Behind rise rugged masses of rock, the southern wall of the Anjera country, practically closed to Europeans, and across the valley are the hills which form the northern limit of the still more impenetrable Rif.
A study of the changes going on in the rif tvalley in which the lakes lie leads, however, to the belief that the Albert Edward and Albert Nyanzas are drying up, a process which the nature of the drainage areas is helping to bring about.
Isolated cases of piracy have occurred on the Rif coast of Morocco even in our time, but the pirate communities which lived by plunder and could live by no other resource, vanished with the French conquest of Algiers in 1830.
A peculiarity of the Rif dialect is the change of the Arabic "1" to "r," and this would seem to support this derivation, "b" and "f" being interchangeable through "v."
In 1844, when war between Spain and Morocco was threatened by reason of the frequent raids by the inhabitants of the Rif on the Spanish settlement of Ceuta, Spain declined arbitration on the ground that her rights were too clear for argument.
