The Captain’s Paradise

From the balcony of my hotel room in Tangier, I look onto an old Moorish city that climbs to the summit of a low-browed hill. Its kasbah is crested with the spire of a minaret; on the lower slope is the cupola of a mosque. The medina is walled in by the rounded bastions that the Portuguese set there four hundred years ago. The flat-roofed houses are painted white and blue. Below the battlements are the cypresses and gravestones of a Jewish cemetery. Beyond a narrow stretch of water rise the hills of Spain; in the far distance, to the right, is the dark sentinel outline of Gibraltar.

Four mornings a week soon after eleven a white motor launch slides across the channel. It is the monscalpe, which inspired early in the fifties that amusing film The Captain’s Paradise, in which Alec Guinness played the part of a captain plying between Africa and Europe with a different matrimonial menage on either side of the straits. On the British side was a starched decorum, a staid and docile domesticity, while on the African side in a world of bazaars and of the dance of veils was a torrid, tropical romance. And that, allowing for poetic license, was more or less the way it was when I first started coming here eleven years ago.

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Alec Waugh

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From the balcony of my hotel room in Tangier, I look onto an old Moorish city that climbs to the summit of a low-browed hill. Its kasbah is crested with the spire of a minaret; on the lower slope is the cupola of a mosque. The medina is walled in by the rounded bastions that the Portuguese set there four hundred years ago. The flat-roofed houses are painted white and blue. Below the battlements are the cypresses and gravestones of a Jewish cemetery. Beyond a narrow stretch of water rise the hills of Spain; in the far distance, to the right, is the dark sentinel outline of Gibraltar.

Four mornings a week soon after eleven a white motor launch slides across the channel. It is the monscalpe, which inspired early in the fifties that amusing film The Captain’s Paradise, in which Alec Guinness played the part of a captain plying between Africa and Europe with a different matrimonial menage on either side of the straits. On the British side was a starched decorum, a staid and docile domesticity, while on the African side in a world of bazaars and of the dance of veils was a torrid, tropical romance. And that, allowing for poetic license, was more or less the way it was when I first started coming here eleven years ago.