Typhus Epidemic

Moroccan nobles uttered passionate but unavailing prayers, last week, as a typhus epidemic spreading from the Arab slums of Fez entered at last the cool and sumptuous palace of the Sultan Mulai Yusef, where such luxuries as fountains, tinkling behind screens of marble fretwork, lull the inhabitants into a disregard of occasional vermin potentially laden with typhus bacilli.

Hadj Ahmed-el-Mokri, son of the Sultan's Grand Wazir (Prime Minister), was stricken with typhus among the first and lay in a dying condition throughout the week. For any member of the potent Mokri family to be thus stricken would have caused a sensation throughout Morocco, but the general anxiety was made acute by the fact that Ahmed was the favorite nephew of famed and beloved "Mokri the Blind," for years the incorruptible and discerning examiner of all maidens put forward by their families or tribes as candidates for the Sultan's harem.

Former Sultan Mulai-Abd-el-Hafid (1908-12) first recognized the peculiar fitness of "Mokri the Blind" for this post after he himself had become wearied by the necessity of personally inspecting hundreds of quite unpresentable maidens, merely because custom decreed that the Sultan alone of men should actually look upon the women with whom he might elect to consort. When it was noised about that "Mokri the Blind" had gradually developed his sense of touch to a point where it was almost equally discriminative with the Sultan's practiced eye, the entire responsibility of making a preliminary choice among candidates for thb harem was passed on to him. Eventually his reputation became such that many of the higher nobles of the court habitually asked his advice when choosing an additional wife. Europeans, while deploring the tendency of "Mokri the Blind" to examine candidates in silence--thereby precluding any investigation of their intellectual powers--nevertheless have honored him as one of the least corrupt of high Moroccan officials. Late despatches reported that no Occidentals had contracted typhus at Fez.