiers, English sirs and ladies, French princes, Swedish barons, perhaps two or three Americans the kind of crowd you find at the de luxe hotel anywhere around the Mediterranean. We strolled across the terrace, went down some steps, crossed a Moorish garden, and stepped through a doorway straight into the Arabian Nights.

A shadowy passageway . . . a flitting veiled figure . . . a quick intense glance of two black eyes. The woman turned a corner sharply. We followed.

A narrow high-walled way, teeming with life and color, dipping steeply into the heart of the city. Tall, dignified, white-robed Moors marching gravely two and two. Porters toiling up hill with heads bent under great baskets piled

By Webb Waldron

Written especially for THE LIVING AGE

high with vivid green mint. Ebony-faced Senegalese in khaki and fez. Brownlegged water vendors with their glistening dripping pig-skins, jingling their bright brass bells. Half-naked children whining: 'Barak alla hou fik! Barak alla hou fik! Blessing upon you!' Trains of donkeys laden with bales of sheepskins. Little boys with flat boards balanced on their heads, trotting to the bread-ovens with the singsong cry: A lajine! A lajine!' Wild mountain people with flying black hair, women unveiled, gazing eagerly at a hawker's sugary pastry. Then a warning shout. A handsome caïd, all in white, on a magnificent brown mare, scatters the crowd. We flatten ourselves against the wall. He clatters past, proud and austere, his servant trotting behind him afoot.

wheeled vehicle can ever enter, so narrow and tortuous are its ways.

Through the lattice which roofs the street, sunlight flickered on a merchant seated like a Buddha at the top of his mound of melons; upon silver Berber bracelets; shaggy Berber rugs of vivid green, yellow, orange, blue; piles of great flat red and white baskets; upon spices, silks, daggers and muskets inlaid with silver; and rows and rows and shelves and shelves of babouches, yellow, green, red.

A shrill jangle of voices drew us to crane over a barrier and we saw in a room almost dark a score of children seated on the floor rocking back and forth in unison to the monotonous rhythm of a phrase chanted by someone unseen. Could that be a school?

A sudden twist of the way revealed an

A STREET OF BAZAARS IN FEZ "THROUGH THE LATTICE which roofs the street, sunlight flickered on a merchant seated like a Buddha.'

open space and we halted, staring in wonder at the unimaginably beautiful carved wooden gateway and façade of an ancient fondouk, weathered to a rich golden brown. Beyond that, against a hand's breadth of sky, a square minaret set with green and blue mosaic.

Another twist plunged us into a veritable labyrinth. An intense warren of secret, intricate alleys so narrow that a man with a basket on his head made us take refuge in a shallow doorway. A sudden glimpse through a narrow gateway revealed a courtyard walled by yellow pottery, aglow in the sun. Then gloom again, roofed by a vast, twisted vine whose trunk, as thick as a tree, came up

at a shop-corner and which spread completely across the way, thrusting its fingers into the mouldering wall on either hand.

We hurried on, pulled around each corner by the certainty of something more mysterious beyond. Dusk had come. Here and there a shop-keeper had lit a candle or two above his wares, but we suddenly realized that most of the merchants had closed their shop-fronts and vanished. The hurrying crowd had thinned.

Where were we? A sharp turn led us directly toward a thing astonishing and beautiful the great, glowing gateway of a mosque. Certainly this was wrong.

We must turn back. Mosques were forbidden ground. But just as the street seemed about to thrust us into the sacred porch, it swerved sharply, giving us just a tantalizing glimpse of a vast interior forested with blue pillars among which scores of men knelt in prayer, then carried us on.

Where were we? It was like a vast cave of innumerable intricate passages. Where were we? Which was north, south, east, west? At a shop we paused, bargained by sign-talk for two candles, lit them, and stole forward by their flickering light under black arches, while beneath our feet at every turn was the invisible rushing of water.

Where were we?

Our hotel terrace, the rattle of tea cups and the clink of glasses, the idle, secure chatter, all that seemed a thousand miles away, a thousand years away. And it was. Where were we?

'I know how to tell direction!' Patty exclaimed suddenly. 'Don't Moslems always face east when they pray?'

So, at the next mosque door, we peered in and oriented ourselves by the compass of the turbaned heads. Ah, then that was east. We studied our map by the flickering candle-flame, and set off. When again in the labyrinth we became doubtful of direction, we sought for another mosque and took our bearings once more by the bowed heads, and so at last climbed up a steep staircase of narrow ways out of that ancient Arabian Night into the present hour of electric light, telephone, wine glass, and dinner coat.

And that is Fez!

Fez actually exists, though it is incredible.

And that is not all. That is, in truth, but a faint suggestion of the fascination of Fez. You can walk out of that same hotel into other things equally of the Arabian Nights.

A turn of a street, and you are through a gate of the city on a road which leads eastward through the mountains toward Taza and Algiers. Here, on the left-hand side of the gate, just outside the city walls, is a natural theatre of rock. And here every afternoon you will find the rough seats of this amphitheatre crowded with men in turbans and djellebus, sitting listening gravely and intently to a white-bearded story teller droning monotonously one of the ancient tales of the East, just where a story-teller sat with his intent audience five hundred years ago and perhaps a thousand years ago.

Then, if you climb up through the cemetery of Sidi Mzali, which crowds the rocky hillside, you reach the Merinide tombs and there, turning round, you look down at one of the stunning panora

Cherif Abd Errahman El Amrani, a notable merchant of Fez, invited us to dine at his home. He sent a servant to fetch us from our hotel to his place of business. There he met us; we set out afoot for his house through an intricacy of crowded alleyways that brought us finally to a massive, nail-studded door at the end of a narrow, muddy, dim cul-desac. A knock. The door sprang open. A slave bowed low. We were ushered through a dark passageway into a glorious courtyard, flooded with sunlight, brilliant with blue, green, and red mosaic. In one of the rooms opening wide on the courtyard, we sat on low divans. A

COUSCOUS AND SOLE MARGUERY

ens, roasted, garnished with nuts and ripe olives. We ate without knives or forks. Then a bowl of couscous, which we rolled into balls in our palms and popped into our mouths. Then delicious sweets. Then mint tea.

While we ate, the fountain in the courtyard tinkled, barefoot slaves stole across the bars of sunlight, soft laughter came from hidden rooms, and we were conscious of curious women's eyes peering down through the gratings of the balcony above at these intruders from the outer world. We questioned El Amrani about himself, his life, his philosophy, his family; he answered freely. When the meal was over, Pat was invited upstairs to view the women's quarters, where, she says, she was introduced to a dozen women of all ages, fat and not so fat, young and old, pretty and otherwise, who giggled, gazed, and giggled again.

Yet, in spite of all this enlightenment, when we came away from El Amrani's house we felt that the mystery behind those walls, the mystery of the life of those walls, the mystery of the life of Fez, was as great as ever.

our hands. Another slave staggered in with a great bowl, whisked off its conical wicker cover to reveal a dozen tiny chick

over

savagely picturesque hills, then down through a cork-oak forest to the sea, and we found against the blue Atlantic the white city of Rabat.

179

Imagine a castle crowning a height above the sea, a castle within whose walls a distinguished French savant, M. Prosper Ricard, has created an Andalusian garden of incredible beauty and a museum of native arts that reproduces marvelously the interior of a Moorish palace. To stroll across this garden, when the late afternoon sun is reddening its walls to positive ochre, and the storks are sailing to and from their sprawling nests on the battlements, and to wander on through a gateway in the walls to the quaint Café Maure and there to sit sipping Arab tea and nibbling gazelles' ears and gazing out across the harbor to the pirate city of Sale, dazzling white in the setting sunto do that is one of the joys of earth whose equal you may find somewhere else, though I doubt it. I have not.

Rabat is another town where the mediæval touches utter modernity. A few steps across an open square from all this beauty you find a hotel, not indeed a hotel that is a Moorish palace as is the Dar Jamai in Fez, yet a hotel that needs no apology.

Setting off in the opposite direction from that hotel down the Rue des Consuls past the gates of fondouks displaying rugs, pottery, and jewelry in the arcades of their ancient courtyards, you plunge back five hundred years in the Marché aux Charbons and the street of the dyers with its glimpses of sombre interiors rich with dark

color. Beyond that, you traverse the medina of the native town and emerge through the city walls to confront the façade of the handsome new French town. And beyond that, out on the plain to the southward, is the Palace of the Sultan.

There, on any Friday morning, you may see the handsome, youthful, rather scared-looking Sultan come forth under his purple parasol, compassed round by his Gardes Noires in their gorgeous crimson balloon-pants, ride to his private mosque for prayer, and half an hour later return to his harem and his fool.

But that is not all.

Photo Ewing Galloway Still beyond, in a deep

green valley, is Chella. The Phoenicians, it is said, built a city here.