VI
THE SAADIAN TOMBS
On one of the last days of our stay in Marrakech we were told, almost
mysteriously, that permission was to be given us to visit the tombs of
the Saadian Sultans.
Though Marrakech has been in the hands of the French since 1912, the
very existence of these tombs was unknown to the authorities till 1917.
Then the Sultan's government privately informed the Resident General
that an unsuspected treasure of Moroccan art was falling into ruin, and
after some hesitation it was agreed that General Lyautey and the
Director of Fine Arts should be admitted to the mosque containing the
tombs, on the express condition that the French Government undertook to
repair them. While we were at Rabat General Lyautey had described his
visit to us, and it was at his request that the Sultan authorized us to
see the mosque, to which no travellers had as yet been admitted.
With a good deal of ceremony, and after the customary _pourparlers_ with
the great Pasha who controls native affairs at Marrakech, an hour was
fixed for our visit, and we drove through long lanes of mud-huts to a
lost quarter near the walls. At last we came to a deserted square on one
side of which stands the long low mosque of Mansourah with a
turquoise-green minaret embroidered with traceries of sculptured terra
cotta. Opposite the mosque is a gate in a crumbling wall; and at this
gate the Pasha's Cadi was to meet us with the keys of the mausoleum. But
we waited in vain. Oriental dilatoriness, or a last secret reluctance to
admit unbelievers to a holy place, had caused the Cadi to forget his
appointment, and we drove away disappointed.
The delay drove us to wondering about these mysterious Saadian Sultans,
who, though coming so late in the annals of Morocco, had left at least
one monument said to be worthy of the Merinid tradition. And the tale
of the Saadians is worth telling.
They came from Arabia to the Draa (the fruitful country south of the
Great Atlas) early in the fifteenth century, when the Merinid empire was
already near disintegration. Like all previous invaders they preached
the doctrine of a pure Islamism to the polytheistic and indifferent
Berbers, and found a ready hearing because they denounced the evils of a
divided empire, and also because the whole of Morocco was in revolt
against the Christian colonies of Spain and Portugal, which had
encircled the coast from Ceuta to Agadir with a chain of fortified
counting-houses. To _bouter dehors_ the money-making unbeliever was an
object that found adherents from the Rif to the Sahara, and the Saadian
cherifs soon rallied a mighty following to their standard. Islam, though
it never really gave a creed to the Berbers, supplied them with a
war-cry as potent to-day as when it first rang across Barbary.
The history of the Saadians is a foreshortened record of that of all
their predecessors. They overthrew the artistic and luxurious Merinids,
and in their turn became artistic and luxurious. Their greatest Sultan,
Abou-el-Abbas, surnamed "The Golden," after defeating the Merinids and
putting an end to Christian rule in Morocco by the crushing victory of
El-Ksar (1578), bethought him in his turn of enriching himself and
beautifying his capital, and with this object in view turned his
attention to the black kingdoms of the south.
Senegal and the Soudan, which had been Mohammedan since the eleventh
century, had attained in the sixteenth century a high degree of
commercial wealth and artistic civilization. The Sultanate of Timbuctoo
seems in reality to have been a thriving empire, and if Timbuctoo was
not the Claude-like vision of Carthaginian palaces which it became in
the tales of imaginative travellers, it apparently had something of the
magnificence of Fez and Marrakech.
The Saadian army, after a march of four and a half months across the
Sahara, conquered the whole black south. Senegal, the Soudan and Bornou
submitted to Abou-el-Abbas, the Sultan of Timbuctoo was dethroned, and
the celebrated negro jurist Ahmed-Baba was brought a prisoner to
Marrakech, where his chief sorrow appears to have been for the loss of
his library of 1,600 volumes--though he declared that, of all the
numerous members of his family, it was he who possessed the smallest
number of books.
Besides this learned bibliophile, the Sultan Abou-el-Abbas brought back
with him an immense booty, principally of ingots of gold, from which he
took his surname of "The Golden"; and as the result of the expedition
Marrakech was embellished with mosques and palaces for which the Sultan
brought marble from Carrara, paying for it with loaves of sugar from the
sugar-cane that the Saadians grew in the Souss.
In spite of these brilliant beginnings the rule of the dynasty was short
and without subsequent interest. Based on a fanatical antagonism against
the foreigner, and fed by the ever-wakeful hatred of the Moors for their
Spanish conquerors, it raised ever higher the Chinese walls of
exclusiveness which the more enlightened Almohads and Merinids had
sought to overthrow. Henceforward less and less daylight and fresh air
were to penetrate into the _souks_ of Morocco.
The day after our unsuccessful attempt to see the tombs of these
ephemeral rulers we received another message, naming an hour for our
visit; and this time the Pasha's representative was waiting in the
archway. We followed his lead, under the openly mistrustful glances of
the Arabs who hung about the square, and after picking our way through a
twisting land between walls, we came out into a filthy nettle-grown
space against the ramparts. At intervals of about thirty feet splendid
square towers rose from the walls, and facing one of them lay a group of
crumbling buildings masked behind other ruins.
We were led first into a narrow mosque or praying-chapel, like those of
the Medersas, with a coffered cedar ceiling resting on four marble
columns, and traceried walls of unusually beautiful design. From this
chapel we passed into the hall of the tombs, a cube about forty feet
square. Fourteen columns of colored marble sustain a domed ceiling of
gilded cedar, with an exterior deambulatory under a tunnel-vaulting also
roofed with cedar. The walls are, as usual, of chiselled stucco, above
revêtements of ceramic mosaic, and between the columns lie the white
marble cenotaphs of the Saadian Sultans, covered with Arabic
inscriptions in the most delicate low-relief. Beyond this central
mausoleum, and balancing the praying-chapel, lies another long narrow
chamber, gold-ceilinged also, and containing a few tombs.
It is difficult, in describing the architecture of Morocco, to avoid
producing an impression of monotony. The ground-plan of mosques and
Medersas is always practically the same, and the same elements, few in
number and endlessly repeated, make up the materials and the form of the
ornament. The effect upon the eye is not monotonous, for a patient art
has infinitely varied the combinations of pattern and the juxtapositions
of color; while the depth of undercutting of the stucco, and the
treatment of the bronze doors and of the carved cedar corbels,
necessarily varies with the periods which produced them.
But in the Saadian mausoleum a new element has been introduced which
makes this little monument a thing apart. The marble columns supporting
the roof appear to be unique in Moroccan architecture, and they lend
themselves to a new roof-plan which relates the building rather to the
tradition of Venice or Byzantine by way of Kairouan and Cordova.
The late date of the monument precludes any idea of a direct artistic
tradition. The most probable explanation seems to be that the architect
of the mausoleum was familiar with European Renaissance architecture,
and saw the beauty to be derived from using precious marbles not merely
as ornament, but in the Roman and Italian way, as a structural element.
Panels and fountain-basins are ornament, and ornament changes nothing
essential in architecture; but when, for instance, heavy square piers
are replaced by detached columns, a new style results.
It is not only the novelty of its plan that makes the Saadian mausoleum
singular among Moroccan monuments. The details of its ornament are of
the most intricate refinement: it seems as though the last graces of the
expiring Merinid art had been gathered up into this rare blossom. And
the slant of sunlight on lustrous columns, the depths of fretted gold,
the dusky ivory of the walls and the pure white of the cenotaphs, so
classic in spareness of ornament and simplicity of design--this subtle
harmony of form and color gives to the dim rich chapel an air of
dream-like unreality.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by M. André Chevrillon_
Marrakech--Mausoleum of the Saadian Sultans (sixteenth century) showing
the tombs]
And how can it seem other than a dream? Who can have conceived, in the
heart of a savage Saharan camp, the serenity and balance of this hidden
place? And how came such fragile loveliness to survive, preserving,
behind a screen of tumbling walls, of nettles and offal and dead beasts,
every curve of its traceries and every cell of its honeycombing?
Such questions inevitably bring one back to the central riddle of the
mysterious North African civilization: the perpetual flux and the
immovable stability, the barbarous customs and sensuous refinements, the
absence of artistic originality and the gift for regrouping borrowed
motives, the patient and exquisite workmanship and the immediate neglect
and degradation of the thing once made.
Revering the dead and camping on their graves, elaborating exquisite
monuments only to abandon and defile them, venerating scholarship and
wisdom and living in ignorance and grossness, these gifted races,
perpetually struggling to reach some higher level of culture from which
they have always been swept down by a fresh wave of barbarism, are
still only a people in the making.
It may be that the political stability which France is helping them to
acquire will at last give their higher qualities time for fruition; and
when one looks at the mausoleum of Marrakech and the Medersas of Fez one
feels that, were the experiment made on artistic grounds alone, it would
yet be well worth making.
