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.