III
THE BAZAARS
Passing out of the enchanted circle of the Bahia it is startling to
plunge into the native life about its gates.
Marrakech is the great market of the south, and the south means not only
the Atlas with its feudal chiefs and their wild clansmen, but all that
lies beyond of heat and savagery, the Sahara of the veiled Touaregs,
Dakka, Timbuctoo, Senegal and the Soudan. Here come the camel caravans
from Demnat and Tameslout, from the Moulouya and the Souss, and those
from the Atlantic ports and the confines of Algeria. The population of
this old city of the southern march has always been even more mixed than
that of the northerly Moroccan towns. It is made up of the descendants
of all the peoples conquered by a long line of Sultans who brought their
trains of captives across the sea from Moorish Spain and across the
Sahara from Timbuctoo. Even in the highly cultivated region on the lower
slopes of the Atlas there are groups of varied ethnic origin, the
descendants of tribes transplanted by long-gone rulers and still
preserving many of their original characteristics.
In the bazaars all these peoples meet and mingle: cattle-dealers,
olive-growers, peasants from the Atlas, the Souss and the Draa, Blue Men
of the Sahara, blacks from Senegal and the Soudan, coming in to trade
with the wool-merchants, tanners, leather-merchants, silk-weavers,
armourers, and makers of agricultural implements.
Dark, fierce and fanatical are these narrow _souks_ of Marrakech. They
are mere mud lanes roofed with rushes, as in South Tunisia and
Timbuctoo, and the crowds swarming in them are so dense that it is
hardly possible, at certain hours, to approach the tiny raised kennels
where the merchants sit like idols among their wares. One feels at once
that something more than the thought of bargaining--dear as this is to
the African heart--animates these incessantly moving throngs. The Souks
of Marrakech seem, more than any others, the central organ of a native
life that extends far beyond the city walls into secret clefts of the
mountains and far-off oases where plots are hatched and holy wars
fomented--farther still, to yellow deserts whence negroes are secretly
brought across the Atlas to that inmost recess of the bazaar where the
ancient traffic in flesh and blood still surreptitiously goes on.
All these many threads of the native life, woven of greed and lust, of
fetichism and fear and blind hate of the stranger, form, in the _souks_,
a thick network in which at times one's feet seem literally to stumble.
Fanatics in sheepskins glowering from the guarded thresholds of the
mosques, fierce tribesmen with inlaid arms in their belts and the
fighters' tufts of wiry hair escaping from camel's-hair turbans, mad
negroes standing stark naked in niches of the walls and pouring down
Soudanese incantations upon the fascinated crowd, consumptive Jews with
pathos and cunning in their large eyes and smiling lips, lusty
slave-girls with earthen oil-jars resting against swaying hips,
almond-eyed boys leading fat merchants by the hand, and bare-legged
Berber women, tattooed and insolently gay, trading their striped
blankets, or bags of dried roses and irises, for sugar, tea or
Manchester cottons--from all these hundreds of unknown and unknowable
people, bound together by secret affinities, or intriguing against each
other with secret hate, there emanates an atmosphere of mystery and
menace more stifling than the smell of camels and spices and black
bodies and smoking fry which hangs like a fog under the close roofing of
the _souks_.
And suddenly one leaves the crowd and the turbid air for one of those
quiet corners that are like the back-waters of the bazaars, a small
square where a vine stretches across a shop-front and hangs ripe
clusters of grapes through the reeds. In the patterning of grape-shadows
a very old donkey, tethered to a stone-post, dozes under a pack-saddle
that is never taken off; and near by, in a matted niche, sits a very old
man in white. This is the chief of the Guild of "morocco" workers of
Marrakech, the most accomplished craftsman in Morocco in the preparing
and using of the skins to which the city gives its name. Of these sleek
moroccos, cream-white or dyed with cochineal or pomegranate skins, are
made the rich bags of the Chleuh dancing-boys, the embroidered slippers
for the harem, the belts and harnesses that figure so largely in
Moroccan trade--and of the finest, in old days, were made the
pomegranate-red morocco bindings of European bibliophiles.
From this peaceful corner one passes into the barbaric splendor of a
_souk_ hung with innumerable plumy bunches of floss silk--skeins of
citron yellow, crimson, grasshopper green and pure purple. This is the
silk-spinners' quarter, and next to it comes that of the dyers, with
great seething vats into which the raw silk is plunged, and ropes
overhead where the rainbow masses are hung out to dry.
Another turn leads into the street of the metal-workers and armourers,
where the sunlight through the thatch flames on round flanks of beaten
copper or picks out the silver bosses of ornate powder-flasks and
pistols, and near by is the _souk_ of the plough-shares, crowded with
peasants in rough Chleuh cloaks who are waiting to have their archaic
ploughs repaired, and that of the smiths, in an outer lane of mud huts
where negroes squat in the dust and sinewy naked figures in tattered
loincloths bend over blazing coals. And here ends the maze of the
bazaars.
