the caravan trail crosses from the outer
to the inner gate, and perpetual lines of camels and donkeys trample the
dead a little deeper into the dusty earth.

This Bab F'touh cemetery is also a kind of fondak. Poor caravans camp
there under the walls in a mire of offal and chicken-feathers and
stripped date-branches prowled through by wolfish dogs and buzzed over
by fat blue flies. Camel-drivers squat beside iron kettles over heaps of
embers, sorcerers from the Sahara offer their amulets to negro women,
peddlers with portable wooden booths sell greasy cakes that look as if
they had been made out of the garbage of the caravans, and in and out
among the unknown dead and sleeping saints circulates the squalid
indifferent life of the living poor.

A walled lane leads down from Bab F'touh to a lower slope, where the
Fazi potters have their baking-kilns. Under a series of grassy terraces
overgrown with olives we saw the archaic ovens and dripping wheels which
produce the earthenware sold in the _souks_. It is a primitive and
homely ware, still fine in shape, though dull in color and monotonous in
pattern; and stacked on the red earth under the olives, the rows of jars
and cups, in their unglazed and unpainted state, showed their classical
descent more plainly than after they have been decorated.

This green quiet hollow, where turbaned figures were moving attentively
among the primitive ovens, so near to the region of flies and offal we
had just left, woke an old phrase in our memories, and as our mules
stumbled back over the graves of Bab F'touh we understood the grim
meaning of the words: "They carried him out and buried him in the
Potters' Field."

V

MEDERSAS, BAZAARS AND AN OASIS

Fez, for two centuries and more, was in a double sense the capital of
Morocco: the centre of its trade as well as of its culture.

Culture, in fact, came to northwest Africa chiefly through the Merinid
princes. The Almohads had erected great monuments from Rabat to
Marrakech, and had fortified Fez, but their "mighty wasteful empire"
fell apart like those that had preceded it. Stability had to come from
the west; it was not till the Arabs had learned it through the Moors
that Morocco produced a dynasty strong and enlightened enough to carry
out the dream of its founders.

Whichever way the discussion sways as to the priority of eastern or
western influences on Moroccan art--whether it came to her from Syria,
and was thence passed o