The People Stared At Us Christians With
Open Mouths; Our Dress Apparently Astonished Them.
At Toser, the Bey
left his tent and entered his palace, so called in courtesy to his
Highness, but a large barn of a house, without any pretensions.
We had
also a room allotted to us in this palace, which was the best to be
found in the town, though a small dark affair. Toser is a miserable
assemblage of mud and brick huts, of very small dimensions, the beams
and the doors being all of date-wood. The gardens, however, under the
date-trees are beautiful, and abundantly watered with copious streams,
all of which are warm, and in one of which we bathed ourselves and felt
new vigour run through our veins. We took a walk in the gardens, and
were surprised at the quantities of doves fluttering among the
date-trees; they were the common blue or Barbary doves. In the environs
of Mogador, these doves are the principal birds shot.
Toser, or Touzer, the _Tisurus_ of ancient geography, is a considerable
town of about six thousand souls, with several villages in its
neighbourhood.
The impression of Toser made upon our tourists agrees with that of the
traveller, Desfontaines, who writes of it in 1784: - "The Bey pitched his
tent on the right side of the city, if such can be called a mass of
_mud-houses_." The description corresponds also with that of Dr. Shaw,
who says that "the villages of the Jereed are built of mud-walls and
rafters of palm-trees." Evidently, however, some improvement has been
made of late years.
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