In Morocco Part 5

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 s.p.a.ces 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 m.u.f.flings 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 a.s.sociate 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 pa.s.sages 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?

[Ill.u.s.tration: _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 pa.s.sion 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 Ch.e.l.la 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 bra.s.s-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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sage under a house bestriding the street, or a caravan of donkeys laden with obstructive reeds or branches of dates made the pa.s.sers-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 b.u.t.tresses 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _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 pa.s.s 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, ca.n.a.lized, 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 anch.o.r.ed 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, m.u.f.fled 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.ses. 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 pa.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _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 _zaoua_[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 l.u.s.tre 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 ma.n.u.scripts are sold by auction.