After the Library mosque, with its commanding tower and modest yet memorable tomb, the traveller remembers the Sultan’s palace, white-walled, green-tiled, vast, imposing; and the lesser mosque of Sidi bel Abbas, to whom the beggars pray, for it is said of him that he knew God.  The city’s hospital stands beside this good man’s grave.  And here one pays tribute also to great Mulai Abd el Kader Ijjilalli, yet another saint whose name is very piously invoked among the poor.  The mosque by the Dukala gate is worthy of note, and earns the salutation of all who come by way of R’hamna to Marrakesh.  The Kaisariyah lingers in the memory, and on hot days in the plains, when shade is far to seek, one recalls a fine fountain with the legend “drink and admire,” where the water-carriers fill their goat-skins and all beggars congregate during the hours of fire.

The Mellah, in which the town Jews live, is reached by way of the Olive Garden.  It is the dirtiest part of Marrakesh, and, all things considered, the least interesting.  The lanes that run between its high walls are full of indescribable filth; comparison with them makes the streets of Madinah and Kasbah almost clean.  One result of the dirt is seen in the prevalence of a very virulent ophthalmia, from which three out of four of the Mellah’s inhabitants seem to suffer, slightly or seriously.  Few adults appear to take exercise, unless they are called abroad to trade, and when business is in a bad way the misery is very real indeed.  A skilled workman is pleased to earn the native equivalent of fourteenpence for a day’s labour, beginning at sunrise, and on this miserable pittance he can support a wife and family.  Low wages and poor living, added to centuries of oppression, have made the Morocco Jew of the towns a pitiable creature; but on the hills, particularly among the Atlas villages, the People of the Book are healthy, athletic, and resourceful, able to use hands as well as head, and the trusted intermediary between Berber hillman and town Moor.

[Illustration:  A GATEWAY, MARRAKESH]

Being of the ancient race myself, I was received in several of the show-houses of the Mellah—­places whose splendid interiors were not at all suggested by the squalid surroundings in which they were set.  This is typical to some extent of all houses in Morocco, even in the coast towns, and greatly misleads the globe-trotter.  There was a fine carving and colouring in many rooms, but the European furniture was, for the most part, wrongly used, and at best grotesquely out of place.  Hygiene has not passed within the Mellah’s walls, but a certain amount of Western tawdriness has.  Patriarchal Jews of good stature and commanding presence had their dignity hopelessly spoilt by the big blue spotted handkerchief worn over the head and tied under the chin; Jewesses in rich apparel seemed quite content with the fineness within their houses, and indifferent to the mire of the streets.