"THE FIERCE SURROUNDING COUNTRY"
Old Fez so long the city of our dreams now become the city of our waking thoughts, is soon to become the city of our reminiscences. For alas! this is to be our last evening in the holy city. The limit of official tolerance is reached; our passports have been suggestively returned, and, knowing the futility of protest, we dine in regretful silence close to the open window that we may not lose a single phase of the ever-changing coloring and lighting of the picture there revealed to us. For the last time we watch the city grow dim in the twilight; although we have witnessed ten times the dying of the day from this same window, the spectacle has not lost its charm, the picture has not lost its fascinating mystery. A sojourn of ten days in Fez has not dissipated, it has but deepened the sense of mystery. But we, to our surprise, have not yet suffered from that strange mental disease, the "longing to get away" that infallibly attacks ambassadors and representatives of foreign powers and is a political force upon which Moorish diplomats may count to rid them of annoying visitors who have come to press vexing demands upon their government. At last a sudden glow, like a great flood of fire, overspreads the city; it is the glow of sunset, the last signal of the dying day, and for a moment it suffuses the entire heavens, as if there were a distant world in conflagration. Fez has assumed a shroud of black; it is the sacred hour of Moghreb, and the lower darkness is resounding with the cries of the Muezzin, those cries of intense faith, those wailing laments that seem to express the nothingness of all things earthly.
The Moors speak of their country as "Moghreb-al-Aksa," the "Country of the Setting Sun." How prophetic!—for in very truth the sun of civilization has set forever upon this land, and though its past be brilliant as the heavenly sunset fires, its future is as dim as the soft-footed night that, stealing in from the black, fierce surrounding country, broods like a pall of death above the sleeping city of the Moors.
LES DERNIERS REBELLES
(BENJAMIN CONSTANT)
THROUGH THE HEART OF THE MOORISH EMPIRE
