splendid mosques and towers
have Romanesque qualities of mass and proportion, and, as M. Raymond
Koechlin has pointed out, inevitably recall the "robust simplicity of
the master builders who at the very same moment were beginning in
France the construction of the first Gothic cathedrals and the noblest
feudal castles."

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

Fez--Medersa Bouanyana]

In the thirteenth century, with the coming of the Merinids, Moroccan
architecture grew more delicate, more luxurious, and perhaps also more
peculiarly itself. That interaction of Spanish and Arab art which
produced the style known as Moorish reached, on the African side of the
Straits, its greatest completeness in Morocco. It was under the Merinids
that Moorish art grew into full beauty in Spain, and under the Merinids
that Fez rebuilt the mosque Kairouiyin and that of the Andalusians, and
created six of its nine _Medersas_, the most perfect surviving buildings
of that unique moment of sober elegance and dignity.

The Cherifian dynasties brought with them a decline in taste. A crude
desire for immediate effect, and the tendency toward a more barbaric
luxury, resulted in the piling up of frail palaces as impermanent as
tents. Yet a last flower grew from the deformed and dying trunk of the
old Empire. The Saadian Sultan who invaded the Soudan and came back
laden with gold and treasure from the great black city of Timbuctoo
covered Marrakech with hasty monuments of which hardly a trace survives.
But there, in a nettle-grown corner of a ruinous quarter, lay hidden
till yesterday the Chapel of the Tombs: the last emanation of pure
beauty of a mysterious, incomplete, forever retrogressive and yet
forever forward-straining people. The Merinid tombs of Fez have fallen;
but those of their destroyers linger on in precarious grace, like a
flower on the edge of a precipice.

IV

Moroccan architecture, then, is easily divided into four groups: the
fortress, the mosque, the collegiate building and the private house.

The kernel of the mosque is always the _mihrab_, or niche facing toward
the Kasbah of Mecca, where the _imam_[A] stands to say the prayer. This
arrangement, which enabled as many as possible of the faithful to kneel
facing the _mihrab_, results in a ground-plan necessarily consisting of
long aisles parallel with the wall of the _mihrab_, to which more and
more aisles are added as the number