‘Cafe with a view’, Tangiers, Morocco 1940
Mr. Burroughs in Morocco
He smokes hashish, has visions, and sets out to the English chemist in quest of an antidote.
Mr. Burroughs’s peregrinations recently brought him to the city of Tangier, in Morocco. While doing the sights of Tangier he dropped into a Moorish cafe, where he regaled himself with coffee (his Jewish guide taking a glass of green tea with peppermint-leaves) and hashish. The hashish was prepared for smoking on the spot. A boy cuts up a few leaves of the Indian hemp along with some tobacco-leaves into a greenish chaff, and the mixture is smoked out of a long wooden pipe with small bowl, which goes the round of the company. Mr. Burroughs took a few whiffs of the hashish-pipe, and appears to have been instantly carried off into the seventh heaven of imaginary delight. Everything grew bright around him. The seasick-complexioned smokers, the string band playing their varied instruments with a piece of bone or tortoiseshell, became objects of joy and pleasure.
“The music, or the hashish, or both,” says Mr. Burroughs, “make you feel so light that you could run up the jagged sides of the pyramids (the stone steps of which are 4 or 5 feet thick) without the sinewy Bedouins tugging at your hands or pushing you behind. From the secure but dizzy height you seem to see the Nile flowing among the green fields, and the white and yellow palaces of beautiful Cairo rise out of the gardens of palms, magnolias, and sweet blossoming acacias. You are transported, like Aladdin, to the moonlit Alhambra, and hear the music of its fountains and streams, or down the Red Sea and beyond the pinnacles of Sinai to gaze at distant Mecca, and then you are floated as by an invisible balloon over the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, to the evergreen foot-hills where sacred streams burst from beneath marble temples and flow by the heathen shrines. But the marble dreams of the sons of the Prophet, the most exquisite harmonies of glistening domes and cupolas perched on lofty towers, render insignificant the cone shaped structures of Further India, of which the builders (without faith either in their idols or in their architecture) seem afraid that they will fall down of their own weight.
“And the next morning,” continues the traveler, “you try to collect your thoughts, and find there are none to collect. The best thing under the circumstances is to try something as an antidote to the combination of hashish, tobacco, coffee, peppermint and green tea, so you inquire if there is any English chemist in Tangier where you can get something cooling. ‘Certainly,’ says the proprietor of the Continental Hotel. ‘From my door you go to the big offalheap on the corner, and turn to the right through a winding alley till you come to a dead donkey, then to the left under a dark archway. Turning up the legs of your trousers you wade through the muck, and when again in the light of day you reach a place where there are four rats and a cat dead on the scene of the conflict of three weeks ago. A little further on, where there is a cesspool and a well, you hold your nose and jump over the rubbish where a building has fallen and the pavement has been appropriated to repair it. A little further on you come to a Seven Dials sort of place into which the sun penetrates, and at the right of this place (called Wad Ahardan) is the house of Mr. Murillo, the English chemist.” ‘Quite so,’ you say, and set out on your journey. The permanent landmarks are all passed after narrowly escaping several falls, and one or two sprained ankles. There is another shop in front of the pharmacy, which is reached through a passage at the side.
“The pharmacy occupies four sides of an inner courtyard roofed in with glass. The upper portions of the building are surrounded by an open verandah overlooking all parts of the pharmacy.
“All four sides are crowded with bottles, and packages, and drawers of hashish, peppermint, and tea. There is a large assortment of Bishop’s effervescent salts of magnesia, antipyrin or bicarbonate of potash, Eno’s or Lamplough’s salines, and a general stock of drugs such as you would expect to find in any English pharmacy. The Sultan has heard of the fame of ‘Sequab,’ and got a dozen of the oil from Mr. Murillo. This is a departure from the usual rule of fastings, and prayers, and incantations, amulets, and charms against the evil eye, which, in the view of the Moors, is the cause of most diseases. They have a number of herbs from which they make decoctions of teas. Chief among these for usefulness is the Origanum compaction for diarrhea, dysentery, and the thyme. Hot infusions are drunk ad lib, or as much as the patient can hold.
“they are also great believers in the virtues of sarsaparilla, which with them appears to act as a tonic. They are quickly acted upon by European drugs, the curative influence of the mercurials and fodides being very prompt, so I am informed by Dr. Churcher at the Medical Mission.
“Dr. Churcher tells me that the effect of hashish is not as bad as that of opium. Taking it is, however, a slavish habit, exciting the imagination, seeming to make a second self which from the outside contemplates the original, and watches its thoughts and movements. The drug is also made into a confection, the consumption of which causes bursts of laughter on occasions when levity is not specially called for. We have all known somebody who must have stolen a pot of this hashish jam in his youth and consumed it all at one sitting, thus ensuring a lasting effect.”
– ‘Mr Burroughs in Morocco’ from the magazine ‘Chemist & Druggist’ in April 1892
