IV
THE KASBAH OF THE OUDAYAS
Salé the white and Rabat the red frown at each other over the foaming
bar of the Bou-Regreg, each walled, terraced, minareted, and presenting
a singularly complete picture of the two types of Moroccan town, the
snowy and the tawny. To the gates of both the Atlantic breakers roll in
with the boom of northern seas, and under a misty northern sky. It is
one of the surprises of Morocco to find the familiar African pictures
bathed in this unfamiliar haze. Even the fierce midday sun does not
wholly dispel it--the air remains thick, opalescent, like water slightly
clouded by milk. One is tempted to say that Morocco is Tunisia seen by
moonlight.
The European town of Rabat, a rapidly developing community, lies almost
wholly outside the walls of the old Arab city. The latter, founded in
the twelfth century by the great Almohad conqueror of Spain,
Yacoub-el-Mansour, stretches its mighty walls to the river's mouth.
Thence they climb the cliff to enclose the Kasbah[A] of the Oudayas, a
troublesome tribe whom one of the Almohad Sultans, mistrusting their
good faith, packed up one day, flocks, tents and camels, and carried
across the _bled_ to stow them into these stout walls under his imperial
eye. Great crenellated ramparts, cyclopean, superb, follow the curve of
the cliff. On the landward side they are interrupted by a gate-tower
resting on one of the most nobly decorated of the horseshoe arches that
break the mighty walls of Moroccan cities. Underneath the tower the
vaulted entrance turns, Arab fashion, at right angles, profiling its red
arch against darkness and mystery. This bending of passages, so
characteristic a device of the Moroccan builder, is like an
architectural expression of the tortuous secret soul of the land.
[Footnote A: Citadel.]
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Rabat--general view from the Kasbah of the Oudayas]
Outside the Kasbah a narrow foot-path is squeezed between the walls and
the edge of the cliff. Toward sunset it looks down on a strange scene.
To the south of the citadel the cliff descends to a long dune sloping to
a sand-beach; and dune and beach are covered with the slanting
headstones of the immense Arab cemetery of El Alou. Acres and acres of
graves fall away from the red ramparts to the grey sea; and breakers
rolling straight from America send their spray across the lowest stones.
There are always things going on toward evening in an Arab cemetery. In
this one, travellers from the _bled_ are camping in one corner, donkeys
grazing (on heaven knows what), a camel dozing under its pack; in
another, about a new-made grave, there are ritual movements of muffled
figures and wailings of a funeral hymn half drowned by the waves. Near
us, on a fallen headstone, a man with a thoughtful face sits chatting
with two friends and hugging to his breast a tiny boy who looks like a
grasshopper in his green caftan; a little way off, a solitary
philosopher, his eye fixed on the sunset, lies on another grave, smoking
his long pipe of kif.
There is infinite sadness in this scene under the fading sky, beside the
cold welter of the Atlantic. One seems to be not in Africa itself, but
in the Africa that northern crusaders may have dreamed of in snow-bound
castles by colder shores of the same ocean. This is what Moghreb must
have looked like to the confused imagination of the Middle Ages, to
Norman knights burning to ransom the Holy Places, or Hansa merchants
devising, in steep-roofed towns, of Barbary and the long caravans
bringing apes and gold-powder from the south.
Inside the gate of the Kasbah one comes on more waste land and on other
walls--for all Moroccan towns are enclosed in circuit within circuit of
battlemented masonry. Then, unexpectedly, a gate in one of the inner
walls lets one into a tiled court enclosed in a traceried cloister and
overlooking an orange-grove that rises out of a carpet of roses. This
peaceful and well-ordered place is the interior of the Medersa (the
college) of the Oudayas. Morocco is full of these colleges, or rather
lodging-houses of the students frequenting the mosques, for all
Mahometan education is given in the mosque itself, only the preparatory
work being done in the colleges. The most beautiful of the Medersas date
from the earlier years of the long Merinid dynasty (1248-1548), the
period at which Moroccan art, freed from too distinctively Spanish and
Arab influences, began to develop a delicate grace of its own as far
removed from the extravagance of Spanish ornament as from the
inheritance of Roman-Byzantine motives that the first Moslem invasion
had brought with it from Syria and Mesopotamia.
These exquisite collegiate buildings, though still in use whenever they
are near a well-known mosque, have all fallen into a state of sordid
disrepair. The Moroccan Arab, though he continues to build--and
fortunately to build in the old tradition, which has never been
lost--has, like all Orientals, an invincible repugnance to repairing and
restoring, and one after another the frail exposed Arab structures, with
their open courts and badly constructed terrace-roofs, are crumbling
into ruin. Happily the French Government has at last been asked to
intervene, and all over Morocco the Medersas are being repaired with
skill and discretion. That of the Oudayas is already completely
restored, and as it had long fallen into disuse it has been transformed
by the Ministry of Fine Arts into a museum of Moroccan art.
The plan of the Medersas is always much the same: the eternal plan of
the Arab house, built about one or more arcaded courts, with long narrow
rooms enclosing them on the ground floor, and several stories above,
reached by narrow stairs, and often opening on finely carved cedar
galleries. The chief difference between the Medersa and the private
house, or even the _fondak_,[A] lies in the use to which the rooms are
put. In the Medersas, one of the ground-floor apartments is always
fitted up as a chapel, and shut off from the court by carved cedar doors
still often touched with old gilding and vermilion. There are always a
few students praying in the chapel, while others sit in the doors of the
upper rooms, their books on their knees, or lean over the carved
galleries chatting with their companions who are washing their feet at
the marble fountain in the court, preparatory to entering the chapel.
[Footnote A: The Moroccan inn or caravanserai.]
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Schmitt, Rabat_
Rabat--interior court of the Medersa of the Oudayas]
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.
