Chapter 3

FEZ

I

THE FIRST VISION

Many-walled Fez rose up before us out of the plain toward the end of the
day.

The walls and towers we saw were those of the upper town, Fez Eldjid
(the New), which lies on the edge of the plateau and hides from view Old
Fez tumbling down below it into the ravine of the Oued Fez. Thus
approached, the city presents to view only a long line of ramparts and
fortresses, merging into the wide, tawny plain and framed in barren
mountains. Not a house is visible outside the walls, except, at a
respectful distance, the few unobtrusive buildings of the European
colony, and not a village breaks the desolation of the landscape.

As we drew nearer, the walls towered close over us, and skirting them we
came to a bare space outside a great horseshoe gate, and found
ourselves suddenly in the foreground of a picture by Carpaccio or
Bellini. Where else had one seen just those rows of white-turbaned
majestic figures, squatting in the dust under lofty walls, all the pale
faces ringed in curling beards turned to the story-teller in the centre
of the group? Transform the story-teller into a rapt young Venetian, and
you have the audience and the foreground of Carpaccio's "Preaching of
St. Stephen," even to the camels craning inquisitive necks above the
turbans. Every step of the way in North Africa corroborates the close
observation of the early travellers, whether painters or narrators, and
shows the unchanged character of the Oriental life that the Venetians
pictured, and Leo Africanus and Windus and Charles Cochelet described.

There was time, before sunset, to go up to the hill from which the
ruined tombs of the Merinid Sultans look down over the city they made
glorious. After the savage massacre of foreign residents in 1912 the
French encircled the heights commanding Fez with one of their admirably
engineered military roads, and in a few minutes our motor had climbed
to the point from which the great dynasty of artist-Sultans dreamed of
looking down forever on their capital.

Nothing endures in Islam, except what human inertia has left standing
and its own solidity has preserved from the elements. Or rather, nothing
remains intact, and nothing wholly perishes, but the architecture, like
all else, lingers on half-ruined and half-unchanged. The Merinid tombs,
however, are only hollow shells and broken walls, grown part of the
brown cliff they cling to. No one thinks of them save as an added touch
of picturesqueness where all is picturesque: they survive as the best
point from which to look down at Fez.

There it lies, outspread in golden light, roofs, terraces, and towers
sliding over the plain's edge in a rush dammed here and there by
barriers