"NOWHERE IN PARTICULAR"
"A SEMBLANCE OF A HIGHWAY"
On the eleventh morning of our journey this semblance of a highway comes straggling from the south to meet us. The countless caravans, crawling toward the holy city, have created this illusion of a road—a road that will lead us in a few short hours to the gates of a great city, the fascination of which, for him who has the slightest love of romance in his soul, is irresistible. Fez is no banal, modernized, or tourist-ridden city, nor is it a mere heap of ugliness and ruin of which the only charm is a remoteness from the living world. Fez is a city that has been in its time one of the proudest and most splendid cities of the Moslem world. Its fall has been so gradual that there has been no change, nothing but a slow decay, so gentle that it has not scarred old Fez, but beautified it. Fez, like Venice, requires but a touch of the imagination, aided by the long shadows of the early morning, the mystery of twilight, or the silvery magic of the moonlight, to restore it to us as it stood in all its somber beauty eight hundred years ago.
"MIDWAY TWIXT HERE AND THERE"
UN TRIBUNAL ARABE
(J. LAURENT MADRID)
Therefore do we most eagerly await the moment that will reveal to us this crumbling stronghold of a dying race, this beautiful but fragile shell of Moorish civilization,—a civilization that long ago ceased to progress, and, ceasing to progress, has thereby ceased to live.