North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

IV

A little to the west of Tlemcen, and almost adjoining it, stands another ruined city, Mansourah. I rambled out toward it on a road alive with market-day bustle and travel, where the country people were arriving in groups with produce and beasts of burden, and the interest of the weekly holiday in town—a rough, hard people, not at all like the Tunisians, but doubtless of a more vital stock. The French cavalry were exercising in the Great Basin that had once been like a lake in that quarter of the city, a part of the water-works of the old days. Almost as soon as I was beyond the gate I saw Mansourah lying on the slope near by, well marked by its great ramparts, with towers. It was the site of an immense fortified camp, where once a Moroccan army had sat down to besiege Tlemcen, and had abode many years in that great siege, and had built a city to house itself. At one point began a paved road, and I passed down its well-worn, smooth flags into the enclosure, which was wooded with olives, and looked like a large orchard, showing spaces of strewn stone, some rough, ruined masses, and on the far side a lofty single tower. The fallen stones indicated the place of the palace, and the tower was the minaret of the destroyed mosque. In those fighting days a siege might consume a reign, and an army was a population; the march might seem a migration; the army brought its women and children along with it and the people who were necessary to its subsistence, traders and the like, and established ordinary life on the spot; a city grew up, and in this case, perhaps, throve especially on the intercepted caravan trade that could no longer find its natural and customary outlet through the besieged town; and if the war were waged successfully the new city would swallow up the old one that would fall to decay. So Tagrart, long before Tlemcen, had been the camp over against Agadir, and, conquering, had become the new seat of the city. The lot of Mansourah, however, was different; it did not finally succeed, but Tlemcen in the end drove the plough over the new city, exterminating it, and leaving only these ruins to be the memorial of the event.

I found little of interest in the detail except that splendid tower, which was a spectacle of ruin; it commanded the scene by its single and solitary figure, and was imposing to the eye and to the mind. It was a minaret, but of a different order from any I ever saw. It stood in the middle of the façade of the mosque, which was entered by the central door of the minaret, massively crowned by concentric arches over the portal; and this base was continued above, in the upper stories, by a bolder and more solid construction than usual, with ornamental details fitted to its severe lines, with a balcony halfway up, and at the top a group of small Gothic arches. It was thus more like a cathedral tower in aspect, position, and use; and in its majestic ruin it seemed such. The treatment of the surface, however, was altogether Moorish. The material was a beautiful rosy stone; and, overlaid on this, one still saw the half-obliterated green and blue lights of the incrusted work like a dull peacock lining. The discreet relief of this ceramic ornament on the rose stone, used as a ground and having its own warm and massive effect in the harmony of tints, must have made a superb example of that mosaic art of color which treated great surfaces like a jewel box. But what a marvel it is to find the camp of a horde of Berber tribes, in the confusion of a fierce and bloody siege, a foyer of the great arts—of architecture, delicate sculpture, and mosaic color! All those onyx columns that have so delighted me were brought from these ruins and reset in their new places in Tlemcen. What an interesting group of impressions a few days had brought me, here! not one city, but a nest of cities, like a nest of boxes—or like Troy, superposed one on another: Pomaria, Agadir, Tagrart, Mansourah, Tlemcen. A necropolis of saints; a mountain-pleasance of fountains, orchards, grottos, the haunt of pigeons and fruits, rich in the privacy and delights of country life; a land of campaigns, and Berber dynasties, and sieges! I began to feel the inadequacies of my schoolboy geography and college histories, the need of a new orientation of my ideas to serve as a ground-plan for my knowledge of the people and its past, the race-character; and, on my return, I sought out the book-shop—an excellent one—and purchased all the little city could tell me about itself.