In truth the only life in her is centred in the market-place
outside the walls, where big expanding Rabat goes
on certain days to provision herself. The market
of Sale, though typical of all Moroccan markets, has
an animation and picturesqueness of its own. Its
rows of white tents pitched on a dusty square between
the outer walls and the fruit-gardens make it look
as though a hostile tribe had sat down to lay siege
to the town, but the army is an army of hucksters,
of farmers from the rich black lands along the river,
of swarthy nomads and leather-gaitered peasant women
from the hills, of slaves and servants and tradesmen
from Rabat and Sale; a draped, veiled, turbaned mob
shrieking, bargaining, fist-shaking, call on Allah
to witness the monstrous villanies of the misbegotten
miscreants they are trading with, and then, struck
with the mysterious Eastern apathy, sinking down in
languid heaps of muslin among the black figs, purple
onions and rosy melons, the fluttering hens, the tethered
goats, the whinnying foals, that are all enclosed in
an outer circle of folded-up camels and of mules dozing
under faded crimson saddles.
[Illustration: From a photograph by Schmitt,
Rabat
Sale—market-place outside the town]
VI
CHELLA AND THE GREAT MOSQUE
The Merinid Sultans of Rabat had a terribly troublesome
neighbour across the Bou-Regreg, and they built Chella
to keep an eye on the pirates of Sale. But Chella
has fallen like a Babylonian city triumphed over by
the prophets; while Sale, sly, fierce and irrepressible,
continued till well on in the nineteenth century to
breed pirates and fanatics.
The ruins of Chella lie on the farther side of the
plateau above the native town of Rabat. The mighty
wall enclosing them faces the city wall of Rabat,
looking at it across one of those great red powdery
wastes which seem, in this strange land, like death
and the desert forever creeping up to overwhelm the
puny works of man.
The red waste is scored by countless trains of donkeys
carrying water from the springs of Chella, by long
caravans of mules and camels, and by the busy motors
of the French administration; yet there emanates from
it an impression of solitude and decay which even
the prosaic tinkle of the trams jogging out from the
European town to the Exhibition grounds above the
sea cannot long dispel.
Perpetually, even in the new thriving French Morocco,
the outline of a ruin or the look in a pair of eyes
shifts the scene, rends the thin veil of the European
Illusion, and confronts one with the old grey Moslem
reality. Passing under the gate of Chella, with
its richly carved corbels and lofty crenellated towers,
one feels one’s self thus completely reabsorbed
into the past.
Below the gate the ground slopes away, bare and blazing,
to a hollow where a little blue-green minaret gleams
through fig-trees, and fragments of arch and vaulting
reveal the outline of a ruined mosque.
