Such was the appearance of this extraordinary man,
who deceived, tortured, betrayed, assassinated, terrorized
and mocked his slaves, his subjects, his women and
children and his ministers like any other half-savage
Arab despot, but who yet managed through his long reign
to maintain a barbarous empire, to police the wilderness,
and give at least an appearance of prosperity and
security where all had before been chaos.
The English emissaries appear to have been much struck
by the magnificence of his palaces, then in all the
splendor of novelty, and gleaming with marbles brought
from Volubilis and Sale. Windus extols in particular
the sunken gardens of cypress, pomegranate and orange
trees, some of them laid out seventy feet below the
level of the palace-courts; the exquisite plaster
fretwork; the miles of tessellated walls and pavement
made in the finely patterned mosaic work of Fez; and
the long terrace walk trellised with “vines
and other greens” leading from the palace to
the famous stables, and over which it was the Sultan’s
custom to drive in a chariot drawn by women and eunuchs.
Moulay-Ismael received the English ambassador with
every show of pomp and friendship, and immediately
“made him a present” of a handful of young
English captives; but just as the negotiations were
about to be concluded Commodore Stewart was privately
advised that the Sultan had no intention of allowing
the rest of the English to be ransomed. Luckily
a diplomatically composed letter, addressed by the
English envoy to one of the favorite wives, resulted
in Ismael’s changing his mind, and the captives
were finally given up, and departed with their rescuers.
As one stands in the fiery sun, among the monstrous
ruins of those tragic walls, one pictures the other
Christian captives pausing for a second, at the risk
of death, in the rhythmic beat of their labor, to watch
the little train of their companions winding away
across the desert to freedom.
On the way back through the long streets that lead
to the ruins we noticed, lying by the roadside, the
shafts of fluted columns, blocks of marble, Roman
capitals: fragments of the long loot of Sale and
Volubilis. We asked how they came there, and were
told that, according to a tradition still believed
in the country, when the prisoners and captives who
were dragging the building materials toward the palace
under the blistering sun heard of the old Sultan’s
death, they dropped their loads with one accord and
fled. At the same moment every worker on the
walls flung down his trowel or hod, every slave of
the palaces stopped grinding or scouring or drawing
water or carrying faggots or polishing the miles of
tessellated floors, so that, when the tyrant’s
heart stopped beating, at that very instant life ceased
to circulate in the huge house he had built, and in
all its members it became a carcass for his carcass.
