"THROUGH GATE AFTER GATE"
The Sultan always dwells amid the wreck of ages. The snow-white palace of the actual sovereign may be seen rising above the crumbling walls of the Imperial Garden. Around it are vague piles of age-worn masonry, the abandoned palaces of emperors who ruled here in the past. Custom demands that on the death of a Sultan his palace be abandoned and a new one built for his successor. It is regarded as a sacrilege for any one to occupy the abode of a departed emperor. Thus, during the centuries, these imperial inclosures in all the Moorish cities have become encumbered with acres of decaying palaces in which bats and owls hold carnival.
"BORN OF AN IMPERIAL MANIA FOR MASONRY"
AN ARTIFICIAL LAKE
In Mequinez everything speaks of Mulai Ismail, the tyrant Sultan of the sixteenth century, that imperial monster whose deeds surpass in horror those of Nero or Caligula, the ruins of whose palaces and public works rival in magnitude the Roman mountains of brick and stone upon the Palatine or in the broad Campagna.
ENDLESS AISLES OF ARCHES
Mulai Ismail built three miles of stables for his twelve thousand horses. We see, to-day, the endless aisles of arches where his chargers were lodged in splendor, every ten horses tended by a negro slave. As a horseman, he was superb. It is said that he was able, in one graceful movement, to mount his steed, draw his sword, and neatly decapitate the slave who held his stirrup. He held that to die by his imperial hand insured immediate entry into paradise, and throughout the latter part of his life of eighty-one vigorous years he went about his land dispensing, with his scimitar, passports to a beatitudinous eternity. Twenty thousand of his subjects were thus favored, Friday being the day chosen by the imperial murderer for these executionary exercises. His pet lions were fed upon the flesh of slaves; his forty cats were treated better than his children, though one disobedient cat was formally executed by his order. Workmen caught idling on the walls, at which his myriad slaves and prisoners were unceasingly engaged, were tumbled into the molds and rammed down into the concrete.