In Morocco | Page 6

across the plain.

IV
THE KASBAH OF THE OUDAYAS
Salé the white and Rabat the red frown at each other over the foaming
bar of the Bou-Regreg, each walled, terraced, minareted, and presenting
a singularly complete picture of the two types of Moroccan town, the
snowy and the tawny. To the gates of both the Atlantic breakers roll in
with the boom of northern seas, and under a misty northern sky. It is
one of the surprises of Morocco to find the familiar African pictures
bathed in this unfamiliar haze. Even the fierce midday sun does not
wholly dispel it--the air remains thick, opalescent, like water slightly
clouded by milk. One is tempted to say that Morocco is Tunisia seen by
moonlight.
The European town of Rabat, a rapidly developing community, lies
almost wholly outside the walls of the old Arab city. The latter,
founded in the twelfth century by the great Almohad conqueror of
Spain, Yacoub-el-Mansour, stretches its mighty walls to the river's

mouth. Thence they climb the cliff to enclose the Kasbah[A] of the
Oudayas, a troublesome tribe whom one of the Almohad Sultans,
mistrusting their good faith, packed up one day, flocks, tents and
camels, and carried across the bled to stow them into these stout walls
under his imperial eye. Great crenellated ramparts, cyclopean, superb,
follow the curve of the cliff. On the landward side they are interrupted
by a gate-tower resting on one of the most nobly decorated of the
horseshoe arches that break the mighty walls of Moroccan cities.
Underneath the tower the vaulted entrance turns, Arab fashion, at right
angles, profiling its red arch against darkness and mystery. This
bending of passages, so characteristic a device of the Moroccan builder,
is like an architectural expression of the tortuous secret soul of the land.
[Footnote A: Citadel.]
[Illustration: From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc
Rabat--general view from the Kasbah of the Oudayas]
Outside the Kasbah a narrow foot-path is squeezed between the walls
and the edge of the cliff. Toward sunset it looks down on a strange
scene. To the south of the citadel the cliff descends to a long dune
sloping to a sand-beach; and dune and beach are covered with the
slanting headstones of the immense Arab cemetery of El Alou. Acres
and acres of graves fall away from the red ramparts to the grey sea; and
breakers rolling straight from America send their spray across the
lowest stones.
There are always things going on toward evening in an Arab cemetery.
In this one, travellers from the bled are camping in one corner, donkeys
grazing (on heaven knows what), a camel dozing under its pack; in
another, about a new-made grave, there are ritual movements of
muffled figures and wailings of a funeral hymn half drowned by the
waves. Near us, on a fallen headstone, a man with a thoughtful face sits
chatting with two friends and hugging to his breast a tiny boy who
looks like a grasshopper in his green caftan; a little way off, a solitary
philosopher, his eye fixed on the sunset, lies on another grave, smoking

his long pipe of kif.
There is infinite sadness in this scene under the fading sky, beside the
cold welter of the Atlantic. One seems to be not in Africa itself, but in
the Africa that northern crusaders may have dreamed of in snow-bound
castles by colder shores of the same ocean. This is what Moghreb must
have looked like to the confused imagination of the Middle Ages, to
Norman knights burning to ransom the Holy Places, or Hansa
merchants devising, in steep-roofed towns, of Barbary and the long
caravans bringing apes and gold-powder from the south.
Inside the gate of the Kasbah one comes on more waste land and on
other walls--for all Moroccan towns are enclosed in circuit within
circuit of battlemented masonry. Then, unexpectedly, a gate in one of
the inner walls lets one into a tiled court enclosed in a traceried cloister
and overlooking an orange-grove that rises out of a carpet of roses. This
peaceful and well-ordered place is the interior of the Medersa (the
college) of the Oudayas. Morocco is full of these colleges, or rather
lodging-houses of the students frequenting the mosques, for all
Mahometan education is given in the mosque itself, only the
preparatory work being done in the colleges. The most beautiful of the
Medersas date from the earlier years of the long Merinid dynasty
(1248-1548), the period at which Moroccan art, freed from too
distinctively Spanish and Arab influences, began to develop a delicate
grace of its own as far removed from the extravagance of Spanish
ornament as from the inheritance of Roman-Byzantine motives that the
first Moslem invasion had brought with it from Syria and
Mesopotamia.
These