The fruit-bearing feature of the country must have been an original
trait. Pomaria, or as one might say in our own phrase, Orchard-town,
was the name of the first settlement in the colonizing days of
Rome. I walked to the place, just under the northern wall of the
city, one morning for a stroll. I was soon at the foot of the tall
minaret of the ruined mosque of Sidi Lahsen that rises on the site
of old Agadir, which was the Berber name that next absorbed the
Roman Pomaria; and I saw the Latin-inscribed stones built into
the foundation, ruin under ruin, as it were; for the walls of the
minaret, which towered a hundred and fifty feet, were dilapidated,
their enamel weather-worn, showing faded green and yellow tones
in the rectangular spaces on the sides and the bordering band at
the top, which bore the ceramic decoration; the campanile above,
tipped with a stork’s nest and a stork, added a touch of lonely
desertion, and grass and flowers were growing between the stones of
the adjacent roofless floor. Ruined mosques are often as beautiful
as English abbeys.
I wandered on through a country district over which was scattered
a native village, but in the main an open region. It was remarkable
for the number of old trees it contained; and, indeed, hardly less
striking a feature of the landscape of Tlemcen, in general, than
its garlanding orchards is this grouping of old trees, though it is
rarer. The whole African coast affords specimens of trees of great
mass and age. I remember one such on the eastern borders of Algeria
that I found among the fields, deep in the country; or rather I was
guided to it by the Arab children I had gathered in my train, and
especially by one Bedouin shepherd lad who had left his wandering
herd to follow me, and they insisted that I should see the sacred
tree. It was a monarch of the vale—one of a group of three;
massive in foliage, long of limb, great of girth, horizontal in
aspect, a leaning, almost fallen, tower of the forest. It looked as
if centuries were indifferent to it—it was so old. It was a holy
tree, a _marabout_, as they called it; and bits of cloth, strips
of rags, fluttered from its boughs, where they had been placed as
votive offerings by the poor people of the district. I was told that
I should put some copper coins on the bough or in the hollow, for an
offering and to have good fortune, for no one would take them, and
I did so, glad to pay my devoirs and wondering inwardly how long it
was since my own far ancestors had joined in tree-worship. It was the
first time I had ever seen a sacred tree, one actually worshipped,
and it touched my imagination. At Tlemcen I saw no tree so fine as
that; but there were several that bore a patriarchal resemblance; and
in the morning stroll I speak of I found a grove of them, not close
together, but spread out over the open landscape and nigh enough
for neighborhood. They were terebinths, old ruins of the vegetable
world, with that same horizontal reach and earth-bowed air—they
might almost seem on their knees in some elemental adoration; age
filled them; in that cemetery—for it was a cemetery—they were
monumental. It was a quiet landscape; cattle were grazing here and
there; three or four ruined koubbas with broken arches and fallen
walls rose at intervals, once stately monuments, for this was the
burial-place of the royalty of Tlemcen in their empire years. Not
far away, on a knoll, in a place apart, was the shrine of the first
patron saint of the city, then Agadir—for Sidi bou-Médyen was
a later comer, and saints, like dynasties, have their times and
seasons, and this cemetery of the City-Gate was old before his
hillside began to know the furrow of death. The first patron, Sidi
Wahhâb, a companion of the Prophet and a comrade of the conqueror,
lies under the terebinths. Pointed by a magnificent tree, I passed
along its shadow down a shelving, stony way to a little garden of
roses; there, in the hollow, sunken in the surrounding soil by its
antiquity, I found the grave of Sidi Yaqoub, walled, but open to
the sky—a lovely place, with the rose and the terebinth and the
sky. This cemetery of the City-Gate was a kind of spiritual outpost
for protection; the saints, indeed, camped about all the gates to
guard the city in their death; nor was it altogether in vain; it is
related of at least one prudent conqueror that he carefully inquired
as to number and virtue of the saints who lay at the various gates,
as if they had been modern batteries, and selected for attack that
postern where least was to be feared from the ghostly artillery.
The position at the spot I have described was uncommonly strong.
I followed on my return the broken line of the old ramparts of
Agadir, a knife-edge path, or divide, as it were, a climbing,
tortuous, rough way, great masses of red soil heavily overgrown with
vivid vegetation, trees, bushes, vines, emerging on a bewildering
combination of gardens and tanneries—a dilapidated, ruinous way
it was altogether. I remember a Tower of the Winds that might have
been on the Roman campagna; and to the north there was always
the broad prospect of the great plain. It was but a short walk
from here to one of the modern gates of Tlemcen, that stands on a
higher level than Agadir; and just under it I came on the mosque of
Sidi’l-Halwi, or, as one would say, Englishing his name, Saint
Bonbon. In his mortal days he made sweetmeats for the children,
and the touch of a child’s story hangs about his legend. When
the wicked vizier beheaded him and his body was cast outside the
gate, it was said that in answer to the guardian’s nightly call
for all belated travellers to enter, the poor ghost would cry from
the outer darkness: “Go to sleep, guardian; there is none without
except the wretched Saint Bonbon.” The repeated miracle found the
ears of the Sultan and was verified by himself in person, and the
wicked vizier was at once sealed up alive in the neighboring wall,
which was conveniently being repaired at the time, and the body of
the saint was honorably laid in the shrine where it still reposes in
the shelter of another of those secular trees—a carob, this time;
and duly the mosque rose hard by with its fair minaret, on whose
faces still the brown and yellow tones of the half-obliterated
faience duskily shine in the sun. I entered under the portal,
partly sheathed in the same weather-battered colors, with touches
of blue and green, relics of an older beauty, and I rested there
an hour about, under the fretted wooden ceilings, untwining the
sinuous arabesque patterns of the arcaded walls, cooling my eyes
with the translucent onyx columns of the nave—low columns with
Moorish capitals, whose gentle forms attested the burning here ages
ago of the lamp of art.