ramic mosaics, near it, the courtyard of the Fondak Nedjarine, oldest
and stateliest of Moroccan inns, with triple galleries of sculptured
cedar rising above arcades of stone. A little farther on lights and
incense draw one to a threshold where it is well not to linger unduly.
Under a deep archway, between booths where gay votive candles are sold,
the glimmer of hanging lamps falls on patches of gilding and mosaic, and
on veiled women prostrating themselves before an invisible shrine--for
this is the vestibule of the mosque of Moulay Idriss, where, on certain
days of the week, women are admitted to pray.

Moulay Idriss was not built over the grave of the Fatimite prophet,
first of the name, whose bones lie in the Zerhoun above his sacred town.
The mosque of Fez grew up around the tomb of his posthumous son, Moulay
Idriss II, who, descending from the hills, fell upon a camp of Berbers
on an affluent of the Sebou, and there laid the foundations of Fez, and
of the Moroccan Empire.

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

Fez--the Nedjarine fountain]

Of the original monument it is said that little remains. The
_zaouia_[A] which encloses it dates from the reign of Moulay-Ismael, the
seventeenth-century Sultan of Meknez, and the mosque itself, and the
green minaret shooting up from the very centre of old Fez, were not
built until 1820. But a rich surface of age has already formed on all
these disparate buildings, and the over-gorgeous details of the shrines
and fountains set in their outer walls are blended into harmony by a
film of incense-smoke, and the grease of countless venerating lips and
hands.

[Footnote A: Moslem monastery.]

Featureless walls of mean houses close in again at the next turn; but a
few steps farther another archway reveals another secret scene. This
time it is a corner of the jealously guarded court of ablutions in the
great mosque El Kairouiyin, with the twin green-roofed pavilions that
are so like those of the Alhambra.

Those who have walked around the outer walls of the mosque of the other
Kairouan, and recall the successive doors opening into the forecourt and
into the mosque itself, will be able to guess at the plan of the church
of Fez. The great Almohad sanctuary of Tunisia is singularly free from
parasitic buildings, and may be approached as easily as that of Cordova,
but the approaches of El Kairouiyin are so built up that one never knows
at whic