THE FIRST VISION
Many-walled Fez rose up before us out of the plain
toward the end of the day.
The walls and towers we saw were those of the upper
town, Fez Eldjid (the New), which lies on the edge
of the plateau and hides from view Old Fez tumbling
down below it into the ravine of the Oued Fez.
Thus approached, the city presents to view only a
long line of ramparts and fortresses, merging into
the wide, tawny plain and framed in barren mountains.
Not a house is visible outside the walls, except, at
a respectful distance, the few unobtrusive buildings
of the European colony, and not a village breaks the
desolation of the landscape.
As we drew nearer, the walls towered close over us,
and skirting them we came to a bare space outside
a great horseshoe gate, and found ourselves suddenly
in the foreground of a picture by Carpaccio or Bellini.
Where else had one seen just those rows of white-turbaned
majestic figures, squatting in the dust under lofty
walls, all the pale faces ringed in curling beards
turned to the story-teller in the centre of the group?
Transform the story-teller into a rapt young Venetian,
and you have the audience and the foreground of Carpaccio’s
“Preaching of St. Stephen,” even to the
camels craning inquisitive necks above the turbans.
Every step of the way in North Africa corroborates
the close observation of the early travellers, whether
painters or narrators, and shows the unchanged character
of the Oriental life that the Venetians pictured,
and Leo Africanus and Windus and Charles Cochelet described.
There was time, before sunset, to go up to the hill
from which the ruined tombs of the Merinid Sultans
look down over the city they made glorious. After
the savage massacre of foreign residents in 1912 the
French encircled the heights commanding Fez with one
of their admirably engineered military roads, and
in a few minutes our motor had climbed to the point
from which the great dynasty of artist-Sultans dreamed
of looking down forever on their capital.
Nothing endures in Islam, except what human inertia
has left standing and its own solidity has preserved
from the elements. Or rather, nothing remains
intact, and nothing wholly perishes, but the architecture,
like all else, lingers on half-ruined and half-unchanged.
The Merinid tombs, however, are only hollow shells
and broken walls, grown part of the brown cliff they
cling to. No one thinks of them save as an added
touch of picturesqueness where all is picturesque:
they survive as the best point from which to look
down at Fez.
There it lies, outspread in golden light, roofs, terraces,
and towers sliding over the plain’s edge in
a rush dammed here and there by barriers of cypress
and ilex, but growing more precipitous as the ravine
of the Fez narrows downward with the fall of the river.
It is as though some powerful enchanter, after decreeing
that the city should be hurled into the depths, had
been moved by its beauty, and with a wave of his wand
held it suspended above destruction.
