Morocco, Its People and Places

by Edmondo De Amicis

Shoe Shop, Fez.

We directed our steps first toward the centre of the city. Here I ought to exclaim, “Chi mi darà la voce e le parole!”[^[5]] How shall I express the wonder, the pity, the sadness that overcame me at that grand and dismal spectacle? The first impression is that of an immense city fallen into decrepitude and slowly decaying. Tall houses, which seemed formed of houses piled one upon the other, all falling to pieces, cracked from roof to base, propped up on every side, with no opening save some loophole in the shape of a cross; long stretches of street, flanked by two high bare walls like the walls of a fortress; streets running up hill and down, encumbered with stones and the ruins of fallen buildings, twisting and turning at every thirty paces; every now and then a long covered passage, dark as a cellar, where you have to feel your way; blind alleys, recesses, dens full of bones, dead animals, and heaps of putrid matter—the whole steeped in a dim and melancholy twilight. In some places the ground is so broken, the dust so thick, the smell so horrible, the flies are so numerous, that we have to stop to take breath. In half an hour we have made so many turns that if our road could be drawn it would form an arabesque as intricate as any in the Alhambra. Here and there we hear the noise of a mill, a murmur of water, the click of a weaver’s loom, a chanting of nasal voices, which we are told come from a school of children; but we see nothing and no one anywhere. We approach the centre of the city; people become more numerous; the men stop to let us pass, and stare astonished; the women turn back, or hide themselves; the children scream and run; the larger boys growl and shake their fists at a distance, mindful of the soldiers and their sticks. We see fountains richly ornamented with mosaics, arabesque doors, arched courts, some few remains of Arab architecture in decay. Every moment we find ourselves in darkness, entering one of the many covered passages. We come to one of the principal streets, about six feet wide, and full of people, who crowd about us. The soldiers shout, and push, and strike in vain, and at last make a sort of bulwark of their bodies by forming a circle around us and clasping hands, face outward. There are a thousand eyes upon us; we can scarcely breathe in the press and heat, and move slowly on, stopping every moment to give passage to a Moor on horseback, or a veiled lady on a camel, or an ass with a load of bleeding sheep’s heads. To the right and left are crowded bazaars; inn court-yards encumbered with merchandise; doors of mosques, through which we catch glimpses of arcades in perspective, and figures prostrate in prayer. All along the street there is nothing to be seen but silent forms in white hoods, moving like spectres. The air is impregnated with an acute and mingled odor of aloes, spices, incense, and kif; we seem to be walking in an immense drug-shop. Groups of boys go by with scarred and scabby heads; horrible old women, perfectly bald and with naked breasts, making their way by dint of furious imprecations against us; naked, or almost naked, madmen, crowned with flowers and feathers, bearing a branch in their hands, laughing and singing and cutting capers before the soldiers, who drive them away with blows. Turning into another street, we meet a saint, an enormously fat old fellow, as naked as he was born, leaning upon a lance bound with strips of red cloth. He squints at us, and mutters something as we pass. Further on come four soldiers dragging along some poor unfortunate, all bleeding and torn, who has been taken in the act of thieving; and after them come a troop of boys calling out, “Cut off his hand! cut off his hand!” Next come two men carrying an uncovered bier, upon which is stretched a corpse, dry as a mummy, wrapped in a white linen sack tied round the neck, waist, and knees. I ask myself where I am, and whether I am awake or asleep, and whether Fez and Paris are in the same planet! We go into the bazaar. The crowd is everywhere. The shops, as in Tangiers, are mere dens opened in the wall. The money-changers are seated on the ground, with heaps of black coin before them. We cross, jostled by the crowd, the cloth-bazaar, that of slippers, that of earthenware, that of metal ornaments, which all together form a labyrinth of alleys roofed with canes and branches of trees. Passing through a vegetable market, thronged with women who lift their arms and scream curses at us, we come out into the centre of the city. There it is the same experience as before, and we finally get out at a gate, and take a turn outside the walls.

The city stands in the form of a monstrous figure of eight between two hills, upon which still tower the ruins of two ancient fortifications. Beyond the hills there is a chain of mountains. The Pearl River divides the town in two—modern Fez on the left bank, ancient Fez on the right—and a girdle of old castellated walls and towers, dark and falling into ruin, binds the whole together. From the heights the eye takes in the whole city—a myriad of white, flat-roofed houses, among which rise tall minarets ornamented with mosaics, gigantic palm-trees, tufts of verdure, green domes, and castellated towers. The grandeur of the ancient city can be divined from what is left, though it is but a skeleton. Near the gates, and upon the hills for a long distance, the country is covered with monuments and ruins, tombs and houses of saints, arches of aqueducts, sepulchres, zanie, and foundations that seem like the remains of a city destroyed by cannon and devoured by flames. Between the wall and the highest of the two hills that flank the city it is all one garden, a thick and intricate grove of mulberry-trees, olives, palms, fruit-trees, and tall poplars, clothed with ivy and grape-vines; little streams run through it, fountains gush and sparkle, and canals intersect it between high green banks. The opposite bank is crowned with aloes twice the height of a man. Along the walls are great fissures and deep ditches filled with vegetation, rude remains of bastions and broken towers,—a grand and severe disorder of ruin and greenery, recalling the more picturesque parts of the walls of Constantinople. We passed by the Gate of Ghisa, the Iron Gate, the Gate of the Padre delle Cuoia, the New Gate, the Burned Gate, the Gate that Opens, the Gate of Lions, the Gate of Sidi Busida, the Gate of the Father of Utility, and re-entered new Fez by the Gate of the Niche of Butter. Here are large gardens, vast open spaces, large squares, surrounded by battlemented walls, beyond which can be seen other squares and other walls, arched gate-ways and towers, and beautiful prospects of hills and mountains. Some of the doors are very lofty, and are covered with iron plates studded with large nails. Approaching the Pearl River, we come upon the decaying carcase of a horse, lying in the middle of the street. Along the wall about a hundred Arabs are washing and jumping upon the linen piled upon the shore. We meet patrols of soldiers, personages of the court on horseback, small caravans of camels, groups of women from the country with their children tied on their backs, who cover their faces at our approach. And at last we see some faces that smile upon us. We enter the Mella, the Hebrew quarter,—truly a triumphal entrance. They run to their windows and terraces, down into the street, calling to one another. The men, with long hair covered by a handkerchief tied under the chin like women, bow with ceremonious smiles. The women, comely and plump, dressed in red and green garments embroidered and braided with gold, wish us buenos dias, and say a thousand charming things with their brilliant dark eyes. Some of the children come and kiss our hands. To escape from this ovation, and from the filth of the streets, we take a cross street, and passing through the Jewish cemetery, get back at last to the palace of the embassy, tired out and with bewildered minds.

“O Fez!” says an Arabian historian, “all the beauty of the earth is concentrated in thee!” He adds that Fez has always been the seat of wisdom, science, peace, and religion; the mother and the queen of all the cities of the Magreb; that its inhabitants have a finer and deeper intelligence than that of the other inhabitants of Morocco; that all that is in it and around it is blessed of God, even to the waters of the Pearl River, which cure the stone, soften the skin, perfume the clothes, destroy insects, render sweeter (if drunk fasting) the pleasures of the senses, and contain precious stones of inestimable value. Not less poetically is related by the Arabian writers the story of the foundation of Fez. When the Abassidi, toward the end of the eighth century, were divided into two factions, one of the princes of the vanquished faction, Edris-ebn-Abdallah, took refuge in the Magreb, a short distance from the place where Fez now stands; and here he lived in solitude, in prayer and meditation, until, by reason of his illustrious origin, as well as because of his holy life, having acquired great fame among the Berbers of that region, they elected him their chief. Gradually, by his arms, and by his high authority as a descendant of Ali and Fatima, he extended his sovereignty over a large extent of country, converting by force to Islamism idolaters, Christians, and Hebrews; and reached such a height of power that the Caliph of the East, Haroun-el-Reschid, jealous of his fame, caused him to be poisoned by a pretended physician, in order to destroy with him his growing empire. But the Berbers gave solemn sepulture to Edris, and recognized as Caliph his posthumous son, Edris-ebn-Edris, who ascended the throne at twelve years of age, consolidated and extended his father’s work, and may be said to have been the true founder of the empire of Morocco, which remained until the end of the tenth century in the hands of his dynasty. It was this same Edris who laid the foundation of Fez, on the 3d of February of the year 808, “in a valley placed between two high hills covered with rich groves, and irrigated by a thousand streams, on the right bank of the River of Pearls.”

Tradition explains in several ways the origin of the name. In digging for the foundations, they found in the earth a great hatchet (called in Arabic Fez), which weighed sixty pounds, and this gave its name to the city.

Edris himself, says another legend, worked at the foundations among his laborers, who, in gratitude, offered him a hatchet made of gold and silver; and he chose to perpetuate, in the name of the city, the memory of their homage. According to another account, the secretary of Edris had asked one day of his lord what name he meant to give the city. “The name,” answered the prince, “of the first person we shall meet.” A man passed by, who, being questioned, said his name was Farés; but he stammered and pronounced it Fez. Another account says that there was an ancient city called Zef, on the Pearl River, which existed eighteen hundred years, and was destroyed before Islam shone upon the world; and Edris imposed upon his metropolis the name of the old city reversed. However it may be, the new city grew rapidly, and already at the beginning of the tenth century rivalled Bagdad in splendor; held within its walls the mosque of El-Caruin and that of Edris, still existant, one the largest and the other the most venerated in Africa; and was called the Mecca of the West. Toward the middle of the eleventh century Gregory IX established there a bishopric. Under the dynasty of the Almoadi it had thirty suburbs, eight hundred mosques, ninety thousand houses, ten thousand shops, eighty-six gates, vast hospitals, magnificent baths, a great and rich library of precious manuscripts in Greek and Latin; also schools of philosophy, of physics, of astronomy, and languages, to which came all the learned and lettered men of Europe and the Levant. It was called the Athens of Africa, and was at one time the seat of a perpetual fair, into which flowed the products of three continents; and European commerce had there its bazaar and its inns; and there—between Moors, Arabs, Berbers, Jews, Negroes, Turks, Christians, and renegades—five hundred thousand people lived and prospered. And now, what a change! Almost all traces of gardens have vanished; the greater part of the mosques are in ruins; of the great library, only a few worm-eaten volumes remain; the schools are dead; commerce languishes; its edifices are falling into ruin; and the population is reduced to less than a fifth of the former number. Fez is no more than an enormous carcase of a metropolis abandoned in the midst of the vast cemetery called Morocco.

Our greatest desire, after our first walk about Fez, was to visit the two famous mosques of El-Caruin and Muley-Edris; but as Christians are not permitted to put a foot in them, we were obliged to content ourselves with what we could see from the street: the Mosaic doors, the arched courts, the long low aisles, divided by a forest of columns, and lighted by a dim, mysterious light. It must not be imagined, however, that these mosques are now what they were in the time of their fame; since, already in the fifteenth century, the celebrated historian Abd-er-Rhaman-ebn-Kaldun, describing that of El-Caruin (may God exalt it more and more, as he says), speaks of various ornaments that were no longer in existence in his time. The first foundations of this enormous mosque were laid on the first Saturday of Ramadan, in the year 859 of Jesus Christ, at the expense of a pious woman of Kairuan. It was at the beginning a small mosque of four naves; but, little by little, governors, emirs, and sultans embellished and enlarged it. Upon the point of the minaret built by the Imaum Ahmed ben Aby-Beker glittered a golden ball studded with pearls and precious stones, on which was represented the sword of Edris-ebn-Edris, the founder of Fez. On the interior walls were suspended talismans which protected the mosque against rats, scorpions, and serpents, The Mirab, or niche turned toward Mecca, was so splendid that the Imaum had it painted white, that it might no longer distract the faithful from their prayers. There was a pulpit of ebony, inlaid with ivory and gems. There were two hundred and seventy columns, forming sixteen naves of twenty-one arches in each, fifteen great doors of entrance for the men, and two small ones for the women, and seventeen hundred hanging lamps, which, in the season of Ramadan, consumed three quintals and a half of oil. All which particulars the historian Kaldun relates with exclamations of wonder and delight, adding that the mosque could contain twenty-two thousand and seven hundred persons, and that the court alone had in its pavement fifty-two thousand bricks. “Glory to Allah, Lord of the world, immensely merciful, and king of the day of the last judgment!”

Expecting that the Sultan would fix a day for the solemn reception of the embassy, we took several turns about the city, in one of which I had an entirely new sensation. We were approaching the Burned Gate, Bab-el-Maroc, to re-enter the city, when the vice-consul made an exclamation—“Two heads!” Lifting my eyes far enough along the wall to see two long streams of blood, my courage failed me to see more. But I was told that the two heads were suspended by the hair over the gate; one appeared to be that of a boy of not more than fifteen, and the other a man of twenty-five or thirty; both Moors. We learned afterward that they were heads of rebels from the confines of Algeria, which had been brought to Fez the day before; but the fresh blood made it probable that they had been cut off in the city, perhaps before that very gate. However that may be, we were informed on this same occasion that heads of rebels are always brought and presented to the Sultan; after which the imperial soldiers catch the first Jew whom they happen to encounter, and make him take out the brain, fill the skull with tow and salt, and hang it over one of the city gates. It is removed from one gate to another, and from one town to another, until it is destroyed. It does not appear, however, that this was done with the two heads of Bab-el-Maroc, for a day or two after, asking an Arab servant what had become of them, he answered with a gesture, “Buried,” and then hastened to add, by way of consolation, “But there are plenty more coming.”

Two days before the solemn reception, we were invited to breakfast by Sid-Moussa.