Israel ben Oliel, a Jew in the service of the Governor of Tetuan, is used by the Moors to squeeze his own people, and is left with a deaf and blind daughter he loves beyond reason. Caine nursed Rossetti through his last years and became the best-paid novelist in the world; he went to Morocco to write this, and the Jewish quarter of Tetuan is drawn from what he saw there. Forty-eight plates of Moorish markets, Algerian harbors, and Arabian stallions, from Eugène Delacroix to Henri-Edmond Cross, give the Morocco of the novel a visual life.
