[Footnote A: The Ghetto in African towns.
All the jewellers in Morocco are Jews.]
The houses were humble ones, such as grow up in the
cracks of a wealthy quarter, and their inhabitants
doubtless small folk, but in the enchanted African
twilight the terraces blossomed like gardens, and when
the moon rose and the muezzin called from the minaret,
the domestic squabbles and the shrill cries from roof
to roof became part of a story in Bagdad, overheard
a thousand years ago by that arch-detective Haroun-al-Raschid.
FEZ ELDJID
It is usual to speak of Fez as very old, and the term
seems justified when one remembers that the palace
of Bou-Jeloud stands on the site of an Almoravid Kasbah
of the eleventh century, that when that Kasbah was
erected Fez Elbali had already existed for three hundred
years, that El Kairouiyin is the contemporary of Sant’
Ambrogio of Milan, and that the original mosque of
Moulay Idriss II was built over his grave in the eighth
century.
Fez is, in fact, the oldest city in Morocco without
a Phenician or a Roman past, and has preserved more
traces than any other of its architectural flowering-time,
yet it would be truer to say of it, as of all Moroccan
cities, that it has no age, since its seemingly immutable
shape is forever crumbling and being renewed on the
old lines.
When we rode forth the next day to visit some of the
palaces of Eldjid our pink-saddled mules carried us
at once out of the bounds of time. How associate
anything so precise and Occidental as years or centuries
with these visions of frail splendor seen through
cypresses and roses? The Cadis in their multiple
muslins, who received us in secret doorways and led
us by many passages into the sudden wonder of gardens
and fountains; the bright-earringed negresses peering
down from painted balconies, the pilgrims and clients
dozing in the sun against hot walls, the deserted
halls with plaster lace-work and gold pendentives in
tiled niches; the Venetian chandeliers and tawdry
rococo beds, the terraces from which pigeons whirled
up in a white cloud while we walked on a carpet of
their feathers—were all these the ghosts
of vanished state, or the actual setting of the life
of some rich merchant with “business connections”
in Liverpool and Lyons, or some government official
at that very moment speeding to Meknez or Casablanca
in his sixty h.p. motor?
We visited old palaces and new, inhabited and abandoned,
and over all lay the same fine dust of oblivion, like
the silvery mould on an overripe fruit. Overripeness
is indeed the characteristic of this rich and stagnant
civilization. Buildings, people, customs, seem
all about to crumble and fall of their own weight:
the present is a perpetually prolonged past.
To touch the past with one’s hands is realized
only in dreams, and in Morocco the dream-feeling envelopes
one at every step. One trembles continually lest
the “Person from Porlock” should step in.
