The walls of Rabat enclose a large space of ground, and the town is defended on the seaside by three forts, erected some years ago by an English renegade, and furnished with ordnance from Gibraltar.  Among the population are three or four thousand Jews, some of them of great wealth and consequence.  The merchants are active and intelligent, carrying on commerce with Fez, and other places of the interior, as also with the foreign ports of Genoa, Gibraltar, and Marseilles.  In the middle ages, the Genoese had a great trade with Rabat, but this trade is now removed to Mogador, Many beautiful gardens and plantations adorn the suburbs, deserving even the name of “an earthly paradise.”

The Moors of Rabat are mostly from Spain, expelled thence by the Spaniards.  The famous Sultan, Almanzor, intended that Rabat should be his capital.  His untenanted mausoleum is placed here, in a separate and sacred quarter.  This prince, surnamed “the victorious,” (Elmansor,) was he who expelled the Moravedi from Spain.  He is the Nero of Western Africa, as Keatinge says, their “King Arthur.”  Tradition has it that Elmansor went in disguise to Mecca, and returned no more.  Mankind love this indefinite and obscure end of their heroes.  Moses went up to the mountain to die there in eternal mystery.  At a short distance from Rabat is Shella, or its ruins, a small suburb situated on the summit of a hill, which contains the tombs of the royal family of the Beni-Merini, and the founder of Rabat, and is a place of inviolate sanctity, no infidel being permitted to enter therein.  Monsieur Chenier supposes Shella to have been the site of the metropolis of the Carthaginian colonies.

Of these two cities, on the banks of the Wad-Bouragrag, Salee was, according to D’Anville, always a place of note as at the present time, and the farthest Roman city on the coast of the Atlantic, being the frontier town of the ancient Mauritania Tingitana.  Some pretend that all the civilization which has extended itself beyond this point is either Moorish, or derived from European colonists.  The river Wad-Bouragrag is somewhat a natural line of demarcation, and the products and animals of the one side differ materially from those of the other, owing to the number and less rapid descent of the streams on the side of the north, and so producing more humidity, whilst the south side, on the contrary, is of a higher and drier soil.

Fidallah, or Seid Allah, i. e., “grace,” or “gift of God,” is a maritime village of the province of Temsa, founded by the Sultan Mohammed in 1773.  It is a strong place, and surrounded with walls.  Fidallah is situated on a vast plain, near the river Wad Millah, where there is a small port, or roadstead, to which the corsairs were wont to resort when they could not reach Salee, long before the village was built, called Mersa Fidallah.  The place contains a thousand souls, mostly in a wretched condition.  Sidi Mohammed, before he built Mogador, had the idea of building a city here; the situation is indeed delightful, surrounded with fertility.