In the Medersa of the Oudayas, these native activities
have been replaced by the lifeless hush of a museum.
The rooms are furnished with old rugs, pottery, brasses,
the curious embroidered hangings which line the tents
of the chiefs, and other specimens of Arab art.
One room reproduces a barber’s shop in the bazaar,
its benches covered with fine matting, the hanging
mirror inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the razor-handles
of silver niello. The horseshoe arches
of the outer gallery look out on orange-blossoms,
roses and the sea. It is all beautiful, calm
and harmonious; and if one is tempted to mourn the
absence of life and local colour, one has only to visit
an abandoned Medersa to see that, but for French intervention,
the charming colonnades and cedar chambers of the
college of the Oudayas would by this time be a heap
of undistinguished rubbish—for plaster and
rubble do not “die in beauty” like the
firm stones of Rome.
ROBINSON CRUSOE’S “SALLEE”
Before Morocco passed under the rule of the great
governor who now administers it, the European colonists
made short work of the beauty and privacy of the old
Arab towns in which they established themselves.
On the west coast, especially, where the Mediterranean
peoples, from the Phenicians to the Portuguese, have
had trading-posts for over two thousand years, the
harm done to such seaboard towns as Tangier, Rabat
and Casablanca is hard to estimate. The modern
European colonist apparently imagined that to plant
his warehouses, cafes and cinema-palaces within
the walls which for so long had fiercely excluded
him was the most impressive way of proclaiming his
domination.
Under General Lyautey such views are no longer tolerated.
Respect for native habits, native beliefs and native
architecture is the first principle inculcated in
the civil servants attached to his administration.
Not only does he require that the native towns shall
be kept intact, and no European building erected within
them; a sense of beauty not often vouchsafed to Colonial
governors causes him to place the administration buildings
so far beyond the walls that the modern colony grouped
around them remains entirely distinct from the old
town, instead of growing out of it like an ugly excrescence.
The Arab quarter of Rabat was already irreparably
disfigured when General Lyautey came to Morocco; but
ferocious old Sale, Phenician counting-house and breeder
of Barbary pirates, had been saved from profanation
by its Moslem fanaticism. Few Christian feet had
entered its walls except those of the prisoners who,
like Robinson Crusoe, slaved for the wealthy merchants
in its mysterious terraced houses. Not till two
or three years ago was it completely pacified; and
when it opened its gates to the infidel it was still,
as it is to-day, the type of the untouched Moroccan
city—so untouched that, with the sunlight
irradiating its cream-coloured walls and the blue-white
domes above them, it rests on its carpet of rich fruit-gardens
like some rare specimen of Arab art on a strip of
old Oriental velvet.
