[Illustration: From a photograph taken by
Mme. la Marquis de Segonzac
Marrakech—apartment of the grand vizier’s
favorite, Palace of the Bahia]
A cock crew, and they vanished ... and when I made
the mistake of asking what they had been doing in
my room at that hour I was told (as though it were
the most natural thing in the world) that they were
the municipal lamp-lighters of Marrakech, whose duty
it is to refill every morning the two hundred acetylene
lamps lighting the palace of the Resident General.
Such unforeseen aspects, in this mysterious city, do
the most ordinary domestic functions wear.
THE BAZAARS
Passing out of the enchanted circle of the Bahia it
is startling to plunge into the native life about
its gates.
Marrakech is the great market of the south, and the
south means not only the Atlas with its feudal chiefs
and their wild clansmen, but all that lies beyond
of heat and savagery, the Sahara of the veiled Touaregs,
Dakka, Timbuctoo, Senegal and the Soudan. Here
come the camel caravans from Demnat and Tameslout,
from the Moulouya and the Souss, and those from the
Atlantic ports and the confines of Algeria. The
population of this old city of the southern march
has always been even more mixed than that of the northerly
Moroccan towns. It is made up of the descendants
of all the peoples conquered by a long line of Sultans
who brought their trains of captives across the sea
from Moorish Spain and across the Sahara from Timbuctoo.
Even in the highly cultivated region on the lower
slopes of the Atlas there are groups of varied ethnic
origin, the descendants of tribes transplanted by
long-gone rulers and still preserving many of their
original characteristics.
In the bazaars all these peoples meet and mingle:
cattle-dealers, olive-growers, peasants from the Atlas,
the Souss and the Draa, Blue Men of the Sahara, blacks
from Senegal and the Soudan, coming in to trade with
the wool-merchants, tanners, leather-merchants, silk-weavers,
armourers, and makers of agricultural implements.
Dark, fierce and fanatical are these narrow souks
of Marrakech. They are mere mud lanes roofed
with rushes, as in South Tunisia and Timbuctoo, and
the crowds swarming in them are so dense that it is
hardly possible, at certain hours, to approach the
tiny raised kennels where the merchants sit like idols
among their wares. One feels at once that something
more than the thought of bargaining—dear
as this is to the African heart—animates
these incessantly moving throngs. The Souks of
Marrakech seem, more than any others, the central organ
of a native life that extends far beyond the city
walls into secret clefts of the mountains and far-off
oases where plots are hatched and holy wars fomented—farther
still, to yellow deserts whence negroes are secretly
brought across the Atlas to that inmost recess of the
bazaar where the ancient traffic in flesh and blood
still surreptitiously goes on.
