A long passage led us into a large patio (courtyard), in which orange-trees were growing. It was open to the sky, the floor tiled with shining tesselated tile-work; a marble fountain rippled in the middle: the dado round the four walls, the three rows of pillars which on all sides supported the gallery above—all were tiled in the same mosaic of small saffron-yellow, powder-blue, and white tiles, which are baked, coloured, and glazed in primitive potteries outside the city, and made only in Tetuan and Fez. A Moorish house is the essence of purity and light, with its whitewashed walls, its absence of all stifling furniture, and its capability of being sluiced down from top to bottom every day with rivers of water by barefooted slaves.
"The Duke" had spared no dollars to make his house beautiful. Of the triple row of arches, supported by the pillars round the patio, the outside row was a plain horse-shoe, the inner toothed, the inmost carved. Through an avenue of pillars the rooms all round the patio look out upon the fountain and the orange-trees. Slaves occupied them. The kitchen also and the hummum are always on the ground floor. We were taken up to the first floor by the tiled staircase, with a plaster fan-shell ceiling, and were shown into the best room—the room belonging to the master of the house. The tiled floor was hidden by an ugly modern French carpet in strips: white and coloured mattresses were laid all round the walls upon the floor instead of chairs. Two immense brass bedsteads stood in recesses, blue silk four-posters; a great cushioned mattress on the carpet beside the bed is reported to be used by the wife; a slave will often sleep in the same room. The lower half of the whitewashed walls was hung with ancient silk brocaded hangings, a long-forgotten relic of the old wandering life as nomad Arabs, and still used by Arabs for the insides of their tents. The richer the owner, the better his silk hangings: the design is invariably a succession of horse-shoe arches, more or less embroidered, and giving the rooms a warm, luxurious air. In the mosques very fine mats are used; in ordinary houses, cafés, and shops, yellow matting lines the walls. Above the old hangings the Duke had hung a line of immense and tawdry gilt-framed mirrors. There were clocks in the room to the number of ten, some of them going; two inlaid cabinets; three cases of artificial flowers under glass; a great wooden coffer—the wife's property—holding a wardrobe of clothes; a gun on one of the walls; a rosary; a thermometer made in Germany: these were the only knick-knacks. Moorish rooms combine bedroom with sitting-room, but are devoid of washing-apparatus, tables, chairs, books, or pictures. Bathing is done in the hummum or in the courtyard of the mosque; of books there are none; while pictures Mohammed forbade, as inclined to lead to idolatry. Query: have many artists been lost to the world in fourteen hundred years among a sect numbering a hundred millions?
The ceiling and woodwork of the room were painted in barbaric, gaudy hues, which mellow with age and "tone" like a faded Kashmir shawl. A row of tiled pillars divided the room lengthwise, and raised the inner half a step above the outer: it was immensely lofty, lighted by the great double doors only, which stood wide open on to the patio. Glass is not used in Morocco: the windowless rooms are aired by the unfastened doors which look on to the patio, itself open to the winds of heaven. The outside world can have little idea of the life going on within the courtyard house: there is much seclusion therein, in fitting harmony with the spirit of Morocco.
Fireplaces do not exist, though from December to March the thermometer has sometimes, on single occasions, touched freezing-point at night. Earthenware pans of charcoal, used for cooking, can be carried upstairs for warmth.
The other rooms in Alarbi Abresha's house were all more or less replicas of the best room shorn of its gilt. As the laws of the Medes and Persians, so is the arrangement of the mattresses (divans) round the walls inside a Moorish house.
A Moor does not spend his day indoors. He eats and sleeps at home, but is otherwise sitting talking with his friends in the city, or in his shop, or out at his garden-house or fields.
He eats in any one of the divanned rooms in which he happens to be at the time, his rule being to "sleep where you will and eat where you will." A slave carries in his dish of meat on a tray, and puts it on a table four inches in front of the divan. Beef, mutton, and chicken are cooked in oil till they fall apart and can be eaten with the fingers. He eats vegetables and fruit, murmurs a "B`ism Allah" beforehand and a "Hamdoollah" (God be praised) at the end; washes his hands; drinks green tea, or begins his meal with it and bread of fine white flour. His wife has the refusal of the dish after her lord, never eating with him; and the slaves follow her. As many as five dishes may be brought up at a meal; and the master of the house, sampling each, chooses which he will eat, and sends the rest away. If he has a guest, it is the height of politeness to select small pieces off the dish and put them within the guest's reach, or, still better, into his mouth.
Moors, unless they are wealthy men, eat "by the eye"—that is, not according to what they require, but according to that they see set before them: frequent hiccups express gratification at hospitality received, accompanied by "Hamdoollah." The amount which a Moor can eat is prodigious. There was a man at Fez who was reverenced as a saint by his neighbours, because he had been known to eat a hundredweight of coos-coosoo (porridge) and a whole sheep at a sitting.
Alarbi Abresha, Junior, meanwhile, took us on into his father's guest-house, a suite of magnificent rooms, decorated in execrable taste, the barbaric glories of the old Moorish style giving place to modern French vulgarity. A courtyard house can be a strange mixture. Its woodwork, possibly arrar, a cypress of beautiful grain, scented like cedar, cinnamon-coloured, and immensely hard (out of which the Roman patricians cut their precious tables, valued at their weight in gold if as much as four feet wide: beams of arrar put into the Córdovo Mosque by the Moors a thousand years ago still exist); its old silk hangings; its tiles, kept polished like jet, and never desecrated by anything harder than a slippered sole,—all alike are the finest relics of a taste which ruled in the construction of the Alhambra, where Mauresque design is seen at its best. The aristocrats of Tetuan are descendants of the old Andalusian families, who, having left Morocco and invaded Spain, settled there, built the Alhambra, were in the course of time driven back over the seas, and took refuge in Tetuan and other coast towns. Their very title-deeds, together with the keys of their houses in Granada, are still in the possession of their descendants in Tetuan.
While the best work in the courtyard houses of to-day harks back to the brave days of Spain, the Moor of the twentieth century has less of the vitality and originality which distinguished his forefathers, and he is apt to mix cheap up-to-date decoration with the patio and the windowless wall, of which the Duke's guest-house may stand for an example.