Moulay Youssef greeted Mme. Lyautey with friendly
simplicity, made the proper speeches to her companions,
and then, with the air of the business-man who has
forgotten to give an order before leaving his office,
he walked up to a corner of the room, and while the
flower-maidens ruffled about him, and through the windows
we saw the last participants in the mystic rites galloping
away toward the crenellated walls of Rabat, his Majesty
the Priest and Emperor of the Faithful unhooked a
small instrument from the wall and applied his sacred
lips to the telephone.
IN OLD RABAT
Before General Lyautey came to Morocco Rabat had been
subjected to the indignity of European “improvements,”
and one must traverse boulevards scored with tram-lines,
and pass between hotel-terraces and cafes and cinema-palaces,
to reach the surviving nucleus of the once beautiful
native town. Then, at the turn of a commonplace
street, one comes upon it suddenly. The shops
and cafes cease, the jingle of trams and the trumpeting
of motor-horns die out, and here, all at once, are
silence and solitude, and the dignified reticence
of the windowless Arab house-fronts.
We were bound for the house of a high government official,
a Moroccan dignitary of the old school, who had invited
us to tea, and added a message to the effect that
the ladies of his household would be happy to receive
me.
The house we sought was some distance down the quietest
of white-walled streets. Our companion knocked
at a low green door, and we were admitted to a passage
into which a wooden stairway descended. A brother-in-law
of our host was waiting for us; in his wake we mounted
the ladder-like stairs and entered a long room with
a florid French carpet and a set of gilt furniture
to match. There were no fretted walls, no painted
cedar doors, no fountains rustling in unseen courts:
the house was squeezed in between others, and such
traces of old ornament as it may have possessed had
vanished.
But presently we saw why its inhabitants were indifferent
to such details. Our host, a handsome white-bearded
old man, welcomed us in the doorway, then he led us
to a raised oriel window at one end of the room, and
seated us in the gilt armchairs face to face with one
of the most beautiful views in Morocco.
Below us lay the white and blue terrace-roofs of the
native town, with palms and minarets shooting up between
them, or the shadows of a vine-trellis patterning
a quiet lane. Beyond, the Atlantic sparkled,
breaking into foam at the mouth of the Bou-Regreg and
under the towering ramparts of the Kasbah of the Oudayas.
To the right, the ruins of the great Mosque rose from
their plateau over the river; and, on the farther
side of the troubled flood, old Sale, white and wicked,
lay like a jewel in its gardens. With such a
scene beneath their eyes, the inhabitants of the house
could hardly feel its lack of architectural interest.
