n, the famous
fourteenth-century bronze chandelier of Tetuan, and the fine old ritual
furniture reported to be contained in certain mosques, are the only
important works of art in Morocco later in date than the Roman _sloughi_
of Volubilis.

III

FEZ ELBALI

The distances in Fez are so great and the streets so narrow, and in some
quarters so crowded, that all but saints or humble folk go about on
mule-back.

In the afternoon, accordingly, the pink mules came again, and we set out
for the long tunnel-like street that leads down the hill to the Fez
Elbali.

"Look out--'ware heads!" our leader would call back at every turn, as
our way shrank to a black passage under a house bestriding the street,
or a caravan of donkeys laden with obstructive reeds or branches of
dates made the passers-by flatten themselves against the walls.

On each side of the street the houses hung over us like fortresses,
leaning across the narrow strip of blue and throwing out great beams and
buttresses to prop each other's bulging sides. Windows there were none
on the lower floors; only here and there an iron-barred slit stuffed
with rags and immemorial filth, from which a lean cat would suddenly
spring out, and scuttle off under an archway like a witch's familiar.

[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_

Fez--a reed-roofed street]

Some of these descending lanes were packed with people, others as
deserted as a cemetery; and it was strange to pass from the thronged
streets leading to the bazaars to the profound and secretive silence of
a quarter of well-to-do dwelling-houses, where only a few veiled women
attended by negro slaves moved noiselessly over the clean cobblestones,
and the sound of fountains and runnels came from hidden courtyards and
over garden-walls.

This noise of water is as characteristic of Fez as of Damascus. The Oued
Fez rushes through the heart of the town, bridged, canalized, built
over, and ever and again bursting out into tumultuous falls and pools
shadowed with foliage. The central artery of the city is not a street
but a waterfall, and tales are told of the dark uses to which, even now,
the underground currents are put by some of the dwellers behind the
blank walls and scented gardens of those highly respectable streets.

The crowd in Oriental cities is made up of many elements, and in Morocco
Turks, Jews and infidels, Berbers of the mountains, fanatics of the
confrat