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 noiselessly over the clean cobblestones,
and the sound of fountains and runnels came from hidden courtyards and
over garden-walls.
This noise of 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 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 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
mouldering 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 sombre, and the bazaars clustered about its holiest sanctuaries
form its most sombre quarter. Dusk 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 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 pray.
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 Meknez, and the mosque itself, and the
green minaret shooting up from the very centre 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.]
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 may be 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 _mirhab_,[A] the lustre 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 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 _mirhab_, 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 are 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 Ech 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.
The actual mosque, or "praying-hall," is said to be formed of a
rectangle or double cube of 90 metres 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 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
fulfilment 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 from below that from our secret coign of
vantage we seemed to be looking down 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 tank, 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 mediaeval principle
of mnemonics, and as there are no examinations, no degrees, no limits to
the duration of any given course, 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 _oulama_ 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."
