VI
CHELLA AND THE GREAT MOSQUE
The Merinid Sultans of Rabat had a terribly troublesome neighbour across
the Bou-Regreg, and they built Chella to keep an eye on the pirates of
Salé. But Chella has fallen like a Babylonian city triumphed over by the
prophets; while Salé, sly, fierce and irrepressible, continued till well
on in the nineteenth century to breed pirates and fanatics.
The ruins of Chella lie on the farther side of the plateau above the
native town of Rabat. The mighty wall enclosing them faces the city wall
of Rabat, looking at it across one of those great red powdery wastes
which seem, in this strange land, like death and the desert forever
creeping up to overwhelm the puny works of man.
The red waste is scored by countless trains of donkeys carrying water
from the springs of Chella, by long caravans of mules and camels, and by
the busy motors of the French administration; yet there emanates from it
an impression of solitude and decay which even the prosaic tinkle of the
trams jogging out from the European town to the Exhibition grounds above
the sea cannot long dispel.
Perpetually, even in the new thriving French Morocco, the outline of a
ruin or the look in a pair of eyes shifts the scene, rends the thin veil
of the European Illusion, and confronts one with the old grey Moslem
reality. Passing under the gate of Chella, with its richly carved
corbels and lofty crenellated towers, one feels one's self thus
completely reabsorbed into the past.
Below the gate the ground slopes away, bare and blazing, to a hollow
where a little blue-green minaret gleams through fig-trees, and
fragments of arch and vaulting reveal the outline of a ruined mosque.
Was ever shade so blue-black and delicious as that of the cork-tree near
the spring where the donkey's water-cans are being filled? Under its
branches a black man in a blue shirt lies immovably sleeping in the
dust. Close by women and children splash and chatter about the spring,
and the dome of a saint's tomb shines through lustreless leaves. The
black man, the donkeys, the women and children, the saint's dome, are
all part of the inimitable Eastern scene in which inertia and agitation
are so curiously combined, and a surface of shrill noise flickers over
depths of such unfathomable silence.
The ruins of Chella belong to the purest period of Moroccan art. The
tracery of the broken arches is all carved in stone or in glazed
turquoise tiling, and the fragments of wall and vaulting have the firm
elegance of a classic ruin. But what would even their beauty be without
the leafy setting of the place? The "unimaginable touch of Time" gives
Chella its peculiar charm: the aged fig-tree clamped in uptorn tiles and
thrusting gouty arms between the arches; the garlanding of vines flung
from column to column; the secret pool to which childless women are
brought to bathe, and where the tree springing from a cleft of the steps
is always hung with the bright bits of stuff which are the votive
offerings of Africa.
The shade, the sound of springs, the terraced orange-garden with irises
blooming along channels of running water, all this greenery and coolness
in the hollow of a fierce red hill make Chella seem, to the traveller
new to Africa, the very type and embodiment of its old contrasts of heat
and freshness, of fire and languor. It is like a desert traveller's
dream in his last fever.
Yacoub-el-Mansour was the fourth of the great Almohad Sultans who, in
the twelfth century, drove out the effete Almoravids, and swept their
victorious armies from Marrakech to Tunis and from Tangier to Madrid.
His grandfather, Abd-el-Moumen, had been occupied with conquest and
civic administration. It was said of his rule that "he seized northern
Africa to make order prevail there"; and in fact, out of a welter of
wild tribes confusedly fighting and robbing he drew an empire firmly
seated and securely governed, wherein caravans travelled from the Atlas
to the Straits without fear of attack, and "a soldier wandering through
the fields would not have dared to pluck an ear of wheat."
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Chella--ruins of mosque]
His grandson, the great El-Mansour, was a conqueror too; but where he
conquered he planted the undying seed of beauty. The victor of Alarcos,
the soldier who subdued the north of Spain, dreamed a great dream of
art. His ambition was to bestow on his three capitals, Seville, Rabat
and Marrakech, the three most beautiful towers the world had ever seen;
and if the tower of Rabat had been completed, and that of Seville had
not been injured by Spanish embellishments, his dream would have been
realized.
The "Tower of Hassan," as the Sultan's tower is called, rises from the
plateau above old Rabat, overlooking the steep cliff that drops down to
the last winding of the Bou-Regreg. Truncated at half its height, it
stands on the edge of the cliff, a far-off beacon to travellers by land
and sea. It is one of the world's great monuments, so sufficient in
strength and majesty that until one has seen its fellow, the Koutoubya
of Marrakech, one wonders if the genius of the builder could have
carried such perfect balance of massive wall-spaces and traceried
openings to a triumphant completion.
Near the tower, the red-brown walls and huge piers of the mosque built
at the same time stretch their roofless alignment beneath the sky. This
mosque, before it was destroyed, must have been one of the finest
monuments of Almohad architecture in Morocco: now, with its tumbled red
masses of masonry and vast cisterns overhung by clumps of blue aloes, it
still forms a ruin of Roman grandeur.
The Mosque, the Tower, the citadel of the Oudayas, and the mighty walls
and towers of Chella, compose an architectural group as noble and
complete as that of some mediaeval Tuscan city. All they need to make
the comparison exact is that they should have been compactly massed on a
steep hill, instead of lying scattered over the wide spaces between the
promontory of the Oudayas and the hill-side of Chella.
The founder of Rabat, the great Yacoub-el-Mansour, called it, in memory
of the battle of Alarcos, "The Camp of Victory" (_Ribat-el-Path_), and
the monuments he bestowed on it justified the name in another sense, by
giving it the beauty that lives when battles are forgotten.
