In Morocco | Page 9

the springs of Chella, by long caravans of mules and camels, and
by the busy motors of the French administration; yet there emanates
from it an impression of solitude and decay which even the prosaic
tinkle of the trams jogging out from the European town to the
Exhibition grounds above the sea cannot long dispel.
Perpetually, even in the new thriving French Morocco, the outline of a
ruin or the look in a pair of eyes shifts the scene, rends the thin veil of
the European Illusion, and confronts one with the old grey Moslem
reality. Passing under the gate of Chella, with its richly carved corbels
and lofty crenellated towers, one feels one's self thus completely
reabsorbed into the past.
Below the gate the ground slopes away, bare and blazing, to a hollow
where a little blue-green minaret gleams through fig-trees, and
fragments of arch and vaulting reveal the outline of a ruined mosque.

Was ever shade so blue-black and delicious as that of the cork-tree near
the spring where the donkey's water-cans are being filled? Under its
branches a black man in a blue shirt lies immovably sleeping in the
dust. Close by women and children splash and chatter about the spring,
and the dome of a saint's tomb shines through lustreless leaves. The
black man, the donkeys, the women and children, the saint's dome, are
all part of the inimitable Eastern scene in which inertia and agitation
are so curiously combined, and a surface of shrill noise flickers over
depths of such unfathomable silence.
The ruins of Chella belong to the purest period of Moroccan art. The
tracery of the broken arches is all carved in stone or in glazed turquoise
tiling, and the fragments of wall and vaulting have the firm elegance of
a classic ruin. But what would even their beauty be without the leafy
setting of the place? The "unimaginable touch of Time" gives Chella its
peculiar charm: the aged fig-tree clamped in uptorn tiles and thrusting
gouty arms between the arches; the garlanding of vines flung from
column to column; the secret pool to which childless women are
brought to bathe, and where the tree springing from a cleft of the steps
is always hung with the bright bits of stuff which are the votive
offerings of Africa.
The shade, the sound of springs, the terraced orange-garden with irises
blooming along channels of running water, all this greenery and
coolness in the hollow of a fierce red hill make Chella seem, to the
traveller new to Africa, the very type and embodiment of its old
contrasts of heat and freshness, of fire and languor. It is like a desert
traveller's dream in his last fever.
Yacoub-el-Mansour was the fourth of the great Almohad Sultans who,
in the twelfth century, drove out the effete Almoravids, and swept their
victorious armies from Marrakech to Tunis and from Tangier to Madrid.
His grandfather, Abd-el-Moumen, had been occupied with conquest
and civic administration. It was said of his rule that "he seized northern
Africa to make order prevail there"; and in fact, out of a welter of wild
tribes confusedly fighting and robbing he drew an empire firmly seated
and securely governed, wherein caravans travelled from the Atlas to the

Straits without fear of attack, and "a soldier wandering through the
fields would not have dared to pluck an ear of wheat."
[Illustration: From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc
Chella--ruins of mosque]
His grandson, the great El-Mansour, was a conqueror too; but where he
conquered he planted the undying seed of beauty. The victor of Alarcos,
the soldier who subdued the north of Spain, dreamed a great dream of
art. His ambition was to bestow on his three capitals, Seville, Rabat and
Marrakech, the three most beautiful towers the world had ever seen;
and if the tower of Rabat had been completed, and that of Seville had
not been injured by Spanish embellishments, his dream would have
been realized.
The "Tower of Hassan," as the Sultan's tower is called, rises from the
plateau above old Rabat, overlooking the steep cliff that drops down to
the last winding of the Bou-Regreg. Truncated at half its height, it
stands on the edge of the cliff, a far-off beacon to travellers by land and
sea. It is one of the world's great monuments, so sufficient in strength
and majesty that until one has seen its fellow, the Koutoubya of
Marrakech, one wonders if the genius of the builder could have carried
such perfect balance of massive wall-spaces and traceried openings to a
triumphant completion.
Near the tower, the red-brown walls and huge piers of the mosque built
at the same time stretch their roofless alignment beneath the sky. This
mosque, before it was destroyed, must have been one