nest in the cedar-beams to preen themselves on the fountain's edge or in
the channels of the pavement, for the roof was full of birds who came
and went through the broken panes of the clerestory. Usually they were
my only visitors, but one morning just at daylight I was waked by a soft
tramp of bare feet, and saw, silhouetted against the cream-coloured
walls, a procession of eight tall negroes in linen tunics, who filed
noiselessly across the atrium like a moving frieze of bronze. In that
fantastic setting, and the hush of that twilight hour, the vision was so
like the picture of a "Seraglio Tragedy," some fragment of a Delacroix
or Decamps floating up into the drowsy brain, that I almost fancied I
had seen the ghosts of Ba-Ahmed's executioners revisiting with dagger
and bowstring the scene of an unavenged crime.

[Illustration: _From a photograph taken by Mme. la Marquis de Segonzac_

Marrakech--apartment of the grand vizier's favorite, Palace of the
Bahia]

A cock crew, and they vanished ... and when I made the mistake of asking
what they had been doing in my room at that hour I was told (as though
it were the most natural thing in the world) that they were the
municipal lamp-lighters of Marrakech, whose duty it is to refill every
morning the two hundred acetylene lamps lighting the palace of the
Resident General. Such unforeseen aspects, in this mysterious city, do
the most ordinary domestic functions wear.

III

THE BAZAARS

Passing out of the enchanted circle of the Bahia it is startling to
plunge into the native life about its gates.

Marrakech is the great market of the south, and the south means not only
the Atlas with its feudal chiefs and their wild clansmen, but all that
lies beyond of heat and savagery, the Sahara of the veiled Touaregs,
Dakka, Timbuctoo, Senegal and the Soudan. Here come the camel caravans
from Demnat and Tameslout, from the Moulouya and the Souss, and those
from the Atlantic ports and the confines of Algeria. The population of
this old city of the southern march has always been even more mixed than
that of the northerly Moroccan towns. It is made up of the descendants
of all the peoples conquered by a long line of Sultans who brought their
trains of captives across the sea from Moorish Spain and across the
Sahara from Timbuctoo. Even in the highly cultivated region on the lower
slopes of the Atlas there are groups of varied ethnic origin, the
descendants of tribes transplante