RUINS OF BATHS.
After a few days spent as those I have described, we started in a
south-westerly direction, and towards evening passed out of the land
of the Ziaïdas. Their territory extends a summer day’s journey from
north to south, and from east to west. We then entered that of the
Ladzian. Our guardians inquired from the shepherds touching different
douars, to select one for sleeping, but did not seem satisfied with
the replies. I urged going to one of the Lachedumbra, a tribe of the
Ladzian, and they reluctantly complied. This was the first douar we
approached as perfect strangers. We rode up to within two hundred paces
and halted. After we had waited about ten minutes we advanced half way
and halted again. Then one man walked slowly out; one of our party in
like manner advanced. They saluted. After some time the Arab shouted,
and instantly a single man advanced from each of the tents on the side
next us: they stood for some minutes as if holding council. The chief
then turned round, and walking straight up to me, took my hand in their
manner, and thrice repeated _Mirababick_; the others then advanced,
and pronounced the salutation all together. Each of the party was thus
greeted in turn. We were led inside. The whole douar set to work, and
in a few minutes our tent was pitched, and strewed with fresh shrubs. A
sheep was led up to the door, the customary present of the sheik, that
we might see it before we made our supper on it. This was a Sherriff’s
douar, and the government officers have no right to enter. Such was the
explanation given to me. It is difficult to ascertain, and impossible
to vouch for, the commonest fact in a country where one is not
thoroughly conversant with its habits, and when information is received
through interpreters, however intelligent and upright these may be;
and, indeed, integrity is next to an impossibility in an interpreter;
but this an eastern traveller learns, if at all, at the wrong end of
his experience.
I have seen no douar entered except by the free will, and in some cases
the formal consent, of the tribe. I was much perplexed at this, as it
appeared at first a contradiction to, and as I afterwards ascertained,
modification of the fundamental rule of Arab society. It doubtless
arose from the necessity of defence against a _central government_.
After they had pitched our tent, instead of pressing upon us as amongst
the Ziaïda, they drew off about thirty yards, and squatted down in
a circle: a few only came, and then it was to bring presents, or to
petition for medicine for a greasy heel, or a barren wife, as the case
might be. I proposed to the sheik a boar hunt, to which he readily
assented; but it was fixed for a future day.
From the high ground, as we approached it, Dar El Baida has an
imposing appearance: inside it is a heap of ruins. A house consisting
of a single room--a good one on a second floor, and entered from a
terrace--was prepared for us. Our horses were piqueted in the street
before it. We understood there was a French Consular agent and some
Europeans here, and consequently we brought for them a camel-load of
game.
This place is said to have been retaken from the Portuguese by the
following stratagem. A Moor pretended to become Christian, settled
in the town, and obtained permission to have a gate opened in the
wall close to his house for the convenience of sending in and out his
flocks. He one night brought in a number of his countrymen covered with
hides, as cattle among them. Such is the story of the place; and if you
doubt it, they say, “There is the gate.”
The Spanish name is Casa Bianca, just as if we chose to call it “White
House.” Its ancient name, “Anafe,” involves some obscurity. The same
name belonged to a colony in Asia Minor, and to an island close to
Crete, which forms an episode in the Orphic epic of the Argonauts.
The adventurers were rescued by Apollo, who discharging an arrow into
the deep, the island arose, and was called Anafe, from ἀνφααίνειν
[anaphainein], _to appear_. What this etymology is worth for the
Cretan Island, it must also be for the Lybian promontory: its present
name likewise implies brightness. It is on the other hand asserted,
that this is the new case of _lucus a non lucendo_, and that Anafe
means,--that is, in Hebrew not Greek,--dark and gloomy,[6] and that
the island was so called, not from having appeared in the light, but
by being shut out from the light by groves.[7] If so, the Lybian
promontory must likewise in those days have been green and feathered,
and not as now, naked and pale. The Phœnician Backs and Parrys did
not dot their charts with the names of the Admiralty Lords of Tyre.
They gave names descriptive or commemorative, as the other names of
this coast will vouch. That the name is Phœnician, not Greek, is clear
from finding it here. We have also Thymiatirium, where Arzilla now
stands, and which is interpreted in Hebrew--an open plain. Ampelusa
was on the northern promontory, and its interpretation coincides with
the descriptions left of groves delightful to the eye, filled with
fruit grateful to the taste. This must have been one of the spots
first named, and this name seems to confirm what we derive from so
many sources regarding the primeval horticulture of this land. Had the
Phœnicians come to plant vines, and gardens--that is, to cultivate and
civilize--they would not have given such a name. These glimpses of
the well-being in the most early times bring up the contrast with the
present. The parched and naked brow of the once shady Anafe, further
recalls an island nearer home, once, also, named after its forests,[8]
where now scarce a tree is to be found. Would that the resemblance were
complete! If Moorish rule has blasted the oak, it has at least spared
the man. What Moorish rule has worst done it has done with a purpose,
and neither on principle nor for philanthropy.
A quantity of grain was in store, and much arriving destined for
England. The stores were filled all along the coast, but there are no
means of shipment. This port is a principal place for the exportation
of bark and wool, both managed by Scheik Tibi, who, last season,
when the country was otherwise impassable, went and came, conducting
caravans of seventy and eighty camels; by his personal character
ensuring safety on the road. The schooner which had been in company
with us during our voyage, lay on the beach high and dry. An English
brig at anchor in the open roadstead was pitching bows under, though
there was scarcely a breath of wind, and had narrowly escaped shipwreck
two days before from her cables having been cut by the rocks.
There is here a sort of bay. The southern horn is a headland running
a little way out, and distant four or five miles. On its bald black
brow I was told that traces of the Phœnician city were to be seen.
I was all impatience to reach the spot, for it was just a site for
them, and no one since would have gone there. So here was the site of
a Lybo-Phœnician city, and any fragment was precious. I found nothing
standing, yet was not disappointed; for the stones in the fields were
rolled fragments of building: the mortar was of such consistency that
it wore or split only with the stones imbedded in it, and these were
crystalline: the stones were small, the mortar abundant; the masses
looked like amygdaloid. For the first time was I assured that I beheld
a piece of Tyrian rubble. I would have travelled many a mile for this.
Mortar was used by them--and what mortar! But this was not the only
architectural point I had to mark this day.
As I sat on the brow of the headland, watching the great waves which
went and came over long shelves of rocks, stretching out to the west
and southward in the line of the declining sun, and playing under his
rays, my eye was attracted to a singular mass immediately below: it
was a cone indented all over with deep semicircular cavities, and,
therefore, bristling with truncated points. The sandstone hollows out
in this manner[9] by the action of the water, and the points which are
left are sharp as a knife. The substance is black and porous, like a
sponge. When the foam dashed over this rock, the basins filled; the
white froth, as the wave retired, poured in cataracts from basin to
basin, on every side, and so continued almost till the next long wave
came to shroud it in spray, and replenish it with foam. As I watched
these changes, familiar forms floated before me, till at last becoming
more distinct, I distinguished those singular pendants that belong to
the Moorish vault, and the indentures of its arch. The stalactites of
caverns might have furnished the type of the last, but could not of
the former. The fair creations of art have models in Nature, and here
is that of the Moorish. The substance in which it is exhibited lines
the whole coast, and must present an infinite variety of such effects.
I had few occasions of seeing that coast, but the very next time I
reached it, about twenty miles north of Rabat, I saw the same figure
reversed, or as we see it in the Moresco vault, depending from the roof
like the stalactites in a cave.[10]
I returned to the same place next morning, but the tide was out, and
the rock without the foam was a common stone. The ledges of rock which
the evening before had been so lashed by the waves, were white (quartz)
rock. On them were patches of coarse recent madrepores, looking like
gigantic sponges. Further out the rocks were black, and on inspection
proved to be so because completely covered with mussels, the largest
I have ever seen, and the finest I have ever tasted. Such is the fury
of the waves, that beautifully-rounded quartz-stones, some of them
three-quarters of a hundred weight, have been cast up into a bank
thirty feet above high-water-mark.
Amongst the mass of ruins within the walls of Dar el Baida one building
alone could be made out. It was a bath. If London or Paris were
laid low, no such monument would survive of their taste, luxury, or
cleanliness. The people called it “Roman,” meaning Portuguese. When
I was at Algesiras, some excavations were making, and on examining
them, the building proved to be a bath. Within the circuit of the
walls of old Ceuta, which unquestionably belonged to a very remote
period, the only edifice, the purpose of which is distinguishable, is
a bath. The vestiges of the Romans, which from time to time we fall
upon in our island, are baths. The Romans and the Saracens were the
most remarkable of conquerors, and are associated in the relics which
they have left-fortresses and baths. The first is of necessity, but how
should the second be ever found conjoined, unless it played some part
in forming that temper which made them great, or in conferring on them
those manners which rendered them acceptable? A nation without the bath
is deprived of a large portion of the health and inoffensive enjoyment
within man’s reach: it therefore increases the value of a people to
itself, and its power as a nation over other people. From what I know
of the loss in both respects which those incur who have it not, I can
estimate its worth to those who had it.
I now had the opportunity of examining a public bath of the Moors
belonging to their good times. The disposition varies from that of the
ancient Thermæ and the modern Hamams. The grand and noble portion of
the Turkish and the ancient bath was a dome, open to the heavens in the
centre. Such a one, but not open in the centre, is here; it was the
inner not the outer apartment. The vault has deep ribs, in the fashion
of a clam shell, and is supported upon columns with horse-shoe arches
spreading between. Instead of a system of flues through the walls, only
one passed through the centre under the floor. To get at it, I had to
break through the pavement of beaten mortar covering a slab of marble.
It was nearly filled up with a deposit, partly of soot and partly of
earthy matter, which I imagined to be the residuum of gazule, on the
use of which hinge the peculiarities I have noticed in the structure
and distribution of the building.
I turned to Leo Africanus, expecting a flood of light upon a matter
with which he must have been so familiar. All I found was this:--“When
any one is to be bathed, they lay him along the ground, _anointing him
with certain ointment_ and with certain _instruments clearing away his
filth_.” The ointment is evidently the gazule; the instrument can only
be the _strigil_. He mentions a “Festival of the Baths.” The servants
and officers go forth with trumpets and pipes, and all their friends,
to gather _a wild onion_; it is put in a brazen vessel, covered over
with a linen cloth, which had been steeped in lees of wine; this they
bring with great solemnity and rejoicings, and suspend in the vessel in
the portal of the bath. This would indicate an Egyptian source, were it
not for the absence of all trace of the bath on their storied walls,
and among their ruins.
The onion, however, being the emblem of the planetary system,[11] may
be a trace of Sabæism. The festival and ceremony savour much of those
of the “Great Mother,” and of course preceded Christianity. No original
superstition arose here; no original bath appears among the Arabs. The
Phœnicians brought their religion and found the bath, and to it the
people adapted the new religious practices.
Part of the funereal rites of the Moors was to convey the corpse to the
bath.[12] Such a practice is unknown in any other country, and seems to
identify the bath with the primitive usages.
The gazule furnishes, however, the strongest intrinsic evidence in
favour of my conclusion, which indeed it requires but scanty proof to
establish, for the rudest people may have had the bath. The Red Indians
are fully acquainted with it, and the means they employ are heated
stones and a leather covering. They crawl in and throw water on the
stones, and soak till the same effect is produced as the Balnea of
Rome obtained. In Morocco they are of primitive and modest structure,
and of diminutive proportions. Add to this, the rude simplicity of
the process, and the exclusive use in them of natural and native
productions. Before coming to this point, I wish to refer to historical
evidence.
Augustus borrowed a stool, called _duretum_,[13] from Spain. Mauritania
was inhabited by the same people, so that two thousand years ago the
Romans copied the Moors.
Few Iberian words have come down to us--one of them is _strigil_. It
applied to a species of metal; and strigils were made of metal. The
early use of this strigil, and its connection with the East, is shown
by one of the celebrated bronzes of antiquity--a group of two boys in
the bath using the strigil, which was attributed to Dædalus.[14] The
Etruscans and Lydians also had it.[15]
The Phæacians, as elsewhere shown, were Phœnicians. Homer mentions
their baths at the time of the Trojan war, when the Greeks had none.
The term Ἡρακλεία λούτρα [Herakleia loutra] seems to identify baths
with that people as much as letters were by the term Καδμεία γράμματα
[Kadmeia grammata]; and as the Greeks got everything from them, the
baths of the Greeks are in themselves a testimony in favour of the
Phœnicians, my inference being, not that the Phœnicians brought thither
the tice, but that they learnt it here.
That the Arabs, when they issued from their deserts, should have
adopted the Thermæ and Balnea of the sinking Roman empire, does not
necessarily follow; indeed it is rather to be assumed that they would
not, and that it was from a people who became by religion incorporated
with them, and from whom, indubitably, they derived their architecture,
that they had it. This view is supported by the use of the glove, which
is not Roman, and the disuse of the strigil, which was so. It would
thus appear that Morocco had conferred on antiquity and the East of the
present day, the chief luxury of the one, and the most beneficial habit
of the other.
There being a bath in the unoccupied house of the Governor of
the Province, I made the attempt to complete my investigation by
experience, and privately applied to the guardian of the mansion, who,
to my surprise, immediately acceded to my request. Soon after, he came
to inform me that the Caïd had been very angry, and had forbidden him
to let me use it. It was suggested that there were mollifying methods,
such as a civil message, a box of tea and some loaves of sugar. While
these were preparing, an elderly Moor walked in and seated himself.
This was no other than the Caïd. He plunged at once _in medias res_,
and the following dialogue ensued.
_Caïd._ No Christian or Jew can go to the bath. It is forbidden by our
law.
Can a law forbid what it enjoins?
_Caïd._ It is the law.
Where is that law?
_Caïd._ (After a pause.) The wise men say there is such a law.
The wise man is he who speaks about what he knows.
_Caïd._ Do the wise men err?
Have you read the book?
_Caïd._ I have heard it read.
Did you hear the word--the Jews and Christians shall not bathe?
_Caïd._ I may or may not have heard.
I have read the book, and have not seen that word, for in it there is
no name for bath. The Mussulmans, when they came to “the West,” found
the bath in your towns as they are to-day, and here first learned how
to bathe, and you were then Christians. How then do you say you have a
law which forbids the Jews or the Christians to go to the bath?
_Caïd._ (laughing). The Nazarenes are cunning. In what Mussulman land
do Christians go to the bath? Missir, is it not a Mussulman land?
Stamboul (Constantinople), is it not a Mussulman land? Now, I will ask
you questions. Where, except in this dark West, do Christians not go to
the bath with the Mussulmans? Why do I want to go to the bath? Have we
got the bath in Europe? From whom did I learn it?
_Caïd._ How can I tell?
I have gone to the bath with doctors of the law (Oulema), and Rejals of
the Ali Osman Doulet: I have been shampooed by vizirs. From Mussulmans
I have learned how to wash myself, and here I come to Mussulmans,
and they say, “You shall not bathe.” This is not Islam, this is
_Jahilic_.[16]
_Caïd._ You shall not say our faces are black. You shall go, but--only
once. To-morrow I will keep the key: it shall be heated when the
Mussulmans are asleep. I will come, and you shall go and be satisfied.
He then got up and walked off. Presently a sheep arrived as an earnest
and propitiation.
It was so often and so confidently repeated to me by the resident
Europeans that I could place no reliance upon his word, that I gave
up all idea of it. Next night, as we were disposing our beds and
preparing to occupy them, there was a rap at the door, and on its being
opened, who should walk in but the Caïd. His abrupt salutation was,
“The bath is ready--come.” While I was re-dressing, he told us that he
had forgotten, and having business of importance with a neighbouring
sheik before sunrise, had started on his journey, when recollecting his
promise, he had returned.
Finding he was making dispositions to accompany me, I begged he would
not take the trouble; but not staying to answer, he seized with one
hand a candle out of the candlestick, laid hold of my hand with the
other, conducted me down stairs, lighting me and lifting me through the
dirty streets over the different places, as if I had been a helpless
child. Arrived at the place, he took the keys from his breast, and
opened the doors. I thought his care was to end here, but he squatted
himself down on a mat in an outhouse, as if to wait the issue. Every
other argument failing, I said, that if he remained there, I could not
stay long enough. He answered, “I will sleep. If I went home I could
not sleep, for something might happen.” The deputy-governor stripped to
officiate as bath-man. But for this weighty matter I must take breath,
and honour it with a special chapter--a chapter which, if the reader
will peruse it with diligence and apply with care, may prolong his
life, fortify his body, diminish his ailments, augment his enjoyments,
and improve his temper: then having found something beneficial to
himself, he may be prompted to do something to secure the like for his
fellow-creatures.
[6] Hebrew: ענפה Anepha. Ramosa et opaca.--BOCH. _Pheleg._
[7] The spot is thus described by Apollonius:--
τοὶ δ’ ἀγλαὸν Ἀπόλλωνι
Ἄλσει ὲνὶ σκιερῷ τέμενος σκιόεντά τε βωμὸν
Ποιέον.
[toi d’ aglaon Apollôni
Alsei eni skierô temenos skioenta te bômon
Poieon].--L. 4. v. 1714.
[8] Ireland was anciently known as Fiodha Inis, or
the Woody Island.
[9] The “Chaudière Falls” are so called from
cavities like kettles hollowed out by stones of harder
consistency getting into a hollow, and there revolving
by the action of the water. On the Clyde the operation
may be seen.
[10] These pensile figures are by all writers on
Moorish architecture held to be an _imitation_ of
stalactite. Nothing can be more absurd: stalactite is
produced by successive coatings or deposits, whereas
the process by which they must have been formed is
abrasion, the salient points being obtained by the
concavity of the intervening surfaces.
[11] The slices representing the orbits of the
planets. We have derived our word from ON I ON; a
reduplication of ON, the Sun, in his chief temple in the
city, called after him, where the onion, being the
symbol, was supposed to be worshipped.
[12] Mision Historial de Marueccos, p. 45.
[13] “Ungebatur enim sæpius, et sudabat ad
flammam: deinde perfundebatur e gelida aqua vel sole
multo calefacta. At quoties nervorum causâ marinis
Albulisque calidis utendum esset, contentus hoc
erat, ut insidens ligneo solio, quod ipse Hispanico
verbo 'duretum’ vocabat, manus ac pedes alternis
jactaret.”--SUETON. in _August._, c. 82.
[14] See Pliny’s Catalogue of Celebrated Statues.
[15] Naked youths with strigils appear on a
vase.--Mus. Gregor. II., tav. lxxxvii.--See _Schol.
Juvenal, Sat._ iii. v. 262.
See plates in Fellows’s “Lycia.”
[16] The word means “folly,” but it is applied
to the period before conversion to Islam, and here
insinuates infidelity.