art on a strip of old Oriental velvet.
Within the walls, the magic persists: which does not always happen
when one penetrates into the mirage-like cities of Arabian Africa. Salé
has the charm of extreme compactness. Crowded between the
river-mouth and the sea, its white and pale-blue houses almost touch
across the narrow streets, and the reed-thatched bazaars seem like
miniature reductions of the great trading labyrinths of Tunis or Fez.
Everything that the reader of the Arabian Nights expects to find is here:
the whitewashed niches wherein pale youths sit weaving the fine
mattings for which the town is still famous; the tunnelled passages
where indolent merchants with bare feet crouch in their little kennels
hung with richly ornamented saddlery and arms, or with slippers of
pale citron leather and bright embroidered babouches, the stalls with
fruit, olives, tunny-fish, vague syrupy sweets, candles for saints' tombs,
Mantegnesque garlands of red and green peppers, griddle-cakes
sizzling on red-hot pans, and all the varied wares and cakes and
condiments that the lady in the tale of the Three Calanders went out to
buy, that memorable morning in the market of Bagdad.
[Illustration: From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc
Salé--entrance of the Medersa]
Only at Salé all is on a small scale: there is not much of any one thing,
except of the exquisite matting. The tide of commerce has ebbed from
the intractable old city, and one feels, as one watches the listless
purchasers in her little languishing bazaars, that her long animosity
against the intruder has ended by destroying her own life.
The feeling increases when one leaves the bazaar for the streets
adjoining it. An even deeper hush than that which hangs over the
well-to-do quarters of all Arab towns broods over these silent
thoroughfares, with heavy-nailed doors barring half-ruined houses. In a
steep deserted square one of these doors opens its panels of
weather-silvered cedar on the court of the frailest, ghostliest of
Medersas--mere carved and painted shell of a dead house of learning.
Mystic interweavings of endless lines, patient patterns interminably
repeated in wood and stone and clay, all are here, from the tessellated
paving of the court to the honeycombing of the cedar roof through
which a patch of sky shows here and there like an inset of turquoise
tiling.
This lovely ruin is in the safe hands of the French Fine Arts
administration, and soon the wood-carvers and stucco-workers of Fez
will have revived its old perfection; but it will never again be more than
a show-Medersa, standing empty and unused beside the mosque behind
whose guarded doors and high walls one guesses that the old religious
fanaticism of Salé is dying also, as her learning and her commerce have
died.
In truth the only life in her is centred in the market-place outside the
walls, where big expanding Rabat goes on certain days to provision
herself. The market of Salé, though typical of all Moroccan markets,
has an animation and picturesqueness of its own. Its rows of white tents
pitched on a dusty square between the outer walls and the fruit-gardens
make it look as though a hostile tribe had sat down to lay siege to the
town, but the army is an army of hucksters, of farmers from the rich
black lands along the river, of swarthy nomads and leather-gaitered
peasant women from the hills, of slaves and servants and tradesmen
from Rabat and Salé; a draped, veiled, turbaned mob shrieking,
bargaining, fist-shaking, call on Allah to witness the monstrous
villanies of the misbegotten miscreants they are trading with, and then,
struck with the mysterious Eastern apathy, sinking down in languid
heaps of muslin among the black figs, purple onions and rosy melons,
the fluttering hens, the tethered goats, the whinnying foals, that are all
enclosed in an outer circle of folded-up camels and of mules dozing
under faded crimson saddles.
[Illustration: From a photograph by Schmitt, Rabat
Salé--market-place outside the town]
VI
CHELLA AND THE GREAT MOSQUE
The Merinid Sultans of Rabat had a terribly troublesome neighbour
across the Bou-Regreg, and they built Chella to keep an eye on the
pirates of Salé. But Chella has fallen like a Babylonian city triumphed
over by the prophets; while Salé, sly, fierce and irrepressible, continued
till well on in the nineteenth century to breed pirates and fanatics.
The ruins of Chella lie on the farther side of the plateau above the
native town of Rabat. The mighty wall enclosing them faces the city
wall of Rabat, looking at it across one of those great red powdery
wastes which seem, in this strange land, like death and the desert
forever creeping up to overwhelm the puny works of man.
The red waste is scored by countless trains of donkeys carrying water
from
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