Sidi Boubikir passed from room to room of his great establishment and showed some of its treasures.  There were great piles of carpets and vast quantities of furniture that must have looked out at one time in their history upon the crowds that throng the Tottenham Court Road; I saw chairs, sofas, bedsteads, clocks, and sideboards, all of English make.  Brought on camels through Dukala and R’hamna to Marrakesh, they were left to fill up the countless rooms without care or arrangement, though their owner’s house must hold more than fifty women, without counting servants.  Probably when they were not quarrelling or dying their finger nails, or painting their faces after a fashion that is far from pleasing to European eyes, the ladies of the hareem passed their days lying on cushions, playing the gimbri[40] or eating sweetmeats.

In one room on the ground-floor there was a great collection of mechanical toys.  Sidi Boubikir explained that the French Commercial Attache had brought a large number to the Sultan’s palace, and that my Lord Abd-el-Aziz had rejected the ones before us.  With the curious childish simplicity that is found so often among the Moors of high position, Boubikir insisted upon winding up the clock-work apparatus of nearly all the toys.  Then one doll danced, another played a drum, a third went through gymnastic exercises, and the toy orchestra played the Marseillaise, while from every adjacent room veiled figures stole out cautiously, as though this room in a Moorish house were a stage and the shrouded visitors were the chorus entering mysteriously from unexpected places.  The old man’s merriment was very real and hearty, so genuine, in fact, that he did not notice how his women-folk were intruding until the last note sounded.  Then he turned round and the swathed figures disappeared suddenly as ghosts at cockcrow.

Though it was clear that Sidi Boubikir seldom saw half the rooms through which we hurried, the passion for building, that seizes all rich Moors, held him fast.  He was adding wing after wing to his vast premises, and would doubtless order more furniture from London to fill the new rooms.  No Moor knows when it is time to call a halt and deem his house complete, and so the country is full of palaces begun by men who fell from power or died leaving the work unfinished.  The Grand Wazeer Ba Ahmad left a palace nearly as big as the Dar el Makhzan itself, and since he died the storks that build upon the flat roofs have been its only occupants.  So it is with the gardens, whose many beauties he did not live to enjoy.  I rode past them one morning, noted all manner of fruit trees blossoming, heard birds singing in their branches, and saw young storks fishing in the little pools that the rains of winter had left.  But there was not one gardener there to tend the ground once so highly cultivated, and I was assured that the terror of the wazeer’s name kept even the hungry beggars from the fruit in harvest time.