Part 8

Our guests remain with us from morning until evening, departing just before the hour when the great wooden gates of every district are closed securely for the night. In Fez, the populace keeps early hours. After nine o'clock it is impossible to enter or to leave the city or even to pass from one quarter to another, be it adjacent or remote. The gates once closed, each district is completely isolated, and all who are shut in must wait till morning to escape; all who are shut out must spend the night away from home, unless they be men of influence, or carry written orders for the opening of the barriers. There is, of course, nothing to do at night; there are no theaters, clubs, or evening parties; the city life dies out at sunset. The people go to their homes before the gates are closed. There is by night no movement save the flowing of the waters. A river sings its way through the heart of Fez, and swift canals are laughing in every quarter. There is everywhere in Fez the sound of running water, as in Rome, as at Nikko in Japan, as round the hill of the Alhambra. The sound is thus associated in my mind with four of the most fascinating places in the world. There is not in the entire city a building that is reminiscent of the cities of our world; there is no smoke, and there are no chimneys; there are no vehicles of any kind in Fez, there is but one wheeled vehicle in the whole Empire; it is the state-coach given by Queen Victoria to the Sultan, a curiosity that is exhibited on state occasions, but a turnout in which the Sultan never rides. There is no noise in Fez—no noise as we understand the word; there are sounds, pleasant and unpleasant, but the ceaseless roar of western cities is not there. The struggle for existence is almost a silent struggle. Moreover, I believe that Fez is in a higher state of civilization, and that its people are less given to crime than are the dwellers in the poorer quarters of London, Paris, and New York. It is safe for a Moorish citizen to walk these crowded streets by day; at night he sleeps securely in his home. There is no flagrant immorality, yet there is no regular police.

The streets of Fez can never cease to astonish men from the modern world. We may have seen similar settings on the stage, similar costumes in pictures or museums; so these are not new to us. What astonishes us is that these things should anywhere form a part of the actual daily life of men and women of our own time. And this life does not even touch our life; its points of contact with the outside world are few. Commercial Fez communicates with the mysterious regions of the south, with Senegambia and Timbuktoo, by means of camel fleets that traverse seas of sand. This commerce has naught in common with the commerce of our world; its methods and its means of transport are totally foreign to our own, and its itineraries are far beyond our ken.

But this city that appears so dim and so mysterious as we walk through the roofless dungeons that serve as streets, reveals to us a brilliant, dazzling aspect, when, disregarding the unwritten law forbidding men to go upon housetops, we venture out upon the terrace of our villa. The roof terraces are sacred to the women; there they may bare their faces in the light of day, there they may lay aside their shrouds, and, bathed in the soft evening light, appear for a brief space as living women,—women with charms and personalities. The men of Fez have tacitly agreed that on the housetops the women shall be free from male observation, free to forget that they are practically slaves. We could not bind ourselves to keep this courteous law, the view from our roof terrace was too tempting. All Fez was there spread out before us, Fez with its snowy dwellings reflecting the golden rays of the declining sun, Fez with its minarets, its mosques, its palaces; Fez with its streets seldom trodden by the feet of unbelievers, its sacred places never polluted by an alien glance.

Old Fez so long the city of our dreams now become the city of our waking thoughts, is soon to become the city of our reminiscences. For alas! this is to be our last evening in the holy city. The limit of official tolerance is reached; our passports have been suggestively returned, and, knowing the futility of protest, we dine in regretful silence close to the open window that we may not lose a single phase of the ever-changing coloring and lighting of the picture there revealed to us. For the last time we watch the city grow dim in the twilight; although we have witnessed ten times the dying of the day from this same window, the spectacle has not lost its charm, the picture has not lost its fascinating mystery. A sojourn of ten days in Fez has not dissipated, it has but deepened the sense of mystery. But we, to our surprise, have not yet suffered from that strange mental disease, the "longing to get away" that infallibly attacks ambassadors and representatives of foreign powers and is a political force upon which Moorish diplomats may count to rid them of annoying visitors who have come to press vexing demands upon their government. At last a sudden glow, like a great flood of fire, overspreads the city; it is the glow of sunset, the last signal of the dying day, and for a moment it suffuses the entire heavens, as if there were a distant world in conflagration. Fez has assumed a shroud of black; it is the sacred hour of Moghreb, and the lower darkness is resounding with the cries of the Muezzin, those cries of intense faith, those wailing laments that seem to express the nothingness of all things earthly.

The Moors speak of their country as "Moghreb-al-Aksa," the "Country of the Setting Sun." How prophetic!—for in very truth the sun of civilization has set forever upon this land, and though its past be brilliant as the heavenly sunset fires, its future is as dim as the soft-footed night that, stealing in from the black, fierce surrounding country, broods like a pall of death above the sleeping city of the Moors.

THROUGH THE HEART OF THE MOORISH EMPIRE

The spell of mystery is still upon Morocco. The Moors are still the people of romance. Of the land we know comparatively little; of the race as it exists to-day we know still less. Christendom assumes that the Moorish Empire expired with the last sigh of Boabdil, leaving the Alhambra as its only legacy.

Almost novel is the thought that the Moors still live as a nation; that Morocco is to-day what Spain would have become had the forces of the Prophet prevailed in the Peninsula. Who would not welcome as a precious privilege the possibility of turning back the pages of history in Spain, to revel in the actual Moorish life as it was lived before the Christian victories of 1492? Who would not gladly leave, at least for a short space, the familiar round of present-day existence and the hackneyed paths of travel, to plunge into a past so picturesque, to see a civilization so refined and yet so utterly unlike our own? No reader of Washington Irving but has longed to people with white-clad cavaliers the courts on the Alhambra Hill, to hear the Arab accents in the streets of old Granada, or the murmuring of the Moslem prayers in the old mosques. But why persist in holding Spain to be the sole stage on which the Moors appropriately can play their parts?

Morocco was their home ere Spain was conquered for them. When Andalusia ungratefully cast out the race that brought it light and knowledge at a time when Europe groped in the blackness of deep ignorance, back to Morocco went the Empire of the Moors. Empires rise and fall. The Moorish Empire rose but did not fall; it was shaken but not shattered; it is still erect. It stands a living skeleton wrapt in the shroud of Islam, its hollowness concealed by the vague folds of ceremonial observances; its government a pompous sham; its cities empty imposing shells of former greatness; its boundless plains the haunts of savage Berber tribes to whom the Emperor is but a name, the Empire a free space in which to ride broad-chested chargers and do battle with hereditary enemies.

In two preceding lectures I have told the story of a journey into Morocco, and of a sojourn in Fez, the metropolis of the Moors. There yet remains to tell a third, concluding chapter of the tale—the narrative of the return from Fez to the sea, from a remote yesterday back to the world of to-day. "Out of Morocco" would serve as an appropriate heading for this chapter,—a chapter rich in adventure and in picturesque experiences. For ten days we have dwelt in mediæval Moslem Fez—unwelcome visitors, objects of suspicion to the jealous Moors.

Two routes are open to us—the direct road to Tangier and the less-frequented road to Rabat on the Atlantic Coast. Despite the protest of the authorities, who warn us of many dangers, we chose the road that leads westward to Mequinez, the Beni-Hasan Plain, and the Atlantic. But the word "road" must be regarded only in its Moroccan sense. As has been said already, there are no roads in this wild land; the slow caravans and the swift troops of Moorish horsemen have followed the hoofmarks left by the caravans or troops which have preceded them, until a system of narrow trails meandering in uncertain parallels has been created between the inland cities and the sea.

These Moorish highways were never surveyed and never tended; like Topsy—who, also, by the way, was an African product—they were never born, "they just growed;" and like Topsy they are wilfully unreasonable; they exasperate us by their defiance of conventionality; amuse us with their peculiar antics, and delight us with preposterous surprises.

As an example, take the highway that leads from Fez to the neighboring city of Mequinez. As we approach a river, the wandering trails converge and form a beaten track that grows more and more like a real road as it winds down toward a substantial bridge. But just as we are about to compliment the road on its reform, it suddenly grows weary of good behavior, becomes rebellious, and, like a balky mule, refuses to cross the bridge. Incredible as it may seem to those who do not know this land of contradictions, Moorish roads will not cross Moorish rivers by means of Moorish bridges. The old way is preferred. Fording was good enough in the old days, and it is good enough to-day. The roads turn sharply from the bridge abutments, scramble down the muddy banks, and plunge into the yellow rivers to emerge slimy and dripping on the opposite shore. The bridges, ponderously useless, studiously neglected, are falling into decay, and have become almost impassable.

We pitch our camp not far from one of those disdained reminders of an attempt at progress. We are midway between Fez and Mequinez in a region notorious because of the thieving bands with which it is infested. It appears wholly unpeopled; yet we are not without misgivings, for, of our caravan, four mules and two men have gone astray. With us are Haj, the dragoman, Achmedo, the valet, and the muleteers, Abuktayer and Bokhurmur. The missing are Kaid Lharbi, the military escort, and the new packer who joined our force in Fez. We have our tent and Haj's kitchen; the other tents and all the supplies and furniture are in the packs of the missing mules somewhere on this gloomy plain, possibly already become the loot of some lawless sheik, or, as we hope, merely delayed because of broken harness, or gone astray because of a mistaken trail. Our groundless fears are set at rest an hour later by the safe arrival of the precious convoy, and once more our palates are delighted by the delicious dinner cooked by Haj, our thirst quenched by cooled oranges, and our weary bodies laid to rest upon our comfortable camp-cots.

After the confinement incident to our residence in city quarters, the free life of the plains is doubly exhilarating, and we find intense pleasure in the satisfaction of the simple, keen desires to eat, drink, and sleep. All food is good, all drink is better, sleep the sweetest gift of the gods.

The morning finds us early in the saddle; four hours' westward progress brings us at noon to one of those rare oases of shadow in this bare land of sunshine. Here hunger, thirst, and weariness are again assuaged by food and drink and sleep. Sharp darts of brilliant, blinding sunshine burn through the leafy masses of the two fig-trees, and with almost malicious persistence pursue the would-be slumberer, who, to avoid this, must every now and then crawl after the receding shadows.

But we are not the only travelers who have sought midday shelter in this forest. On our approach we were greeted by a family group,—a man and woman with a little child, and a black slave. To our surprise the man addressed us in Spanish:—

"_Buenos dias, Señor, habla usted Español?_"

"_Si, Señor, un poco_," we reply, and then begins an interesting conversation.

"Where are your animals?" we ask.

"Stolen with all my goods, last night," he answers. "We must now go on foot to Fez to report our loss to the authorities."

We learn that our unfortunate friend is a maker of sausage cases, that he lives in Mequinez, and that he is hospitably inclined; for in return for our sympathy, he begs us to make use of his house in Mequinez, where another of his wives will welcome us and give us food and lodging.

This strange offer of hospitality, coupled with a something in the man's expression leads me to say, "But, Señor, you are not like a Moor."

"Why should I be?" he smilingly asks. "_Yo, yo soy Chino._" "I, I am a Chinese."

He is the happy father of a dainty little girl, a type of Chinese beauty, and two lusty boys, who bear upon their faces maps of Peking and Canton. The negress, his slave, he is sending back to Mequinez with tidings of his loss. Haj, with Occidental gallantry, offers the dusky damsel his place on a pack-mule, and after the exchange of many kindnesses our little company, made up of individuals so diverse in race, in language, and in thought, breaks up.

Our Chinese Moor with wife and child go trudging off toward Fez, while the American caravan with its Arab escort and African passenger moves toward the other great interior city, Mequinez. Long before we come in sight of Mequinez, we find our progress barred by a huge wall forty feet or more in height, stretching away in two directions as far as the eye can reach. But there are ogive archways, through which our caravan passes as freely as the sunshine or the breeze. There are no gates, no guards, to hinder us. On we file across vacant fields until we reach a second wall as forbidding as the first and apparently as interminable.

"What are these walls?" we ask. "Why were they built? what purpose can they serve?"

And Haj tells us that they were reared to protect the city from the turbulent surrounding tribes, to cut off, if need be, the approach of hostile bands.

A third wall, wide and high, beginning at the city gate wanders away toward the south, its utility not easily divined. As we trace its curving course over a distant ridge, we think of the Roman aqueducts in the Campagna, and of the great wall of China, for this unknown Moorish work vies with those famous masses of masonry in impressiveness of aspect if not in hugeness and in length of years. It was the creation of the crazy Sultan, Mulai Ismail, a contemporary of Louis XIV, of France, a Moorish emperor who suffered from a mania for masonry, and made his people suffer that he might satisfy his madness for works of colossal inutility.

One of his wildest projects was the building of an elevated boulevard, two hundred miles in length, along which he could ride from Mequinez to Morocco City, safe from the attack of the rebellious tribesmen who hold the intervening provinces.

The huge north gate of this his favored city appears to us as we approach late in the afternoon like the entrance to some "mysterious nowhere." It seems to be a portal to the empty sky, a door through which the traveler might pass into the infinity of space. It is, in fact, the gate of an almost deserted metropolis, a city that was built for a population of one hundred thousand and contains to-day less than six thousand souls. Small wonder that we find it empty and forsaken in aspect as we pass from court to court and through gate after gate. There are in Mequinez more houses vacant than occupied, more roofs fallen than intact, more palaces in ruins than huts in good repair. The Sultan is forced to maintain a palace here, for Mequinez ranks with Fez and Morocco City as one of the three capitals of the Moorish Empire, each city jealous of its dignity as the abode of the Imperial master.

The Sultan always dwells amid the wreck of ages. The snow-white palace of the actual sovereign may be seen rising above the crumbling walls of the Imperial Garden. Around it are vague piles of age-worn masonry, the abandoned palaces of emperors who ruled here in the past. Custom demands that on the death of a Sultan his palace be abandoned and a new one built for his successor. It is regarded as a sacrilege for any one to occupy the abode of a departed emperor. Thus, during the centuries, these imperial inclosures in all the Moorish cities have become encumbered with acres of decaying palaces in which bats and owls hold carnival.

In Mequinez everything speaks of Mulai Ismail, the tyrant Sultan of the sixteenth century, that imperial monster whose deeds surpass in horror those of Nero or Caligula, the ruins of whose palaces and public works rival in magnitude the Roman mountains of brick and stone upon the Palatine or in the broad Campagna.

Mulai Ismail built three miles of stables for his twelve thousand horses. We see, to-day, the endless aisles of arches where his chargers were lodged in splendor, every ten horses tended by a negro slave. As a horseman, he was superb. It is said that he was able, in one graceful movement, to mount his steed, draw his sword, and neatly decapitate the slave who held his stirrup. He held that to die by his imperial hand insured immediate entry into paradise, and throughout the latter part of his life of eighty-one vigorous years he went about his land dispensing, with his scimitar, passports to a beatitudinous eternity. Twenty thousand of his subjects were thus favored, Friday being the day chosen by the imperial murderer for these executionary exercises. His pet lions were fed upon the flesh of slaves; his forty cats were treated better than his children, though one disobedient cat was formally executed by his order. Workmen caught idling on the walls, at which his myriad slaves and prisoners were unceasingly engaged, were tumbled into the molds and rammed down into the concrete.

An incredibly atrocious deed crowned his career of crime. A wife suspected of infidelity was filled with powder and blown to pieces. The mere drowning of a wife in the small artificial lake was but a gentle pastime. He had two thousand wives. As to the number of his children we must accept the word of an ambassador of Louis XIV, who visited the court of Mulai Ismail in 1703. He asked the favorite son how many brothers and sisters he possessed. After two days spent in compiling a catalogue, the Prince submitted the names of five hundred and twenty-five brothers and three hundred and forty-two sisters. Later reports give the number of sons who lived to mount horse the astounding total of seven hundred. To create palaces and to people them was the life-work of Mulai Ismail.

One incident that makes this impossible man seem real to us is this: He actually sent ambassadors to France to demand of Louis XIV the hand of Mlle. de Blois, the natural daughter of the King and Louise de la Valliére! The honor was declined in polite terms by the Grand Monarque.

In Mulai's day Europeans were not strangers to Morocco; but they came—not as we come to-day, as travelers with tents and guides to camp freely for a few sunny days under the imperial walls—they came as slaves and captives taken from merchant-ships by pirates; they came with chains and manacles, to toil for dark, hopeless years in building these same walls, in piling up these useless miles of mud, brick, and cement. The thought of the sufferings endured by them makes doubly strange our actual comfort; the dangers of the living past throw into striking contrast the security of the dead present. We are not even annoyed by crowds. Perhaps there are no crowds in Mequinez to-day. The only citizen who deigns to take an interest in us is an old man who rides up on a tiny donkey and sits studying the strangers with a plainly puzzled look upon his wrinkled face. That he may not depart without some mark of our appreciation of his call, we display our modern arsenal, a shotgun and a rifle, testing the latter by firing at an eagle that is soaring overhead. By chance the shot is a successful one. Down comes the big bird like a meteorite, grazing the donkey's ear, and falling with a thud at his astonished nose; whereupon our visitor having seen enough rides off in silence to tell of our prowess in the half-deserted bazaars.

From Mequinez we carry away impressions as enduring as its walls and gates. We know that we shall never forget the sadness of this empty city, its silence, and its forlorn magnificence. In all Morocco there is no more artistic structure than the Kasbah Gate of Mequinez. It is as it was; no restoration has marred it. Time has but softened it, made it more beautiful. Corinthian pillars, brought from the ruins of the Roman city of Volubilis, add to its dignity and tell of a civilization that long antedates that of the Arab conquerors. It, too, like every gate and every palace in the city of Mulai Ismail recounts its tragedy. The man whose mind conceived its form, its intricate designs, its unsymmetrical perfections, fell victim to his artist-pride. For, when the Sultan complimented him on his achievements, he declared that he could build a gate more beautiful, more imposing, did the imperial master so desire; and this boast cost the architect his eyes, for the Sultan was resolved that this, his favorite gate, should have no rival and no peer. Less beautiful, but more imposing is the great North Gate by which we enter and through which we ride out into the black, treacherous country. Our muleteers have halted at a fountain to drink and pray; for the fountain marks the burial-place of a great Moslem saint, the founder of the fraternity of the Hamdouchi, a kindred society to that of the fanatical Aissaoua, a sect of self-torturers and religious maniacs.