with a twist of camel's hair, and below the cotton shifts fastened on
their shoulders with silver clasps their legs were bare to the knee, or
covered with leather leggings to protect them from the thorny _bled_.

They seemed abler bargainers than the men, and the play of expression on
their dramatic and intensely feminine faces as they wheedled the price
of a calf out of a fierce hillsman, or haggled over a heap of dates that
a Jew with greasy ringlets was trying to secure for his secret
distillery, showed that they knew their superiority and enjoyed it.

Jews abounded in the market-place and also in the town. Sefrou contains
a large Israelite colony, and after we had wandered through the steep
streets, over gushing waterfalls spanned by "ass-backed" Spanish
bridges, and through a thatched _souk_ smelling strong of camels and the
desert, the French commissioner (the only European in Sefrou) suggested
that it might interest us to visit the _Mellah_.

It was our first sight of a typical Jewish quarter in Africa. The
_Mellah_ of Fez was almost entirely destroyed during the massacres of
1912 (which incidentally included a _pogrom_), and its distinctive
character, happily for the inhabitants, has disappeared in the
rebuilding. North African Jews are still compelled to live in ghettos,
into which they are locked at night, as in France and Germany in the
Middle Ages, and until lately the men have been compelled to go unarmed,
to wear black gabardines and black slippers, to take off their shoes
when they passed near a mosque or a saint's tomb, and in various other
ways to manifest their subjection to the ruling race. Nowhere else do
they live in conditions of such demoralizing promiscuity as in some of
the cities of Morocco. They have so long been subject to unrestricted
extortion on the part of the Moslems that even the wealthy Jews (who are