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112 DAYS IN THE SUN
and moaning. From one a pair of yellowish-gray legs
stuck out; a naked child with scales all over its body
was crawling out of another. The old woman who
had charge of the place swept the child back into its
section with the aid of her cane, and with a countenance
as angry as if she herself were a neat chambermaid and
the little one a toad that had crawled over the thresh-
old. The principal duty of the old woman is to see to
it that the patients do not run away and that each dies
in his own section.. There is no doubt that they will
all die—what other reason could have induced them
to resort to the hospital? They receive no food but
what is brought them by their relatives; and it is also
obvious that once one has brought one’s dear ones to
this institution and thus made it possible for them to
die in its conventional surroundings, there is no par-
ticular reason for supplying them with too much food.
Such a procedure would be equivalent to throwing
Allah’s gifts out of the window. They will have things
enough to eat in the place they are going to, at least
so Hadji says. But suppose they are slow in going?
“Then they send for the medicine man, and he helps
them to die,” is Hadji’s simple answer. Perhaps this
is the reason why I never saw a single cripple (and
cripples are the curse of southern European countries)
—anywhere in Tangiers.
The prison is based on like principles. It is situated
far above the city, next to Kasbah—the fort—and re-
minds you of a church built in the rotunda form. It
has no windows and no doors; light is admitted from
above through the rickety roof, and when new pris-
oners arrive to be incarcerated, a hole is made in the
wall, which is bricked up again after they are inside.
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