ernities, Soudanese blacks and haggard Blue Men of the Souss,
jostle the merchants and government officials with that democratic
familiarity which goes side by side with abject servility in this land
of perpetual contradictions. But Fez is above all the city of wealth and
learning, of universities and counting-houses, and the merchant and the
_oulama_[A]--the sedentary and luxurious types--prevail.

[Footnote A: Learned man, doctor of the university.]

The slippered Fazi merchant, wrapped in white muslins and securely
mounted on a broad velvet saddle-cloth anchored to the back of a broad
mule, is as unlike the Arab horseman of the desert as Mr. Tracy Tupman
was unlike the Musketeers of Dumas. Ease, music, money-making, the
affairs of his harem and the bringing-up of his children, are his chief
interests, and his plump pale face with long-lashed hazel eyes, his
curling beard and fat womanish hands, recall the portly potentates of
Hindu miniatures, dreaming among houris beside lotus-tanks.

These personages, when they ride abroad, are preceded by a swarthy
footman, who keeps his hand on the embroidered bridle; and the
government officers and dignitaries of the _Makhzen_[A] are usually
escorted by several mounted officers of their household, with a servant
to each mule. The cry of the runners scatters the crowd, and even the
panniered donkeys and perpetually astonished camels somehow contrive to
become two-dimensional while the white procession goes by.

[Footnote A: The Sultan's government.]

Then the populace closes in again, so quickly and densely that it seems
impossible it could ever have been parted, and negro water-carriers,
muffled women, beggars streaming with sores, sinewy and greasy "saints,"
Soudanese sorcerers hung with amulets made of sardine-boxes and
hares'-feet, long-lashed boys of the Chleuh in clean embroidered
caftans, Jews in black robes and skull-caps, university students
carrying their prayer-carpets, bangled and spangled black women,
scrofulous children with gazelle eyes and mangy skulls, and blind men
tapping along with linked arms and howling out verses of the Koran,
surge together in a mass drawn by irresistible suction to the point
where the bazaars converge about the mosques of Moulay Idriss and El
Kairouiyin.

Seen from a terrace of the upper town, the long thatched roofing of El
Attarine, the central bazaar of Fez, promises fantastic revelations of
native life; but the dun-colored crowd