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-earringed 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; 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 Meknez or Casablanca in his sixty h.p. motor?
We visited old palaces and new, inhabited and abandoned, and over all
lay the same fine dust of oblivion, like the silvery mould on an
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 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 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 fondak 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
survive; there 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 any one 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
mediaeval 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.
