 For centuries, Europeans had seen the Rif mountains and people on the mountains from ships in the Mediterranean Sea, but almost no European had ever ventured into the area.Walter Burton Harris, the Morocco correspondent for "The Times", who covered the war, wrote that as late as 1912 only "one or two Europeans had been able to visit the cedar forests that lie south of Fez.A few had traveled in the southern Atlas and pushed on into the Sus...and that was almost all".