Everywhere is the loud rush or the low crooning of
water, and over every wall comes the scent of jasmine
and rose. Far off, from the red purgatory between
the walls, sounds the savage thrum-thrum of a negro
orgy, here all is peace and perfume. A minaret
springs up between the roofs like a palm, and from
its balcony the little white figure bends over and
drops a blessing on all the loveliness and all the
squalor.
MARRAKECH
THE WAY THERE
There are countless Arab tales of evil Djinns who
take the form of sandstorms and hot winds to overwhelm
exhausted travellers.
In spite of the new French road between Rabat and
Marrakech the memory of such tales rises up insistently
from every mile of the level red earth and the desolate
stony stretches of the bled. As long as
the road runs in sight of the Atlantic breakers they
give the scene freshness and life, but when it bends
inland and stretches away across the wilderness the
sense of the immensity and immobility of Africa descends
on one with an intolerable oppression.
The road traverses no villages, and not even a ring
of nomad tents is visible in the distance on the wide
stretches of arable land. At infrequent intervals
our motor passed a train of laden mules, or a group
of peasants about a well, and sometimes, far off, a
fortified farm profiled its thick-set angle-towers
against the sky, or a white koubba floated
like a mirage above the brush, but these rare signs
of life intensified the solitude of the long miles
between.
At midday we were refreshed by the sight of the little
oasis around the military-post of Settat. We
lunched there with the commanding officer, in a cool
Arab house about a flowery patio, but that brief interval
over, the fiery plain began again. After Settat
the road runs on for miles across the waste to the
gorge of the Oued Ouem, and beyond the river it climbs
to another plain so desperate in its calcined aridity
that the prickly scrub of the wilderness we had left
seemed like the vegetation of an oasis. For fifty
kilometres the earth under our wheels was made up
of a kind of glistening red slag covered with pebbles
and stones. Not the scantest and toughest of
rock-growths thrust a leaf through its brassy surface,
not a well-head or a darker depression of the rock
gave sign of a trickle of water. Everything around
us glittered with the same unmerciful dryness.
A long way ahead loomed the line of the Djebilets,
the Djinn-haunted mountains guarding Marrakech on
the north. When at last we reached them the wicked
glister of their purple flanks seemed like a volcanic
upheaval of the plain. For some time we had watched
the clouds gathering over them, and as we got to the
top of the defile rain was falling from a fringe of
thunder to the south. Then the vapours lifted,
and we saw below us another red plain with an island
of palms in its centre. Mysteriously, from the
heart of the palms, a tower shot up, as if alone in
the wilderness, behind it stood the sun-streaked cliffs
of the Atlas, with snow summits appearing and vanishing
through the storm.
