The “Tower of Hassan,” as the Sultan’s
tower is called, rises from the plateau above old
Rabat, overlooking the steep cliff that drops down
to the last winding of the Bou-Regreg. Truncated
at half its height, it stands on the edge of the cliff,
a far-off beacon to travellers by land and sea.
It is one of the world’s great monuments, so
sufficient in strength and majesty that until one
has seen its fellow, the Koutoubya of Marrakech, one
wonders if the genius of the builder could have carried
such perfect balance of massive wall-spaces and traceried
openings to a triumphant completion.
Near the tower, the red-brown walls and huge piers
of the mosque built at the same time stretch their
roofless alignment beneath the sky. This mosque,
before it was destroyed, must have been one of the
finest monuments of Almohad architecture in Morocco:
now, with its tumbled red masses of masonry and vast
cisterns overhung by clumps of blue aloes, it still
forms a ruin of Roman grandeur.
The Mosque, the Tower, the citadel of the Oudayas,
and the mighty walls and towers of Chella, compose
an architectural group as noble and complete as that
of some mediaeval Tuscan city. All they need to
make the comparison exact is that they should have
been compactly massed on a steep hill, instead of
lying scattered over the wide spaces between the promontory
of the Oudayas and the hill-side of Chella.
The founder of Rabat, the great Yacoub-el-Mansour,
called it, in memory of the battle of Alarcos, “The
Camp of Victory” (Ribat-el-Path), and
the monuments he bestowed on it justified the name
in another sense, by giving it the beauty that lives
when battles are forgotten.
VOLUBILIS, MOULAY IDRISS AND MEKNEZ
VOLUBILIS
One day before sunrise we set out from Rabat for the
ruins of Roman Volubilis.
From the ferry of the Bou-Regreg we looked backward
on a last vision of orange ramparts under a night-blue
sky sprinkled with stars; ahead, over gardens still
deep in shadow, the walls of Sale were passing from
drab to peach-colour in the eastern glow. Dawn
is the romantic hour in Africa. Dirt and dilapidation
disappear under a pearly haze, and a breeze from the
sea blows away the memory of fetid markets and sordid
heaps of humanity. At that hour the old Moroccan
cities look like the ivory citadels in a Persian miniature,
and the fat shopkeepers riding out to their vegetable-gardens
like Princes sallying forth to rescue captive maidens.
Our way led along the highroad from Rabat to the modern
port of Kenitra, near the ruins of the Phenician colony
of Mehedyia. Just north of Kenitra we struck
the trail, branching off eastward to a European village
on the light railway between Rabat and Fez, and beyond
the railway-sheds and flat-roofed stores the wilderness
began, stretching away into clear distances bounded
by the hills of the Rarb,[A] above which the sun was
rising.
