by Mary Morris
from IN MOROCCO
THE BAHIA
Whoever would understand Marrakech must begin by mounting at sunset to the roof of the Bahia.
Outspread below lies the oasis-city of the south, flat and vast as the great nomad camp it really is, its low roof extending on all sides to a belt of blue palms ringed with desert. Only two or three minarets and a few noblemen’s houses among gardens break the general flatness; but they are hardly noticeable, so irresistibly is the eye drawn toward two dominant objects—the white wall of the Atlas and the red tower of the Koutoubya.
Foursquare, untapering, the great tower lifts its flanks of ruddy stone. Its large spaces of unornamented wall, its triple tier of clustered openings, lightening as they rise from the severe rectangular lights of the first stage to the graceful arcade below the parapet, have the stern harmony of the noblest architecture. The Koutoubya would be magnificent anywhere; in this flat desert it is grand enough to face the Atlas.
The Almohad conquerers who built the Koutoubya and embellished Marrakech dreamed a dream of beauty that extended from the Guadalquivir to the Sahara; and at its two extremes they placed their watch towers. The Giralda watched over civilized enemies in a land of ancient Roman culture; the Koutoubya stood at the edge of the world, facing the hordes of the desert.
The Almoravid princes who founded Marrakech came from the black desert of Senegal; themselves were leaders of wild hordes. In the history of North Africa the same cycle has perpetually repeated itself. Generation after generation of chiefs have flowed in from the desert or the mountains, overthrown their predecessors, massacred, plundered, grown rich, built sudden places, encouraged their great servants to do the same; then fallen on them, and taken their wealth and their palaces. Usually some religious fury, some ascetic wrath against the self-indulgence of the cities, has been the motive of these attacks; but invariably the same results followed, as they followed when the Germanic barbarians descended on Italy. The conquerors, infected with luxury and mad with power, built vaster palaces, planned grander cities; but Sultans and Viziers camped in their golden houses as if on the march, and the mud huts of the tribesmen within their walls were but one degree removed from the mud-walled tents of the bled.
This was more especially the case with Marrakech, a city of Berbers and blacks, and the last outpost against the fierce black world beyond the Atlas from which its founders came. When one looks at its site, and considers its history, one can only marvel at the height of civilization it attained.
The Bahia itself, now the palace of the Resident-General, though built less than a hundred years ago, is typical of the architectural megalomania of the great southern chiefs. It was built by Ba-Ahmed, the all-powerful black Vizier of the Sultan Moulay-el-Hassan (reigned from 1873–1894). Ba-Ahmed was evidently an artist and an archaeologist. His ambition was to re-create a Palace of Beauty such as the Moors had built in the prime of Arab art, and he brought to Marrakech skilled artificers of Fez, the last surviving masters of the mystery of chiselled plaster and ceramic mosaics and honeycombing of gilded cedar. They came, they built the Bahia, and it remains the loveliest and most fantastic of Moroccan palaces.
Court within court, garden beyond garden, reception halls, private apartments, slaves’ quarters, sunny prophets’ chambers on the roofs and baths in vaulted crypts, the labyrinth of passages and rooms stretches away over several acres of ground. A long court enclosed in pale-green trellis-work, where pigeons plume themselves about a great tank and the dripping tiles glitter with refracted sunlight, leads to the fresh gloom of a cypress garden, or under jasmine tunnels bordered with running water; and these again open on arcaded apartments faced with tiles and stucco-work, where, in languid twilight, the hours drift by to the ceaseless music of the fountains.
The beauty of Moroccan palaces is made up of details of ornament and refinements of sensuous delight too numerous to record; but to get an idea of their general character it is worthwhile to cross the Court of Cypresses at the Bahia and follow a series of low-studded passages that turn on themselves till they reach the center of the labyrinth. Here, passing by a low padlocked door leading to a crypt, and known as the “Door of the Vizier’s Treasure-House,” one comes on a painted portal that opens into a still more secret sanctuary: the apartment of the Grand Vizier’s Favorite.
This lovely prison, from which all sight and sound of the outer world are excluded, is built about an atrium paved with disks of turquoise and black and white. Water trickles from a central vasca of alabaster into a hexagonal mosaic channel in the pavement. The walls, which are at least 25 feet high, are roofed with painted beams resting on panels of traceried stucco in which is set a clerestory of jewelled glass. On each side of the atrium are long recessed rooms closed by vermilion doors painted with gold arabesques and vases of spring flowers; and into these shadowy inner rooms, spread with rugs and divans and soft pillows, no light comes except when their doors are opened into the atrium. In this fabulous place it was my good luck to be lodged while I was in Marrakech.
In a climate where, after the winter snow has melted from the Atlas, every breath of air for long months is a flame of fire, these enclosed rooms in the middle of the palaces are the only places of refuge from the heat. Even in October the temperature of the Favorite’s apartment was deliciously reviving after a morning in the bazaars or the dusty streets, and I never came back to its wet tiles and perpetual twilight without the sense of plunging into a deep sea-pool.
From far off, through circuitous corridors, came the scent of citron-blossom and jasmine, with sometimes a bird’s song before dawn, sometimes a flute’s wail at sunset, and always the call of the muezzin in the night; but no sunlight reached the apartment except in remote rays through the clerestory, and no air except through one or two broken panes.
Sometimes, lying on my divan, and looking out through the vermilion doors, I used to surprise a pair of swallows dropped down from their nest in the cedar-beams to preen themselves on the fountain’s edge or in the channels of the pavement; for the roof was full of birds who came and went through the broken panes of the clerestory. Usually they were my only visitors; but one morning just at daylight I was waked by a soft tramp of bare feet, and saw, silhouetted against the cream-colored walls a procession of eight tall negroes in linen tunics, who filed noiselessly across the atrium like a moving frieze of bronze. In that fantastic setting, and the hush of that twilight hour, the vision was so like the picture of a “Seraglio Tragedy,” some fragment of a Delacroix or Decamps floating up into the drowsy brain, that I almost fancied I had seen ghosts of Ba-Ahmed’s executioners revisiting with dagger and bowstring the scene of an unavenged crime.
A cock crew, and they vanished … and when I made the mistake of asking what they had been doing in my room at that hour I was told (as though it were the most natural thing in the world) that they were the municipal lamp-lighters of Marrakech, whose duty it is to refill every morning the two hundred acetylene lamps lighting the Palace of the Resident-General. Such unforeseen aspects, in this mysterious city, do the most ordinary domestic functions wear.
THE BAZAARS
Marrakech is the great market of the south; and the south means not only the Atlas with its feudal chiefs and their wild clansmen, but all that lies beyond of heat and savagery: the Sahara of the veiled Touaregs, Dakka, Timbuctoo, Senegal and the Soudan. Here come the camel caravans from Demnat and Tameslout, from the Moulouya and the Souss, and those from the Atlantic ports and the confines of Algeria. The population of this old city of the southern march has always been even more mixed than that of the northerly Moroccan towns. It is made up of the descendants of all the people conquered by a long line of Sultans who brought their trains of captives across the sea from Moorish Spain and across the Sahara from Timbuctoo. Even in the highly cultivated region of the lower slope of the Atlas there are groups of varied ethnic origin, the descendants of tribes transplanted by long-gone rulers and still preserving many of their original characteri
stics.
In the bazaars all these peoples meet and mingle: cattle-dealers, olive growers, peasants from the Atlas, the Souss and the Draa. Blue Men of the Sahara, blacks from Senegal and the Soudan, coming in to trade with the wool-merchants, tanners, leather-merchants, silk-weavers, armourers, and makers of agricultural implements.
Dark, fierce and fanatical are these narrow souks of Marrakech. They are mere mud lanes roofed with rushes, as in South Tunisia and Timbuctoo, and the crowds swarming in them are so dense that it is hardly possible, at certain hours, to approach the tiny raised kennels where the merchants sit like idols among their wares. One feels at once that something more than the thought of bargaining—dear as this is to the African heart—animates these incessantly moving throngs. The souks of Marrakech seem, more than any others, the central organ of a native life that extends far beyond the city walls into secret clefts of the mountains and far-off oases where plots are hatched and holy wars fomented—farther still, to yellow deserts whence negroes are secretly brought across the Atlas to that inmost recess of the bazaar where the ancient traffic in flesh and blood still surreptitiously goes on.
All these many threads of the native life, woven of greed and lust, of fetishism and fear and blind hate of the stranger, form, in the souks, a thick network in which at times one’s feet seem literally to stumble. Fanatics in sheep skins glowering from the guarded thresholds of the mosques, fierce tribesmen with inlaid arms in their belts and the fighters’ tufts of wiry hair escaping from camel’s-hair turbans, mad negroes standing stark naked in niches of the walls pouring down Soudanese incantations upon the fascinated crowd, consumptive Jews with pathos and cunning in their large eyes and smiling lips, lusty slave-girls with earthen oil-jars resting against swaying hips, almond-eyed boys leading fat merchants by the hand, and bare-legged Berber women, tattooed and insolently gay, trading their striped blankets, or bags of dried roses and irises, for sugar, tea or Manchester cottons—from all these hundreds of unknown and unknowable people, bound together by secret affinities, or intriguing against each other with secret hate, there emanated an atmosphere of mystery and menace more stifling than the smell of camels and spices and black bodies and smoking fry which hangs like a fog under the close roofing of the souks.
And suddenly one leaves the crowd and the turbid air for one of those quiet corners that are like the back-waters of the bazaar: a small square where a vine stretches across a shop-front and hangs ripe clusters of grapes through the reeds. In the patterning of grape-shadows a very old donkey, tethered to a stone-post, dozes under a pack-saddle that is never taken off; and near by, in a matted niche, sits a very old man in white. This is the chief of the Guild of “Morocco” Workers of Marrakech, the most accomplished craftsmen in Morocco in the preparing and using of the skins to which the city gives its name. Of these sleek moroccos, cream-white or dyed with cochineal or pomegranate skins, are made the rich bags of the Chleuh dancing-boys, the embroidered slippers for the harem, the belts and harnesses that figure so largely in Moroccan trade—and of the finest, in old days, were made the pomegranate-red morocco bindings of European bibliophiles.
From this peaceful corner one passes into the barbaric splendor of a souk hung with innumerable plumy bunches of floss silk—skeins of citron yellow, crimson, grasshopper green and pure purple. This is the silk-spinners’ quarter, and next to it comes that of the dyers, with great seething vats into which the raw silk is plunged, and ropes overhead where the rainbow masses are hung out to dry.
Another turn leads into the street of the metal workers and armourers, where the sunlight through the thatch flames on round flanks of beaten copper or picks out the silver bosses of ornate powder-flasks and pistols; and nearby is the souk of the ploughshares, crowded with peasants in rough Chleuh cloaks who are waiting to have their archaic ploughs repaired, and that of the smiths, in an outer lane of mud huts where negroes squat in the dust and sinewy naked figures in tattered loin cloths bend over blazing coals. And here ends the maze of the bazaar.
WILLA CATHER
(1876–1947)
More than ten years before the publication of Willa Cather’s first novel, O Pioneers!, the writer toured England and France and sent fourteen travel articles back home for publication in the Nebraska State Journal. It was the first trip to Europe for Cather, a high-school teacher of English and Latin in Pittsburgh on summer leave. With her friend Isabelle McClung, she visited with genuine wonder such sights as London’s East End and Paris’s Notre Dame. The excerpt that follows hints at works to come, Shadows on the Rock and Death Comes for the Archbishop, which both draw on the French landscape for inspiration (“there is nothing but a little cardboard house of stucco, and a plateau of brown pine needles, and green fir trees, the scent of dried lavender always in the air, and the sea reaching like a wide blue road into the sky”). Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for One of Ours in 1922. She was born in Virginia and died in New York City.
from WILLA CATHER IN EUROPE
Le Lavandou, September 10, 1902
We came to Lavandou chiefly because we could not find anyone who had ever been here, and because in Paris people seemed never to have heard of the place. It does not exist on the ordinary map of France, and Baedeker, in his Southern France, merely mentions it. Lavandou is a fishing village of less than a hundred souls, that lies in a beautiful little bay of the Mediterranean. Its score or so of houses are built on the narrow strip of beach between the steep hillside and the sea. They are scarcely more than huts, built of mud and stone on either side of one narrow street. There is one café, and before it is a little square of sycamore trees, where the sailors, always barefoot, with their corduroy trousers and tam-o’-shanter caps, play some primitive game of ball in the afternoon. There is one very fairly good hotel, built on the sea, and from the windows of our rooms we have the whole sweep of ocean before us. There is a long veranda running the full length of the house on the side facing the sea, straw-thatched and overgrown by gourd vines, where all our meals are served to us. The fare is very good for a semi-desert country, though the wine here is thin and sour and brackish, as though the sea-wash had got into the soil that grew it. The wine of the country just here is all red, for the white grapes which flourish about Avignon grow poorly here. We have good fish, however, excellent sauces, plenty of fresh figs and peaches, and the fine little French lobster called langouste. Every morning the one little train that rattles in over the narrow-gauge tracks from Hyères brings us our piece of ice, done up in a bit of sailcloth, and we watch for it eagerly enough. This little train constitutes our railroad service, and it comprises a toy engine, a coal car, a mail and baggage car, and two coaches, one for first and one for second class.
The coast for a hundred miles on either side of us is quite as wild as it was when the Saracens held it. It is one endless succession of pine hills that terminate in cliffs jutting over the sea. There are no cattle or pigs raised here, and the people drink only goat’s milk besides their own wines. The gardens are for the most part pitiful little hillside patches of failure. Potatoes, figs, olives, and grapes are almost the only things that will grow at all in this dry, sandy soil. The sea is an even more uncertain harvest, as, with the exception of the lobsters, the fish of the Mediterranean are not particularly good, and bring a low price in the market. The water, indeed, is not cold enough to produce good fish. How the people live at all I am not able to discover. They burn pine knots and cones for fuel—the thermometer never goes down to freezing-point—and they are able to make a savoury dish of almost anything that grows. They are very fond of a salad they make of little sea-grass, dressed with the oil they get from their olives. But never imagine they are not happy, these poor fishermen of this smiling, niggardly sea. Every day we see them along the road as we walk back to the village; before every cottage the table set under an arbour or under an olive tree, with the family seated about, eating their figs and sea-grass salad, and drinking their sour wine, and singing—always singing.
Out of every wandering in which people and places come and go in long successions, there is always one place remembered above the rest because the external or internal conditions were such that they most nearly produced happiness. I am sure that for me that one place will always be Lavandou. Nothing else in England or France has given anything like this sense of immeasurable possession and immeasurable content. I am sure I do not know why a wretched little fishing village, with nothing but green pines and blue sea and a sky of porcelain, should mean more than a dozen places that I have wanted to see all my life. No books have ever been written about Lavandou, no music or pictures ever came from here, but I know well enough that I shall yearn for it long after I have forgotten London and Paris. One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.
About a mile down the shore from the village there is a little villa of white stucco, with a red-tiled roof and a little stone porch, built in the pines. It is the winter studio of a painter who is in Paris now. He has managed to keep away from it all the disfiguring and wearisome accompaniments of houses made with hands. There is no well, no stable, no yard, no driveway. It is a mere lodge, set on a little table of land between two cliffs that run out into the sea. All about it are the pines, and the little porch and plateau are covered with pine needles. You approach it by a winding path that runs down through the underbrush from the high-road. There, for the last week, we have taken up our abode. Nominally we stopped at the Hôtel de la Méditerrané, but we only slept and ate there. For twelve hours out of the twenty-four we were the possessors of a villa on the Mediterranean, and the potentates of a principality of pines. There is before the villa a little plateau on the flat top of a cliff extending out into the sea, brown with pine needles, and shaded by one tall, straight pine tree that grows on the very tip of the little promontory. It is good for one’s soul to sit there all the day through, wrapped in a steamer rug if the sea breeze blows strong, and to do nothing for hours together but stare at this great water that seems to trail its delft-blue mantle across the world. Then, as Daudet said, one becomes a part of the foam that drifts, of the wind that blows, and of the pines that answer.
