Fez is the metropolis of a world that is gone: the head of a missing body. A hundred thousand Moors in Fez-el-Bali live in an age synchronous with the Crusades and with the Gothic. The modern world is here like a mirage—or like a curse of Allah.
A river, plenteous in water for Morocco, makes of the hills a single grove for olive, fig and eucalyptus. The town lies solid, within them. Most cities are a crust of houses split into streets and squares. Old Fez is a solid carapace of roofs, its rise and fall like the articulations of a body.
Underneath the roofs are the soukhs, intricate like the wrinkles on an old man’s face. These are streets of myriad and tiny shops. In one section there will be only goldsmiths—hundreds of men squatting before their little bellows and their little gems. In another congregate the sellers of fish, the vendors of soap and grease, the ironmongers, the makers of leathern ware. The typical soukh is not more than three paces wide; and each shop is an open box, slightly above the level of the walk, and large enough for a single squatting man. Overhead, is a roof of grapevine or of rush, joining the two sides of the street together and letting in mere crevices of light.
Back and forth in this myriad-textured warren move the Fasi. The rich swathe through on mules; asses laden with produce are led by uncouth Berbers from the mountains or by black slaves from the south of the Sahara. The human pigment is bewildering. The city Arab is pale as a dweller of the northern towns of Europe: the Kabyl is dark-skinned, blue-eyed: the Ethiop is black as the shadows in the tiny shops. Burnouse and turbans are pied. Vendors shout for the passers-by to stop. And from time to time there is a break in the ceaseless lineage of bazaars: the carved, closed shutter of a Koran school shields the incessant coil of adolescent voices, strident, wild, unmeditative—shouting the words of their Prophet. Along the bare walls of the mosques and the medersas, beggars are posted. Their stintless catch-word weaves with the beat of ass-hoof, with the thresh of human feet, with the shop-calls, with the chanting of students.
Each beggar has his phrase. It invokes alms with the patronage and to the glory of a particular saint. It guarantees to the almsgiver a saint’s word in Heaven. He sits in the shadow of the holy buildings. The carven door leads through a passage of mosaic to a court, gorgeous with tile and woodwork laid perhaps with mother-of-pearl. The holy students of the medersa live in cells, mounting in honey-comb mass to the minaret.
From the crowded soukhs, streets toweringly high and sinisterly narrow twist in all directions. A band of Moorish minstrels moves from dark door to dark door. The voices of drum and pipe give forth a ghost of music. The voices are shrill like the calls of mountain life. Arab music was lean and violent, a gray fusion of thrusts. This song of the true Moor is almost disembodied. It has accent, but no texture. It stands against the intricate mellow noise of the city, enfolded in the liquid sconce of hills, like a savage summons. A door opens, a copper falls in a drum. The leader of the band gives his toned blessing; the slender men move on, weaving with their song a pall on Islam.
On a hill stands the mosque of Bab-Guissa (one of the 785 mosques built in Fez by the Almohades, exclusive of monasteries and medersas). By this mosque is the north gate through which the Berber from the Rif passes with donkey-charge of olive or of grain. Each donkey-load pays duty to the Sultan; and each appraisal calls for threats from the custom officer—degenerate Moors who are truly slaves of France. The Riffian pays his pence in sullen silence. And his non-resistance maddens the Fasi. Nearby is an olive market, Fondouk el lhoudi. The olives ripen in winter. Vast rush troughs and baskets hold the black fruit in the open Square, under the sun and the flies, and the sweating men and donkeys. With the barter come blows. A negro catches a bargainer with his teeth and is flung off with a ripped cheek. The crowd buzzes, deeply unmoved. The open baskets of olives, black-gemmed in the air, give an intenser note....
On the heights above Bab-Guissa are the ruined tombs—the koubbas—of the Merinides. Their crumbled arabesques look down on the long valley of Oued Fez. A spirit of those ancient rulers could still find his Fez-el-Bali: know this shut and terracing carapace of stone, blue tile, gold ceramic, fumy beneath the sun. The old walls are there, too, although time and cactus have splintered them. And the mosques rise like a thousand claws toward Allah—the hold of the pious town on the One God.[2]
The sun is sinking on the Almohadian wall that forms a corner with the mosque Bab-Guissa. Soon will come from myriad minarets, the call for evening prayer. The mountain donkeys no longer lurch through the Gate; and the slaves of the imprisoned Sultan are gone. This rocky height studded with moldering tombs, this wall and this tower form a natural amphitheater. It is crowded with Moors. They squat on the ground, swathed in burnouses. Water-boys thread silently. All indeed is silent, facing down to a central point within the wall where sits a man.
His beard is white and his voice is gentle: he is a man with exquisite hands and manners of the Court. And he is speaking so quietly, that the massed crowd must hold silent indeed, if it would hear him. He is the Chronicler of Fez—poet, historian, journalist: one of the great sons of the Moghreb. Each day at nightfall, for an hour, he bespeaks in his own verse the glory of Islam. Each of his tales lasts three months: there are four of them to the year. His unemphatic words give to the men of Fez two realities of Islam: the splendor which was, and the splendor which is eternal. He speaks, not without humor; his immobile body radiates peace. He tells of the gardens underneath which flows water—the Garden whither Islam somnolently moves through this demonic hour of wireless, guns and rail-ways....