In Morocco
by Edith Wharton · English · Gutenberg #39042 · 328,583 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of In Morocco
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: In Morocco
Author: Edith Wharton
Release date: March 4, 2012 [eBook #39042]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39042
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN MOROCCO ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries.)
IN MOROCCO
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Fez Elbali from the ramparts]
IN MOROCCO
BY
EDITH WHARTON
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1919, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published October, 1920
THE SCRIBNER PRESS
TO
GENERAL LYAUTEY
RESIDENT GENERAL OF FRANCE IN MOROCCO AND TO
MADAME LYAUTEY,
THANKS TO WHOSE KINDNESS THE JOURNEY
I HAD SO LONG DREAMED OF
SURPASSED WHAT I HAD DREAMED
PREFACE
I
Having begun my book with the statement that Morocco still lacks a
guide-book, I should have wished to take a first step toward remedying
that deficiency.
But the conditions in which I travelled, though full of unexpected and
picturesque opportunities, were not suited to leisurely study of the
places visited. The time was limited by the approach of the rainy
season, which puts an end to motoring over the treacherous trails of the
Spanish zone. In 1918, owing to the watchfulness of German submarines in
the Straits and along the northwest coast of Africa, the trip by sea
from Marseilles to Casablanca, ordinarily so easy, was not to be made
without much discomfort and loss of time. Once on board the steamer,
passengers were often kept in port (without leave to land) for six or
eight days; therefore for any one bound by a time-limit, as most
war-workers were, it was necessary to travel across country, and to be
back at Tangier before the November rains.
This left me only one month in which to visit Morocco from the
Mediterranean to the High Atlas, and from the Atlantic to Fez, and even
had there been a Djinn's carpet to carry me, the multiplicity of
impressions received would have made precise observation difficult.
The next best thing to a Djinn's carpet, a military motor, was at my
disposal every morning; but war conditions imposed restrictions, and the
wish to use the minimum of petrol often stood in the way of the second
visit which alone makes it possible to carry away a definite and
detailed impression.
These drawbacks were more than offset by the advantage of making my
quick trip at a moment unique in the history of the country; the brief
moment of transition between its virtually complete subjection to
European authority, and the fast approaching hour when it is thrown open
to all the banalities and promiscuities of modern travel.
Morocco is too curious, too beautiful, too rich in landscape and
architecture, and above all too much of a novelty, not to attract one of
the main streams of spring travel as soon as Mediterranean passenger
traffic is resumed. Now that the war is over, only a few months' work on
roads and railways divide it from the great torrent of "tourism"; and
once that deluge is let loose, no eye will ever again see Moulay Idriss
and Fez and Marrakech as I saw them.
In spite of the incessant efforts of the present French administration
to preserve the old monuments of Morocco from injury, and her native
arts and industries from the corruption of European bad taste, the
impression of mystery and remoteness which the country now produces must
inevitably vanish with the approach of the "Circular Ticket." Within a
few years far more will be known of the past of Morocco, but that past
will be far less visible to the traveller than it is to-day. Excavations
will reveal fresh traces of Roman and Phenician occupation; the remote
affinities between Copts and Berbers, between Bagdad and Fez, between
Byzantine art and the architecture of the Souss, will be explored and
elucidated; but, while these successive discoveries are being made, the
strange survival of mediaeval life, of a life contemporary with the
crusaders, with Saladin, even with the great days of the Caliphate of
Bagdad, which now greets the astonished traveller, will gradually
disappear, till at last even the mysterious autocthones of the Atlas
will have folded their tents and silently stolen away.
II
Authoritative utterances on Morocco are not wanting for those who can
read them in French; but they are to be found mainly in large and often
inaccessible books, like M. Doutte's "En Tribu," the Marquis de
Segonzac's remarkable explorations in the Atlas, or Foucauld's classic
(but unobtainable) "Reconnaissance au Maroc"; and few, if any, have been
translated into English.
M. Louis Chatelain has dealt with the Roman ruins of Volubilis and M.
Tranchant de Lunel, M. Raymond Koechlin, M. Gaillard, M. Ricard, and
many other French scholars, have written of Moslem architecture and art
in articles published either in "France-Maroc," as introductions to
catalogues of exhibitions, or in the reviews and daily papers. Pierre
Loti and M. Andre Chevrillon have reflected, with the intensest visual
sensibility, the romantic and ruinous Morocco of yesterday; and in the
volumes of the "Conferences Marocaines," published by the French
government, the experts gathered about the Resident-General have
examined the industrial and agricultural Morocco of to-morrow. Lastly,
one striking book sums up, with the clearness and consecutiveness of
which French scholarship alone possesses the art, the chief things to be
said on all these subjects, save that of art and archaeology. This is M.
Augustin Bernard's volume, "Le Maroc," the one portable and compact yet
full and informing book since Leo Africanus described the bazaars of
Fez. But M. Augustin Bernard deals only with the ethnology, the social,
religious and political history, and the physical properties, of the
country; and this, though "a large order," leaves out the visual and
picturesque side, except in so far as the book touches on the always
picturesque life of the people.
For the use, therefore, of the happy wanderers who may be planning a
Moroccan journey, I have added to the record of my personal impressions
a slight sketch of the history and art of the country. In extenuation of
the attempt I must add that the chief merit of this sketch will be its
absence of originality. Its facts will be chiefly drawn from the pages
of M. Augustin Bernard, M. H. Saladin, and M. Gaston Migeon, and the
rich sources of the "Conferences Marocaines" and the articles of
"France-Maroc." It will also be deeply indebted to information given on
the spot by the brilliant specialists of the French administration, to
the Marquis de Segonzac, with whom I had the good luck to travel from
Rabat to Marrakech and back; to M. Alfred de Tarde, editor of
"France-Maroc"; to M. Tranchant de Lunel, director of the French School
of Fine Arts in Morocco; to M. Goulven, the historian of Portuguese
Mazagan; to M. Louis Chatelain, and to the many other cultivated and
cordial French officials, military and civilian, who, at each stage of
my journey, did their amiable best to answer my questions and open my
eyes.
NOTE
In the writing of proper names and of other Arab words the French
spelling has been followed.
In the case of proper names, and names of cities and districts, this
seems justified by the fact that they occur in a French colony, where
French usage naturally prevails; and to spell _Oudjda_ in the French
way, and _koubba_, for instance, in the English form of _kubba_, would
cause needless confusion as to their respective pronunciation. It seems
therefore simpler, in a book written for the ordinary traveller, to
conform altogether to French usage.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE vii
I. RABAT AND SALE 1
II. VOLUBILIS, MOULAY IDRISS AND MEKNEZ 35
III. FEZ 75
IV. MARRAKECH 121
V. HAREMS AND CEREMONIES 159
VI. GENERAL LYAUTEY'S WORK IN MOROCCO 207
VII. A SKETCH OF MOROCCAN HISTORY 229
VIII. NOTE ON MOROCCAN ARCHITECTURE 259
IX. BOOKS CONSULTED 279
INDEX 283
ILLUSTRATIONS
FEZ ELBALI FROM THE RAMPARTS _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
GENERAL VIEW FROM THE KASBAH OF THE OUDAYAS--RABAT 16
INTERIOR COURT OF THE MEDERSA OF THE OUDAYAS--RABAT 20
ENTRANCE OF THE MEDERSA--SALE 24
MARKET-PLACE OUTSIDE THE TOWN--SALE 26
CHELLA-RUINS OF MOSQUE--SALE 30
THE WESTERN PORTICO OF THE BASILICA OF ANTONIUS
PIUS--VOLUBILIS 46
MOULAY IDRISS 48
THE MARKET-PLACE--MOULAY IDRISS 50
MARKET-PLACE ON THE DAY OF THE RITUAL DANCE OF
THE HAMADCHAS--MOULAY IDRISS 52
THE MARKET-PLACE. PROCESSION OF THE CONFRATERNITY
OF THE HAMADCHAS--MOULAY IDRISS 56
GATE: "BAB-MANSOUR"--MEKNEZ 58
THE RUINS OF THE PALACE OF MOULAY-ISMAEL--MEKNEZ 66
FEZ ELDJID 84
A REED-ROOFED STREET--FEZ 88
THE NEDJARINE FOUNTAIN--FEZ 94
THE BAZAARS. A VIEW OF THE SOUK EL ATTARINE AND
THE QUAISARYA--FEZ 108
THE "LITTLE GARDEN" IN BACKGROUND, PALACE OF
THE BAHIA--MARRAKECH 128
THE GREAT COURT, PALACE OF THE BAHIA--MARRAKECH 130
APARTMENT OF THE GRAND VIZIER'S FAVORITE, PALACE
OF THE BAHIA--MARRAKECH 132
A FONDAK--MARRAKECH 144
MAUSOLEUM OF THE SAADIAN SULTANS SHOWING THE
TOMBS--MARRAKECH 156
THE SULTAN OF MOROCCO UNDER THE GREEN UMBRELLA 168
A CLAN OF MOUNTAINEERS AND THEIR CAID 170
THE SULTAN ENTERING MARRAKECH IN STATE 176
WOMEN WATCHING A PROCESSION FROM A ROOF 194
A STREET FOUNTAIN--MARRAKECH 262
GATE OF THE KASBAH OF THE OUDAYAS--RABAT 266
MEDERSA BOUANYANA--FEZ 268
THE PRAYING-CHAPEL IN THE MEDERSA EL ATTARINE--FEZ 270
INTERIOR COURT OF THE MEDERSA--SALE 274
THE GATE OF THE PORTUGUESE--MARRAKECH 276
MAP
THE PART OF MOROCCO VISITED BY MRS. WHARTON 8
I
RABAT AND SALE
I
LEAVING TANGIER
To step on board a steamer in a Spanish port, and three hours later to
land in _a country without a guide-book_, is a sensation to rouse the
hunger of the repletest sight-seer.
The sensation is attainable by any one who will take the trouble to row
out into the harbour of Algeciras and scramble onto a little black boat
headed across the straits. Hardly has the rock of Gibraltar turned to
cloud when one's foot is on the soil of an almost unknown Africa.
Tangier, indeed, is in the guide-books; but, cuckoo-like, it has had to
lays its egg in strange nests, and the traveller who wants to find out
about it must acquire a work dealing with some other country--Spain or
Portugal or Algeria. There is no guide-book to Morocco, and no way of
knowing, once one has left Tangier behind, where the long trail over the
Rif is going to land one, in the sense understood by any one accustomed
to European certainties. The air of the unforeseen blows on one from the
roadless passes of the Atlas.
This feeling of adventure is heightened by the contrast between
Tangier--cosmopolitan, frowsy, familiar Tangier, that every tourist has
visited for the last forty years--and the vast unknown just beyond. One
has met, of course, travellers who have been to Fez; but they have gone
there on special missions, under escort, mysteriously, perhaps
perilously; the expedition has seemed, till lately, a considerable
affair. And when one opens the records of Moroccan travellers written
within the last twenty years, how many, even of the most adventurous,
are found to have gone beyond Fez? And what, to this day, do the names
of Meknez and Marrakech, of Mogador, Saffi or Rabat, signify to any but
a few students of political history, a few explorers and naturalists?
Not till within the last year has Morocco been open to travel from
Tangier to the Great Atlas, and from Moulay Idriss to the Atlantic.
Three years ago Christians were being massacred in the streets of Sale,
the pirate town across the river from Rabat, and two years ago no
European had been allowed to enter the Sacred City of Moulay Idriss, the
burial-place of the lawful descendant of Ali, founder of the Idrissite
dynasty. Now, thanks to the energy and the imagination of one of the
greatest of colonial administrators, the country, at least in the French
zone, is as safe and open as the opposite shore of Spain. All that
remains is to tell the traveller how to find his way about it.
Ten years ago there was not a wheeled vehicle in Morocco; now its
thousands of miles of trail, and its hundreds of miles of firm French
roads, are travelled by countless carts, omnibuses and motor-vehicles.
There are light railways from Rabat to Fez in the west, and to a point
about eighty-five kilometres from Marrakech in the south; and it is
possible to say that within a year a regular railway system will connect
eastern Morocco with western Algeria, and the ports of Tangier and
Casablanca with the principal points of the interior.
What, then, prevents the tourist from instantly taking ship at Bordeaux
or Algeciras and letting loose his motor on this new world? Only the
temporary obstacles which the war has everywhere put in the way of
travel. Till these are lifted it will hardly be possible to travel in
Morocco except by favour of the Resident-General; but, normal conditions
once restored, the country will be as accessible, from the straits of
Gibraltar to the Great Atlas, as Algeria or Tunisia.
To see Morocco during the war was therefore to see it in the last phase
of its curiously abrupt transition from remoteness and danger to
security and accessibility; at a moment when its aspect and its customs
were still almost unaffected by European influences, and when the
"Christian" might taste the transient joy of wandering unmolested in
cities of ancient mystery and hostility, whose inhabitants seemed hardly
aware of his intrusion.
II
THE TRAIL TO EL-KSAR
With such opportunities ahead it was impossible, that brilliant morning
of September, 1917, not to be off quickly from Tangier, impossible to do
justice to the pale-blue town piled up within brown walls against the
thickly-foliaged gardens of "the Mountain," to the animation of its
market-place and the secret beauties of its steep Arab streets. For
Tangier swarms with people in European clothes, there are English,
French and Spanish signs above its shops, and cab-stands in its squares;
it belongs, as much as Algiers, to the familiar dog-eared world of
travel--and there, beyond the last dip of "the Mountain," lies the world
of mystery, with the rosy dawn just breaking over it. The motor is at
the door and we are off.
The so-called Spanish zone, which encloses internationalized Tangier in
a wide circuit of territory, extends southward for a distance of about a
hundred and fifteen kilometres. Consequently, when good roads traverse
it, French Morocco will be reached in less than two hours by
motor-travellers bound for the south. But for the present Spanish
enterprise dies out after a few miles of macadam (as it does even
between Madrid and Toledo), and the tourist is committed to the _piste_.
These _pistes_--the old caravan-trails from the south--are more
available to motors in Morocco than in southern Algeria and Tunisia,
since they run mostly over soil which, though sandy in part, is bound
together by a tough dwarf vegetation, and not over pure desert sand.
This, however, is the utmost that can be said of the Spanish _pistes_.
In the French protectorate constant efforts are made to keep the trails
fit for wheeled traffic, but Spain shows no sense of a corresponding
obligation.
After leaving the macadamized road which runs south from Tangier one
seems to have embarked on a petrified ocean in a boat hardly equal to
the adventure. Then, as one leaps and plunges over humps and ruts, down
sheer banks into rivers, and up precipices into sand-pits, one gradually
gains faith in one's conveyance and in one's spinal column; but both
must be sound in every joint to resist the strain of the long miles to
Arbaoua, the frontier post of the French protectorate.
[Illustration: The part of Morocco visited by Mrs. Wharton]
Luckily there are other things to think about. At the first turn out of
Tangier, Europe and the European disappear, and as soon as the motor
begins to dip and rise over the arid little hills beyond to the last
gardens one is sure that every figure on the road will be picturesque
instead of prosaic, every garment graceful instead of grotesque. One
knows, too, that there will be no more omnibuses or trams or
motorcyclists, but only long lines of camels rising up in brown friezes
against the sky, little black donkeys trotting across the scrub under
bulging pack-saddles, and noble draped figures walking beside them or
majestically perching on their rumps. And for miles and miles there will
be no more towns--only, at intervals on the naked slopes, circles of
rush-roofed huts in a blue stockade of cactus, or a hundred or two nomad
tents of black camel's hair resting on walls of wattled thorn and
grouped about a terebinth-tree and a well.
Between these nomad colonies lies the _bled_, the immense waste of
fallow land and palmetto desert: an earth as void of life as the sky
above it of clouds. The scenery is always the same; but if one has the
love of great emptinesses, and of the play of light on long stretches of
parched earth and rock, the sameness is part of the enchantment. In such
a scene every landmark takes on an extreme value. For miles one watches
the little white dome of a saint's grave rising and disappearing with
the undulations of the trail; at last one is abreast of it, and the
solitary tomb, alone with its fig-tree and its broken well-curb, puts a
meaning into the waste. The same importance, but intensified, marks the
appearance of every human figure. The two white-draped riders passing
single file up the red slope to that ring of tents on the ridge have a
mysterious and inexplicable importance: one follows their progress with
eyes that ache with conjecture. More exciting still is the encounter of
the first veiled woman heading a little cavalcade from the south. All
the mystery that awaits us looks out through the eye-slits in the
grave-clothes muffling her. Where have they come from, where are they
going, all these slow wayfarers out of the unknown? Probably only from
one thatched _douar_[1] to another; but interminable distances unroll
behind them, they breathe of Timbuctoo and the farthest desert. Just
such figures must swarm in the Saharan cities, in the Soudan and
Senegal. There is no break in the links: these wanderers have looked on
at the building of cities that were dust when the Romans pushed their
outposts across the Atlas.
III
EL-KSAR TO RABAT
A town at last--its nearness announced by the multiplied ruts of the
trail, the cactus hedges, the fig-trees weighed down by dust leaning
over ruinous earthern walls. And here are the first houses of the
European El-Ksar--neat white Spanish houses on the slope outside the old
Arab settlement. Of the Arab town itself, above reed stockades and brown
walls, only a minaret and a few flat roofs are visible. Under the walls
drowse the usual gregarious Lazaruses; others, temporarily resuscitated,
trail their grave-clothes after a line of camels and donkeys toward the
olive-gardens outside the town.
The way to Rabat is long and difficult, and there is no time to visit
El-Ksar, though its minaret beckons so alluringly above the
fruit-orchards; so we stop for luncheon outside the walls, at a canteen
with a corrugated iron roof where skinny Spaniards are serving thick
purple wine and eggs fried in oil to a party of French soldiers. The
heat has suddenly become intolerable, and a flaming wind straight from
the south brings in at the door, with a cloud of blue flies, the smell
of camels and trampled herbs and the strong spices of the bazaars.
Luncheon over, we hurry on between the cactus hedges, and then plunge
back into the waste. Beyond El-Ksar the last hills of the Rif die away,
and there is a stretch of wilderness without an outline till the Lesser
Atlas begins to rise in the east. Once in the French protectorate the
trail improves, but there are still difficult bits; and finally, on a
high plateau, the chauffeur stops in a web of crisscross trails, throws
up his hands, and confesses that he has lost his way. The heat is mortal
at the moment. For the last hour the red breath of the sirocco has
risen from every hollow into which we dipped; now it hangs about us in
the open, as if we had caught it in our wheels and it had to pause above
us when we paused.
All around is the featureless wild land, palmetto scrub stretching away
into eternity. A few yards off rises the inevitable ruined _koubba_[2]
with its fig-tree: in the shade under its crumbling wall the buzz of the
flies is like the sound of frying. Farther off, we discern a cluster of
huts, and presently some Arab boys and a tall pensive shepherd come
hurrying across the scrub. They are full of good-will, and no doubt of
information; but our chauffeur speaks no Arabic and the talk dies down
into shrugs and head-shakings. The Arabs retire to the shade of the
wall, and we decide to start--for anywhere....
The chauffeur turns the crank, but there is no responding quiver.
Something has gone wrong; we can't move, and it is not much comfort to
remember that, if we could, we should not know where to go. At least we
should be cooler in motion than sitting still under the blinding sky.
Such an adventure initiates one at the outset into the stern facts of
desert motoring. Every detail of our trip from Tangier to Rabat had been
carefully planned to keep us in unbroken contact with civilization. We
were to "tub" in one European hotel, and to dine in another, with just
enough picnicking between to give a touch of local colour. But let one
little cog slip and the whole plan falls to bits, and we are alone in
the old untamed Moghreb, as remote from Europe as any mediaeval
adventurer. If one lose one's way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as
though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a Djinn.
It is a good thing to begin with such a mishap, not only because it
develops the fatalism necessary to the enjoyment of Africa, but because
it lets one at once into the mysterious heart of the country: a country
so deeply conditioned by its miles and miles of uncitied wilderness that
until one has known the wilderness one cannot begin to understand the
cities.
We came to one at length, after sunset on that first endless day. The
motor, cleverly patched up, had found its way to a real road, and
speeding along between the stunted cork-trees of the forest of Mamora
brought us to a last rise from which we beheld in the dusk a line of
yellow walls backed by the misty blue of the Atlantic. Sale, the fierce
old pirate town, where Robinson Crusoe was so long a slave, lay before
us, snow-white in its cheese-coloured ramparts skirted by fig and olive
gardens. Below its gates a stretch of waste land, endlessly trailed over
by mules and camels, sloped down to the mouth of the Bou-Regreg, the
blue-brown river dividing it from Rabat. The motor stopped at the
landing-stage of the steam-ferry; crowding about it were droves of
donkeys, knots of camels, plump-faced merchants on crimson-saddled
mules, with negro servants at their bridles, bare-legged water-carriers
with hairy goat-skins slung over their shoulders, and Arab women in a
heap of veils, cloaks, mufflings, all of the same ashy white, the
caftans of clutched children peeping through in patches of old rose and
lilac and pale green.
Across the river the native town of Rabat lay piled up on an orange-red
cliff beaten by the Atlantic. Its walls, red too, plunged into the
darkening breakers at the mouth of the river; and behind it, stretching
up to the mighty tower of Hassan, and the ruins of the Great Mosque, the
scattered houses of the European city showed their many lights across
the plain.
IV
THE KASBAH OF THE OUDAYAS
Sale the white and Rabat the red frown at each other over the foaming
bar of the Bou-Regreg, each walled, terraced, minareted, and presenting
a singularly complete picture of the two types of Moroccan town, the
snowy and the tawny. To the gates of both the Atlantic breakers roll in
with the boom of northern seas, and under a misty northern sky. It is
one of the surprises of Morocco to find the familiar African pictures
bathed in this unfamiliar haze. Even the fierce midday sun does not
wholly dispel it: the air remains thick, opalescent, like water slightly
clouded by milk. One is tempted to say that Morocco is Tunisia seen by
moonlight.
The European town of Rabat, a rapidly developing community, lies almost
wholly outside the walls of the old Arab city. The latter, founded in
the twelfth century by the great Almohad conqueror of Spain,
Yacoub-el-Mansour, stretches its mighty walls to the river's mouth.
Thence they climb the cliff to enclose the Kasbah[3] of the Oudayas, a
troublesome tribe whom one of the Almohad Sultans, mistrusting their
good faith, packed up one day, flocks, tents and camels, and carried
across the _bled_ to stow them into these stout walls under his
imperial eye. Great crenellated ramparts, cyclopean, superb, follow the
curve of the cliff. On the landward side they are interrupted by a
gate-tower resting on one of the most nobly decorated of the horseshoe
arches that break the mighty walls of Moroccan cities. Underneath the
tower the vaulted entrance turns, Arab fashion, at right angles,
profiling its red arch against darkness and mystery. This bending of
passages, so characteristic a device of the Moroccan builder, is like an
architectural expression of the tortuous secret soul of the land.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Rabat--general view from the Kasbah of the Oudayas]
Outside the Kasbah a narrow foot-path is squeezed between the walls and
the edge of the cliff. Toward sunset it looks down on a strange scene.
To the south of the citadel the cliff descends to a long dune sloping to
a sand-beach; and dune and beach are covered with the slanting
headstones of the immense Arab cemetery of El Alou. Acres and acres of
graves fall away from the red ramparts to the grey sea; and breakers
rolling straight from America send their spray across the lowest stones.
There are always things going on toward evening in an Arab cemetery. In
this one, travellers from the _bled_ are camping in one corner, donkeys
grazing (on heaven knows what), a camel dozing under its pack; in
another, about a new-made grave, there are ritual movements of muffled
figures and wailings of a funeral hymn half drowned by the waves. Near
us, on a fallen headstone, a man with a thoughtful face sits chatting
with two friends and hugging to his breast a tiny boy who looks like a
grasshopper in his green caftan; a little way off, a solitary
philosopher, his eye fixed on the sunset, lies on another grave, smoking
his long pipe of kif.
There is infinite sadness in this scene under the fading sky, beside the
cold welter of the Atlantic. One seems to be not in Africa itself, but
in the Africa that northern crusaders may have dreamed of in snow-bound
castles by colder shores of the same ocean. This is what Moghreb must
have looked like to the confused imagination of the Middle Ages, to
Norman knights burning to ransom the Holy Places, or Hansa merchants
devising, in steep-roofed towns, of Barbary and the long caravans
bringing apes and gold-powder from the south.
* * * * *
Inside the gate of the Kasbah one comes on more waste land and on other
walls--for all Moroccan towns are enclosed in circuit within circuit of
battlemented masonry. Then, unexpectedly, a gate in one of the inner
walls lets one into a tiled court enclosed in a traceried cloister and
overlooking an orange-grove that rises out of a carpet of roses. This
peaceful and well-ordered place is the interior of the Medersa (the
college) of the Oudayas. Morocco is full of these colleges, or rather
lodging-houses of the students frequenting the mosques; for all
Mahometan education is given in the mosque itself, only the preparatory
work being done in the colleges. The most beautiful of the Medersas date
from the earlier years of the long Merinid dynasty (1248-1548), the
period at which Moroccan art, freed from too distinctively Spanish and
Arab influences, began to develop a delicate grace of its own as far
removed from the extravagance of Spanish ornament as from the
inheritance of Roman-Byzantine motives that the first Moslem invasion
had brought with it from Syria and Mesopotamia.
These exquisite collegiate buildings, though still in use whenever they
are near a well-known mosque, have all fallen into a state of sordid
disrepair. The Moroccan Arab, though he continues to build--and
fortunately to build in the old tradition, which has never been
lost--has, like all Orientals, an invincible repugnance to repairing and
restoring, and one after another the frail exposed Arab structures, with
their open courts and badly constructed terrace-roofs, are crumbling
into ruin. Happily the French Government has at last been asked to
intervene, and all over Morocco the Medersas are being repaired with
skill and discretion. That of the Oudayas is already completely
restored, and as it had long fallen into disuse it has been transformed
by the Ministry of Fine Arts into a museum of Moroccan art.
The plan of the Medersas is always much the same: the eternal plan of
the Arab house, built about one or more arcaded courts, with long narrow
rooms enclosing them on the ground floor, and several stories above,
reached by narrow stairs, and often opening on finely carved cedar
galleries. The chief difference between the Medersa and the private
house, or even the _fondak_,[4] lies in the use to which the rooms are
put. In the Medersas, one of the ground-floor apartments is always
fitted up as a chapel, and shut off from the court by carved cedar doors
still often touched with old gilding and vermilion. There are always a
few students praying in the chapel, while others sit in the doors of the
upper rooms, their books on their knees, or lean over the carved
galleries chatting with their companions who are washing their feet at
the marble fountain in the court, preparatory to entering the chapel.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Schmitt, Rabat_
Rabat--interior court of the Medersa of the Oudayas]
In the Medersa of the Oudayas, these native activities have been
replaced by the lifeless hush of a museum. The rooms are furnished with
old rugs, pottery, brasses, the curious embroidered hangings which line
the tents of the chiefs, and other specimens of Arab art. One room
reproduces a barber's shop in the bazaar, its benches covered with fine
matting, the hanging mirror inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the
razor-handles of silver _niello_. The horseshoe arches of the outer
gallery look out on orange-blossoms, roses and the sea. It is all
beautiful, calm and harmonious; and if one is tempted to mourn the
absence of life and local colour, one has only to visit an abandoned
Medersa to see that, but for French intervention, the charming
colonnades and cedar chambers of the college of the Oudayas would by
this time be a heap of undistinguished rubbish--for plaster and rubble
do not "die in beauty" like the firm stones of Rome.
V
ROBINSON CRUSOE'S "SALLEE"
Before Morocco passed under the rule of the great governor who now
administers it, the European colonists made short work of the beauty and
privacy of the old Arab towns in which they established themselves.
On the west coast, especially, where the Mediterranean peoples, from the
Phenicians to the Portuguese, have had trading-posts for over two
thousand years, the harm done to such seaboard towns as Tangier, Rabat
and Casablanca is hard to estimate. The modern European colonist
apparently imagined that to plant his warehouses, _cafes_ and
cinema-palaces within the walls which for so long had fiercely excluded
him was the most impressive way of proclaiming his domination.
Under General Lyautey such views are no longer tolerated. Respect for
native habits, native beliefs and native architecture is the first
principle inculcated in the civil servants attached to his
administration. Not only does he require that the native towns shall be
kept intact, and no European building erected within them; a sense of
beauty not often vouchsafed to Colonial governors causes him to place
the administration buildings so far beyond the walls that the modern
colony grouped around them remains entirely distinct from the old town,
instead of growing out of it like an ugly excrescence.
The Arab quarter of Rabat was already irreparably disfigured when
General Lyautey came to Morocco; but ferocious old Sale, Phenician
counting-house and breeder of Barbary pirates, had been saved from
profanation by its Moslem fanaticism. Few Christian feet had entered its
walls except those of the prisoners who, like Robinson Crusoe, slaved
for the wealthy merchants in its mysterious terraced houses. Not till
two or three years ago was it completely pacified; and when it opened
its gates to the infidel it was still, as it is to-day, the type of the
untouched Moroccan city--so untouched that, with the sunlight
irradiating its cream-coloured walls and the blue-white domes above
them, it rests on its carpet of rich fruit-gardens like some rare
specimen of Arab art on a strip of old Oriental velvet.
Within the walls, the magic persists: which does not always happen when
one penetrates into the mirage-like cities of Arabian Africa. Sale has
the charm of extreme compactness. Crowded between the river-mouth and
the sea, its white and pale-blue houses almost touch across the narrow
streets, and the reed-thatched bazaars seem like miniature reductions of
the great trading labyrinths of Tunis or Fez.
Everything that the reader of the Arabian Nights expects to find is
here: the whitewashed niches wherein pale youths sit weaving the fine
mattings for which the town is still famous; the tunnelled passages
where indolent merchants with bare feet crouch in their little kennels
hung with richly ornamented saddlery and arms, or with slippers of pale
citron leather and bright embroidered _babouches_; the stalls with
fruit, olives, tunny-fish, vague syrupy sweets, candles for saints'
tombs, Mantegnesque garlands of red and green peppers, griddle-cakes
sizzling on red-hot pans, and all the varied wares and cakes and
condiments that the lady in the tale of the Three Calanders went out to
buy, that memorable morning in the market of Bagdad.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Sale--entrance of the Medersa]
Only at Sale all is on a small scale: there is not much of any one
thing, except of the exquisite matting. The tide of commerce has ebbed
from the intractable old city, and one feels, as one watches the
listless purchasers in her little languishing bazaars, that her long
animosity against the intruder has ended by destroying her own life.
The feeling increases when one leaves the bazaar for the streets
adjoining it. An even deeper hush than that which hangs over the
well-to-do quarters of all Arab towns broods over these silent
thorough-fares, with heavy-nailed doors barring half-ruined houses. In a
steep deserted square one of these doors opens its panels of
weather-silvered cedar on the court of the frailest, ghostliest of
Medersas--mere carved and painted shell of a dead house of learning.
Mystic interweavings of endless lines, patient patterns interminably
repeated in wood and stone and clay, all are here, from the tessellated
paving of the court to the honeycombing of the cedar roof through which
a patch of sky shows here and there like an inset of turquoise tiling.
This lovely ruin is in the safe hands of the French Fine Arts
administration, and soon the wood-carvers and stucco-workers of Fez will
have revived its old perfection; but it will never again be more than a
show-Medersa, standing empty and unused beside the mosque behind whose
guarded doors and high walls one guesses that the old religious
fanaticism of Sale is dying also, as her learning and her commerce have
died.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Schmitt, Rabat_
Sale--market-place outside the town]
In truth the only life in her is centred in the market-place outside the
walls, where big expanding Rabat goes on certain days to provision
herself. The market of Sale, though typical of all Moroccan markets, has
an animation and picturesqueness of its own. Its rows of white tents
pitched on a dusty square between the outer walls and the fruit-gardens
make it look as though a hostile tribe had sat down to lay siege to the
town; but the army is an army of hucksters, of farmers from the rich
black lands along the river, of swarthy nomads and leather-gaitered
peasant women from the hills, of slaves and servants and tradesmen from
Rabat and Sale; a draped, veiled, turbaned mob shrieking, bargaining,
fist-shaking, call on Allah to witness the monstrous villanies of the
misbegotten miscreants they are trading with, and then, struck with the
mysterious Eastern apathy, sinking down in languid heaps of muslin among
the black figs, purple onions and rosy melons, the fluttering hens, the
tethered goats, the whinnying foals, that are all enclosed in an outer
circle of folded-up camels and of mules dozing under faded crimson
saddles.
VI
CHELLA AND THE GREAT MOSQUE
The Merinid Sultans of Rabat had a terribly troublesome neighbour across
the Bou-Regreg, and they built Chella to keep an eye on the pirates of
Sale. But Chella has fallen like a Babylonian city triumphed over by the
prophets; while Sale, sly, fierce and irrepressible, continued till well
on in the nineteenth century to breed pirates and fanatics.
The ruins of Chella lie on the farther side of the plateau above the
native town of Rabat. The mighty wall enclosing them faces the city wall
of Rabat, looking at it across one of those great red powdery wastes
which seem, in this strange land, like death and the desert forever
creeping up to overwhelm the puny works of man.
The red waste is scored by countless trains of donkeys carrying water
from the springs of Chella, by long caravans of mules and camels, and
by the busy motors of the French administration; yet there emanates from
it an impression of solitude and decay which even the prosaic tinkle of
the trams jogging out from the European town to the Exhibition grounds
above the sea cannot long dispel.
Perpetually, even in the new thriving French Morocco, the outline of a
ruin or the look in a pair of eyes shifts the scene, rends the thin veil
of the European Illusion, and confronts one with the old grey Moslem
reality. Passing under the gate of Chella, with its richly carved
corbels and lofty crenellated towers, one feels one's self thus
completely reabsorbed into the past.
Below the gate the ground slopes away, bare and blazing, to a hollow
where a little blue-green minaret gleams through fig-trees, and
fragments of arch and vaulting reveal the outline of a ruined mosque.
Was ever shade so blue-black and delicious as that of the cork-tree near
the spring where the donkey's water-cans are being filled? Under its
branches a black man in a blue shirt lies immovably sleeping in the
dust. Close by women and children splash and chatter about the spring,
and the dome of a saint's tomb shines through lustreless leaves. The
black man, the donkeys, the women and children, the saint's dome, are
all part of the inimitable Eastern scene in which inertia and agitation
are so curiously combined, and a surface of shrill noise flickers over
depths of such unfathomable silence.
The ruins of Chella belong to the purest period of Moroccan art. The
tracery of the broken arches is all carved in stone or in glazed
turquoise tiling, and the fragments of wall and vaulting have the firm
elegance of a classic ruin. But what would even their beauty be without
the leafy setting of the place? The "unimaginable touch of Time" gives
Chella its peculiar charm: the aged fig-tree clamped in uptorn tiles and
thrusting gouty arms between the arches; the garlanding of vines flung
from column to column; the secret pool to which childless women are
brought to bathe, and where the tree springing from a cleft of the steps
is always hung with the bright bits of stuff which are the votive
offerings of Africa.
The shade, the sound of springs, the terraced orange-garden with irises
blooming along channels of running water, all this greenery and coolness
in the hollow of a fierce red hill make Chella seem, to the traveller
new to Africa, the very type and embodiment of its old contrasts of heat
and freshness, of fire and languor. It is like a desert traveller's
dream in his last fever.
Yacoub-el-Mansour was the fourth of the great Almohad Sultans who, in
the twelfth century, drove out the effete Almoravids, and swept their
victorious armies from Marrakech to Tunis and from Tangier to Madrid.
His grandfather, Abd-el-Moumen, had been occupied with conquest and
civic administration. It was said of his rule that "he seized northern
Africa to make order prevail there"; and in fact, out of a welter of
wild tribes confusedly fighting and robbing he drew an empire firmly
seated and securely governed, wherein caravans travelled from the Atlas
to the Straits without fear of attack, and "a soldier wandering through
the fields would not have dared to pluck an ear of wheat."
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Chella--ruins of mosque]
His grandson, the great El-Mansour, was a conqueror too; but where he
conquered he planted the undying seed of beauty. The victor of Alarcos,
the soldier who subdued the north of Spain, dreamed a great dream of
art. His ambition was to bestow on his three capitals, Seville, Rabat
and Marrakech, the three most beautiful towers the world had ever seen;
and if the tower of Rabat had been completed, and that of Seville had
not been injured by Spanish embellishments, his dream would have been
realized.
The "Tower of Hassan," as the Sultan's tower is called, rises from the
plateau above old Rabat, overlooking the steep cliff that drops down to
the last winding of the Bou-Regreg. Truncated at half its height, it
stands on the edge of the cliff, a far-off beacon to travellers by land
and sea. It is one of the world's great monuments, so sufficient in
strength and majesty that until one has seen its fellow, the Koutoubya
of Marrakech, one wonders if the genius of the builder could have
carried such perfect balance of massive wall-spaces and traceried
openings to a triumphant completion.
Near the tower, the red-brown walls and huge piers of the mosque built
at the same time stretch their roofless alignment beneath the sky. This
mosque, before it was destroyed, must have been one of the finest
monuments of Almohad architecture in Morocco: now, with its tumbled red
masses of masonry and vast cisterns overhung by clumps of blue aloes, it
still forms a ruin of Roman grandeur.
The Mosque, the Tower, the citadel of the Oudayas, and the mighty walls
and towers of Chella, compose an architectural group as noble and
complete as that of some mediaeval Tuscan city. All they need to make the
comparison exact is that they should have been compactly massed on a
steep hill, instead of lying scattered over the wide spaces between the
promontory of the Oudayas and the hillside of Chella.
The founder of Rabat, the great Yacoub-el-Mansour, called it, in memory
of the battle of Alarcos, "The Camp of Victory" (_Ribat-el-Path_), and
the monuments he bestowed on it justified the name in another sense, by
giving it the beauty that lives when battles are forgotten.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Village of tents. The village of mud-huts is called a _nourwal_.
[2] Saint's tomb. The saint himself is called a _marabout_.
[3] Citadel.
[4] The Moroccan inn or caravanserai.
II
VOLUBILIS, MOULAY IDRISS AND MEKNEZ
I
VOLUBILIS
One day before sunrise we set out from Rabat for the ruins of Roman
Volubilis.
From the ferry of the Bou-Regreg we looked backward on a last vision of
orange ramparts under a night-blue sky sprinkled with stars; ahead, over
gardens still deep in shadow, the walls of Sale were passing from drab
to peach-colour in the eastern glow. Dawn is the romantic hour in
Africa. Dirt and dilapidation disappear under a pearly haze, and a
breeze from the sea blows away the memory of fetid markets and sordid
heaps of humanity. At that hour the old Moroccan cities look like the
ivory citadels in a Persian miniature, and the fat shopkeepers riding
out to their vegetable-gardens like Princes sallying forth to rescue
captive maidens.
Our way led along the highroad from Rabat to the modern port of Kenitra,
near the ruins of the Phenician colony of Mehedyia. Just north of
Kenitra we struck the trail, branching off eastward to a European
village on the light railway between Rabat and Fez, and beyond the
railway-sheds and flat-roofed stores the wilderness began, stretching
away into clear distances bounded by the hills of the Rarb,[5] above
which the sun was rising.
Range after range these translucent hills rose before us; all around the
solitude was complete. Village life, and even tent life, naturally
gathers about a river-bank or a spring; and the waste we were crossing
was of waterless sand bound together by a loose desert growth. Only an
abandoned well-curb here and there cast its blue shadow on the yellow
_bled_, or a saint's tomb hung like a bubble between sky and sand. The
light had the preternatural purity which gives a foretaste of mirage: it
was the light in which magic becomes real, and which helps to understand
how, to people living in such an atmosphere, the boundary between fact
and dream perpetually fluctuates.
The sand was scored with tracks and ruts innumerable, for the road
between Rabat and Fez is travelled not only by French government motors
but by native caravans and trains of pilgrims to and from the sacred
city of Moulay Idriss, the founder of the Idrissite dynasty, whose tomb
is in the Zerhoun, the mountain ridge above Volubilis. To untrained eyes
it was impossible to guess which of the trails one ought to follow; and
without much surprise we suddenly found the motor stopping, while its
wheels spun round vainly in the loose sand.
The military chauffeur was not surprised either; nor was Captain de M.,
the French staff-officer who accompanied us.
"It often happens just here," they admitted philosophically. "When the
General goes to Meknez he is always followed by a number of motors, so
that if his own is stuck he may go on in another."
This was interesting to know, but not particularly helpful, as the
General and his motors were not travelling our way that morning. Nor was
any one else, apparently. It is curious how quickly the _bled_ empties
itself to the horizon if one happens to have an accident in it! But we
had learned our lesson between Tangier and Rabat, and were able to
produce a fair imitation of the fatalistic smile of the country.
The officer remarked cheerfully that somebody might turn up, and we all
sat down in the _bled_.
A Berber woman, cropping up from nowhere, came and sat beside us. She
had the thin sun-tanned face of her kind, brilliant eyes touched with
_khol_, high cheek-bones, and the exceedingly short upper lip which
gives such charm to the smile of the young nomad women. Her dress was
the usual faded cotton shift, hooked on the shoulders with brass or
silver clasps (still the antique _fibulae_), and wound about with a vague
drapery in whose folds a brown baby wriggled.
The coolness of dawn had vanished and the sun beat down from a fierce
sky. The village on the railway was too far off to be reached on foot,
and there were probably no mules there to spare. Nearer at hand there
was no sign of help: not a fortified farm, or even a circle of nomad
tents. It was the unadulterated desert--and we waited.
Not in vain; for after an hour or two, from far off in the direction of
the hills, there appeared an army with banners. We stared at it
unbelievingly. The _mirage_, of course! We were too sophisticated to
doubt it, and tales of sun-dazed travellers mocked by such visions rose
in our well-stocked memories.
The chauffeur thought otherwise. "Good! That's a pilgrimage from the
mountains. They're going to Sale to pray at the tomb of the _marabout_;
to-day is his feast-day."
And so they were! And as we hung on their approach, and speculated as to
the chances of their stopping to help, I had time to note the beauty of
this long train winding toward us under parti-colored banners. There was
something celestial, almost diaphanous, in the hundreds of figures
turbaned and draped in white, marching slowly through the hot colorless
radiance over the hot colorless sand.
The most part were on foot, or bestriding tiny donkeys, but a stately
Caid rode alone at the end of the line on a horse saddled with crimson
velvet; and to him our officer appealed.
The Caid courteously responded, and twenty or thirty pilgrims were
ordered to harness themselves to the motor and haul it back to the
trail, while the rest of the procession moved hieratically onward.
I felt scruples at turning from their path even a fraction of this pious
company; but they fell to with a saintly readiness, and before long the
motor was on the trail. Then rewards were dispensed; and instantly those
holy men became a prey to the darkest passions. Even in this land of
contrasts the transition from pious serenity to rapacious rage can
seldom have been more rapid. The devotees of the _marabout_ fought,
screamed, tore their garments and rolled over each other with sanguinary
gestures in the struggle for our pesetas; then, perceiving our
indifference, they suddenly remembered their religious duties, scrambled
to their feet, tucked up their flying draperies, and raced after the
tail-end of the procession.
Through a golden heat-haze we struggled on to the hills. The country was
fallow, and in great part too sandy for agriculture; but here and there
we came on one of the deep-set Moroccan rivers, with a reddish-yellow
course channelled between perpendicular banks of red earth, and marked
by a thin line of verdure that widened to fruit-gardens wherever a
village had sprung up. We traversed several of these "sedentary"[6]
villages, _nourwals_ of clay houses with thatched conical roofs, in
gardens of fig, apricot and pomegranate that must be so many pink and
white paradises after the winter rains.
One of these villages seemed to be inhabited entirely by blacks, big
friendly creatures who came out to tell us by which trail to reach the
bridge over the yellow _oued_. In the _oued_ their womenkind were
washing the variegated family rags. They were handsome blue-bronze
creatures, bare to the waist, with tight black astrakhan curls and
firmly sculptured legs and ankles; and all around them, like a swarm of
gnats, danced countless jolly pickaninnies, naked as lizards, with the
spindle legs and globular stomachs of children fed only on cereals.
Half terrified but wholly interested, these infants buzzed about the
motor while we stopped to photograph them; and as we watched their
antics we wondered whether they were the descendants of the little
Soudanese boys whom the founder of Meknez, the terrible Sultan
Moulay-Ismael, used to carry off from beyond the Atlas and bring up in
his military camps to form the nucleus of the Black Guard which defended
his frontiers. We were on the line of travel between Meknez and the sea,
and it seemed not unlikely that these _nourwals_ were all that remained
of scattered outposts of Moulay-Ismael's legionaries.
After a time we left _oueds_ and villages behind us and were in the
mountains of the Rarb, toiling across a high sandy plateau. Far off a
fringe of vegetation showed promise of shade and water, and at last,
against a pale mass of olive-trees, we saw the sight which, at whatever
end of the world one comes upon it, wakes the same sense of awe: the
ruin of a Roman city.
Volubilis (called by the Arabs the Castle of the Pharaohs) is the only
considerable Roman colony so far discovered in Morocco. It stands on the
extreme ledge of a high plateau backed by the mountains of the Zerhoun.
Below the plateau, the land drops down precipitately to a narrow
river-valley green with orchards and gardens, and in the neck of the
valley, where the hills meet again, the conical white town of Moulay
Idriss, the Sacred City of Morocco, rises sharply against a wooded
background.
So the two dominations look at each other across the valley: one, the
lifeless Roman ruin, representing a system, an order, a social
conception that still run through all our modern ways; the other, the
untouched Moslem city, more dead and sucked back into an unintelligible
past than any broken architrave of Greece or Rome.
Volubilis seems to have had the extent and wealth of a great military
outpost, such as Timgad in Algeria; but in the seventeenth century it
was very nearly destroyed by Moulay-Ismael, the Sultan of the Black
Guard, who carried off its monuments piece-meal to build his new capital
of Meknez, that Mequinez of contemporary travellers which was held to be
one of the wonders of the age.
Little remains to Volubilis in the way of important monuments: only the
fragments of a basilica, part of an arch of triumph erected in honour of
Caracalla, and the fallen columns and architraves which strew the path
of Rome across the world. But its site is magnificent; and as the
excavation of the ruins was interrupted by the war it is possible that
subsequent search may bring forth other treasures comparable to the
beautiful bronze _sloughi_ (the African hound) which is now its
principal possession.
It was delicious, after seven hours of travel under the African sun, to
sit on the shady terrace where the Curator of Volubilis, M. Louis
Chatelain, welcomes his visitors. The French Fine Arts have built a
charming house with gardens and pergolas for the custodian of the ruins,
and have found in M. Chatelain an archaeologist so absorbed in his task
that, as soon as conditions permit, every inch of soil in the
circumference of the city will be made to yield up whatever secrets it
hides.
II
MOULAY IDRISS
We lingered under the pergolas of Volubilis till the heat grew less
intolerable, and then our companions suggested a visit to Moulay Idriss.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Volubilis--the western portico of the basilica of Antonius Pius]
Such a possibility had not occurred to us, and even Captain de M. seemed
to doubt whether the expedition were advisable. Moulay Idriss was still
said to be resentful of Christian intrusion: it was only a year before
that the first French officers had entered it.
But M. Chatelain was confident that there would be no opposition to our
visit, and with the piled-up terraces and towers of the Sacred City
growing golden in the afternoon light across the valley it was
impossible to hesitate.
We drove down through an olive-wood as ancient as those of Mitylene and
Corfu, and then along the narrowing valley, between gardens luxuriant
even in the parched Moroccan autumn. Presently the motor began to climb
the steep road to the town, and at a gateway we got out and were met by
the native chief of police. Instantly at the high windows of mysterious
houses veiled heads appeared and sidelong eyes cautiously inspected us.
But the quarter was deserted, and we walked on without meeting any one
to the Street of the Weavers, a silent narrow way between low
whitewashed niches like the cubicles in a convent. In each niche sat a
grave white-robed youth, forming a great amphora-shaped grain-basket out
of closely plaited straw. Vine-leaves and tendrils hung through the reed
roofing overhead, and grape-clusters cast their classic shadow at our
feet. It was like walking on the unrolled frieze of a white Etruscan
vase patterned with black vine garlands.
The silence and emptiness of the place began to strike us: there was no
sign of the Oriental crowd that usually springs out of the dust at the
approach of strangers. But suddenly we heard close by the lament of the
_rekka_ (a kind of long fife), accompanied by a wild thrum-thrum of
earthenware drums and a curious excited chanting of men's voices. I had
heard such a chant before, at the other end of North Africa, in
Kairouan, one of the other great Sanctuaries of Islam, where the sect of
the Aissaouas celebrate their sanguinary rites in the _Zaouia_[7] of
their confraternity. Yet it seemed incredible that if the Aissaouas of
Moulay Idriss were performing their ceremonies that day the chief of
police should be placidly leading us through the streets in the very
direction from which the chant was coming. The Moroccan, though he has
no desire to get into trouble with the Christian, prefers to be left
alone on feast-days, especially in such a stronghold of the faith as
Moulay Idriss.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Moulay-Idriss (9,000 inhabitants)]
But "Geschehen ist geschehen" is the sum of Oriental philosophy. For
centuries Moulay Idriss had held out fanatically on its holy steep;
then, suddenly, in 1916, its chiefs saw that the game was up, and
surrendered without a pretense of resistance. Now the whole thing was
over, the new conditions were accepted, and the chief of police assured
us that with the French uniform at our side we should be safe anywhere.
"The Aissaouas?" he explained. "No, this is another sect, the Hamadchas,
who are performing their ritual dance on the feast-day of their patron,
the _marabout_ Hamadch, whose tomb is in the Zerhoun. The feast is
celebrated publicly in the market-place of Moulay Idriss."
As he spoke we came out into the market-place, and understood why there
had been no crowd at the gate. All the population was in the square and
on the roofs that mount above it, tier by tier, against the wooded
hillside: Moulay Idriss had better to do that day than to gape at a few
tourists in dust-coats.
Short of Sfax, and the other coast cities of eastern Tunisia, there is
surely not another town in North Africa as white as Moulay Idriss. Some
are pale blue and pinky yellow, like the Kasbah of Tangier, or cream and
blue like Sale; but Tangier and Sale, for centuries continuously
subject to European influences, have probably borrowed their colors from
Genoa and the Italian Riviera. In the interior of the country, and
especially in Morocco, where the whole color-scheme is much soberer than
in Algeria and Tunisia, the color of the native houses is always a
penitential shade of mud and ashes.
But Moulay Idriss, that afternoon, was as white as if its arcaded square
had been scooped out of a big cream cheese. The late sunlight lay like
gold-leaf on one side of the square, the other was in pure blue shade;
and above it, the crowded roofs, terraces and balconies packed with
women in bright dresses looked like a flower-field on the edge of a
marble quarry.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Moulay-Idriss--the market-place]
The bright dresses were as unusual a sight as the white walls, for the
average Moroccan crowd is the color of its houses. But the occasion was
a special one, for these feasts of the Hamadchas occur only twice a
year, in spring and autumn, and as the ritual dances take place out of
doors, instead of being performed inside the building of the
confraternity, the feminine population seizes the opportunity to burst
into flower on the house-tops.
It is rare, in Morocco, to see in the streets or the bazaars any women
except of the humblest classes, household slaves, servants, peasants
from the country or small tradesmen's wives; and even they (with the
exception of the unveiled Berber women) are wrapped in the prevailing
grave-clothes. The _filles de joie_ and dancing-girls whose brilliant
dresses enliven certain streets of the Algerian and Tunisian towns are
invisible, or at least unnoticeable, in Morocco, where life, on the
whole, seems so much less gay and brightly-tinted; and the women of the
richer classes, mercantile or aristocratic, never leave their harems
except to be married or buried. A throng of women dressed in light
colors is therefore to be seen in public only when some street festival
draws them to the roofs. Even then it is probable that the throng is
mostly composed of slaves, household servants, and women of the lower
_bourgeoisie_; but as they are all dressed in mauve and rose and pale
green, with long earrings and jewelled head-bands flashing through their
parted veils, the illusion, from a little distance, is as complete as
though they were the ladies in waiting of the Queen of Sheba; and that
radiant afternoon at Moulay Idriss, above the vine-garlanded square, and
against the background of piled-up terraces, their vivid groups were in
such contrast to the usual gray assemblages of the East that the scene
seemed like a setting for some extravagantly staged ballet.
For the same reason the spectacle unrolling itself below us took on a
blessed air of unreality. Any normal person who has seen a dance of the
Aissaouas and watched them swallow thorns and hot coals, slash
themselves with knives, and roll on the floor in epilepsy must have
privately longed, after the first excitement was over, to fly from the
repulsive scene. The Hamadchas are much more savage than Aissaouas, and
carry much farther their display of cataleptic anaesthesia; and, knowing
this, I had wondered how long I should be able to stand the sight of
what was going on below our terrace. But the beauty of the setting
redeemed the bestial horror. In that unreal golden light the scene
became merely symbolical: it was like one of those strange animal masks
which the Middle Ages brought down from antiquity by way of the
satyr-plays of Greece, and of which the half-human protagonists still
grin and contort themselves among the Christian symbols of Gothic
cathedrals.
[Illustration: _From a photograph taken by Captain Henissart of the
French Army_
Moulay-Idriss--market-place on the day of the ritual dance of the
Hamadchas]
At one end of the square the musicians stood on a stone platform above
the dancers. Like the musicians in a bas-relief they were flattened
side by side against a wall, the fife-players with lifted arms and
inflated cheeks, the drummers pounding frantically on long earthenware
drums shaped like enormous hour-glasses and painted in barbaric
patterns; and below, down the length of the market-place, the dance
unrolled itself in a frenzied order that would have filled with envy a
Paris or London impresario.
In its centre an inspired-looking creature whirled about on his axis,
the black ringlets standing out in snaky spirals from his haggard head,
his cheek-muscles convulsively twitching. Around him, but a long way
off, the dancers rocked and circled with long raucous cries dominated by
the sobbing booming music; and in the sunlit space between dancers and
holy man, two or three impish children bobbed about with fixed eyes and
a grimace of comic frenzy, solemnly parodying his contortions.
Meanwhile a tall grave personage in a doge-like cap, the only calm
figure in the tumult, moved gravely here and there, regulating the
dance, stimulating the frenzy, or calming some devotee who had broken
the ranks and lay tossing and foaming on the stones. There was
something far more sinister in this passionless figure, holding his hand
on the key that let loose such crazy forces, than in the poor central
whirligig who merely set the rhythm of the convulsions.
The dancers were all dressed in white caftans or in the blue shirts of
the lowest classes. In the sunlight something that looked like fresh red
paint glistened on their shaved black or yellow skulls and made dark
blotches on their garments. At first these stripes and stains suggested
only a gaudy ritual ornament like the pattern on the drums; then one saw
that the paint, or whatever it was, kept dripping down from the whirling
caftans and forming fresh pools among the stones; that as one of the
pools dried up another formed, redder and more glistening, and that
these pools were fed from great gashes which the dancers hacked in their
own skulls and breasts with hatchets and sharpened stones. The dance was
a blood-rite, a great sacrificial symbol, in which blood flowed so
freely that all the rocking feet were splashed with it.
Gradually, however, it became evident that many of the dancers simply
rocked and howled, without hacking themselves, and that most of the
bleeding skulls and breasts belonged to negroes. Every now and then the
circle widened to let in another figure, black or dark yellow, the
figure of some humble blue-shirted spectator suddenly "getting religion"
and rushing forward to snatch a weapon and baptize himself with his own
blood; and as each new recruit joined the dancers the music shrieked
louder and the devotees howled more wolfishly. And still, in the centre,
the mad _marabout_ spun, and the children bobbed and mimicked him and
rolled their diamond eyes.
Such is the dance of the Hamadchas, of the confraternity of the
_marabout_ Hamadch, a powerful saint of the seventeenth century, whose
tomb is in the Zerhoun above Moulay Idriss. Hamadch, it appears, had a
faithful slave, who, when his master died, killed himself in despair,
and the self-inflicted wounds of the brotherhood are supposed to
symbolize the slave's suicide; though no doubt the origin of the
ceremony might be traced back to the depths of that ensanguined grove
where Mr. Fraser plucked the Golden Bough.
The more naive interpretation, however, has its advantages, since it
enables the devotees to divide their ritual duties into two classes, the
devotions of the free men being addressed to the saint who died in his
bed, while the slaves belong to the slave, and must therefore simulate
his horrid end. And this is the reason why most of the white caftans
simply rock and writhe, while the humble blue shirts drip with blood.
[Illustration: _From a photograph taken by Captain Henissart of the
French Army_
Moulay-Idriss--the market-place. Procession of the confraternity of the
Hamadchas]
The sun was setting when we came down from our terrace above the
market-place. To find a lodging for the night we had to press on to
Meknez, where we were awaited at the French military post; therefore we
were reluctantly obliged to refuse an invitation to take tea with the
Caid, whose high-perched house commands the whole white amphitheatre of
the town. It was disappointing to leave Moulay Idriss with the Hamadchas
howling their maddest, and so much besides to see; but as we drove away
under the long shadows of the olives we counted ourselves lucky to have
entered the sacred town, and luckier still to have been there on the day
of the dance which, till a year ago, no foreigner had been allowed to
see.
A fine French road runs from Moulay Idriss to Meknez, and we flew on
through the dusk between wooded hills and open stretches on which the
fires of nomad camps put orange splashes in the darkness. Then the moon
rose, and by its light we saw a widening valley, and gardens and
orchards that stretched up to a great walled city outlined against the
stars.
III
MEKNEZ
All that evening, from the garden of the Military Subdivision on the
opposite height, we sat and looked across at the dark tree-clumps and
moon-lit walls of Meknez, and listened to its fantastic history.
Meknez was built by the Sultan Moulay-Ismael, around the nucleus of a
small town of which the site happened to please him, at the very moment
when Louis XIV was creating Versailles. The coincidence of two
contemporary autocrats calling cities out of the wilderness has caused
persons with a taste for analogy to describe Meknez as the Versailles of
Morocco: an epithet which is about as instructive as it would be to call
Phidias the Benvenuto Cellini of Greece.
There is, however, a pretext for the comparison in the fact that the two
sovereigns took a lively interest in each other's affairs. Moulay-Ismael
sent several embassies to treat with Louis XIV on the eternal question
of piracy and the ransom of Christian captives, and the two rulers were
continually exchanging gifts and compliments.
The governor of Tetouan, who was sent to Paris in 1680, having brought
as presents to the French King a lion, a lioness, a tigress, and four
ostriches, Louis XIV shortly afterward despatched M. de Saint-Amand to
Morocco with two dozen watches, twelve pieces of gold brocade, a cannon
six feet long and other firearms. After this the relations between the
two courts remained friendly till 1693, at which time they were strained
by the refusal of France to return the Moorish captives who were
employed on the king's galleys, and who were probably as much needed
there as the Sultan's Christian slaves for the building of Moorish
palaces.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Meknez--gate: "Bab-Mansour"]
Six years later the Sultan despatched Abdallah-ben-Aissa to France to
reopen negotiations. The ambassador was as brilliantly received and as
eagerly run after as a modern statesman on an official mission, and his
candidly expressed admiration for the personal charms of the Princesse
de Conti, one of the French monarch's legitimatized children, is
supposed to have been mistaken by the court for an offer of marriage
from the Emperor of Barbary. But he came back without a treaty.
Moulay-Ismael, whose long reign (1673 to 1727) and extraordinary
exploits make him already a legendary figure, conceived, early in his
career, a passion for Meknez; and through all his troubled rule, with
its alternations of barbaric warfare and far-reaching negotiations,
palace intrigue, crazy bloodshed and great administrative reforms, his
heart perpetually reverted to the wooded slopes on which he dreamed of
building a city more splendid than Fez or Marrakech.
"The Sultan" (writes his chronicler Aboul Kasim-ibn-Ahmad, called
"Ezziani") "loved Meknez, the climate of which had enchanted him, and he
would have liked never to leave it." He left it, indeed, often, left it
perpetually, to fight with revolted tribes in the Atlas, to defeat one
Berber army after another, to carry his arms across the High Atlas into
the Souss, to adorn Fez with the heads of seven hundred vanquished
chiefs, to put down his three rebellious brothers, to strip all the
cities of his empire of their negroes and transport them to Meknez ("so
that not a negro, man, woman or child, slave or free, was left in any
part of the country"); to fight and defeat the Christians (1683); to
take Tangier, to conduct a campaign on the Moulouya, to lead the holy
war against the Spanish (1689), to take Larache, the Spanish commercial
post on the west coast (which furnished eighteen hundred captives for
Meknez); to lay siege to Ceuta, conduct a campaign against the Turks of
Algiers, repress the pillage in his army, subdue more tribes, and build
forts for his Black Legionaries from Oudjda to the Oued Noun. But almost
each year's bloody record ends with the placid phrase: "Then the Sultan
returned to Meknez."
In the year 1701, Ezziani writes, the indomitable old man "deprived his
rebellious sons of their principalities; after which date he consecrated
himself exclusively to the building of his palaces and the planting of
his gardens. And in 1720 (nineteen years later in this long reign!) he
ordered the destruction of the mausoleum of Moulay Idriss for the
purpose of enlarging it. And to gain the necessary space he bought all
the adjacent land, and the workmen did not leave these new labors till
they were entirely completed."
In this same year there was levied on Fez a new tax which was so heavy
that the inhabitants were obliged to abandon the city.
Yet it is written of this terrible old monarch, who devastated whole
districts, and sacrificed uncounted thousands of lives for his ruthless
pleasure, that under his administration of his chaotic and turbulent
empire "the country rejoiced in the most complete security. A Jew or a
woman might travel alone from Oudjda to the Oued Noun without any one's
asking their business. Abundance reigned throughout the land: grain,
food, cattle were to be bought for the lowest prices. Nowhere in the
whole of Morocco was a highwayman or a robber to be found."
And probably both sides of the picture are true.
* * * * *
What, then, was the marvel across the valley, what were the "lordly
pleasure-houses" to whose creation and enlargement Moulay-Ismael
returned again and again amid the throes and violences of a nearly
centenarian life?
The chronicler continues: "The Sultan caused all the houses near the
Kasbah[8] to be demolished, _and compelled the inhabitants to carry away
the ruins of their dwellings_. All the eastern end of the town was also
torn down, and the ramparts were rebuilt. He also built the Great Mosque
next to the palace of Nasr.... He occupied himself personally with the
construction of his palaces, and before one was finished he caused
another to be begun. He built the mosque of Elakhdar; the walls of the
new town were pierced with twenty fortified gates and surmounted with
platforms for cannon. Within the walls he made a great artificial lake
where one might row in boats. There was also a granary with immense
subterranean reservoirs of water, and a stable _three miles long_ for
the Sultan's horses and mules; twelve thousand horses could be stabled
in it. The flooring rested on vaults in which the grain for the horses
was stored.... He also built the palace of Elmansour, which had twenty
cupolas; from the top of each cupola one could look forth on the plain
and the mountains around Meknez. All about the stables the rarest trees
were planted. Within the walls were fifty palaces, each with its own
mosque and its baths. Never was such a thing known in any country, Arab
or foreign, pagan or Moslem. The guarding of the doors of these palaces
was intrusted to twelve hundred black eunuchs."
Such were the wonders that seventeenth century travellers toiled across
the desert to see, and from which they came back dazzled and almost
incredulous, as if half-suspecting that some djinn had deluded them with
the vision of a phantom city. But for the soberer European records, and
the evidence of the ruins themselves (for the whole of the new Meknez is
a ruin), one might indeed be inclined to regard Ezziani's statements as
an Oriental fable; but the briefest glimpse of Moulay-Ismael's Meknez
makes it easy to believe all his chronicler tells of it, even to the
three miles of stables.
Next morning we drove across the valley and, skirting the old town on
the hill, entered, by one of the twenty gates of Moulay-Ismael, a long
empty street lined with half-ruined arcades. Beyond was another street
of beaten red earth bordered by high red walls blotched with gray and
mauve. Ahead of us this road stretched out interminably (Meknez, before
Washington, was the "city of magnificent distances"), and down its empty
length only one or two draped figures passed, like shadows on the way to
Shadowland. It was clear that the living held no further traffic with
the Meknez of Moulay-Ismael.
Here it was at last. Another great gateway let us, under a resplendently
bejewelled arch of turquoise-blue and green, into another walled
emptiness of red clay; a third gate opened into still vaster vacancies,
and at their farther end rose a colossal red ruin, something like the
lower stories of a Roman amphitheatre that should stretch out
indefinitely instead of forming a circle, or like a series of Roman
aqueducts built side by side and joined into one structure. Below this
indescribable ruin the arid ground sloped down to an artificial water
which was surely the lake that the Sultan had made for his
boating-parties; and beyond it more red earth stretched away to more
walls and gates, with glimpses of abandoned palaces and huge crumbling
angle-towers.
The vastness, the silence, the catastrophic desolation of the place,
were all the more impressive because of the relatively recent date of
the buildings. As Moulay-Ismael had dealt with Volubilis, so time had
dealt with his own Meknez; and the destruction which it had taken
thousands of lash-driven slaves to inflict on the stout walls of the
Roman city, neglect and abandonment had here rapidly accomplished. But
though the sun-baked clay of which the impatient Sultan built his
pleasure-houses will not suffer comparison with the firm stones of Rome,
"the high Roman fashion" is visible in the shape and outline of these
ruins. What they are no one knows. In spite of Ezziani's text (written
when the place was already partly destroyed) archaeologists disagree as
to the uses of the crypt of rose-flushed clay whose twenty rows of
gigantic arches are so like an alignment of Roman aqueducts. Were these
the vaulted granaries, or the subterranean reservoirs under the three
miles of stabling which housed the twelve thousand horses? The stables,
at any rate, were certainly near this spot, for the lake adjoins the
ruins as in the chronicler's description; and between it and old
Meknez, behind walls within walls, lie all that remains of the fifty
palaces with their cupolas, gardens, mosques and baths.
This inner region is less ruined than the mysterious vaulted structure,
and one of the palaces, being still reserved for the present Sultan's
use, cannot be visited; but we wandered unchallenged through desert
courts, gardens of cypress and olive where dried fountains and painted
summer-houses are falling into dust, and barren spaces enclosed in long
empty facades. It was all the work of an eager and imperious old man,
who, to realize his dream quickly, built in perishable materials; but
the design, the dimensions, the whole conception, show that he had not
only heard of Versailles but had looked with his own eyes on Volubilis.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Meknez--the ruins of the palace of Moulay-Ismael]
To build on such a scale, and finish the work in a single lifetime, even
if the materials be malleable and the life a long one, implies a command
of human labor that the other Sultan at Versailles must have envied.
The imposition of the _corvee_ was of course even simpler in Morocco
than in France, since the material to draw on was unlimited, provided
one could assert one's power over it; and for that purpose Ismael had
his Black Army, the hundred and fifty thousand disciplined legionaries
who enabled him to enforce his rule over all the wild country from
Algiers to Agadir.
The methods by which this army were raised and increased are worth
recounting in Ezziani's words:
"A _taleb_[9] of Marrakech having shown the Sultan a register containing
the names of the negroes who had formed part of the army of El-Mansour,
Moulay-Ismael ordered his agents to collect all that remained of these
negroes and their children.... He also sent to the tribes of the
Beni-Hasen, and into the mountains, to purchase all the negroes to be
found there. Thus all that were in the whole of Moghreb were assembled,
from the cities and the countryside, till not one was left, slave or
free.
"These negroes were armed and clothed, and sent to Mechra Erremel (north
of Meknez) where they were ordered to build themselves houses, plant
gardens and remain till their children were ten years old. Then the
Sultan caused all the children to be brought to him, both boys and
girls. The boys were apprenticed to masons, carpenters, and other
tradesmen; others were employed to make mortar. The next year they were
taught to drive the mules, the third to make _adobe_ for building; the
fourth year they learned to ride horses bareback, the fifth they were
taught to ride in the saddle while using firearms. At the age of sixteen
these boys became soldiers. They were then married to the young
negresses who had meanwhile been taught cooking and washing in the
Sultan's palaces--except those who were pretty, and these were given a
musical education, after which each one received a wedding-dress and a
marriage settlement, and was handed over to her husband.
"All the children of these couples were in due time destined for the
Black Army, or for domestic service in the palaces. Every year the
Sultan went to the camp at Mechra Erremel and brought back the
children. The Black Army numbered one hundred and fifty thousand men, of
whom part were at Erremel, part at Meknez, and the rest in the
seventy-six forts which the Sultan built for them throughout his domain.
May the Lord be merciful to his memory!"
Such was the army by means of which Ismael enforced the _corvee_ on his
undisciplined tribes. Many thousands of lives went to the building of
imperial Meknez; but his subjects would scarcely have sufficed if he had
not been able to add to them twenty-five thousand Christian captives.
M. Augustin Bernard, in his admirable book on Morocco, says that the
seventeenth century was "the golden age of piracy" in Morocco; and the
great Ismael was no doubt one of its chief promoters. One understands
his unwillingness to come to an agreement with his great friend and
competitor, Louis XIV, on the difficult subject of the ransom of
Christian captives when one reads in the admiring Ezziani that it took
fifty-five thousand prisoners and captives to execute his architectural
conceptions.
"These prisoners, by day, were occupied on various tasks; at night they
were locked into subterranean dungeons. Any prisoner who died at his
task was _built into the wall he was building_." (This statement is
confirmed by John Windus, the English traveller who visited the court of
Moulay-Ismael in the Sultan's old age.) Many Europeans must have
succumbed quickly to the heat and the lash, for the wall-builders were
obliged to make each stroke in time with their neighbors, and were
bastinadoed mercilessly if they broke the rhythm; and there is little
doubt that the expert artisans of France, Italy and Spain were even
dearer to the old architectural madman than the friendship of the
palace-building despot across the sea.
Ezziani's chronicle dates from the first part of the nineteenth century,
and is an Arab's colorless panegyric of a great Arab ruler; but John
Windus, the Englishman who accompanied Commodore Stewart's embassy to
Meknez in 1721, saw the imperial palaces and their builder with his own
eyes, and described them with the vivacity of a foreigner struck by
every contrast.
Moulay-Ismael was then about eighty-seven years old, "a middle-sized
man, who has the remains of a good face, with nothing of a negro's
features, though his mother was a black. He has a high nose, which is
pretty long from the eye-brows downward, and thin. He has lost all his
teeth, and breathes short, as if his lungs were bad, coughs and spits
pretty often, which never falls to the ground, men being always ready
with handkerchiefs to receive it. His beard is thin and very white, his
eyes seem to have been sparkling, but their vigor decayed through age,
and his cheeks very much sunk in."
Such was the appearance of this extraordinary man, who deceived,
tortured, betrayed, assassinated, terrorized and mocked his slaves, his
subjects, his women and children and his ministers like any other
half-savage Arab despot, but who yet managed through his long reign to
maintain a barbarous empire, to police the wilderness, and give at least
an appearance of prosperity and security where all had before been
chaos.
The English emissaries appear to have been much struck by the
magnificence of his palaces, then in all the splendor of novelty, and
gleaming with marbles brought from Volubilis and Sale. Windus extols in
particular the sunken gardens of cypress, pomegranate and orange trees,
some of them laid out seventy feet below the level of the palace-courts;
the exquisite plaster fretwork; the miles of tessellated walls and
pavement made in the finely patterned mosaic work of Fez; and the long
terrace walk trellised with "vines and other greens" leading from the
palace to the famous stables, and over which it was the Sultan's custom
to drive in a chariot drawn by women and eunuchs.
Moulay-Ismael received the English ambassador with every show of pomp
and friendship, and immediately "made him a present" of a handful of
young English captives; but just as the negotiations were about to be
concluded Commodore Stewart was privately advised that the Sultan had no
intention of allowing the rest of the English to be ransomed. Luckily a
diplomatically composed letter, addressed by the English envoy to one of
the favorite wives, resulted in Ismael's changing his mind, and the
captives were finally given up, and departed with their rescuers. As one
stands in the fiery sun, among the monstrous ruins of those tragic
walls, one pictures the other Christian captives pausing for a second,
at the risk of death, in the rhythmic beat of their labor, to watch the
little train of their companions winding away across the desert to
freedom.
On the way back through the long streets that lead to the ruins we
noticed, lying by the roadside, the shafts of fluted columns, blocks of
marble, Roman capitals: fragments of the long loot of Sale and
Volubilis. We asked how they came there, and were told that, according
to a tradition still believed in the country, when the prisoners and
captives who were dragging the building materials toward the palace
under the blistering sun heard of the old Sultan's death, they dropped
their loads with one accord and fled. At the same moment every worker on
the walls flung down his trowel or hod, every slave of the palaces
stopped grinding or scouring or drawing water or carrying faggots or
polishing the miles of tessellated floors; so that, when the tyrant's
heart stopped beating, at that very instant life ceased to circulate in
the huge house he had built, and in all its members it became a carcass
for his carcass.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] The high plateau-and-hill formation between Tangier and Fez.
[6] So called to distinguish them from the tent villages of the less
settled groups.
[7] Sacred college.
[8] The citadal of old Meknez.
[9] Learned man.
III
FEZ
I
THE FIRST VISION
Many-walled Fez rose up before us out of the plain toward the end of the
day.
The walls and towers we saw were those of the upper town, Fez Eldjid
(the New), which lies on the edge of the plateau and hides from view Old
Fez tumbling down below it into the ravine of the Oued Fez. Thus
approached, the city presents to view only a long line of ramparts and
fortresses, merging into the wide, tawny plain and framed in barren
mountains. Not a house is visible outside the walls, except, at a
respectful distance, the few unobtrusive buildings of the European
colony; and not a village breaks the desolation of the landscape.
As we drew nearer, the walls towered close over us, and skirting them we
came to a bare space outside a great horseshoe gate, and found ourselves
suddenly in the foreground of a picture by Carpaccio or Bellini. Where
else had one seen just those rows of white-turbaned majestic figures,
squatting in the dust under lofty walls, all the pale faces ringed in
curling beards turned to the story-teller in the centre of the group?
Transform the story-teller into a rapt young Venetian, and you have the
audience and the foreground of Carpaccio's "Preaching of St. Stephen,"
even to the camels craning inquisitive necks above the turbans. Every
step of the way in North Africa corroborates the close observation of
the early travellers, whether painters or narrators, and shows the
unchanged character of the Oriental life that the Venetians pictured,
and Leo Africanus and Windus and Charles Cochelet described.
There was time, before sunset, to go up to the hill, from which the
ruined tombs of the Merinid Sultans look down over the city they made
glorious. After the savage massacre of foreign residents in 1912 the
French encircled the heights commanding Fez with one of their admirably
engineered military roads, and in a few minutes our motor had climbed to
the point from which the great dynasty of artist-Sultans dreamed of
looking down forever on their capital.
Nothing endures in Islam, except what human inertia has left standing
and its own solidity has preserved from the elements. Or rather, nothing
remains intact, and nothing wholly perishes, but the architecture, like
all else, lingers on half-ruined and half-unchanged. The Merinid tombs,
however, are only hollow shells and broken walls, grown part of the
brown cliff they cling to. No one thinks of them save as an added touch
of picturesqueness where all is picturesque: they survive as the best
point from which to look down at Fez.
There it lies, outspread in golden light, roofs, terraces, and towers
sliding over the plain's edge in a rush dammed here and there by
barriers of cypress and ilex, but growing more precipitous as the
ravine of the Fez narrows downward with the fall of the river. It is as
though some powerful enchanter, after decreeing that the city should be
hurled into the depths, had been moved by its beauty, and with a wave of
his wand held it suspended above destruction.
At first the eye takes in only this impression of a great city over a
green abyss; then the complex scene begins to define itself. All around
are the outer lines of ramparts, walls beyond walls, their crenellations
climbing the heights, their angle fortresses dominating the precipices.
Almost on a level with us lies the upper city, the aristocratic Fez
Eldjid of painted palaces and gardens; then, as the houses close in and
descend more abruptly, terraces, minarets, domes, and long reed-thatched
roofs of the bazaars, all gather around the green-tiled tomb of Moulay
Idriss, and the tower of the Almohad mosque of El Kairouiyin, which
adjoin each other in the depths of Fez, and form its central sanctuary.
* * * * *
From the Merinid hill we had noticed a long facade among the cypresses
and fruit-trees of Eldjid. This was Bou-Jeloud, the old summer-palace
of the Sultan's harem, now the house of the Resident-General, where
lodgings had been prepared for us.
The road descended again, crossing the Oued Fez by one of the fine old
single-arch bridges that mark the architectural link between Morocco and
Spain. We skirted high walls, wayside pools, and dripping mill-wheels;
then one of the city gates engulfed us, and we were in the waste spaces
of intramural Fez, formerly the lines of defense of a rich and
perpetually menaced city, now chiefly used for refuse-heaps, open-air
fondaks, and dreaming-places for rows of Lazaruses rolled in their
cerements in the dust.
Through another gate and more walls we came to an arch in the inner line
of defense. Beyond that, the motor paused before a green door, where a
Cadi in a silken caftan received us. Across squares of orange-trees
divided by running water we were led to an arcaded apartment hung with
Moroccan embroideries and lined with wide divans; the hall of reception
of the Resident-General. Through its arches were other tiled distances,
fountains, arcades; beyond, in greener depths, the bright blossoms of a
flower-garden. Such was our first sight of Bou-Jeloud, once the
summer-palace of the wives of Moulay Hafid.
Upstairs, from a room walled and ceiled with cedar, and decorated with
the bold rose-pink embroideries of Sale and the intricate old needlework
of Fez, I looked out over the upper city toward the mauve and tawny
mountains.
Just below the window the flat roofs of a group of little houses
descended like the steps of an irregular staircase. Between them rose a
few cypresses and a green minaret; out of the court of one house an
ancient fig-tree thrust its twisted arms. The sun had set, and one after
another bright figures appeared on the roofs. The children came first,
hung with silver amulets and amber beads, and pursued by negresses in
striped turbans, who bustled up with rugs and matting; then the mothers
followed more indolently, released from their ashy mufflings and
showing, under their light veils, long earrings from the _Mellah_[10]
and caftans of pale green or peach color.
The houses were humble ones, such as grow up in the cracks of a wealthy
quarter, and their inhabitants doubtless small folk; but in the
enchanted African twilight the terraces blossomed like gardens, and when
the moon rose and the muezzin called from the minaret, the domestic
squabbles and the shrill cries from roof to roof became part of a story
in Bagdad, overheard a thousand years ago by that arch-detective
Haroun-al-Raschid.
II
FEZ ELDJID
It is usual to speak of Fez as very old, and the term seems justified
when one remembers that the palace of Bou-Jeloud stands on the site of
an Almoravid Kasbah of the eleventh century, that when that Kasbah was
erected Fez Elbali had already existed for three hundred years, that El
Kairouiyin is the contemporary of Sant' Ambrogio of Milan, and that the
original mosque of Moulay Idriss II was built over his grave in the
eighth century.
Fez is, in fact, the oldest city in Morocco without a Phenician or a
Roman past, and has preserved more traces than any other of its
architectural flowering-time; yet it would be truer to say of it, as of
all Moroccan cities, that it has no age, since its seemingly immutable
shape is forever crumbling and being renewed on the old lines.
When we rode forth the next day to visit some of the palaces of Eldjid
our pink-saddled mules carried us at once out of the bounds of time. How
associate anything so precise and Occidental as years or centuries with
these visions of frail splendor seen through cypresses and roses? The
Cadis in their multiple muslins, who received us in secret doorways and
led us by many passages into the sudden wonder of gardens and fountains;
the bright-earringed negresses peering down from painted balconies; the
pilgrims and clients dozing in the sun against hot walls; the deserted
halls with plaster lace-work and gold pendentives in tiled niches; the
Venetian chandeliers and tawdry rococo beds; the terraces from which
pigeons whirled up in a white cloud while we walked on a carpet of their
feathers--were all these the ghosts of vanished state, or the actual
setting of the life of some rich merchant with "business connections"
in Liverpool and Lyons, or some government official at that very moment
speeding to Meknez or Casablanca in his sixty h. p. motor?
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Fez Eldjid (the upper city)]
We visited old palaces and new, inhabited and abandoned, and over all
lay the same fine dust of oblivion, like the silvery mould on an
overripe fruit. Overripeness is indeed the characteristic of this rich
and stagnant civilization. Buildings, people, customs, seem all about to
crumble and fall of their own weight: the present is a perpetually
prolonged past. To touch the past with one's hands is realized only in
dreams; and in Morocco the dream-feeling envelopes one at every step.
One trembles continually lest the "Person from Porlock" should step in.
He is undoubtedly on the way; but Fez had not heard of him when we rode
out that morning. Fez Eldjid, the "New Fez" of palaces and government
buildings, was founded in the fourteenth century by the Merinid princes,
and probably looks much as it did then. The palaces in their overgrown
gardens, with pale-green trellises dividing the rose-beds from the
blue-and-white tiled paths, and fountains in fluted basins of Italian
marble, all had the same drowsy charm; yet the oldest were built not
more than a century or two ago, others within the last fifty years; and
at Marrakech, later in our journey, we were to visit a sumptuous
dwelling where plaster-cutters and ceramists from Fez were actually
repeating with wonderful skill and spontaneity, the old ornamentation of
which the threads run back to Rome and Damascus.
Of really old private dwellings, palaces or rich men's houses, there are
surprisingly few in Morocco. It is hard to guess the age of some of the
featureless houses propping each other's flanks in old Fez or old Sale;
but people rich enough to rebuild have always done so, and the passion
for building seems allied, in this country of inconsequences, to the
supine indifference that lets existing constructions crumble back to
clay. "Dust to dust" should have been the motto of the Moroccan
palace-builders.
Fez possesses one old secular building, a fine fondak of the fifteenth
century; but in Morocco, as a rule, only mosques and the tombs of saints
are preserved--none too carefully--and even the strong stone buildings
of the Almohads have been allowed to fall to ruin, as at Chella and
Rabat. This indifference to the completed object--which is like a kind
of collective exaggeration of the artist's indifference to his completed
work--has resulted in the total disappearance of the furniture and works
of art which must have filled the beautiful buildings of the Merinid
period. Neither pottery nor brass-work nor enamels nor fine hangings
survive; there is no parallel in Morocco to the textiles of Syria, the
potteries of Persia, the Byzantine ivories or enamels. It has been said
that the Moroccan is always a nomad, who lives in his house as if it
were a tent; but this is not a conclusive answer to any one who knows
the passion of the modern Moroccan for European furniture. When one
reads the list of the treasures contained in the palaces of the mediaeval
Sultans of Egypt one feels sure that, if artists were lacking in
Morocco, the princes and merchants who brought skilled craftsmen across
the desert to build their cities must also have imported treasures to
adorn them. Yet, as far as is known, the famous fourteenth-century
bronze chandelier of Tetuan, and the fine old ritual furniture reported
to be contained in certain mosques, are the only important works of art
in Morocco later in date than the Roman _sloughi_ of Volubilis.
III
FEZ ELBALI
The distances in Fez are so great and the streets so narrow, and in some
quarters so crowded, that all but saints or humble folk go about on
mule-back.
In the afternoon, accordingly, the pink mules came again, and we set out
for the long tunnel-like street that leads down the hill to the Fez
Elbali.
"Look out--'ware heads!" our leader would call back at every turn, as
our way shrank to a black passage under a house bestriding the street,
or a caravan of donkeys laden with obstructive reeds or branches of
dates made the passers-by flatten themselves against the walls.
On each side of the street the houses hung over us like fortresses,
leaning across the narrow strip of blue and throwing out great beams and
buttresses to prop each other's bulging sides. Windows there were none
on the lower floors; only here and there an iron-barred slit stuffed
with rags and immemorial filth, from which a lean cat would suddenly
spring out, and scuttle off under an archway like a witch's familiar.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Fez--a reed-roofed street]
Some of these descending lanes were packed with people, others as
deserted as a cemetery; and it was strange to pass from the thronged
streets leading to the bazaars to the profound and secretive silence of
a quarter of well-to-do dwelling-houses, where only a few veiled women
attended by negro slaves moved noiselessly over the clean cobblestones,
and the sound of fountains and runnels came from hidden courtyards and
over garden-walls.
This noise of water is as characteristic of Fez as of Damascus. The Oued
Fez rushes through the heart of the town, bridged, canalized, built
over, and ever and again bursting out into tumultuous falls and pools
shadowed with foliage. The central artery of the city is not a street
but a waterfall; and tales are told of the dark uses to which, even
now, the underground currents are put by some of the dwellers behind the
blank walls and scented gardens of those highly respectable streets.
The crowd in Oriental cities is made up of many elements, and in Morocco
Turks, Jews and infidels, Berbers of the mountains, fanatics of the
confraternities, Soudanese blacks and haggard Blue Men of the Souss,
jostle the merchants and government officials with that democratic
familiarity which goes side by side with abject servility in this land
of perpetual contradictions. But Fez is above all the city of wealth and
learning, of universities and counting-houses, and the merchant and the
_oulama_[11]--the sedentary and luxurious types--prevail.
The slippered Fazi merchant, wrapped in white muslins and securely
mounted on a broad velvet saddle-cloth anchored to the back of a broad
mule, is as unlike the Arab horseman of the desert as Mr. Tracy Tupman
was unlike the Musketeers of Dumas. Ease, music, money-making, the
affairs of his harem and the bringing-up of his children, are his chief
interests, and his plump pale face with long-lashed hazel eyes, his
curling beard and fat womanish hands, recall the portly potentates of
Hindu miniatures, dreaming among houris beside lotus-tanks.
These personages, when they ride abroad, are preceded by a swarthy
footman, who keeps his hand on the embroidered bridle; and the
government officers and dignitaries of the _Makhzen_[12] are usually
escorted by several mounted officers of their household, with a servant
to each mule. The cry of the runners scatters the crowd, and even the
panniered donkeys and perpetually astonished camels somehow contrive to
become two-dimensional while the white procession goes by.
Then the populace closes in again, so quickly and densely that it seems
impossible it could ever have been parted, and negro water-carriers,
muffled women, beggars streaming with sores, sinewy and greasy "saints,"
Soudanese sorcerers hung with amulets made of sardine-boxes and
hares'-feet, long-lashed boys of the Chleuh in clean embroidered
caftans, Jews in black robes and skull-caps, university students
carrying their prayer-carpets, bangled and spangled black women,
scrofulous children with gazelle eyes and mangy skulls, and blind men
tapping along with linked arms and howling out verses of the Koran,
surge together in a mass drawn by irresistible suction to the point
where the bazaars converge about the mosques of Moulay Idriss and El
Kairouiyin.
Seen from a terrace of the upper town, the long thatched roofing of El
Attarine, the central bazaar of Fez, promises fantastic revelations of
native life; but the dun-colored crowds moving through its checkered
twilight, the lack of carved shop-fronts and gaily adorned
coffee-houses, and the absence of the painted coffers and vivid
embroideries of Tunis, remind one that Morocco is a melancholy country,
and Fez a profoundly melancholy city.
_Dust and ashes, dust and ashes_, echoes from the gray walls, the
mouldering thatch of the _souks_, the long lamentable song of the blind
beggars sitting in rows under the feet of the camels and asses. No young
men stroll through the bazaar in bright caftans, with roses and jasmine
behind their ears, no pedlars offer lemonade and sweetmeats and golden
fritters, no flower-sellers pursue one with tight bunches of
orange-blossom and little pink roses. The well-to-do ride by in white,
and the rest of the population goes mournfully in earth-color.
But gradually one falls under the spell of another influence--the
influence of the Atlas and the desert. Unknown Africa seems much nearer
to Morocco than to the white towns of Tunis and the smiling oases of
South Algeria. One feels the nearness of Marrakech at Fez, and at
Marrakech that of Timbuctoo.
Fez is sombre, and the bazaars clustered about its holiest sanctuaries
form its most sombre quarter. Dusk falls there early, and oil-lanterns
twinkle in the merchants' niches while the clear African daylight still
lies on the gardens of upper Fez. This twilight adds to the mystery of
the _souks_, making them, in spite of profane noise and crowding and
filth, an impressive approach to the sacred places.
Until a year or two ago, the precincts around Moulay Idriss and El
Kairouiyin were _horm_, that is, cut off from the unbeliever. Heavy
beams of wood barred the end of each _souk_, shutting off the
sanctuaries, and the Christian could only conjecture what lay beyond.
Now he knows in part; for, though the beams have not been lowered, all
comers may pass under them to the lanes about the mosques, and even
pause a moment in their open doorways. Farther one may not go, for the
shrines of Morocco are still closed to unbelievers; but whoever knows
Cordova, or has stood under the arches of the Great Mosque of Kairouan,
can reconstruct something of the hidden beauties of its namesake, the
"Mosque Kairouan" of western Africa.
Once under the bars, the richness of the old Moorish Fez presses upon
one with unexpected beauty. Here is the graceful tiled fountain of
Nedjarine, glittering with the unapproachable blues and greens of
ceramic mosaics; near it, the courtyard of the Fondak Nedjarine, oldest
and stateliest of Moroccan inns, with triple galleries of sculptured
cedar rising above arcades of stone. A little farther on lights and
incense draw one to a threshold where it is well not to linger unduly.
Under a deep archway, between booths where gay votive candles are sold,
the glimmer of hanging lamps falls on patches of gilding and mosaic, and
on veiled women prostrating themselves before an invisible shrine--for
this is the vestibule of the mosque of Moulay Idriss, where, on certain
days of the week, women are admitted to pray.
Moulay Idriss was not built over the grave of the Fatimite prophet,
first of the name, whose bones lie in the Zerhoun above his sacred town.
The mosque of Fez grew up around the tomb of his posthumous son, Moulay
Idriss II, who, descending from the hills, fell upon a camp of Berbers
on an affluent of the Sebou, and there laid the foundations of Fez, and
of the Moroccan Empire.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Fez--the Nedjarine fountain]
Of the original monument it is said that little remains. The
_zaouia_[13] which encloses it dates from the reign of Moulay-Ismael,
the seventeenth-century Sultan of Meknez, and the mosque itself, and the
green minaret shooting up from the very centre of old Fez, were not
built until 1820. But a rich surface of age has already formed on all
these disparate buildings, and the over-gorgeous details of the shrines
and fountains set in their outer walls are blended into harmony by a
film of incense-smoke, and the grease of countless venerating lips and
hands.
Featureless walls of mean houses close in again at the next turn; but a
few steps farther another archway reveals another secret scene. This
time it is a corner of the jealously guarded court of ablutions in the
great mosque El Kairouiyin, with the twin green-roofed pavilions that
are so like those of the Alhambra.
Those who have walked around the outer walls of the mosque of the other
Kairouan, and recall the successive doors opening into the forecourt and
into the mosque itself, will be able to guess at the plan of the church
of Fez. The great Almohad sanctuary of Tunisia is singularly free from
parasitic buildings, and may be approached as easily as that of Cordova;
but the approaches of El Kairouiyin are so built up that one never knows
at which turn of the labyrinth one may catch sight of its court of
fountains, or peep down the endless colonnades of which the Arabs say:
"The man who should try to count the columns of Kairouiyin would go
mad."
Marble floors, heavy whitewashed piers, prostrate figures in the
penumbra, rows of yellow slippers outside in the sunlight--out of such
glimpses one must reconstruct a vision of the long vistas of arches, the
blues and golds of the _mirhab_,[14] the lustre of bronze chandeliers,
and the ivory inlaying of the twelfth-century _minbar_[15] of ebony and
sandalwood.
No Christian footstep has yet profaned Kairouiyin, but fairly definite
information as to its plan has been gleaned by students of Moroccan art.
The number of its "countless" columns has been counted, and it is known
that, to the right of the _mirhab_, carved cedar doors open into a
mortuary chapel called "the mosque of the dead"--and also that in this
chapel, on Fridays, old books and precious manuscripts are sold by
auction.
This odd association of uses recalls the fact that Kairouiyin is not
only a church but a library, the University of Fez as well as its
cathedral. The beautiful Medersas with which the Merinids adorned the
city are simply the lodging-houses of the students; the classes are all
held in the courts and galleries adjoining the mosque.
El Kairouiyin was originally an oratory built in the ninth century by
Fatmah, whose father had migrated from Kairouan to Fez. Later it was
enlarged, and its cupola was surmounted by the talismans which protect
sacred edifices against rats, scorpions and serpents; but in spite of
these precautions all animal life was not successfully exorcised from
it. In the twelfth century, when the great gate Ech Chemmain was
building, a well was discovered under its foundations. The mouth of the
well was obstructed by an immense tortoise; but when the workmen
attempted to take the tortoise out she said: "Burn me rather than take
me away from here." They respected her wishes and built her into the
foundations; and since then women who suffer from the back-ache have
only to come and sit on the bench above the well to be cured.
The actual mosque, or "praying-hall," is said to be formed of a
rectangle or double cube of 90 metres by 45, and this vast space is
equally divided by rows of horseshoe arches resting on whitewashed piers
on which the lower part is swathed in finely patterned matting from
Sale. Fifteen monumental doorways lead into the mosque. Their doors are
of cedar, heavily barred and ornamented with wrought iron, and one of
them bears the name of the artisan, and the date 531 of the Hegira (the
first half of the twelfth century). The mosque also contains the two
halls of audience of the Cadi, of which one has a graceful exterior
facade with coupled lights under horseshoe arches; the library, whose
20,000 volumes are reported to have dwindled to about a thousand; the
chapel where the Masters of the Koran recite the sacred text in
fulfilment of pious bequests; the "museum" in the upper part of the
minaret, wherein a remarkable collection of ancient astronomical
instruments is said to be preserved; and the _mestonda_, or raised hall
above the court, where women come to pray.
But the crown of El Kairouiyin is the Merinid court of ablutions. This
inaccessible wonder lies close under the Medersa Attarine, one of the
oldest and most beautiful collegiate buildings of Fez; and through the
kindness of the Director of Fine Arts, who was with us, we were taken
up to the roof of the Medersa and allowed to look down into the
enclosure.
It is so closely guarded from below that from our secret of vantage we
seemed to be looking down into the heart of forbidden things. Spacious
and serene the great tiled cloister lay beneath us, water spilling over
from a central basin of marble with a cool sound to which lesser
fountains made answer from under the pyramidal green roofs of the twin
pavilions. It was near the prayer-hour, and worshippers were flocking
in, laying off their shoes and burnouses, washing their faces at the
fountains and their feet in the central tank, or stretching themselves
out in the shadow of the enclosing arcade.
This, then, was the famous court "so cool in the great heats that seated
by thy beautiful jet of water I feel the perfection of bliss"--as the
learned doctor Abou Abd Allah el Maghili sang of it; the court in which
the students gather from the adjoining halls after having committed to
memory the principals of grammar in prose and verse, the "science of
the reading of the Koran," the invention, exposition and ornaments of
style, law, medicine, theology, metaphysics and astronomy, as well as
the talismanic numbers, and the art of ascertaining by calculation the
influences of the angels, the spirits and the heavenly bodies, "the
names of the victor and the vanquished, and of the desired object and
the person who desires it."
Such is the twentieth-century curriculum of the University of Fez.
Repetition is the rule of Arab education as it is of Arab ornament. The
teaching of the University is based entirely on the mediaeval principle
of mnemonics; and as there are no examinations, no degrees, no limits to
the duration of any given course, nor is any disgrace attached to
slowness in learning, it is not surprising that many students, coming as
youths, linger by the fountain of Kairouiyin till their hair is gray.
One well-known _oulama_ has lately finished his studies after
twenty-seven years at the University, and is justly proud of the length
of his stay. The life of the scholar is easy, the way of knowledge is
long, the contrast exquisite between the foul lanes and noisy bazaars
outside and this cool heaven of learning. No wonder the students of
Kairouiyin say with the tortoise: "Burn me rather than take me away."
IV
EL ANDALOUS AND THE POTTERS' FIELD
Outside the sacred precincts of Moulay Idriss and Kairouiyin, on the
other side of the Oued Fez, lies El Andalous, the mosque which the
Andalusian Moors built when they settled in Fez in the ninth century.
It stands apart from the bazaars, on higher ground, and though it is not
_horm_ we found it less easy to see than the more famous mosques, since
the Christian loiterer in its doorways is more quickly noticed. The Fazi
are not yet used to seeing unbelievers near their sacred places. It is
only in the tumult and confusion of the _souks_ that one can linger on
the edge of the inner mysteries without becoming aware of attracting
sullen looks; and my only impression of El Andalous is of a magnificent
Almohad door and the rich blur of an interior in which there was no time
to single out the details.
Turning from its forbidden and forbidding threshold we rode on through
a poor quarter which leads to the great gate of Bab F'touh. Beyond the
gate rises a dusty rocky slope extending to the outer walls--one of
those grim intramural deserts that girdle Fez with desolation. This one
is strewn with gravestones, not enclosed, but, as in most Moroccan
cemeteries, simply cropping up like nettles between the rocks and out of
the flaming dust. Here and there among the slabs rises a well-curb or a
crumbling _koubba_. A solitary palm shoots up beside one of the shrines.
And between the crowded graves the caravan trail crosses from the outer
to the inner gate, and perpetual lines of camels and donkeys trample the
dead a little deeper into the dusty earth.
This Bab F'touh cemetery is also a kind of fondak. Poor caravans camp
there under the walls in a mire of offal and chicken-feathers and
stripped date-branches prowled through by wolfish dogs and buzzed over
by fat blue flies. Camel-drivers squat beside iron kettles over heaps of
embers, sorcerers from the Sahara offer their amulets to negro women,
peddlers with portable wooden booths sell greasy cakes that look as if
they had been made out of the garbage of the caravans, and in and out
among the unknown dead and sleeping saints circulates the squalid
indifferent life of the living poor.
A walled lane leads down from Bab F'touh to a lower slope, where the
Fazi potters have their baking-kilns. Under a series of grassy terraces
overgrown with olives we saw the archaic ovens and dripping wheels which
produce the earthenware sold in the _souks_. It is a primitive and
homely ware, still fine in shape, though dull in color and monotonous in
pattern; and stacked on the red earth under the olives, the rows of jars
and cups, in their unglazed and unpainted state, showed their classical
descent more plainly than after they have been decorated.
This green quiet hollow, where turbaned figures were moving attentively
among the primitive ovens, so near to the region of flies and offal we
had just left, woke an old phrase in our memories, and as our mules
stumbled back over the graves of Bab F'touh we understood the grim
meaning of the words: "They carried him out and buried him in the
Potters' Field."
V
MEDERSAS, BAZAARS AND AN OASIS
Fez, for two centuries and more, was in a double sense the capital of
Morocco: the centre of its trade as well as of its culture.
Culture, in fact, came to northwest Africa chiefly through the Merinid
princes. The Almohads had erected great monuments from Rabat to
Marrakech, and had fortified Fez; but their "mighty wasteful empire"
fell apart like those that had preceded it. Stability had to come from
the west; it was not till the Arabs had learned it through the Moors
that Morocco produced a dynasty strong and enlightened enough to carry
out the dream of its founders.
Whichever way the discussion sways as to the priority of eastern or
western influences on Moroccan art--whether it came to her from Syria,
and was thence passed on to Spain, or was first formed in Spain, and
afterward modified by the Moroccan imagination--there can at least be no
doubt that Fazi art and culture, in their prime, are partly the
reflection of European civilization.
Fugitives from Spain came to the new city when Moulay Idriss founded
it. One part of the town was given to them, and the river divided the
Elbali of the Almohads into the two quarters of Kairouiyin and Andalous,
which still retain their old names. But the full intellectual and
artistic flowering of Fez was delayed till the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. It seems as though the seeds of the new springtime of art,
blown across the sea from reawakening Europe, had at last given the
weltering tribes of the desert the force to create their own type of
beauty.
Nine Medersas sprang up in Fez, six of them built by the princes who
were also creating the exquisite collegiate buildings of Sale, Rabat and
old Meknez, and the enchanting mosque and minaret of Chella. The power
of these rulers also was in perpetual flux; they were always at war with
the Sultans of Tlemeen, the Christians of Spain, the princes of northern
Algeria and Tunis. But during the fourteenth century they established a
rule wide and firm enough to permit of the great outburst of art and
learning which produced the Medersas of Fez.
Until a year or two ago these collegiate buildings were as inaccessible
as the mosques; but now that the French government has undertaken their
restoration strangers may visit them under the guidance of the Fine Arts
Department.
All are built on the same plan, the plan of Sale and Rabat, which (as M.
Tranchant de Lunel[16] has pointed out) became, with slight
modifications, that of the rich private houses of Morocco. But
interesting as they are in plan and the application of ornament, their
main beauty lies in their details: in the union of chiselled plaster
with the delicate mosaic work of niches and revetements; the web-like
arabesques of the upper walls and the bold, almost Gothic sculpture of
the cedar architraves and corbels supporting them. And when all these
details are enumerated, and also the fretted panels of cedar, the bronze
doors with their great shield-like bosses, and the honeycombings and
rufflings of the gilded ceilings, there still remains the general tinge
of dry disintegration, as though all were perishing of a desert
fever--that, and the final wonder of seeing before one, in such a
setting, the continuance of the very life that went on there when the
tiles were set and the gold was new on the ceilings.
For these tottering Medersas, already in the hands of the restorers, are
still inhabited. As long as the stairway holds and the balcony has not
rotted from its corbels, the students of the University see no reason
for abandoning their lodgings above the cool fountain and the house of
prayer. The strange men giving incomprehensible orders for unnecessary
repairs need not disturb their meditations; and when the hammering grows
too loud the _oulamas_ have only to pass through the silk market or the
_souk_ of the embroiderers to the mosque of Kairouiyin, and go on
weaving the pattern of their dreams by the fountain of perfect bliss.
* * * * *
One reads of the bazaars of Fez that they have been for centuries the
central market of the country. Here are to be found not only the silks
and pottery, the Jewish goldsmiths' work, the arms and embroidered
saddlery which the city itself produces, but "morocco" from Marrakech,
rugs, tent-hangings and matting from Rabat and Sale, grain baskets from
Moulay Idriss, daggers from the Souss, and whatever European wares the
native markets consume. One looks, on the plan of Fez, at the space
covered by the bazaars; one breasts the swarms that pour through them
from dawn to dusk--and one remains perplexed, disappointed. They are
less "Oriental" than one had expected, if "Oriental" means color and
gaiety.
Sometimes, on occasion, it does mean that: as, for instance, when a
procession passes bearing the gifts for a Jewish wedding. The gray crowd
makes way for a group of musicians in brilliant caftans, and following
them comes a long file of women with uncovered faces and bejewelled
necks, balancing on their heads the dishes the guests have sent to the
feast--_kouskous_, sweet creams and syrups, "gazelles' horns" of sugar
and almonds--in delicately woven baskets, each covered with several
squares of bright gauze edged with gold. Then one remembers the
marketing of the Lady of "The Three Calendars," and Fez again becomes
the Bagdad of Al Raschid.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Fez--the bazaars. A view of the Souk el Attarine and the Quaisarya (silk
market)]
But when no exceptional events, processions, ceremonies and the like
brighten the underworld of the _souks_, their look is uniformly
melancholy. The gay bazaars, the gaily-painted houses, the flowers and
flute-playing of North Africa, are found in her Mediterranean ports, in
contact with European influences. The farther west she extends, the more
she becomes self-contained, sombre, uninfluenced, a gloomy fanatic with
her back to the walls of the Atlantic and the Atlas. Color and laughter
lie mostly along the trade-routes, where the peoples of the world come
and go in curiosity and rivalry. This ashen crowd swarming gloomily
through the dark tunnels represents the real Moghreb that is close to
the wild tribes of the "hinterland" and the grim feudal fortresses of
the Atlas. How close, one has only to go out to Sefrou on a market-day
to see.
Sefrou is a military outpost in an oasis under the Atlas, about forty
miles south of Fez. To most people the word "oasis" evokes palms and
sand; but though Morocco possesses many oases it has no pure sand and
few palms. I remember it as a considerable event when I discovered one
from my lofty window at Bou-Jeloud.
The _bled_ is made of very different stuff from the sand-ocean of the
Sahara. The light plays few tricks with it. Its monotony is wearisome
rather than impressive, and the fact that it is seldom without some form
of dwarfish vegetation makes the transition less startling when the
alluvial green is finally reached. One had always half expected it, and
it does not spring at a djinn's wave out of sterile gold.
But the fact brings its own compensations. Moroccan oases differ one
from another far more than those of South Algeria and Tunisia. Some have
no palms, others but a few, others are real palm-oases, though even in
the south (at least on the hither side of the great Atlas) none spreads
out a dense uniform roofing of metal-blue fronds like the date-oases of
Biskra or Tozeur. As for Sefrou, which Foucauld called the most
beautiful oasis of Morocco, it is simply an extremely fertile valley
with vineyards and orchards stretching up to a fine background of
mountains. But the fact that it lies just below the Atlas makes it an
important market-place and centre of caravans.
Though so near Fez it is still almost on the disputed border between the
loyal and the "unsubmissive" tribes, those that are _Blad-Makhzen_ (of
the Sultan's government) and those that are against it. Until recently,
therefore, it has been inaccessible to visitors, and even now a strongly
fortified French post dominates the height above the town. Looking down
from the fort, one distinguishes, through masses of many-tinted green, a
suburb of Arab houses in gardens, and below, on the river, Sefrou
itself, a stout little walled town with angle-towers defiantly thrust
forth toward the Atlas. It is just outside these walls that the market
is held.
It was swarming with hill-people the day we were there, and strange was
the contrast between the crowd inside the circle of picketed horses and
the white-robed cockneys from Rabat who fill the market-place of Sale.
Here at last we were in touch with un-Arab Morocco, with Berbers of the
_bled_ and the hills, whose women know no veils and no seclusion, and
who, under a thin surface of Mahometanism, preserve their old stone and
animal worship, and all the gross fetichistic beliefs from which Mahomet
dreamed of freeing Africa.
The men were lean and weather-bitten, some with negroid lips, others
with beaked noses and gaunt cheek-bones, all muscular and
fierce-looking. Some were wrapped in the black cloaks worn by the Blue
Men of the Sahara,[17] with a great orange sun embroidered on the back;
some tunicked like the Egyptian fellah, under a rough striped outer
garment trimmed with bright tufts and tassels of wool. The men of the
Rif had a braided lock on the shoulder, those of the Atlas a ringlet
over each ear, and brown woollen scarfs wound round their temples,
leaving the shaven crown bare.
The women, squatting among their kids and poultry and cheeses, glanced
at us with brilliant hennaed eyes and smiles that lifted their short
upper lips maliciously. Their thin faces were painted in stripes and
patterns of indigo. Silver necklets covered their throats, long earrings
dangled under the wool-embroidered kerchiefs bound about their temples
with a twist of camel's hair, and below the cotton shifts fastened on
their shoulders with silver clasps their legs were bare to the knee, or
covered with leather leggings to protect them from the thorny _bled_.
They seemed abler bargainers than the men, and the play of expression on
their dramatic and intensely feminine faces as they wheedled the price
of a calf out of a fierce hillsman, or haggled over a heap of dates that
a Jew with greasy ringlets was trying to secure for his secret
distillery, showed that they knew their superiority and enjoyed it.
Jews abounded in the market-place and also in the town. Sefrou contains
a large Israelite colony, and after we had wandered through the steep
streets, over gushing waterfalls spanned by "ass-backed" Spanish
bridges, and through a thatched _souk_ smelling strong of camels and the
desert, the French commissioner (the only European in Sefrou) suggested
that it might interest us to visit the _Mellah_.
It was our first sight of a typical Jewish quarter in Africa. The
_Mellah_ of Fez was almost entirely destroyed during the massacres of
1912 (which incidentally included a _pogrom_), and its distinctive
character, happily for the inhabitants, has disappeared in the
rebuilding. North African Jews are still compelled to live in ghettos,
into which they are locked at night, as in France and Germany in the
Middle Ages; and until lately the men have been compelled to go unarmed,
to wear black gabardines and black slippers, to take off their shoes
when they passed near a mosque or a saint's tomb, and in various other
ways to manifest their subjection to the ruling race. Nowhere else do
they live in conditions of such demoralizing promiscuity as in some of
the cities of Morocco. They have so long been subject to unrestricted
extortion on the part of the Moslems that even the wealthy Jews (who are
numerous) have sunk to the habits and appearance of the poorest; and
Sefrou, which has come so recently under French control, offers a good
specimen of a _Mellah_ before foreign sanitation has lighted up its dark
places.
Dark indeed they were. After wandering through narrow and malodorous
lanes, and slipping about in the offal of the _souks_, we were suddenly
led under an arch over which should have been written "All light
abandon--" and which made all we had seen before seem clean and bright
and airy.
The beneficent African sun dries up and purifies the immemorial filth
of Africa; where that sun enters there is none of the foulness of damp.
But into the _Mellah_ of Sefrou it never comes, for the streets form a
sort of subterranean rabbit-warren under the upper stories of a solid
agglomeration of tall houses--a buried city lit even at midday by
oil-lamps hanging in the goldsmiths' shops and under the archways of the
black and reeking staircases.
It was a Jewish feast-day. The Hebrew stalls in the _souks_ were closed,
and the whole population of the _Mellah_ thronged its tunnels in holiday
dress. Hurrying past us were young women with plump white faces and
lovely eyes, turbaned in brilliant gauzes, with draperies of dirty
curtain muslin over tawdry brocaded caftans. Their paler children
swarmed about them, little long-earringed girls like wax dolls dressed
in scraps of old finery, little boys in tattered caftans with
long-lashed eyes and wily smiles; and, waddling in the rear, their
unwieldy grandmothers, huge lumps of tallowy flesh who were probably
still in the thirties.
With them were the men of the family, in black gabardines and
skull-caps: sallow striplings, incalculably aged ancestors,
round-bellied husbands and fathers bumping along like black balloons;
all hastening to the low doorways dressed with lamps and paper garlands
behind which the feast was spread.
One is told that in cities like Fez and Marrakech the Hebrew quarter
conceals flowery patios and gilded rooms with the heavy European
furniture that rich Jews delight in. Perhaps even in the _Mellah_ of
Sefrou, among the ragged figures shuffling past us, there were some few
with bags of gold in their walls and rich stuffs hid away in painted
coffers; but for patios and flowers and daylight there seemed no room in
the dark _bolgia_ they inhabit. No wonder the babies of the Moroccan
ghettos are nursed on date-brandy, and their elders doze away to death
under its consoling spell.
VI
THE LAST GLIMPSE
It is well to bid good-by to Fez at night--a moonlight night for choice.
Then, after dining at the Arab inn of Fez Eldjid--where it might be
inconvenient to lodge, but where it is extremely pleasant to eat
_kouskous_ under a grape-trellis in a tiled and fountained patio--this
pleasure over, one may set out on foot and stray down the lanes toward
Fez Elbali.
Not long ago the gates between the different quarters of the city used
to be locked every night at nine o'clock, and the merchant who went out
to dine in another part of the town had to lodge with his host. Now this
custom has been given up, and one may roam about untroubled through the
old quarters, grown as silent as the grave after the intense life of the
bazaars has ceased at nightfall.
Nobody is in the streets: wandering from ghostly passage to passage, one
hears no step but that of the watchman with staff and lantern. Presently
there appears, far off, a light like a low-flying firefly; as it comes
nearer, it is seen to proceed from the _Mellah_ lamp of open-work brass
that a servant carries ahead of two merchants on their way home from
Elbali. The merchants are grave men: they move softly and slowly on
their fat slippered feet, pausing from time to time in confidential
talk. At last they stop before a house wall with a low blue door barred
by heavy hasps of iron. The servant lifts the lamp and knocks. There is
a long delay; then, with infinite caution, the door is opened a few
inches, and another lifted light shines faintly on lustrous tiled walls,
and on the face of a woman slave who quickly veils herself. Evidently
the master is a man of standing, and the house well guarded. The two
merchants touch each other on the right shoulder, one of them passes in,
and his friend goes on through the moonlight, his servant's lantern
dancing ahead.
But here we are in an open space looking down one of the descents to El
Attarine. A misty radiance washes the tall houses, the garden-walls, the
archways; even the moonlight does not whiten Fez, but only turns its
gray to tarnished silver. Overhead in a tower window a single light
twinkles: women's voices rise and fall on the roofs. In a rich man's
doorway slaves are sleeping, huddled on the tiles. A cock crows from
somebody's dunghill; a skeleton dog prowls by for garbage.
Everywhere is the loud rush or the low crooning of water, and over every
wall comes the scent of jasmine and rose. Far off, from the red
purgatory between the walls, sounds the savage thrum-thrum of a negro
orgy; here all is peace and perfume. A minaret springs up between the
roof like a palm, and from its balcony the little white figure bends
over and drops a blessing on all the loveliness and all the squalor.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] The Ghetto in African towns. All the jewellers in Morocco are Jews.
[11] Learned man, doctor of the university.
[12] The Sultan's government.
[13] Moslem monastery.
[14] Niche in the sanctuary of mosques.
[15] Movable pulpit.
[16] In _France-Maroc_, _No._ 1.
[17] So called because of the indigo dye of their tunics, which leaves a
permanent stain on their bodies.
IV
MARRAKECH
I
THE WAY THERE
There are countless Arab tales of evil Djinns who take the form of
sandstorms and hot winds to overwhelm exhausted travellers.
In spite of the new French road between Rabat and Marrakech the memory
of such tales rises up insistently from every mile of the level red
earth and the desolate stony stretches of the _bled_. As long as the
road runs in sight of the Atlantic breakers they give the scene
freshness and life; but when it bends inland and stretches away across
the wilderness the sense of the immensity and immobility of Africa
descends on one with an intolerable oppression.
The road traverses no villages, and not even a ring of nomad tents is
visible in the distance on the wide stretches of arable land. At
infrequent intervals our motor passed a train of laden mules, or a group
of peasants about a well, and sometimes, far off, a fortified farm
profiled its thick-set angle-towers against the sky, or a white _koubba_
floated like a mirage above the brush; but these rare signs of life
intensified the solitude of the long miles between.
At midday we were refreshed by the sight of the little oasis around the
military-post of Settat. We lunched there with the commanding officer,
in a cool Arab house about a flowery patio; but that brief interval
over, the fiery plain began again. After Settat the road runs on for
miles across the waste to the gorge of the Oued Ouem; and beyond the
river it climbs to another plain so desperate in its calcined aridity
that the prickly scrub of the wilderness we had left seemed like the
vegetation of an oasis. For fifty kilometres the earth under our wheels
was made up of a kind of glistening red slag covered with pebbles and
stones. Not the scantest and toughest of rock-growths thrust a leaf
through its brassy surface; not a well-head or a darker depression of
the rock gave sign of a trickle of water. Everything around us glittered
with the same unmerciful dryness.
A long way ahead loomed the line of the Djebilets, the Djinn-haunted
mountains guarding Marrakech on the north. When at last we reached them
the wicked glister of their purple flanks seemed like a volcanic
upheaval of the plain. For some time we had watched the clouds gathering
over them, and as we got to the top of the defile rain was falling from
a fringe of thunder to the south. Then the vapours lifted, and we saw
below us another red plain with an island of palms in its centre.
Mysteriously, from the heart of the palms, a tower shot up, as if alone
in the wilderness; behind it stood the sun-streaked cliffs of the Atlas,
with snow summits appearing and vanishing through the storm.
As we drove downward the rock gradually began to turn to red earth
fissured by yellow streams, and stray knots of palms sprang up, lean and
dishevelled, about well-heads where people were watering camels and
donkeys. To the east, dominating the oasis, the twin peaked hills of the
Ghilis, fortified to the crest, mounted guard over invisible Marrakech;
but still, above the palms, we saw only that lonely and triumphant
tower.
Presently we crossed the Oued Tensif on an old bridge built by Moroccan
engineers. Beyond the river were more palms, then olive-orchards, then
the vague sketch of the new European settlement, with a few shops and
cafes on avenues ending suddenly in clay pits, and at last Marrakech
itself appeared to us, in the form of a red wall across a red
wilderness.
We passed through a gate and were confronted by other ramparts. Then we
entered an outskirt of dusty red lanes bordered by clay hovels with
draped figures slinking by like ghosts. After that more walls, more
gates, more endlessly winding lanes, more gates again, more turns, a
dusty open space with donkeys and camels and negroes; a final wall with
a great door under a lofty arch--and suddenly we were in the palace of
the Bahia, among flowers and shadows and falling water.
II
THE BAHIA
Whoever would understand Marrakech must begin by mounting at sunset to
the roof of the Bahia.
Outspread below lies the oasis-city of the south, flat and vast as the
great nomad camp it really is, its low roofs extending on all sides to a
belt of blue palms ringed with desert. Only two or three minarets and a
few noblemen's houses among gardens break the general flatness; but they
are hardly noticeable, so irresistibly is the eye drawn toward two
dominant objects--the white wall of the Atlas and the red tower of the
Koutoubya.
Foursquare, untapering, the great tower lifts its flanks of ruddy stone.
Its large spaces of unornamented wall, its triple tier of clustered
openings, lightening as they rise from the severe rectangular lights of
the first stage to the graceful arcade below the parapet, have the
stern harmony of the noblest architecture. The Koutoubya would be
magnificent anywhere; in this flat desert it is grand enough to face the
Atlas.
The Almohad conquerors who built the Koutoubya and embellished Marrakech
dreamed a dream of beauty that extended from the Guadalquivir to the
Sahara; and at its two extremes they placed their watch-towers. The
Giralda watched over civilized enemies in a land of ancient Roman
culture; the Koutoubya stood at the edge of the world, facing the hordes
of the desert.
The Almoravid princes who founded Marrakech came from the black desert
of Senegal; themselves were leaders of wild hordes. In the history of
North Africa the same cycle has perpetually repeated itself. Generation
after generation of chiefs have flowed in from the desert or the
mountains, overthrown their predecessors, massacred, plundered, grown
rich, built sudden palaces, encouraged their great servants to do the
same; then fallen on them, and taken their wealth and their palaces.
Usually some religious fury, some ascetic wrath against the
self-indulgence of the cities, has been the motive of these attacks; but
invariably the same results followed, as they followed when the Germanic
barbarians descended on Italy. The conquerors, infected with luxury and
mad with power, built vaster palaces, planned grander cities; but
Sultans and Viziers camped in their golden houses as if on the march,
and the mud huts of the tribesmen within their walls were but one degree
removed from the mud-walled tents of the _bled_.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Marrakech--The "Little Garden" (with painted doors) in background,
Palace of the Bahia]
This was more especially the case with Marrakech, a city of Berbers and
blacks, and the last outpost against the fierce black world beyond the
Atlas from which its founders came. When one looks at its site, and
considers its history, one can only marvel at the height of civilization
it attained.
The Bahia itself, now the palace of the Resident General, though built
less than a hundred years ago, is typical of the architectural
megalomania of the great southern chiefs. It was built by Ba-Ahmed, the
all-powerful black Vizier of the Sultan Moulay-el-Hassan.[18] Ba-Ahmed
was evidently an artist and an archaeologist. His ambition was to
re-create a Palace of Beauty such as the Moors had built in the prime of
Arab art, and he brought to Marrakech skilled artificers of Fez, the
last surviving masters of the mystery of chiselled plaster and ceramic
mosaics and honeycombing of gilded cedar. They came, they built the
Bahia, and it remains the loveliest and most fantastic of Moroccan
palaces.
Court within court, garden beyond garden, reception halls, private
apartments, slaves' quarters, sunny prophets' chambers on the roofs and
baths in vaulted crypts, the labyrinth of passages and rooms stretches
away over several acres of ground. A long court enclosed in pale-green
trellis-work, where pigeons plume themselves about a great tank and the
dripping tiles glitter with refracted sunlight, leads to the fresh gloom
of a cypress garden, or under jasmine tunnels bordered with running
water; and these again open on arcaded apartments faced with tiles and
stucco-work, where, in a languid twilight, the hours drift by to the
ceaseless music of the fountains.
The beauty of Moroccan palaces is made up of details of ornament and
refinements of sensuous delight too numerous to record; but to get an
idea of their general character it is worth while to cross the Court of
Cypresses at the Bahia and follow a series of low-studded passages that
turn on themselves till they reach the centre of the labyrinth. Here,
passing by a low padlocked door leading to a crypt, and known as the
"Door of the Vizier's Treasure-House," one comes on a painted portal
that opens into a still more secret sanctuary: The apartment of the
Grand Vizier's Favourite.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Felix, Marrakech_
Marrakech--the great court, Palace of the Bahia]
This lovely prison, from which all sight and sound of the outer world
are excluded, is built about an atrium paved with disks of turquoise and
black and white. Water trickles from a central _vasca_ of alabaster into
a hexagonal mosaic channel in the pavement. The walls, which are at
least twenty-five feet high, are roofed with painted beams resting on
panels of traceried stucco in which is set a clerestory of jewelled
glass. On each side of the atrium are long recessed rooms closed by
vermilion doors painted with gold arabesques and vases of spring
flowers; and into these shadowy inner rooms, spread with rugs and divans
and soft pillows, no light comes except when their doors are opened
into the atrium. In this fabulous place it was my good luck to be lodged
while I was at Marrakech.
In a climate where, after the winter snow has melted from the Atlas,
every breath of air for long months is a flame of fire, these enclosed
rooms in the middle of the palaces are the only places of refuge from
the heat. Even in October the temperature of the favourite's apartment
was deliciously reviving after a morning in the bazaars or the dusty
streets, and I never came back to its wet tiles and perpetual twilight
without the sense of plunging into a deep sea-pool.
From far off, through circuitous corridors, came the scent of
citron-blossom and jasmine, with sometimes a bird's song before dawn,
sometimes a flute's wail at sunset, and always the call of the muezzin
in the night; but no sunlight reached the apartment except in remote
rays through the clerestory, and no air except through one or two broken
panes.
Sometimes, lying on my divan, and looking out through the vermilion
doors, I used to surprise a pair of swallows dropping down from their
nest in the cedar-beams to preen themselves on the fountain's edge or in
the channels of the pavement; for the roof was full of birds who came
and went through the broken panes of the clerestory. Usually they were
my only visitors; but one morning just at daylight I was waked by a soft
tramp of bare feet, and saw, silhouetted against the cream-coloured
walls, a procession of eight tall negroes in linen tunics, who filed
noiselessly across the atrium like a moving frieze of bronze. In that
fantastic setting, and the hush of that twilight hour, the vision was so
like the picture of a "Seraglio Tragedy," some fragment of a Delacroix
or Decamps floating up into the drowsy brain, that I almost fancied I
had seen the ghosts of Ba-Ahmed's executioners revisiting with dagger
and bowstring the scene of an unavenged crime.
[Illustration: _From a photograph taken by Mme. la Marquis de Segonzac_
Marrakech--apartment of the grand vizier's favorite, Palace of the
Bahia]
A cock crew, and they vanished ... and when I made the mistake of
asking what they had been doing in my room at that hour I was told (as
though it were the most natural thing in the world) that they were the
municipal lamp-lighters of Marrakech, whose duty it is to refill every
morning the two hundred acetylene lamps lighting the palace of the
Resident General. Such unforeseen aspects, in this mysterious city, do
the most ordinary domestic functions wear.
III
THE BAZAARS
Passing out of the enchanted circle of the Bahia it is startling to
plunge into the native life about its gates.
Marrakech is the great market of the south; and the south means not only
the Atlas with its feudal chiefs and their wild clansmen, but all that
lies beyond of heat and savagery: the Sahara of the veiled Touaregs,
Dakka, Timbuctoo, Senegal and the Soudan. Here come the camel caravans
from Demnat and Tameslout, from the Moulouya and the Souss, and those
from the Atlantic ports and the confines of Algeria. The population of
this old city of the southern march has always been even more mixed
than that of the northerly Moroccan towns. It is made up of the
descendants of all the peoples conquered by a long line of Sultans who
brought their trains of captives across the sea from Moorish Spain and
across the Sahara from Timbuctoo. Even in the highly cultivated region
on the lower slopes of the Atlas there are groups of varied ethnic
origin, the descendants of tribes transplanted by long-gone rulers and
still preserving many of their original characteristics.
In the bazaars all these peoples meet and mingle: cattle-dealers,
olive-growers, peasants from the Atlas, the Souss and the Draa, Blue Men
of the Sahara, blacks from Senegal and the Soudan, coming in to trade
with the wool-merchants, tanners, leather-merchants, silk-weavers,
armourers, and makers of agricultural implements.
Dark, fierce and fanatical are these narrow _souks_ of Marrakech. They
are mere mud lanes roofed with rushes, as in South Tunisia and
Timbuctoo, and the crowds swarming in them are so dense that it is
hardly possible, at certain hours, to approach the tiny raised kennels
where the merchants sit like idols among their wares. One feels at once
that something more than the thought of bargaining--dear as this is to
the African heart--animates these incessantly moving throngs. The Souks
of Marrakech seem, more than any others, the central organ of a native
life that extends far beyond the city walls into secret clefts of the
mountains and far-off oases where plots are hatched and holy wars
fomented--farther still, to yellow deserts whence negroes are secretly
brought across the Atlas to that inmost recess of the bazaar where the
ancient traffic in flesh and blood still surreptitiously goes on.
All these many threads of the native life, woven of greed and lust, of
fetichism and fear and blind hate of the stranger, form, in the _souks_,
a thick network in which at times one's feet seem literally to stumble.
Fanatics in sheepskins glowering from the guarded thresholds of the
mosques, fierce tribesmen with inlaid arms in their belts and the
fighters' tufts of wiry hair escaping from camel's-hair turbans, mad
negroes standing stark naked in niches of the walls and pouring down
Soudanese incantations upon the fascinated crowd, consumptive Jews with
pathos and cunning in their large eyes and smiling lips, lusty
slave-girls with earthen oil-jars resting against swaying hips,
almond-eyed boys leading fat merchants by the hand, and bare-legged
Berber women, tattooed and insolently gay, trading their striped
blankets, or bags of dried roses and irises, for sugar, tea or
Manchester cottons--from all these hundreds of unknown and unknowable
people, bound together by secret affinities, or intriguing against each
other with secret hate, there emanates an atmosphere of mystery and
menace more stifling than the smell of camels and spices and black
bodies and smoking fry which hangs like a fog under the close roofing of
the _souks_.
And suddenly one leaves the crowd and the turbid air for one of those
quiet corners that are like the back-waters of the bazaars: a small
square where a vine stretches across a shop-front and hangs ripe
clusters of grapes through the reeds. In the patterning of grape-shadows
a very old donkey, tethered to a stone-post, dozes under a pack-saddle
that is never taken off; and near by, in a matted niche, sits a very old
man in white. This is the chief of the Guild of "morocco" workers of
Marrakech, the most accomplished craftsman in Morocco in the preparing
and using of the skins to which the city gives its name. Of these sleek
moroccos, cream-white or dyed with cochineal or pomegranate skins, are
made the rich bags of the Chleuh dancing-boys, the embroidered slippers
for the harem, the belts and harnesses that figure so largely in
Moroccan trade--and of the finest, in old days, were made the
pomegranate-red morocco bindings of European bibliophiles.
From this peaceful corner one passes into the barbaric splendor of a
_souk_ hung with innumerable plumy bunches of floss silk--skeins of
citron yellow, crimson, grasshopper green and pure purple. This is the
silk-spinners' quarter, and next to it comes that of the dyers, with
great seething vats into which the raw silk is plunged, and ropes
overhead where the rainbow masses are hung out to dry.
Another turn leads into the street of the metalworkers and armourers,
where the sunlight through the thatch flames on round flanks of beaten
copper or picks out the silver bosses of ornate powder-flasks and
pistols; and near by is the _souk_ of the plough-shares, crowded with
peasants in rough Chleuh cloaks who are waiting to have their archaic
ploughs repaired, and that of the smiths, in an outer lane of mud huts
where negroes squat in the dust and sinewy naked figures in tattered
loincloths bend over blazing coals. And here ends the maze of the
bazaars.
IV
THE AGDAL
One of the Almohad Sultans who, during their hundred years of empire,
scattered such great monuments from Seville to the Atlas, felt the need
of coolness about his southern capital, and laid out the olive-yards of
the Agdal.
To the south of Marrakech the Agdal extends for many acres between the
outer walls of the city and the edge of the palm-oasis--a continuous
belt of silver foliage traversed by deep red lanes, and enclosing a
wide-spreading summer palace and two immense reservoirs walled with
masonry; and the vision of these serene sheets of water, in which the
olives and palms are motionlessly reflected, is one of the most poetic
impressions in that city of inveterate poetry.
On the edge of one of the reservoirs a sentimental Sultan built in the
last century a little pleasure-house called the Menara. It is composed
of a few rooms with a two-storied loggia looking across the water to the
palm-groves, and surrounded by a garden of cypresses and orange-trees.
The Menara, long since abandoned, is usually uninhabited; but on the day
when we drove through the Agdal we noticed, at the gate, a group of
well-dressed servants holding mules with embroidered saddle-clothes.
The French officer who was with us asked the porter what was going on,
and he replied that the Chief of the Guild of Wool-Merchants had hired
the pavilion for a week and invited a few friends to visit him. They
were now, the porter added, taking tea in the loggia above the lake; and
the host, being informed of our presence, begged that we should do him
and his friends the honour of visiting the pavilion.
In reply to this amiable invitation we crossed an empty saloon
surrounded with divans and passed out onto the loggia where the
wool-merchant and his guests were seated. They were evidently persons of
consequence: large bulky men wrapped in fresh muslins and reclining side
by side on muslin-covered divans and cushions. Black slaves had placed
before them brass trays with pots of mint-tea, glasses in filigree
stands, and dishes of gazelles' horns and sugar-plums; and they sat
serenely absorbing these refreshments and gazing with large calm eyes
upon the motionless water and the reflected trees.
So, we were told, they would probably spend the greater part of their
holiday. The merchant's cooks had taken possession of the kitchens, and
toward sunset a sumptuous repast of many courses would be carried into
the saloon on covered trays, and the guests would squat about it on rugs
of Rabat, tearing with their fingers the tender chicken wings and small
artichokes cooked in oil, plunging their fat white hands to the wrist
into huge mounds of saffron and rice, and washing off the traces of each
course in the brass basin of perfumed water carried about by a young
black slave-girl with hoop-earrings and a green-and-gold scarf about her
hips.
Then the singing-girls would come out from Marrakech, squat round-faced
young women heavily hennaed and bejewelled, accompanied by gaunt
musicians in bright caftans; and for hours they would sing sentimental
or obscene ballads to the persistent maddening twang of violin and flute
and drum. Meanwhile fiery brandy or sweet champagne would probably be
passed around between the steaming glasses of mint-tea which the slaves
perpetually refilled; or perhaps the sultry air, the heavy meal, the
scent of the garden and the vertiginous repetition of the music would
suffice to plunge these sedentary worthies into the delicious coma in
which every festive evening in Morocco ends.
The next day would be spent in the same manner, except that probably the
Chleuh boys with sidelong eyes and clean caftans would come instead of
the singing-girls, and weave the arabesque of their dance in place of
the runic pattern of the singing. But the result would always be the
same: a prolonged state of obese ecstasy culminating in the collapse of
huge heaps of snoring muslin on the divans against the wall. Finally at
the week's end the wool-merchant and his friends would all ride back
with dignity to the bazaar.
V
ON THE ROOFS
"Should you like to see the Chleuh boys dance?" some one asked.
"There they are," another of our companions added, pointing to a dense
ring of spectators on one side of the immense dusty square at the
entrance of the _souks_--the "Square of the Dead" as it is called, in
memory of the executions that used to take place under one of its grim
red gates.
It is the square of the living now, the centre of all the life,
amusement and gossip of Marrakech, and the spectators are so thickly
packed about the story-tellers, snake-charmers and dancers who frequent
it that one can guess what is going on within each circle only by the
wailing monologue or the persistent drum-beat that proceeds from it.
Ah, yes--we should indeed like to see the Chleuh boys dance; we who,
since we had been in Morocco, had seen no dancing, heard no singing,
caught no single glimpse of merry-making! But how were we to get within
sight of them?
On one side of the "Square of the Dead" stands a large house, of
European build, but modelled on Oriental lines: the office of the French
municipal administration. The French Government no longer allows its
offices to be built within the walls of Moroccan towns, and this house
goes back to the epic days of the Caid Sir Harry Maclean, to whom it was
presented by the fantastic Abd-el-Aziz when the Caid was his favourite
companion as well as his military adviser.
At the suggestion of the municipal officials we mounted the stairs and
looked down on the packed square. There can be no more Oriental sight
this side of the Atlas and the Sahara. The square is surrounded by low
mud-houses, fondaks, cafes, and the like. In one corner, near the
archway leading into the _souks_, is the fruit-market, where the
red-gold branches of unripe dates[19] for animal fodder are piled up in
great stacks, and dozens of donkeys are coming and going, their
panniers laden with fruits and vegetables which are being heaped on the
ground in gorgeous pyramids: purple egg-plants, melons, cucumbers,
bright orange pumpkins, mauve and pink and violet onions, rusty crimson
pomegranates and the gold grapes of Sefrou and Sale, all mingled with
fresh green sheaves of mint and wormwood.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from "France-Maroc"_
Marrakech--a fondak]
In the middle of the square sit the story-tellers' turbaned audiences.
Beyond these are the humbler crowds about the wild-ringleted
snake-charmers with their epileptic gestures and hissing incantations,
and farther off, in the densest circle of all, we could just discern the
shaved heads and waving surpliced arms of the dancing-boys. Under an
archway near by an important personage in white muslin, mounted on a
handsome mule and surrounded by his attendants, sat with motionless face
and narrowed eyes gravely following the movements of the dancers.
Suddenly, as we stood watching the extraordinary animation of the scene,
a reddish light overspread it, and one of our companions exclaimed:
"Ah--a dust-storm!"
In that very moment it was upon us: a red cloud rushing across the
square out of nowhere, whirling the date-branches over the heads of the
squatting throngs, tumbling down the stacks of fruits and vegetables,
rooting up the canvas awnings over the lemonade-sellers' stalls and
before the cafe doors, huddling the blinded donkeys under the walls of
the fondak, and stripping to the hips the black slave-girls scudding
home from the _souks_.
Such a blast would instantly have scattered any western crowd, but "the
patient East" remained undisturbed, rounding its shoulders before the
storm and continuing to follow attentively the motions of the dancers
and the turns of the story-tellers. By and bye, however, the gale grew
too furious, and the spectators were so involved in collapsing tents,
eddying date-branches and stampeding mules that the square began to
clear, save for the listeners about the most popular story-teller, who
continued to sit on unmoved. And then, at the height of the storm, they
too were abruptly scattered by the rush of a cavalcade across the
square. First came a handsomely dressed man, carrying before him on his
peaked saddle a tiny boy in a gold-embroidered orange caftan, in front
of whom he held an open book; and behind them a train of white-draped
men on showily harnessed mules, followed by musicians in bright dresses.
It was only a Circumcision procession on its way to the mosque; but the
dust-enveloped rider in his rich dress, clutching the bewildered child
to his breast, looked like some Oriental prince trying to escape with
his son from the fiery embraces of desert Erl-maidens.
As swiftly as it rose the storm subsided, leaving the fruit-market in
ruins under a sky as clear and innocent as an infant's eye. The Chleuh
boys had vanished with the rest, like marionettes swept into a drawer by
an impatient child; but presently, toward sunset, we were told that we
were to see them after all, and our hosts led us up to the roof of the
Caid's house.
The city lay stretched before us like one immense terrace circumscribed
by palms. The sky was pure blue, verging to turquoise green where the
Atlas floated above mist; and facing the celestial snows stood the
Koutoubya, red in the sunset.
People were beginning to come out on the roofs: it was the hour of
peace, of ablutions, of family life on the house-tops. Groups of women
in pale tints and floating veils spoke to each other from terrace to
terrace, through the chatter of children and the guttural calls of
bedizened negresses. And presently, on the roof adjoining ours, appeared
the slim dancing-boys with white caftans and hennaed feet.
The three swarthy musicians who accompanied them crossed their lean legs
on the tiles and set up their throb-throb and thrum-thrum, and on a
narrow strip of terrace the youths began their measured steps.
It was a grave static dance, such as David may have performed before the
Ark; untouched by mirth or folly, as beseemed a dance in that sombre
land, and borrowing its magic from its gravity. Even when the pace
quickened with the stress of the music the gestures still continued to
be restrained and hieratic; only when, one by one, the performers
detached themselves from the round and knelt before us for the _peseta_
it is customary to press on their foreheads, did one see, by the
moisture which made the coin adhere, how quick and violent their
movements had been.
The performance, like all things Oriental, like the life, the patterns,
the stories, seemed to have no beginning and no end: it just went
monotonously and indefatigably on till fate snipped its thread by
calling us away to dinner. And so at last we went down into the dust of
the streets refreshed by that vision of white youths dancing on the
house-tops against the gold of a sunset that made them look--in spite of
ankle-bracelets and painted eyes--almost as guileless and happy as the
round of angels on the roof of Fra Angelico's Nativity.
VI
THE SAADIAN TOMBS
On one of the last days of our stay in Marrakech we were told, almost
mysteriously, that permission was to be given us to visit the tombs of
the Saadian Sultans.
Though Marrakech has been in the hands of the French since 1912, the
very existence of these tombs was unknown to the authorities till 1917.
Then the Sultan's government privately informed the Resident General
that an unsuspected treasure of Moroccan art was falling into ruin, and
after some hesitation it was agreed that General Lyautey and the
Director of Fine Arts should be admitted to the mosque containing the
tombs, on the express condition that the French Government undertook to
repair them. While we were at Rabat General Lyautey had described his
visit to us, and it was at his request that the Sultan authorized us to
see the mosque, to which no travellers had as yet been admitted.
With a good deal of ceremony, and after the customary _pourparlers_ with
the great Pasha who controls native affairs at Marrakech, an hour was
fixed for our visit, and we drove through long lanes of mud-huts to a
lost quarter near the walls. At last we came to a deserted square on one
side of which stands the long low mosque of Mansourah with a
turquoise-green minaret embroidered with traceries of sculptured terra
cotta. Opposite the mosque is a gate in a crumbling wall; and at this
gate the Pasha's Cadi was to meet us with the keys of the mausoleum. But
we waited in vain. Oriental dilatoriness, or a last secret reluctance to
admit unbelievers to a holy place, had caused the Cadi to forget his
appointment; and we drove away disappointed.
The delay drove us to wondering about these mysterious Saadian Sultans,
who, though coming so late in the annals of Morocco, had left at least
one monument said to be worthy of the Merinid tradition. And the tale of
the Saadians is worth telling.
They came from Arabia to the Draa (the fruitful country south of the
Great Atlas) early in the fifteenth century, when the Merinid empire was
already near disintegration. Like all previous invaders they preached
the doctrine of a pure Islamism to the polytheistic and indifferent
Berbers, and found a ready hearing because they denounced the evils of a
divided empire, and also because the whole of Morocco was in revolt
against the Christian colonies of Spain and Portugal, which had
encircled the coast from Ceuta to Agadir with a chain of fortified
counting-houses. To _bouter dehors_ the money-making unbeliever was an
object that found adherents from the Rif to the Sahara, and the Saadian
cherifs soon rallied a mighty following to their standard. Islam, though
it never really gave a creed to the Berbers, supplied them with a
war-cry as potent to-day as when it first rang across Barbary.
The history of the Saadians is a foreshortened record of that of all
their predecessors. They overthrew the artistic and luxurious Merinids,
and in their turn became artistic and luxurious. Their greatest Sultan,
Abou-el-Abbas, surnamed "The Golden," after defeating the Merinids and
putting an end to Christian rule in Morocco by the crushing victory of
El-Ksar (1578), bethought him in his turn of enriching himself and
beautifying his capital, and with this object in view turned his
attention to the black kingdoms of the south.
Senegal and the Soudan, which had been Mohammedan since the eleventh
century, had attained in the sixteenth century a high degree of
commercial wealth and artistic civilization. The Sultanate of Timbuctoo
seems in reality to have been a thriving empire, and if Timbuctoo was
not the Claude-like vision of Carthaginian palaces which it became in
the tales of imaginative travellers, it apparently had something of the
magnificence of Fez and Marrakech.
The Saadian army, after a march of four and a half months across the
Sahara, conquered the whole black south. Senegal, the Soudan and Bornou
submitted to Abou-el-Abbas, the Sultan of Timbuctoo was dethroned, and
the celebrated negro jurist Ahmed-Baba was brought a prisoner to
Marrakech, where his chief sorrow appears to have been for the loss of
his library of 1,600 volumes--though he declared that, of all the
numerous members of his family, it was he who possessed the smallest
number of books.
Besides this learned bibliophile, the Sultan Abou-el-Abbas brought back
with him an immense booty, principally of ingots of gold, from which he
took his surname of "The Golden"; and as the result of the expedition
Marrakech was embellished with mosques and palaces for which the Sultan
brought marble from Carrara, paying for it with loaves of sugar from the
sugar-cane that the Saadians grew in the Souss.
In spite of these brilliant beginnings the rule of the dynasty was short
and without subsequent interest. Based on a fanatical antagonism
against the foreigner, and fed by the ever-wakeful hatred of the Moors
for their Spanish conquerors, it raised ever higher the Chinese walls of
exclusiveness which the more enlightened Almohads and Merinids had
sought to overthrow. Henceforward less and less daylight and fresh air
were to penetrate into the _souks_ of Morocco.
The day after our unsuccessful attempt to see the tombs of these
ephemeral rulers we received another message, naming an hour for our
visit; and this time the Pasha's representative was waiting in the
archway. We followed his lead, under the openly mistrustful glances of
the Arabs who hung about the square, and after picking our way through a
twisting land between walls we came out into a filthy nettle-grown space
against the ramparts. At intervals of about thirty feet splendid square
towers rose from the walls, and facing one of them lay a group of
crumbling buildings masked behind other ruins.
We were led first into a narrow mosque or praying-chapel, like those of
the Medersas, with a coffered cedar ceiling resting on four marble
columns, and traceried walls of unusually beautiful design. From this
chapel we passed into the hall of the tombs, a cube about forty feet
square. Fourteen columns of colored marble sustain a domed ceiling of
gilded cedar, with an exterior deambulatory under a tunnel-vaulting also
roofed with cedar. The walls are, as usual, of chiselled stucco, above
revetements of ceramic mosaic, and between the columns lie the white
marble cenotaphs of the Saadian Sultans, covered with Arabic
inscriptions in the most delicate low-relief. Beyond this central
mausoleum, and balancing the praying-chapel, lies another long narrow
chamber, gold-ceilinged also, and containing a few tombs.
It is difficult, in describing the architecture of Morocco, to avoid
producing an impression of monotony. The ground-plan of mosques and
Medersas is always practically the same; and the same elements, few in
number and endlessly repeated, make up the materials and the form of the
ornament. The effect upon the eye is not monotonous, for a patient art
has infinitely varied the combinations of pattern and the juxtapositions
of color; while the depth of undercutting of the stucco, and the
treatment of the bronze doors and of the carved cedar corbels,
necessarily varies with the periods which produced them.
But in the Saadian mausoleum a new element has been introduced which
makes this little monument a thing apart. The marble columns supporting
the roof appear to be unique in Moroccan architecture, and they lend
themselves to a new roof-plan which relates the building rather to the
tradition of Venice or Byzantine by way of Kairouan and Cordova.
The late date of the monument precludes any idea of a direct artistic
tradition. The most probable explanation seems to be that the architect
of the mausoleum was familiar with European Renaissance architecture,
and saw the beauty to be derived from using precious marbles not merely
as ornament, but in the Roman and Italian way, as a structural element.
Panels and fountain-basins are ornament, and ornament changes nothing
essential in architecture; but when, for instance, heavy square piers
are replaced by detached columns, a new style results.
It is not only the novelty of its plan that makes the Saadian mausoleum
singular among Moroccan monuments. The details of its ornament are of
the most intricate refinement: it seems as though the last graces of the
expiring Merinid art had been gathered up into this rare blossom. And
the slant of sunlight on lustrous columns, the depths of fretted gold,
the dusky ivory of the walls and the pure white of the cenotaphs, so
classic in spareness of ornament and simplicity of design--this subtle
harmony of form and color gives to the dim rich chapel an air of
dream-like unreality.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by M. Andre Chevrillon_
Marrakech--Mausoleum of the Saadian Sultans (sixteenth century) showing
the tombs]
And how can it seem other than a dream? Who can have conceived, in the
heart of a savage Saharan camp, the serenity and balance of this hidden
place? And how came such fragile loveliness to survive, preserving,
behind a screen of tumbling walls, of nettles and offal and dead beasts,
every curve of its traceries and every cell of its honeycombing?
Such questions inevitably bring one back to the central riddle of the
mysterious North African civilization: the perpetual flux and the
immovable stability, the barbarous customs and sensuous refinements, the
absence of artistic originality and the gift for regrouping borrowed
motives, the patient and exquisite workmanship and the immediate neglect
and degradation of the thing once made.
Revering the dead and camping on their graves, elaborating exquisite
monuments only to abandon and defile them, venerating scholarship and
wisdom and living in ignorance and grossness, these gifted races,
perpetually struggling to reach some higher level of culture from which
they have always been swept down by a fresh wave of barbarism, are still
only a people in the making.
It may be that the political stability which France is helping them to
acquire will at last give their higher qualities time for fruition; and
when one looks at the mausoleum of Marrakech and the Medersas of Fez one
feels that, were the experiment made on artistic grounds alone, it would
yet be well worth making.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Moulay-el-Hassan reigned from 1873 to 1894.
[19] Dates do not ripen in Morocco.
V
HAREMS AND CEREMONIES
I
THE CROWD IN THE STREET
To occidental travellers the most vivid impression produced by a first
contact with the Near East is the surprise of being in a country where
the human element increases instead of diminishing the delight of the
eye.
After all, then, the intimate harmony between nature and architecture
and the human body that is revealed in Greek art was not an artist's
counsel of perfection but an honest rendering of reality: there were,
there still are, privileged scenes where the fall of a green-grocer's
draperies or a milkman's cloak or a beggar's rags are part of the
composition, distinctly related to it in line and colour, and where the
natural unstudied attitudes of the human body are correspondingly
harmonious, however hum-drum the acts it is engaged in. The discovery,
to the traveller returning from the East, robs the most romantic scenes
of western Europe of half their charm: in the Piazza of San Marco, in
the market-place of Siena, where at least the robes of the Procurators
or the gay tights of Pinturicchio's striplings once justified man's
presence among his works, one can see, at first, only the outrage
inflicted on beauty by the "plentiful strutting manikins" of the modern
world.
Moroccan crowds are always a feast to the eye. The instinct of skilful
drapery, the sense of colour (subdued by custom, but breaking out in
subtle glimpses under the universal ashy tints) make the humblest
assemblage of donkey-men and water-carriers an ever-renewed delight. But
it is only on rare occasions, and in the court ceremonies to which so
few foreigners have had access, that the hidden sumptuousness of the
native life is revealed. Even then, the term sumptuousness may seem
ill-chosen, since the nomadic nature of African life persists in spite
of palaces and chamberlains and all the elaborate ritual of the Makhzen,
and the most pompous rites are likely to end in a dusty gallop of wild
tribesmen, and the most princely processions to tail off in a string of
half-naked urchins riding bareback on donkeys.
As in all Oriental countries, the contact between prince and beggar,
vizier and serf is disconcertingly free and familiar, and one must see
the highest court officials kissing the hem of the Sultan's robe, and
hear authentic tales of slaves given by one merchant to another at the
end of a convivial evening, to be reminded that nothing is as democratic
in appearance as a society of which the whole structure hangs on the
whim of one man.
II
AID-EL-KEBIR
In the verandah of the Residence of Rabat I stood looking out between
posts festooned with gentian-blue ipomeas at the first shimmer of light
on black cypresses and white tobacco-flowers, on the scattered roofs of
the new town, and the plain stretching away to the Sultan's palace
above the sea.
We had been told, late the night before, that the Sultan would allow
Madame Lyautey, with the three ladies of her party, to be present at the
great religious rite of the Aid-el-Kebir (the Sacrifice of the Sheep).
The honour was an unprecedented one, a favour probably conceded only at
the last moment: for as a rule no women are admitted to these
ceremonies. It was an opportunity not to be missed; and all through the
short stifling night I had lain awake wondering if I should be ready
early enough. Presently the motors assembled, and we set out with the
French officers in attendance on the Governor's wife.
The Sultan's palace, a large modern building on the familiar Arab lines,
lies in a treeless and gardenless waste enclosed by high walls and close
above the blue Atlantic. We motored past the gates, where the Sultan's
Black Guard was drawn up, and out to the _msalla_,[20] a sort of common
adjacent to all the Sultan's residences where public ceremonies are
usually performed. The sun was already beating down on the great plain
thronged with horsemen and with the native population of Rabat on
mule-back and foot. Within an open space in the centre of the crowd a
canvas palissade dyed with a bold black pattern surrounded the Sultan's
tents. The Black Guard, in scarlet tunics and white and green turbans,
were drawn up on the edge of the open space, keeping the spectators at a
distance; but under the guidance of our companions we penetrated to the
edge of the crowd.
The palissade was open on one side, and within it we could see moving
about among the snowy-robed officials a group of men in straight narrow
gowns of almond-green, peach-blossom, lilac and pink; they were the
Sultan's musicians, whose coloured dresses always flower out
conspicuously among the white draperies of all the other court
attendants.
In the tent nearest the opening, against a background of embroidered
hangings, a circle of majestic turbaned old men squatted placidly on
Rabat rugs. Presently the circle broke up, there was an agitated coming
and going, and some one said: "The Sultan has gone to the tent at the
back of the enclosure to kill the sheep."
A sense of the impending solemnity ran through the crowd. The mysterious
rumour which is the Voice of the Bazaar rose about us like the wind in a
palm-oasis; the Black Guard fired a salute from an adjoining hillock;
the clouds of red dust flung up by wheeling horsemen thickened and then
parted, and a white-robed rider sprang out from the tent of the
Sacrifice with something red and dripping across his saddle-bow, and
galloped away toward Rabat through the shouting. A little shiver ran
over the group of occidental spectators, who knew that the dripping red
thing was a sheep with its throat so skilfully slit that, if the omen
were favourable, it would live on through the long race to Rabat and
gasp out its agonized life on the tiles of the Mosque.
The Sacrifice of the Sheep, one of the four great Moslem rites, is
simply the annual propitiatory offering made by every Mahometan head of
a family, and by the Sultan as such. It is based not on a Koranic
injunction, but on the "Souna" or record of the Prophet's "custom" or
usages, which forms an authoritative precedent in Moslem ritual. So far
goes the Moslem exegesis. In reality, of course, the Moslem
blood-sacrifice comes, by way of the Semitic ritual, from far beyond and
behind it; and the belief that the Sultan's prosperity for the coming
year depends on the animal's protracted agony seems to relate the
ceremony to the dark magic so deeply rooted in the mysterious tribes
peopling North Africa long ages before the first Phoenician prows had
rounded its coast.
Between the Black Guard and the tents, five or six horses were being led
up and down by muscular grooms in snowy tunics. They were handsome
animals, as Moroccan horses go, and each of a different colour; and on
the bay horse was a red saddle embroidered in gold, on the piebald a
saddle of peach-colour and silver, on the chestnut, grass-green
encrusted with seed-pearls, on the white mare purple housings, and
orange velvet on the grey. The Sultan's band had struck up a shrill
hammering and twanging, the salute of the Black Guard continued at
intervals, and the caparisoned steeds began to rear and snort and drag
back from the cruel Arab bits with their exquisite _niello_
incrustations. Some one whispered that these were His Majesty's
horses--and that it was never known till he appeared which one he would
mount.
Presently the crowd about the tents thickened, and when it divided again
there emerged from it a grey horse bearing a motionless figure swathed
in blinding white. Marching at the horse's bridle, lean brown grooms in
white tunics rhythmically waved long strips of white linen to keep off
the flies from the Imperial Presence; and beside the motionless rider,
in a line with his horse's flank, rode the Imperial Parasol-bearer, who
held above the sovereign's head a great sunshade of bright green velvet.
Slowly the grey horse advanced a few yards before the tent; behind rode
the court dignitaries, followed by the musicians, who looked, in their
bright scant caftans, like the slender music-making angels of a
Florentine fresco.
The Sultan, pausing beneath his velvet dome, waited to receive the
homage of the assembled tribes. An official, riding forward, drew bridle
and called out a name. Instantly there came storming across the plain a
wild cavalcade of tribesmen, with rifles slung across their shoulders,
pistols and cutlasses in their belts, and twists of camel's-hair bound
about their turbans. Within a few feet of the Sultan they drew in, their
leader uttered a cry and sprang forward, bending to the saddle-bow, and
with a great shout the tribe galloped by, each man bowed over his
horse's neck as he flew past the hieratic figure on the grey horse.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from "France-Maroc"_
The Sultan of Morocco under the green umbrella (at Meknez, 1916)]
Again and again this ceremony was repeated, the Sultan advancing a few
feet as each new group thundered toward him. There were more than ten
thousand horsemen and chieftains from the Atlas and the wilderness, and
as the ceremony continued the dust-clouds grew denser and more
fiery-golden, till at last the forward-surging lines showed through them
like blurred images in a tarnished mirror.
As the Sultan advanced we followed, abreast of him and facing the
oncoming squadrons. The contrast between his motionless figure and the
wild waves of cavalry beating against it typified the strange soul of
Islam, with its impetuosity forever culminating in impassiveness. The
sun hung high, a brazen ball in a white sky, darting down metallic
shafts on the dust-enveloped plain and the serene white figure under its
umbrella. The fat man with a soft round beard-fringed face, wrapped in
spirals of pure white, one plump hand on his embroidered bridle, his
yellow-slippered feet thrust heel-down in big velvet-lined stirrups,
became, through sheer immobility, a symbol, a mystery, a God. The human
flux beat against him, dissolved, ebbed away, another spear-crested wave
swept up behind it and dissolved in turn; and he sat on, hour after
hour, under the white-hot sky, unconscious of the heat, the dust, the
tumult, embodying to the wild factious precipitate hordes a long
tradition of serene aloofness.
III
THE IMPERIAL MIRADOR
As the last riders galloped up to do homage we were summoned to our
motors and driven rapidly to the palace. The Sultan had sent word to
Mme. Lyautey that the ladies of the Imperial harem would entertain her
and her guests while his Majesty received the Resident General, and we
had to hasten back in order not to miss the next act of the spectacle.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from "France-Maroc"_
A clan of mountaineers and their caid.]
We walked across a long court lined with the Black Guard, passed under a
gateway, and were met by a shabbily dressed negress. Traversing a hot
dazzle of polychrome tiles we reached another archway guarded by the
chief eunuch, a towering black with the enamelled eyes of a basalt bust.
The eunuch delivered us to other negresses, and we entered a labyrinth
of inner passages and patios, all murmuring and dripping with water.
Passing down long corridors where slaves in dim greyish garments
flattened themselves against the walls, we caught glimpses of great dark
rooms, laundries, pantries, bakeries, kitchens, where savoury things
were brewing and stewing, and where more negresses, abandoning their
pots and pans, came to peep at us from the threshold. In one corner, on
a bench against a wall hung with matting, grey parrots in tall cages
were being fed by a slave.
A narrow staircase mounted to a landing where a princess out of an Arab
fairy-tale awaited us. Stepping softly on her embroidered slippers she
led us to the next landing, where another golden-slippered being smiled
out on us, a little girl this one, blushing and dimpling under a
jewelled diadem and pearl-woven braids. On a third landing a third
damsel appeared, and encircled by the three graces we mounted to the
tall _mirador_ in the central tower from which we were to look down at
the coming ceremony. One by one, our little guides, kicking off their
golden shoes, which a slave laid neatly outside the door, led us on soft
bare feet into the upper chamber of the harem.
It was a large room, enclosed on all sides by a balcony glazed with
panes of brightly-coloured glass. On a gaudy modern Rabat carpet stood
gilt armchairs of florid design and a table bearing a commercial bronze
of the "art goods" variety. Divans with muslin-covered cushions were
ranged against the walls and down an adjoining gallery-like apartment
which was otherwise furnished only with clocks. The passion for clocks
and other mechanical contrivances is common to all unmechanical races,
and every chief's palace in North Africa contains a collection of
time-pieces which might be called striking if so many had not ceased to
go. But those in the Sultan's harem of Rabat are remarkable for the fact
that, while designed on current European models, they are proportioned
in size to the Imperial dignity, so that a Dutch "grandfather" becomes a
wardrobe, and the box-clock of the European mantelpiece a cupboard that
has to be set on the floor. At the end of this avenue of time-pieces a
European double-bed with a bright silk quilt covered with Nottingham
lace stood majestically on a carpeted platform.
But for the enchanting glimpses of sea and plain through the lattices of
the gallery, the apartment of the Sultan's ladies falls far short of
occidental ideas of elegance. But there was hardly time to think of
this, for the door of the _mirador_ was always opening to let in another
fairy-tale figure, till at last we were surrounded by a dozen houris,
laughing, babbling, taking us by the hand, and putting shy questions
while they looked at us with caressing eyes. They were all (our
interpretess whispered) the Sultan's "favourites," round-faced
apricot-tinted girls in their teens, with high cheek-bones, full red
lips, surprised brown eyes between curved-up Asiatic lids, and little
brown hands fluttering out like birds from their brocaded sleeves.
In honour of the ceremony, and of Mme. Lyautey's visit, they had put on
their finest clothes, and their freedom of movement was somewhat
hampered by their narrow sumptuous gowns, with over-draperies of gold
and silver brocade and pale rosy gauze held in by corset-like sashes of
gold tissue of Fez, and the heavy silken cords that looped their
voluminous sleeves. Above their foreheads the hair was shaven like that
of an Italian fourteenth-century beauty, and only a black line as narrow
as a pencilled eyebrow showed through the twist of gauze fastened by a
jewelled clasp above the real eye-brows. Over the forehead-jewel rose
the complicated structure of the head-dress. Ropes of black wool were
plaited through the hair, forming, at the back, a double loop that stood
out above the nape like the twin handles of a vase, the upper veiled in
airy shot gauzes and fastened with jewelled bands and ornaments. On each
side of the red cheeks other braids were looped over the ears hung with
broad earrings of filigree set with rough pearls and emeralds, or gold
hoops and pendants of coral; and an unexpected tulle ruff, like that of
a Watteau shepherdess, framed the round chin above a torrent of
necklaces, necklaces of amber, coral, baroque pearls, hung with
mysterious barbaric amulets and fetiches. As the young things moved
about us on soft hennaed feet the light played on shifting gleams of
gold and silver, blue and violet and apple-green, all harmonized and
bemisted by clouds of pink and sky-blue; and through the changing group
capered a little black picaninny in a caftan of silver-shot purple with
a sash of raspberry red.
But presently there was a flutter in the aviary. A fresh pair of
_babouches_ clicked on the landing, and a young girl, less brilliantly
dressed and less brilliant of face than the others, came in on bare
painted feet. Her movements were shy and hesitating, her large lips
pale, her eye-brows less vividly dark, her head less jewelled. But all
the little humming-birds gathered about her with respectful rustlings as
she advanced toward us leaning on one of the young girls, and holding
out her ringed hand to Mme. Lyautey's curtsey. It was the young
Princess, the Sultan's legitimate daughter. She examined us with sad
eyes, spoke a few compliments through the interpretess, and seated
herself in silence, letting the others sparkle and chatter.
Conversation with the shy Princess was flagging when one of the
favourites beckoned us to the balcony. We were told we might push open
the painted panes a few inches, but as we did so the butterfly group
drew back lest they should be seen looking out on the forbidden world.
Salutes were crashing out again from the direction of the _msalla_:
puffs of smoke floated over the slopes like thistle-down. Farther off, a
pall of red vapour veiled the gallop of the last horsemen wheeling away
toward Rabat. The vapour subsided, and moving out of it we discerned a
slow procession. First rode a detachment of the Black Guard, mounted on
black horses, and, comically fierce in their British scarlet and Meccan
green, a uniform invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century by
a retired English army officer. After the Guard came the
standard-bearers and the great dignitaries, then the Sultan, still
aloof, immovable, as if rapt in the contemplation of his mystic office.
More court officials followed, then the bright-gowned musicians on
foot, then a confused irrepressible crowd of pilgrims, beggars, saints,
mountebanks, and the other small folk of the Bazaar, ending in a line of
boys jamming their naked heels into the ribs of world-weary donkeys.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from "France-Maroc"_
The Sultan entering Marrakech in state]
The Sultan rode into the court below us, and Vizier and chamberlains,
snowy-white against the scarlet line of the Guards, hurried forward to
kiss his draperies, his shoes, his stirrup. Descending from his velvet
saddle, still entranced, he paced across the tiles between a double line
of white servitors bowing to the ground. White pigeons circled over him
like petals loosed from a great orchard, and he disappeared with his
retinue under the shadowy arcade of the audience chamber at the back of
the court.
At this point one of the favourites called us in from the _mirador_. The
door had just opened to admit an elderly woman preceded by a respectful
group of girls. From the newcomer's round ruddy face, her short round
body, the round hands emerging from her round wrists, an inexplicable
majesty emanated; and though she too was less richly arrayed than the
favourites she carried her head-dress of striped gauze like a crown.
This impressive old lady was the Sultan's mother. As she held out her
plump wrinkled hand to Mme. Lyautey and spoke a few words through the
interpretess one felt that at last a painted window of the _mirador_ had
been broken, and a thought let into the vacuum of the harem. What
thought, it would have taken deep insight into the processes of the Arab
mind to discover; but its honesty was manifest in the old Empress's
voice and smile. Here at last was a woman beyond the trivial
dissimulations, the childish cunning, the idle cruelties of the harem.
It was not a surprise to be told that she was her son's most trusted
adviser, and the chief authority in the palace. If such a woman deceived
and intrigued it would be for great purposes and for ends she believed
in: the depth of her soul had air and daylight in it, and she would
never willingly shut them out.
The Empress Mother chatted for a while with Mme. Lyautey, asking about
the Resident General's health, enquiring for news of the war, and
saying, with an emotion perceptible even through the unintelligible
words: "All is well with Morocco as long as all is well with France."
Then she withdrew, and we were summoned again to the _mirador_.
This time it was to see a company of officers in brilliant uniforms
advancing at a trot across the plain from Rabat. At sight of the figure
that headed them, so slim, erect and young on his splendid chestnut,
with a pale blue tunic barred by the wide orange ribbon of the Cherifian
Order, salutes pealed forth again from the slope above the palace and
the Black Guard presented arms. A moment later General Lyautey and his
staff were riding in at the gates below us. On the threshold of the
inner court they dismounted, and moving to the other side of our balcony
we followed the next stage of the ceremony. The Sultan was still seated
in the audience chamber. The court officials still stood drawn up in a
snow-white line against the snow-white walls. The great dignitaries
advanced across the tiles to greet the General; then they fell aside,
and he went forward alone, followed at a little distance by his staff. A
third of the way across the court he paused, in accordance with the
Moroccan court ceremonial, and bowed in the direction of the arcaded
room; a few steps farther he bowed again, and a third time on the
threshold of the room. Then French uniforms and Moroccan draperies
closed in about him, and all vanished into the shadows of the audience
hall.
Our audience too seemed to be over. We had exhausted the limited small
talk of the harem, had learned from the young beauties that, though they
were forbidden to look on at the ceremony, the dancers and singers would
come to entertain them presently, and had begun to take leave when a
negress hurried in to say that his Majesty begged Mme. Lyautey and her
friends to await his arrival. This was the crowning incident of our
visit, and I wondered with what Byzantine ritual the Anointed One fresh
from the exercise of his priestly functions would be received among his
women.
The door opened, and without any announcement or other preliminary
flourish a fat man with a pleasant face, his djellabah stretched over a
portly front, walked in holding a little boy by the hand. Such was his
Majesty the Sultan Moulay Youssef, despoiled of sacramental burnouses
and turban, and shuffling along on bare yellow-slippered feet with the
gait of a stout elderly gentleman who has taken off his boots in the
passage preparatory to a domestic evening.
The little Prince, one of his two legitimate sons, was dressed with
equal simplicity, for silken garments are worn in Morocco only by
musicians, boy-dancers and other hermaphrodite fry. With his ceremonial
raiment the Sultan had put off his air of superhuman majesty, and the
expression of his round pale face corresponded with the plainness of his
dress. The favourites fluttered about him, respectful but by no means
awestruck, and the youngest began to play with the little Prince. We
could well believe the report that his was the happiest harem in
Morocco, as well as the only one into which a breath of the outer world
ever came.
Moulay Youssef greeted Mme. Lyautey with friendly simplicity, made the
proper speeches to her companions, and then, with the air of the
business-man who has forgotten to give an order before leaving his
office, he walked up to a corner of the room, and while the
flower-maidens ruffled about him, and through the windows we saw the
last participants in the mystic rites galloping away toward the
crenellated walls of Rabat, his Majesty the Priest and Emperor of the
Faithful unhooked a small instrument from the wall and applied his
sacred lips to the telephone.
IV
IN OLD RABAT
Before General Lyautey came to Morocco Rabat had been subjected to the
indignity of European "improvements," and one must traverse boulevards
scored with tram-lines, and pass between hotel-terraces and cafes and
cinema-palaces, to reach the surviving nucleus of the once beautiful
native town. Then, at the turn of a commonplace street, one comes upon
it suddenly. The shops and cafes cease, the jingle of trams and the
trumpeting of motor-horns die out, and here, all at once, are silence
and solitude, and the dignified reticence of the windowless Arab
house-fronts.
We were bound for the house of a high government official, a Moroccan
dignitary of the old school, who had invited us to tea, and added a
message to the effect that the ladies of his household would be happy to
receive me.
The house we sought was some distance down the quietest of white-walled
streets. Our companion knocked at a low green door, and we were admitted
to a passage into which a wooden stairway descended. A brother-in-law of
our host was waiting for us: in his wake we mounted the ladder-like
stairs and entered a long room with a florid French carpet and a set of
gilt furniture to match. There were no fretted walls, no painted cedar
doors, no fountains rustling in unseen courts: the house was squeezed in
between others, and such traces of old ornament as it m
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/39042