Part 7 (1/2)

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.

n.o.body is in the streets: wandering from ghostly pa.s.sage to pa.s.sage, 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 bra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+nes faintly on l.u.s.trous 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 pa.s.ses in, and his friend goes on through the moonlight, his servant's lantern dancing ahead.

But here we are in an open s.p.a.ce 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 c.o.c.k 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 pa.s.sed 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 p.r.i.c.kly 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 bra.s.sy 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.