In Morocco | Page 7

exquisite collegiate buildings, though still in use whenever they
are near a well-known mosque, have all fallen into a state of sordid
disrepair. The Moroccan Arab, though he continues to build--and
fortunately to build in the old tradition, which has never been lost--has,
like all Orientals, an invincible repugnance to repairing and restoring,
and one after another the frail exposed Arab structures, with their open
courts and badly constructed terrace-roofs, are crumbling into ruin.
Happily the French Government has at last been asked to intervene, and

all over Morocco the Medersas are being repaired with skill and
discretion. That of the Oudayas is already completely restored, and as it
had long fallen into disuse it has been transformed by the Ministry of
Fine Arts into a museum of Moroccan art.
The plan of the Medersas is always much the same: the eternal plan of
the Arab house, built about one or more arcaded courts, with long
narrow rooms enclosing them on the ground floor, and several stories
above, reached by narrow stairs, and often opening on finely carved
cedar galleries. The chief difference between the Medersa and the
private house, or even the fondak,[A] lies in the use to which the rooms
are put. In the Medersas, one of the ground-floor apartments is always
fitted up as a chapel, and shut off from the court by carved cedar doors
still often touched with old gilding and vermilion. There are always a
few students praying in the chapel, while others sit in the doors of the
upper rooms, their books on their knees, or lean over the carved
galleries chatting with their companions who are washing their feet at
the marble fountain in the court, preparatory to entering the chapel.
[Footnote A: The Moroccan inn or caravanserai.]
[Illustration: From a photograph by Schmitt, Rabat
Rabat--interior court of the Medersa of the Oudayas]
In the Medersa of the Oudayas, these native activities have been
replaced by the lifeless hush of a museum. The rooms are furnished
with old rugs, pottery, brasses, the curious embroidered hangings which
line the tents of the chiefs, and other specimens of Arab art. One room
reproduces a barber's shop in the bazaar, its benches covered with fine
matting, the hanging mirror inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the
razor-handles of silver niello. The horseshoe arches of the outer gallery
look out on orange-blossoms, roses and the sea. It is all beautiful, calm
and harmonious; and if one is tempted to mourn the absence of life and
local colour, one has only to visit an abandoned Medersa to see that,
but for French intervention, the charming colonnades and cedar
chambers of the college of the Oudayas would by this time be a heap of
undistinguished rubbish--for plaster and rubble do not "die in beauty"

like the firm stones of Rome.

V
ROBINSON CRUSOE'S "SALLEE"
Before Morocco passed under the rule of the great governor who now
administers it, the European colonists made short work of the beauty
and privacy of the old Arab towns in which they established
themselves.
On the west coast, especially, where the Mediterranean peoples, from
the Phenicians to the Portuguese, have had trading-posts for over two
thousand years, the harm done to such seaboard towns as Tangier,
Rabat and Casablanca is hard to estimate. The modern European
colonist apparently imagined that to plant his warehouses, cafés and
cinema-palaces within the walls which for so long had fiercely
excluded him was the most impressive way of proclaiming his
domination.
Under General Lyautey such views are no longer tolerated. Respect for
native habits, native beliefs and native architecture is the first principle
inculcated in the civil servants attached to his administration. Not only
does he require that the native towns shall be kept intact, and no
European building erected within them; a sense of beauty not often
vouchsafed to Colonial governors causes him to place the
administration buildings so far beyond the walls that the modern colony
grouped around them remains entirely distinct from the old town,
instead of growing out of it like an ugly excrescence.
The Arab quarter of Rabat was already irreparably disfigured when
General Lyautey came to Morocco; but ferocious old Salé, Phenician
counting-house and breeder of Barbary pirates, had been saved from
profanation by its Moslem fanaticism. Few Christian feet had entered
its walls except those of the prisoners who, like Robinson Crusoe,
slaved for the wealthy merchants in its mysterious terraced houses. Not

till two or three years ago was it completely pacified; and when it
opened its gates to the infidel it was still, as it is to-day, the type of the
untouched Moroccan city--so untouched that, with the sunlight
irradiating its cream-coloured walls and the blue-white domes above
them, it rests on its carpet of rich fruit-gardens like some rare specimen
of Arab