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 cafés 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 cafés 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 may have possessed
had vanished.
But presently we saw why its inhabitants were indifferent to such
details. Our host, a handsome white-bearded old man, welcomed us in the
doorway, then he led us to a raised oriel window at one end of the room,
and seated us in the gilt armchairs face to face with one of the most
beautiful views in Morocco.
Below us lay the white and blue terrace-roofs of the native town, with
palms and minarets shooting up between them, or the shadows of a
vine-trellis patterning a quiet lane. Beyond, the Atlantic sparkled,
breaking into foam at the mouth of the Bou-Regreg and under the towering
ramparts of the Kasbah of the Oudayas. To the right, the ruins of the
great Mosque rose from their plateau over the river; and, on the
farther side of the troubled flood, old Salé, white and wicked, lay like
a jewel in its gardens. With such a scene beneath their eyes, the
inhabitants of the house could hardly feel its lack of architectural
interest.
After exchanging the usual compliments, and giving us time to enjoy the
view, our host withdrew, taking with him the men of our party. A moment
later he reappeared with a rosy fair-haired girl, dressed in Arab
costume, but evidently of European birth. The brother-in-law explained
that this young woman, who had "studied in Algeria," and whose mother
was French, was the intimate friend of the ladies of the household, and
would act as interpreter. Our host then again left us, joining the men
visitors in another room, and the door opened to admit his wife and
daughters-in-law.
The mistress of the house was a handsome Algerian with sad expressive
eyes, the younger women were pale, fat and amiable. They all wore sober
dresses, in keeping with the simplicity of the house, and but for the
vacuity of their faces the group might have been that of a Professor's
family in an English or American University town, decently costumed for
an Arabian Nights' pageant in the college grounds. I was never more
vividly reminded of the fact that human nature, from one pole to the
other, falls naturally into certain categories, and that Respectability
wears the same face in an Oriental harem as in England or America.
My hostesses received me with the utmost amiability, we seated ourselves
in the oriel facing the view, and the interchange of questions and
compliments began.
Had I any children? (They asked it all at once.)
Alas, no.
"In Islam" (one of the ladies ventured) "a woman without children is
considered the most unhappy being in the world."
I replied that in the western world also childless women were pitied.
(The brother-in-law smiled incredulously.)
Knowing that European fashions are of absorbing interest to the harem I
next enquired: "What do these ladies think of our stiff tailor-dresses?
Don't they find them excessively ugly?"
"Yes, they do;" (it was again the brother-in-law who replied.) "But
they suppose that in your own homes you dress less badly."
"And have they never any desire to travel, or to visit the Bazaars, as
the Turkish ladies do?"
"No, indeed. They are too busy to give such matters a thought. In _our
country_ women of the highest class occupy themselves with their
household and their children, and the rest of their time is devoted to
needlework." (At this statement I gave the brother-in-law a smile as
incredulous as his own.)
All this time the fair-haired interpretess had not been allowed by the
vigilant guardian of the harem to utter a word.
I turned to her with a question.
"So your mother is French, _Mademoiselle_?"
"_Oui, Madame_."
"From what part of France did she come?"
A bewildered pause. Finally, "I don't know . . . from Switzerland, I
think," brought out this shining example of the Higher Education. In
spite of Algerian "advantages" the poor girl could speak only a few
words of her mother's tongue. She had kept the European features and
complexion, but her soul was the soul of Islam. The harem had placed its
powerful imprint upon her, and she looked at me with the same remote and
passive eyes as the daughters of the house.
After struggling for a while longer with a conversation which the
watchful brother-in-law continued to direct as he pleased, I felt my own
lips stiffening into the resigned smile of the harem, and it was a
relief when at last their guardian drove the pale flock away, and the
handsome old gentleman who owned them reappeared on the scene, bringing
back my friends, and followed by slaves and tea.
V
IN FEZ
What thoughts, what speculations, one wonders, go on under the narrow
veiled brows of the little creatures destined to the high honour of
marriage or concubinage in Moroccan palaces?
Some are brought down from mountains and cedar forests, from the free
life of the tents where the nomad women go unveiled. Others come from
harems in the turreted cities beyond the Atlas, where blue palm-groves
beat all night against the stars and date-caravans journey across the
desert from Timbuctoo. Some, born and bred in an airy palace among
pomegranate gardens and white terraces, pass thence to one of the feudal
fortresses near the snows, where for half the year the great chiefs of
the south live in their clan, among fighting men and falconers and packs
of _sloughis_. And still others grow up in a stifling Mellah, trip
unveiled on its blue terraces overlooking the gardens of the great, and,
seen one day at sunset by a fat vizier or his pale young master, are
acquired for a handsome sum and transferred to the painted sepulchre of
the harem.
Worst of all must be the fate of those who go from tents and cedar
forests, or from some sea-blown garden above Rabat, into one of the
houses of Old Fez. They are well-nigh impenetrable, these palaces of
Elbali; the Fazi dignitaries do not welcome the visits of strange women.
On the rare occasions when they are received, a member of the family
(one of the sons, or a brother-in-law who has "studied in Algeria")
usually acts as interpreter; and perhaps it is as well that no one from
the outer world should come to remind these listless creatures that
somewhere the gulls dance on the Atlantic and the wind murmurs through
olive-yards and clatters the metallic fronds of palm-groves.
We had been invited, one day, to visit the harem of one of the chief
dignitaries of the Makhzen at Fez, and these thoughts came to me as I
sat among the pale women in their mouldering prison. The descent through
the steep tunnelled streets gave one the sense of being lowered into the
shaft of a mine. At each step the strip of sky grew narrower, and was
more often obscured by the low vaulted passages into which we plunged.
The noises of the Bazaar had died out, and only the sound of fountains
behind garden walls and the clatter of our mules' hoofs on the stones
went with us. Then fountains and gardens ceased also, the towering
masonry closed in, and we entered an almost subterranean labyrinth which
sun and air never reach. At length our mules turned into a _cul-de-sac_
blocked by a high building. On the right was another building, one of
those blind mysterious house-fronts of Fez that seem like a fragment of
its ancient fortifications. Clients and servants lounged on the stone
benches built into the wall; it was evidently the house of an important
person. A charming youth with intelligent eyes waited on the threshold
to receive us; he was one of the sons of the house, the one who had
"studied in Algeria" and knew how to talk to visitors. We followed him
into a small arcaded _patio_ hemmed in by the high walls of the house.
On the right was the usual long room with archways giving on the court.
Our host, a patriarchal personage, draped in fat as in a toga, came
toward us, a mountain of majestic muslins, his eyes sparkling in a
swarthy silver-bearded face. He seated us on divans and lowered his
voluminous person to a heap of cushions on the step leading into the
court, and the son who had studied in Algeria instructed a negress to
prepare the tea.
Across the _patio_ was another arcade closely hung with unbleached
cotton. From behind it came the sound of chatter, and now and then a
bare brown child in a scant shirt would escape, and be hurriedly pulled
back with soft explosions of laughter, while a black woman came out to
readjust the curtains.
There were three of these negresses, splendid bronze creatures, wearing
white djellabahs over bright-coloured caftans, striped scarves knotted
about their large hips, and gauze turbans on their crinkled hair. Their
wrists clinked with heavy silver bracelets, and big circular earrings
danced in their purple ear-lobes. A languor lay on all the other inmates
of the household, on the servants and hangers-on squatting in the shade
under the arcade, on our monumental host and his smiling son; but the
three negresses, vibrating with activity, rushed continually from the
curtained chamber to the kitchen, and from the kitchen to the master's
reception-room, bearing on their pinky-blue palms trays of Britannia
metal with tall glasses and fresh bunches of mint, shouting orders to
dozing menials, and calling to each other from opposite ends of the
court; and finally the stoutest of the three, disappearing from view,
reappeared suddenly on a pale green balcony overhead, where, profiled
against a square of blue sky, she leaned over in a Veronese attitude and
screamed down to the others like an excited parrot.
In spite of their febrile activity and tropical bird-shrieks, we waited
in vain for tea; and after a while our host suggested to his son that I
might like to visit the ladies of the household. As I had expected, the
young man led me across the _patio_, lifted the cotton hanging and
introduced me into an apartment exactly like the one we had just left.
Divans covered with striped mattress-ticking stood against the white
walls, and on them sat seven or eight passive-looking women over whom a
number of pale children scrambled.
The eldest of the group, and evidently the mistress of the house,
was an Algerian lady, probably of about fifty, with a sad and
delicately-modelled face; the others were daughters, daughters-in-law
and concubines. The latter word evokes to occidental ears images of
sensual seduction which the Moroccan harem seldom realizes. All the
ladies of this dignified official household wore the same look of
somewhat melancholy respectability. In their stuffy curtained apartment
they were like cellar-grown flowers, pale, heavy, fuller but frailer
than the garden sort. Their dresses, rich but sober, the veils and
diadems put on in honour of my visit, had a dignified dowdiness in odd
contrast to the frivolity of the Imperial harem. But what chiefly
struck me was the apathy of the younger women. I asked them if they had
a garden, and they shook their heads wistfully, saying that there were
no gardens in Old Fez. The roof was therefore their only escape: a roof
overlooking acres and acres of other roofs, and closed in by the naked
fortified mountains which stand about Fez like prison-walls.
After a brief exchange of compliments silence fell. Conversing through
interpreters is a benumbing process, and there are few points of contact
between the open-air occidental mind and beings imprisoned in a
conception of sexual and domestic life based on slave-service and
incessant espionage. These languid women on their muslin cushions toil
not, neither do they spin. The Moroccan lady knows little of cooking,
needlework or any household arts. When her child is ill she can only
hang it with amulets and wail over it, the great lady of the Fazi palace
is as ignorant of hygiene as the peasant-woman of the _bled_. And all
these colourless eventless lives depend on the favour of one fat
tyrannical man, bloated with good living and authority, himself almost
as inert and sedentary as his women, and accustomed to impose his whims
on them ever since he ran about the same _patio_ as a little
short-smocked boy.
The redeeming point in this stagnant domesticity is the tenderness of
the parents for their children, and western writers have laid so much
stress on this that one would suppose children could be loved only by
inert and ignorant parents. It is in fact charming to see the heavy eyes
of the Moroccan father light up when a brown grass-hopper baby jumps on
his knee, and the unfeigned tenderness with which the childless women of
the harem caress the babies of their happier rivals. But the
sentimentalist moved by this display of family feeling would do well to
consider the lives of these much-petted children. Ignorance,
unhealthiness and a precocious sexual initiation prevail in all classes.
Education consists in learning by heart endless passages of the Koran,
and amusement in assisting at spectacles that would be unintelligible to
western children, but that the pleasantries of the harem make perfectly
comprehensible to Moroccan infancy. At eight or nine the little girls
are married, at twelve the son of the house is "given his first
negress"; and thereafter, in the rich and leisured class, both sexes
live till old age in an atmosphere of sensuality without seduction.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from "France-Maroc"_
Women watching a procession from a roof]
The young son of the house led me back across the court, where the
negresses were still shrieking and scurrying, and passing to and fro
like a stage-procession with the vain paraphernalia of a tea that never
came. Our host still smiled from his cushions, resigned to Oriental
delays. To distract the impatient westerners, a servant unhooked from
the wall the cage of a gently-cooing dove. It was brought to us, still
cooing, and looked at me with the same resigned and vacant eyes as the
ladies I had just left. As it was being restored to its hook the slaves
lolling about the entrance scattered respectfully at the approach of a
handsome man of about thirty, with delicate features and a black beard.
Crossing the court, he stooped to kiss the shoulder of our host, who
introduced him as his eldest son, the husband of one or two of the
little pale wives with whom I had been exchanging platitudes.
From the increasing agitation of the negresses it became evident that
the ceremony of tea-making had been postponed till his arrival. A metal
tray bearing a Britannia samovar and tea-pot was placed on the tiles of
the court, and squatting beside it the newcomer gravely proceeded to
infuse the mint. Suddenly the cotton hangings fluttered again, and a
tiny child in the scantest of smocks rushed out and scampered across the
court. Our venerable host, stretching out rapturous arms, caught the
fugitive to his bosom, where the little boy lay like a squirrel,
watching us with great sidelong eyes. He was the last-born of the
patriarch, and the youngest brother of the majestic bearded gentleman
engaged in tea-making. While he was still in his father's arms two more
sons appeared: charming almond-eyed schoolboys returning from their
Koran-class, escorted by their slaves. All the sons greeted each other
affectionately, and caressed with almost feminine tenderness the dancing
baby so lately added to their ranks; and finally, to crown this scene of
domestic intimacy, the three negresses, their gigantic effort at last
accomplished, passed about glasses of steaming mint and trays of
gazelles' horns and white sugar-cakes.
VI
IN MARRAKECH
The farther one travels from the Mediterranean and Europe the closer the
curtains of the women's quarters are drawn. The only harem in which we
were allowed an interpreter was that of the Sultan himself, in the
private harems of Fez and Rabat a French-speaking relative transmitted
(or professed to transmit) our remarks; in Marrakech, the great nobleman
and dignitary who kindly invited me to visit his household was deaf to
our hint that the presence of a lady from one of the French government
schools might facilitate our intercourse.
When we drove up to his palace, one of the stateliest in Marrakech, the
street was thronged with clansmen and clients. Dignified merchants in
white muslin, whose grooms held white mules saddled with rose-coloured
velvet, warriors from the Atlas wearing the corkscrew ringlets which are
a sign of military prowess, Jewish traders in black gabardines,
leather-gaitered peasant-women with chickens and cheese, and beggars
rolling their blind eyes or exposing their fly-plastered sores, were
gathered in Oriental promiscuity about the great man's door; while under
the archway stood a group of youths and warlike-looking older men who
were evidently of his own clan.
The Caïd's chamberlain, a middle-aged man of dignified appearance,
advanced to meet us between bowing clients and tradesmen. He led us
through cool passages lined with the intricate mosaic-work of Fez, past
beggars who sat on stone benches whining out their blessings, and pale
Fazi craftsmen laying a floor of delicate tiles. The Caïd is a lover of
old Arab architecture. His splendid house, which is not yet finished,
has been planned and decorated on the lines of the old Imperial palaces,
and when a few years of sun and rain and Oriental neglect have worked
their way on its cedar-wood and gilding and ivory stucco it will have
the same faded loveliness as the fairy palaces of Fez.
In a garden where fountains splashed and roses climbed among cypresses,
the Caïd himself awaited us. This great fighter and loyal friend of
France is a magnificent eagle-beaked man, brown, lean and sinewy, with
vigilant eyes looking out under his carefully draped muslin turban, and
negroid lips half-hidden by a close black beard.
Tea was prepared in the familiar setting; a long arcaded room with
painted ceiling and richly stuccoed walls. All around were ranged the
usual mattresses covered with striped ticking and piled with muslin
cushions. A bedstead of brass, imitating a Louis XVI cane bed, and
adorned with brass garlands and bows, throned on the usual platform; and
the only other ornaments were a few clocks and bunches of wax flowers
under glass. Like all Orientals, this hero of the Atlas, who spends half
his life with his fighting clansmen in a mediaeval stronghold among the
snows, and the other half rolling in a 60 h.p. motor over smooth French
roads, seems unaware of any degrees of beauty or appropriateness in
objects of European design, and places against the exquisite mosaics and
traceries of his Fazi craftsmen the tawdriest bric-à-brac of the cheap
department-store.
While tea was being served I noticed a tiny negress, not more than six
or seven years old, who stood motionless in the embrasure of an archway.
Like most of the Moroccan slaves, even in the greatest households, she
was shabbily, almost raggedly, dressed. A dirty _gandourah_ of striped
muslin covered her faded caftan, and a cheap kerchief was wound above
her grave and precocious little face. With preternatural vigilance she
watched each movement of the Caïd, who never spoke to her, looked at
her, or made her the slightest perceptible sign, but whose least wish
she instantly divined, refilling his tea-cup, passing the plates of
sweets, or removing our empty glasses, in obedience to some secret
telegraphy on which her whole being hung.
The Caïd is a great man. He and his famous elder brother, holding the
southern marches of Morocco against alien enemies and internal
rebellion, played a preponderant part in the defence of the French
colonies in North Africa during the long struggle of the war.
Enlightened, cultivated, a friend of the arts, a scholar and
diplomatist, he seems, unlike many Orientals, to have selected the best
in assimilating European influences. Yet when I looked at the tiny
creature watching him with those anxious joyless eyes I felt once more
the abyss that slavery and the seraglio put between the most
Europeanized Mahometan and the western conception of life. The Caïd's
little black slaves are well-known in Morocco, and behind the sad child
leaning in the archway stood all the shadowy evils of the social system
that hangs like a millstone about the neck of Islam.