FEZ ELBALI
The distances in Fez are so great and the streets
so narrow, and in some quarters so crowded, that all
but saints or humble folk go about on mule-back.
In the afternoon, accordingly, the pink mules came
again, and we set out for the long tunnel-like street
that leads down the hill to the Fez Elbali.
“Look out—’ware heads!”
our leader would call back at every turn, as our way
shrank to a black passage under a house bestriding
the street, or a caravan of donkeys laden with obstructive
reeds or branches of dates made the passers-by flatten
themselves against the walls.
On each side of the street the houses hung over us
like fortresses, leaning across the narrow strip of
blue and throwing out great beams and buttresses to
prop each other’s bulging sides. Windows
there were none on the lower floors; only here and
there an iron-barred slit stuffed with rags and immemorial
filth, from which a lean cat would suddenly spring
out, and scuttle off under an archway like a witch’s
familiar.
[Illustration: From a photograph from the
Service des Beaux-Arts au Maroc
Fez—a reed-roofed street]
Some of these descending lanes were packed with people,
others as deserted as a cemetery; and it was strange
to pass from the thronged streets leading to the bazaars
to the profound and secretive silence of a quarter
of well-to-do dwelling-houses, where only a few veiled
women attended by negro slaves moved noiselessly over
the clean cobblestones, and the sound of fountains
and runnels came from hidden courtyards and over garden-walls.
This noise of water is as characteristic of Fez as
of Damascus. The Oued Fez rushes through the
heart of the town, bridged, canalized, built over,
and ever and again bursting out into tumultuous falls
and pools shadowed with foliage. The central
artery of the city is not a street but a waterfall,
and tales are told of the dark uses to which, even
now, the underground currents are put by some of the
dwellers behind the blank walls and scented gardens
of those highly respectable streets.
The crowd in Oriental cities is made up of many elements,
and in Morocco Turks, Jews and infidels, Berbers of
the mountains, fanatics of the confraternities, Soudanese
blacks and haggard Blue Men of the Souss, jostle the
merchants and government officials with that democratic
familiarity which goes side by side with abject servility
in this land of perpetual contradictions. But
Fez is above all the city of wealth and learning,
of universities and counting-houses, and the merchant
and the oulama[A]—the sedentary
and luxurious types—prevail.
[Footnote A: Learned man, doctor of the university.]
The slippered Fazi merchant, wrapped in white muslins
and securely mounted on a broad velvet saddle-cloth
anchored to the back of a broad mule, is as unlike
the Arab horseman of the desert as Mr. Tracy Tupman
was unlike the Musketeers of Dumas. Ease, music,
money-making, the affairs of his harem and the bringing-up
of his children, are his chief interests, and his
plump pale face with long-lashed hazel eyes, his curling
beard and fat womanish hands, recall the portly potentates
of Hindu miniatures, dreaming among houris beside
lotus-tanks.
