II
MOULAY IDRISS
We lingered under the pergolas of Volubilis till the heat grew less
intolerable, and then our companions suggested a visit to Moulay Idriss.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Volubilis--the western portico of the basilica of Antonius Pius]
Such a possibility had not occurred to us, and even Captain de M.
seemed to doubt whether the expedition were advisable. Moulay Idriss was
still said to be resentful of Christian intrusion: it was only a year
before that the first French officers had entered it.
But M. Châtelain was confident that there would be no opposition to our
visit, and with the piled-up terraces and towers of the Sacred City
growing golden in the afternoon light across the valley it was
impossible to hesitate.
We drove down through an olive-wood as ancient as those of Mitylene and
Corfu, and then along the narrowing valley, between gardens luxuriant
even in the parched Moroccan autumn. Presently the motor began to climb
the steep road to the town, and at a gateway we got out and were met by
the native chief of police. Instantly at the high windows of mysterious
houses veiled heads appeared and sidelong eyes cautiously inspected us.
But the quarter was deserted, and we walked on without meeting any one
to the Street of the Weavers, a silent narrow way between low
whitewashed niches like the cubicles in a convent. In each niche sat a
grave white-robed youth, forming a great amphora-shaped grain-basket out
of closely plaited straw. Vine-leaves and tendrils hung through the reed
roofing overhead, and grape-clusters cast their classic shadow at our
feet. It was like walking on the unrolled frieze of a white Etruscan
vase patterned with black vine garlands.
The silence and emptiness of the place began to strike us: there was no
sign of the Oriental crowd that usually springs out of the dust at the
approach of strangers. But suddenly we heard close by the lament of the
_rekka_ (a kind of long fife), accompanied by a wild thrum-thrum of
earthenware drums and a curious excited chanting of men's voices. I had
heard such a chant before, at the other end of North Africa, in
Kairouan, one of the other great Sanctuaries of Islam, where the sect of
the Aïssaouas celebrate their sanguinary rites in the _Zaouia_[A] of
their confraternity. Yet it seemed incredible that if the Aïssaouas of
Moulay Idriss were performing their ceremonies that day the chief of
police should be placidly leading us through the streets in the very
direction from which the chant was coming. The Moroccan, though he
has no desire to get into trouble with the Christian, prefers to be left
alone on feast-days, especially in such a stronghold of the faith as
Moulay Idriss.
[Footnote A: Sacred college.]
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Moulay-Idriss (9,000 inhabitants)]
But "Geschehen ist geschehen" is the sum of Oriental philosophy. For
centuries Moulay Idriss had held out fanatically on its holy steep;
then, suddenly, in 1916, its chiefs saw that the game was up, and
surrendered without a pretense of resistance. Now the whole thing was
over, the new conditions were accepted, and the chief of police assured
us that with the French uniform at our side we should be safe anywhere.
"The Aïssaouas?" he explained. "No, this is another sect, the Hamadchas,
who are performing their ritual dance on the feast-day of their patron,
the _marabout_ Hamadch, whose tomb is in the Zerhoun. The feast is
celebrated publicly in the market-place of Moulay Idriss."
As he spoke we came out into the market-place, and understood why there
had been no crowd at the gate. All the population was in the square and
on the roofs that mount above it, tier by tier, against the wooded
hillside: Moulay Idriss had better to do that day than to gape at a few
tourists in dust-coats.
Short of Sfax, and the other coast cities of eastern Tunisia, there is
surely not another town in North Africa as white as Moulay Idriss. Some
are pale blue and pinky yellow, like the Kasbah of Tangier, or cream and
blue like Salé, but Tangier and Salé, for centuries continuously subject
to European influences, have probably borrowed their colors from Genoa
and the Italian Riviera. In the interior of the country, and especially
in Morocco, where the whole color-scheme is much soberer than in Algeria
and Tunisia, the color of the native houses is always a penitential
shade of mud and ashes.
But Moulay Idriss, that afternoon, was as white as if its arcaded square
had been scooped out of a big cream cheese. The late sunlight lay like
gold-leaf on one side of the square, the other was in pure blue shade,
and above it, the crowded roofs, terraces and balconies packed with
women in bright dresses looked like a flower-field on the edge of a
marble quarry.
The bright dresses were as unusual a sight as the white walls, for the
average Moroccan crowd is the color of its houses. But the occasion
was a special one, for these feasts of the Hamadchas occur only twice a
year, in spring and autumn, and as the ritual dances take place out of
doors, instead of being performed inside the building of the
confraternity, the feminine population seizes the opportunity to burst
into flower on the housetops.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Moulay-Idriss--the market-place]
It is rare, in Morocco, to see in the streets or the bazaars any women
except of the humblest classes, household slaves, servants, peasants
from the country or small tradesmen's wives; and even they (with the
exception of the unveiled Berber women) are wrapped in the prevailing
grave-clothes. The _filles de joie_ and dancing-girls whose brilliant
dresses enliven certain streets of the Algerian and Tunisian towns are
invisible, or at least unnoticeable, in Morocco, where life, on the
whole, seems so much less gay and brightly-tinted; and the women of the
richer classes, mercantile or aristocratic, never leave their harems
except to be married or buried. A throng of women dressed in light
colors is therefore to be seen in public only when some street festival
draws them to the roofs. Even then it is probable that the throng is
mostly composed of slaves, household servants, and women of the lower
_bourgeoisie_; but as they are all dressed in mauve and rose and pale
green, with long earrings and jewelled head-bands flashing through their
parted veils, the illusion, from a little distance, is as complete as
though they were the ladies in waiting of the Queen of Sheba; and that
radiant afternoon at Moulay Idriss, above the vine-garlanded square, and
against the background of piled-up terraces, their vivid groups were in
such contrast to the usual gray assemblages of the East that the scene
seemed like a setting for some extravagantly staged ballet.
For the same reason the spectacle unrolling itself below us took on a
blessed air of unreality. Any normal person who has seen a dance of the
Aïssaouas and watched them swallow thorns and hot coals, slash
themselves with knives, and roll on the floor in epilepsy must have
privately longed, after the first excitement was over, to fly from the
repulsive scene. The Hamadchas are much more savage than Aïssaouas, and
carry much farther their display of cataleptic anaesthesia, and, knowing
this, I had wondered how long I should be able to stand the sight of
what was going on below our terrace. But the beauty of the setting
redeemed the bestial horror. In that unreal golden light the scene
became merely symbolical: it was like one of those strange animal masks
which the Middle Ages brought down from antiquity by way of the
satyr-plays of Greece, and of which the half-human protagonists still
grin and contort themselves among the Christian symbols of Gothic
cathedrals.
[Illustration: _From a photograph taken by Captain Henissart of the
French Army_
Moulay-Idriss--market-place on the day of the ritual dance of the
Hamadchas]
At one end of the square the musicians stood on a stone platform above
the dancers. Like the musicians in a bas-relief they were flattened side
by side against a wall, the fife-players with lifted arms and inflated
cheeks, the drummers pounding frantically on long earthenware drums
shaped like enormous hour-glasses and painted in barbaric patterns; and
below, down the length of the market-place, the dance unrolled itself in
a frenzied order that would have filled with envy a Paris or London
impresario.
In its centre an inspired-looking creature whirled about on his axis,
the black ringlets standing out in snaky spirals from his haggard head,
his cheek-muscles convulsively twitching. Around him, but a long way
off, the dancers rocked and circled with long raucous cries dominated
by the sobbing booming music, and in the sunlit space between dancers
and holy man, two or three impish children bobbed about with fixed eyes
and a grimace of comic frenzy, solemnly parodying his contortions.
Meanwhile a tall grave personage in a doge-like cap, the only calm
figure in the tumult, moved gravely here and there, regulating the
dance, stimulating the frenzy, or calming some devotee who had broken
the ranks and lay tossing and foaming on the stones. There was something
far more sinister in this passionless figure, holding his hand on the
key that let loose such crazy forces, than in the poor central whirligig
who merely set the rhythm of the convulsions.
The dancers were all dressed in white caftans or in the blue shirts of
the lowest classes. In the sunlight something that looked like fresh red
paint glistened on their shaved black or yellow skulls and made dark
blotches on their garments. At first these stripes and stains suggested
only a gaudy ritual ornament like the pattern on the drums; then one saw
that the paint, or whatever it was, kept dripping down from the whirling
caftans and forming fresh pools among the stones, that as one of the
pools dried up another formed, redder and more glistening, and that
these pools were fed from great gashes which the dancers hacked in their
own skulls and breasts with hatchets and sharpened stones. The dance was
a blood-rite, a great sacrificial symbol, in which blood flowed so
freely that all the rocking feet were splashed with it.
Gradually, however, it became evident that many of the dancers simply
rocked and howled, without hacking themselves, and that most of the
bleeding skulls and breasts belonged to negroes. Every now and then the
circle widened to let in another figure, black or dark yellow, the
figure of some humble blue-shirted spectator suddenly "getting religion"
and rushing forward to snatch a weapon and baptize himself with his own
blood; and as each new recruit joined the dancers the music shrieked
louder and the devotees howled more wolfishly. And still, in the centre,
the mad _marabout_ spun, and the children bobbed and mimicked him and
rolled their diamond eyes.
Such is the dance of the Hamadchas, of the confraternity of the
_marabout_ Hamadch, a powerful saint of the seventeenth century, whose
tomb is in the Zerhoun above Moulay Idriss. Hamadch, it appears, had a
faithful slave, who, when his master died, killed himself in despair,
and the self-inflicted wounds of the brotherhood are supposed to
symbolize the slave's suicide; though no doubt the origin of the
ceremony might be traced back to the depths of that ensanguined grove
where Mr. Fraser plucked the Golden Bough.
The more naïve interpretation, however, has its advantages, since it
enables the devotees to divide their ritual duties into two classes, the
devotions of the free men being addressed to the saint who died in his
bed, while the slaves belong to the slave, and must therefore simulate
his horrid end. And this is the reason why most of the white caftans
simply rock and writhe, while the humble blue shirts drip with blood.
[Illustration: _From a photograph taken by Captain Henissart of the
French Army_
Moulay-Idriss--the market-place. Procession of the confraternity of the
Hamadchas]
The sun was setting when we came down from our terrace above the
market-place. To find a lodging for the night we had to press on to
Meknez, where we were awaited at the French military post; therefore we
were reluctantly obliged to refuse an invitation to take tea with the
Caïd, whose high-perched house commands the whole white amphitheatre
of the town. It was disappointing to leave Moulay Idriss with the
Hamadchas howling their maddest, and so much besides to see; but as we
drove away under the long shadows of the olives we counted ourselves
lucky to have entered the sacred town, and luckier still to have been
there on the day of the dance which, till a year ago, no foreigner had
been allowed to see.
A fine French road runs from Moulay Idriss to Meknez, and we flew on
through the dusk between wooded hills and open stretches on which the
fires of nomad camps put orange splashes in the darkness. Then the moon
rose, and by its light we saw a widening valley, and gardens and
orchards that stretched up to a great walled city outlined against the
stars.
