Many-walled Fez rose up before us out of the plain toward the end of the day.
The walls and towers we saw were those of the upper town, Fez Eldjid (the New), which lies on the edge of the plateau and hides from view Old Fez tumbling down below it into the ravine of the Oued Fez.
Thus approached, the city presents to view only a long line of ramparts and fortresses, merging into the wide, tawny plain and framed in barren mountains.
Not a house is visible outside the walls, except, at a respectful distance, the few unobtrusive buildings of the European colony, and not a village breaks the desolation of the landscape. As we drew nearer, the walls towered close over us, and skirting them we came to a bare space outside a great horseshoe gate and found ourselves suddenly in the foreground of a picture by Carpaccio or Bellini.
Where else had one seen just those rows of white turbaned majestic figures, squatting in the dust under lofty walls, all the pale faces ringed in curling beards turned to the story-teller in the center of the group? Transform the story-teller into a rapt young Venetian, and you have the audience and the foreground of Carpaccio’s “Preaching of St. Stephen,” even to the camels craning inquisitive necks above the turbans. Every step of the way in North Africa corroborates the close observation of the early travelers, whether painters or narrators, and shows the unchanged 66 characters of the Oriental life that the Venetians pictured, and Leo Africanus and Windus and Charles Cochelet described. There was time, before sunset, to go up to the hill from which the ruined tombs of the Merinid Sultans look down over the city they made gloriously.
After the savage massacre of foreign residents in 1912, the French encircled the heights commanding Fez with one of their admirably engineered military roads, and in a few minutes, our motor had climbed to the point from which the great dynasty of artist-Sultans dreamed of looking down forever on their capital. Nothing endures in Islam, except what human inertia has left standing and its own solidity has preserved from the elements. Or rather, nothing remains intact, and nothing wholly perishes, but the architecture, like all else, lingers on half-ruined and half-unchanged. The Merinid tombs, however, are only hollow shells and broken walls, grown part of the brown cliff they cling to. No one thinks of them save as an added touch of picturesqueness,
where all is picturesque: they survive as the best point from which to look down at Fez. There it lies, outspread in golden light, roofs, terraces, and towers sliding over the plain’s edge in a rush dammed here and there by barriers of cypress and ilex but growing more precipitous as the ravine of the Fez narrows downward with the fall of the river.
It is as though some powerful enchanter, after decreeing that the city should be hurled into the depths, had been 67 moved by its beauty, and with a wave of his wand held it suspended above destruction. At first, the eye takes in only this impression of a great city over a green abyss, then the complex scene begins to define itself. All around are the outer lines of ramparts, walls beyond walls, their crenellations climbing the heights, their angle fortresses dominating the precipices. Almost on a level with us lies the upper city, the aristocratic Fez Eldjid of painted palaces and gardens, then, as the houses close in and descend more abruptly, terraces, minarets, domes, and long reed thatched roofs of the bazaars, all gather around the green-tiled tomb of Moulay Idriss and the tower of the Almohad mosque of El Kairouiyin, which adjoin each other in the depths of Fez, and form its central sanctuary.
From the Merinid hill, we had noticed a long façade among the cypresses and fruit-trees of Eldjid. This was Bou-Jeloud, the old summer palace of the Sultan’s harem, now the house of the Resident-General, where lodgings had been prepared for us. The road descended again, crossing the Oued Fez by one of the fine old single-arch bridges that mark the architectural link between Morocco and Spain. We skirted high walls, wayside pools, and dripping mill wheels; then one of the city gates engulfed us, and we were in the waste spaces of intramural Fez, formerly the lines of defense of a rich and perpetually menaced city, now chiefly used for refuse-heaps, open-air fondaks, 68 and dreaming-places for rows of Lazaruses rolled in their cerements in the dust.
Through another gate and more walls we came to an arch in the inner line of defense. Beyond that, the motor paused before a green door, where a Cadi in a silken caftan received us. Across squares of orange-trees divided by running water we were led to an arcaded apartment hung with Moroccan embroideries and lined with wide divans; the hall of reception of the Resident-General. Through its arches were other tiled distances, fountains, arcades, beyond, in greener depths, the bright blossoms of a flower-garden. Such was our first sight of Bou-Jeloud, once the summer-palace of the wives of Moulay Hafid. Upstairs, from a room walled and ceiled with cedar, and decorated with the bold rose-pink embroideries of Salé and the intricate old needlework of Fez, I looked out over the upper city toward the mauve and tawny mountains.
Just below the window, the flat roofs of a group of little houses descended like the steps of an irregular staircase. Between them rose a few cypresses and a green minaret, out of the court of one house an ancient fig-tree thrust its twisted arms. The sun had set, and one after another bright figure appeared on the roofs. The children came first, hung with silver amulets and amber beads, and pursued by negresses in striped turbans, who bustled up with rugs and matting, then the mothers followed more indolently, released from their ashy mufflings and showing, under their light 69 veils, long earrings from the Mellah[A] and caftans of pale green or peach color. [Footnote A: The Ghetto in African towns.
All the jewelers in Morocco are Jews.] The houses were humble ones, such as growing up in the cracks of a wealthy quarter, and their inhabitants doubtless small folk, but in the enchanted African twilight the terraces blossomed like gardens, and when the moon rose and the muezzin called from the minaret, the domestic squabbles and the shrill cries from the roof to roof became part of a story in Bagdad, overheard a thousand years ago by that arch-detective Haroun-al-Raschid.
II. FEZ ELDJID
It is usual to speak of Fez as very old, and the term seems justified when one remembers that the palace of Bou-Jeloud stands on the site of an Almoravid Kasbah of the eleventh century, that when that Kasbah was erected Fez Elbali had already existed for three hundred years, that El Kairouiyin is the contemporary of Sant’ Ambrogio of Milan, and that the original mosque of Moulay Idriss II was built over his grave in the eighth century.
Fez is, in fact, the oldest city in Morocco without a Phenician or a Roman past, and has preserved more traces than any other of its architectural flowering-time, yet it would be truer to say of it, as of all Moroccan cities, that it has no age, since its seemingly immutable shape is forever crumbling and being renewed on the old lines. When we rode forth the next day to visit some of the palaces of Eldjid our pink-saddled mules carried us at once out of the bounds of time.
How associate anything so precise and Occidental as years or centuries with these visions of frail splendor seen through cypresses and roses? The Cadis in their multiple muslins, who received us in secret doorways and led us by many passages into the sudden wonder of gardens and fountains; the bright-earrings negresses peering down from painted balconies, the pilgrims and clients dozing in the sun against hot walls, the deserted halls with plaster lace-work and gold pendentives in tiled niches; 71 the Venetian chandeliers and tawdry rococo beds, the terraces from which pigeons whirled up in a white cloud while we walked on a carpet of their feathers– were all these the ghosts of vanished state, or the actual setting of the life of some rich merchant with “business connections” in Liverpool and Lyons, or some government official at that very moment speeding to Meknes or Casablanca in his sixty h.p. motor? We visited old palaces and new, inhabited and abandoned, and overall lay the same fine dust of oblivion, like the silvery mold on overripe fruit.
Overripeness is indeed the characteristic of this rich and stagnant civilization. Buildings, people, customs, seem all about to crumble and fall of their own weight: the present is a perpetually prolonged past.
To touch the past with one’s hands is realized only in dreams, and in Morocco the dream-feeling envelopes one at every step. One trembles continually lest the “Person from Porlock” should step in.
[Illustration: From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au Maroc Fez Eldjid (the upper city)] He is undoubtedly on the way, but Fez had not heard of him when we rode out that morning.
Fez Eldjid, the “New Fez” of palaces and government buildings, was founded in the fourteenth century by the Merinid princes, and probably looks much as it did then. The palaces in their overgrown gardens, with pale-green trellises dividing the rose-beds from the blue-and-white tiled paths, and fountains in fluted basins of 72 Italian marble, all had the same drowsy charm, yet the oldest were built not more than a century or two ago, others within the last fifty years; and at Marrakech, later in our journey, we were to visit a sumptuous dwelling where plaster-cutters and ceramists from Fez were actually repeating with wonderful skill and spontaneity, the old ornamentation of which the threads run back to Rome and Damascus.
Of really old private dwellings, palaces or rich men’s houses, there are surprisingly few in Morocco. It is hard to guess the age of some of the featureless houses propping each other’s flanks in old Fez or old Salé, but people rich enough to rebuild have always done so, and the passion for the building seems allied, in this country of inconsequences, to the supine indifference that lets existing constructions crumble back to clay. “Dust to dust” should have been the motto of the Moroccan palace-builders.
Fez possesses one old secular building, a fine fond of the fifteenth century, but in Morocco, as a rule, only mosques and the tombs of saints are preserved–none too carefully–and even the strong stone buildings of the Almohads have been allowed to fall to ruin, as at Chella and Rabat. This indifference to the completed object–which is like a kind of collective exaggeration of the artist’s indifference to his completed work–has resulted in the total disappearance of the furniture and works of art which must have filled the beautiful buildings of the Merinid period.
Neither pottery nor brasswork nor enamels nor fine hangings survives; there 73 is no parallel in Morocco to the textiles of Syria, the potteries of Persia, the Byzantine ivories or enamels. It has been said that the Moroccan is always a nomad, who lives in his house as if it were a tent; but this is not a conclusive answer to anyone who knows the passion of the modern Moroccan for European furniture.
When one reads the list of the treasures contained in the palaces of the medieval Sultans of Egypt one feels sure that, if artists were lacking in Morocco, the princes and merchants who brought skilled craftsmen across the desert to build their cities must also have imported treasures to adorn them. Yet, as far as is known, the famous fourteenth-century bronze chandelier of Tetuan, and the fine old ritual furniture reported to be contained in certain mosques, are the only important works of art in Morocco later in date than the Roman Sloughi of Volubilis.
III. FEZ ELBALI
The distances in Fez are so great and the streets so narrow, and in some quarters so crowded, that all but saints or humble folk go about on mule-back. In the afternoon, accordingly, the pink mules came again, and we set out for the long tunnel-like street that leads down the hill to the Fez Elbali.
“Look out–‘ware heads!” our leader would call back at every turn, as our way shrank to a black passage under a house bestriding the street, or a caravan of donkeys laden with obstructive reeds or branches of dates made the passers-by flatten themselves against the walls. On each side of the street, the houses hung over us like fortresses, leaning across the narrow strip of blue and throwing out great beams and buttresses to prop each other’s bulging sides.
Windows there were none on the lower floors; only here and there an iron-barred slit stuffed with rags and immemorial filth, from which a lean cat would suddenly spring out, and scuttle off under an archway like a witch’s familiar. [Illustration: From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au Maroc Fez–a reed-roofed street] Some of these descending lanes were packed with people, others as deserted as a cemetery; and it was strange to pass from the thronged streets leading to the bazaars to the profound and secretive silence of a quarter of well-to-do dwelling-houses, where only a few veiled women attended by negro slaves moved 75 noiselessly over the clean cobblestones, and the sound of fountains and runnels came from hidden courtyards and over garden-walls.
This noise of the water is as characteristic of Fez as of Damascus. The Oued Fez rushes through the heart of the town, bridged, canalized, built over, and ever and again bursting out into tumultuous falls and pools shadowed with foliage. The central artery of the city is not a street but a waterfall, and tales are told of the dark uses to which, even now, the underground currents are put by some of the dwellers behind the blank walls and scented gardens of those highly respectable streets.
The crowd in Oriental cities is made up of many elements, and in Morocco Turks, Jews and infidels, Berbers of the mountains, fanatics of the confraternities, Soudanese blacks and haggard Blue Men of the Souss, jostle the merchants and government officials with that democratic familiarity which goes side by side with abject servility in this land of perpetual contradictions. But Fez is above all the city of wealth and learning, of universities and counting houses, and the merchant and the oulama[A]–the sedentary and luxurious types–prevail. [Footnote A: Learned man, doctor of the university.]
The slippered Fazi merchant, wrapped in white muslins and securely mounted on a broad velvet saddle-cloth anchored to the back of a broad mule, is as unlike the Arab horseman of the desert as Mr. Tracy Tupman was unlike the Musketeers of Dumas.
Ease, music, money-making, the affairs of his harem and the 76 bringing-up of his children, are his chief interests, and his plump pale face with long-lashed hazel eyes, his curling beard, and fat womanish hands recall the portly potentates of Hindu miniatures, dreaming among houris beside lotus-tanks.
These personages, when they ride abroad, are preceded by a swarthy footman, who keeps his hand on the embroidered bridle; and the government officers and dignitaries of the Makhzen[A] are usually escorted by several mounted officers of their household, with a servant to each mule. The cry of the runners scatters the crowd, and even the panniered donkeys and perpetually astonished camels somehow contrive to become two-dimensional while the white procession goes by.
[Footnote A: The Sultan’s government.] Then the populace closes in again, so quickly and densely that it seems impossible it could ever have been parted, and negro water-carriers, muffled women, beggars streaming with sores, sinewy and greasy “saints,” Soudanese sorcerers hung with amulets made of sardine-boxes and hares’-feet, long-lashed boys of the Chleuh in clean embroidered caftans, Jews in black robes and skull-caps, university students carrying their prayer-carpets, bangled and spangled black women, scrofulous children with gazelle eyes and mangy skulls, and blind men tapping along with linked arms and howling out verses of the Koran, surge together in a mass drawn by irresistible suction to the point where 77 the bazaars converge about the mosques of Moulay Idriss and El Kairouiyin. Seen from a terrace of the upper town, the long thatched roofing of El Attarine, the central bazaar of Fez, promises fantastic revelations of native life; but the dun-colored crowds moving through its checkered twilight, the lack of carved shop-fronts and gaily adorned coffee-houses, and the absence of the painted coffers and vivid embroideries of Tunis, remind one that Morocco is a melancholy country, and Fez a profoundly melancholy city.
Dust and ashes, dust and ashes, echoes from the gray walls, the moldering thatch of the souks, the long lamentable song of the blind beggars sitting in rows under the feet of the camels and asses. No young men stroll through the bazaar in bright caftans, with roses and jasmine behind their ears, no pedlars offer lemonade and sweetmeats and golden-fritters, no flower-sellers pursue one with tight bunches of orange blossom and little pink roses.
The well-to-do ride by in white and the rest of the population goes mournfully in earth-color. But gradually one falls under the spell of another influence–the influence of the Atlas and the desert. Unknown Africa seems much nearer to Morocco than to the white towns of Tunis and the smiling oases of South Algeria. One feels the nearness of Marrakech at Fez, and at Marrakech that of Timbuctoo. Fez is somber, and the bazaars clustered about its holiest sanctuaries form its most somber quarter. Dusk 78 falls there early, and oil-lanterns twinkle in the merchants’ niches while the clear African daylight still lies on the gardens of upper Fez. This twilight adds to the mystery of the souks, making them, in spite of profane noise and crowding and filth, an impressive approach to the sacred places. Until a year or two ago, the precincts around Moulay Idriss and El Kairouiyin were horm, that is, cut off from the unbeliever. Heavy beams of wood barred the end of each souk, shutting off the sanctuaries, and the Christian could only conjecture what lay beyond.
Now he knows in part; for, though the beams have not been lowered, all comers may pass under them to the lanes about the mosques, and even pause a moment in their open doorways. Farther one may not go, for the shrines of Morocco are still closed to unbelievers; but whoever knows Cordova, or has stood under the arches of the Great Mosque of Kairouan, can reconstruct something of the hidden beauties of its namesake, the “Mosque Kairouan” of western Africa. Once under the bars, the richness of the old Moorish Fez presses upon one with unexpected beauty. Here is the graceful tiled fountain of Nedjarine, glittering with the unapproachable blues and greens of ceramic mosaics, near it, the courtyard of the Fondak Nedjarine, oldest and stateliest of Moroccan inns, with triple galleries of sculptured cedar rising above arcades of stone. A little farther on lights and incense draw one to a threshold where it is well not to linger unduly. Under a deep archway, between booths where gay votive 79 candles are sold, the glimmer of hanging lamps falls on patches of gilding and mosaic, and on veiled women prostrating themselves before an invisible shrine–for this is the vestibule of the mosque of Moulay Idriss, where, on certain days of the week, women are admitted to praying.
Moulay Idriss was not built over the grave of the Fatimite prophet, first of the name, whose bones lie in the Zerhoun above his sacred town. The mosque of Fez grew up around the tomb of his posthumous son, Moulay Idriss II, who, descending from the hills, fell upon a camp of Berbers on an affluent of the Sebou, and there laid the foundations of Fez, and of the Moroccan Empire. [Illustration: From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au Maroc Fez–the Nedjarine fountain] Of the original monument it is said that little remains. The zaouia[A] which encloses it dates from the reign of Moulay-Ismaël, the seventeenth-century Sultan of Meknes, and the mosque itself, and the green minaret shooting up from the very center of old Fez, were not built until 1820. But a rich surface of age has already formed on all these disparate buildings, and the over-gorgeous details of the shrines and fountains set in their outer walls are blended into harmony by a film of incense-smoke, and the grease of countless venerating lips and hands. [Footnote A: Moslem monastery.]
80 Featureless walls of mean houses close in again at the next turn, but a few steps farther another archway reveals another secret scene. This time it is a corner of the jealously guarded court of ablutions in the great mosque El Kairouiyin, with the twin green-roofed pavilions that are so like those of the Alhambra. Those who have walked around the outer walls of the mosque of the other Kairouan, and recall the successive doors opening into the forecourt and into the mosque itself, will be able to guess at the plan of the church of Fez. The great Almohad sanctuary of Tunisia is singularly free from parasitic buildings and maybe approached as easily as that of Cordova, but the approaches of El Kairouiyin are so built up that one never knows at which turn of the labyrinth one may catch sight of its court of fountains, or peep down the endless colonnades of which the Arabs say: “The man who should try to count the columns of Kairouiyin would go mad.
” Marble floors, heavy whitewashed piers, prostrate figures in the penumbra, rows of yellow slippers outside in the sunlight–out of such glimpses one must reconstruct a vision of the long vistas of arches, the blues and golds of the mihrab,[A] the luster of bronze chandeliers, and the ivory inlaying of the twelfth-century minbar[B] of ebony and sandalwood. [Footnote A: Niche in the sanctuary of mosques.] [Footnote B: Movable pulpit.] No Christian footstep has yet profaned Kairouiyin, but fairly definite information as to its plan has been 81 gleaned by students of Moroccan art. The number of its “countless” columns has been counted, and it is known that, to the right of the mihrab, carved cedar doors open into a mortuary chapel called “the mosque of the dead”- -and also that in this chapel, on Fridays, old books and precious manuscripts are sold by auction. This odd association of uses recalls the fact that Kairouiyin is not only a church but a library, the University of Fez as well as its cathedral. The beautiful Medersas with which the Merinids adorned the city is simply the lodging-houses of the students, the classes are all held in the courts and galleries adjoining the mosque. El Kairouiyin was originally an oratory built in the ninth century by Fatmah, whose father had migrated from Kairouan to Fez. Later it was enlarged, and its cupola was surmounted by the talismans which protect sacred edifices against rats, scorpions, and serpents, but in spite of these precautions, all animal life was not successfully exorcised from it.
In the twelfth century, when the great gate Each Chemmâin was building, a well was discovered under its foundations. The mouth of the well was obstructed by an immense tortoise, but when the workmen attempted to take the tortoise out she said: “Burn me rather than take me away from here.” They respected her wishes and built her into the foundations, and since then women who suffer from the back-ache have only to come and sit on the bench above the well to be cured. 82 The actual mosque, or “praying-hall,” is said to be formed of a rectangle or double cube of 90 meters by 45, and this vast space is equally divided by rows of horseshoe arches resting on whitewashed piers on which the lower part is swathed in finely patterned matting from Salé. Fifteen monumental doorways lead into the mosque. Their doors are of cedar, heavily barred and ornamented with wrought iron, and one of them bears the name of the artisan and the date 531 of the Hegira (the first half of the twelfth century).
The mosque also contains the two halls of an audience of the Cadi, of which one has a graceful exterior façade with coupled lights under horseshoe arches; the library, whose 20,000 volumes are reported to have dwindled to about a thousand, the chapel where the Masters of the Koran recite the sacred text in fulfillment of pious bequests; the “museum” in the upper part of the minaret, wherein a remarkable collection of ancient astronomical instruments is said to be preserved; and the Mestonda, or raised hall above the court, where women come to pray. But the crown of El Kairouiyin is the Merinid court of ablutions. This inaccessible wonder lies close under the Medersa Attarine, one of the oldest and most beautiful collegiate buildings of Fez, and through the kindness of the Director of Fine Arts, who was with us, we were taken up to the roof of the Medersa and allowed to look down into the enclosure. It is so closely guarded against below that from our secret coign of vantage we seemed to be looking down 83 into the heart of forbidden things.
Spacious and serene the great tiled cloister lay beneath us, water spilling over from a central basin of marble with a cool sound to which lesser fountains made answer from under the pyramidal green roofs of the twin pavilions. It was near the prayer-hour, and worshippers were flocking in, laying off their shoes and burnouses, washing their faces at the fountains and their feet in the central bank, or stretching themselves out in the shadow of the enclosing arcade. This, then, was the famous court “so cool in the great heats that seated by thy beautiful jet of water I feel the perfection of bliss”–as the learned doctor Abou Abd Allah el Maghili sang of it, the court in which the students gather from the adjoining halls after having committed to memory the principles of grammar in prose and verse, the “science of the reading of the Koran,” the invention, exposition, and ornaments of style, law, medicine, theology, metaphysics and astronomy, as well as the talismanic numbers, and the art of ascertaining by calculation the influences of the angels, the spirits and the heavenly bodies, “the names of the victor and the vanquished, and of the desired object and the person who desires it.” Such is the twentieth-century curriculum of the University of Fez. Repetition is the rule of Arab education as it is of Arab ornament.
The teaching of the University is based entirely on the medieval principle of mnemonics, and as there are no examinations, no degrees, no limits to the duration of any given course, 84 nor is any disgrace attached to slowness in learning, it is not surprising that many students, coming as youths, linger by the fountain of Kairouiyin till their hair is gray. One well-known ulama has lately finished his studies after twenty-seven years at the University and is justly proud of the length of his stay. The life of the scholar is easy, the way of knowledge is long, the contrast exquisite between the foul lanes and noisy bazaars outside and this cool heaven of learning. No wonder the students of Kairouiyin say with the tortoise, “Burn me rather than take me away.”
