, the stalls with
fruit, olives, tunny-fish, vague syrupy sweets, candles for saints'
tombs, Mantegnesque garlands of red and green peppers, griddle-cakes
sizzling on red-hot pans, and all the varied wares and cakes and
condiments that the lady in the tale of the Three Calanders went out to
buy, that memorable morning in the market of Bagdad.

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

Sale--entrance of the Medersa]

Only at Sale all is on a small scale: there is not much of any one
thing, except of the exquisite matting. The tide of commerce has ebbed
from the intractable old city, and one feels, as one watches the
listless purchasers in her little languishing bazaars, that her long
animosity against the intruder has ended by destroying her own life.

The feeling increases when one leaves the bazaar for the streets
adjoining it. An even deeper hush than that which hangs over the
well-to-do quarters of all Arab towns broods over these silent
thoroughfares, with heavy-nailed doors barring half-ruined houses. In a
steep deserted square one of these doors opens its panels of
weather-silvered cedar on the court of the frailest, ghostliest of
Medersas--mere carved and painted shell of a dead house of learning.
Mystic interweavings of endless lines, patient patterns interminably
repeated in wood and stone and clay, all are here, from the tessellated
paving of the court to the honeycombing of the cedar roof through which
a patch of sky shows here and there like an inset of turquoise tiling.

This lovely ruin is in the safe hands of the French Fine Arts
administration, and soon the wood-carvers and stucco-workers of Fez will
have revived its old perfection; but it will never again be more than a
show-Medersa, standing empty and unused beside the mosque behind whose
guarded doors and high walls one guesses that the old religious
fanaticism of Sale is dying also, as her learning and her commerce have
died.

In truth the only life in her is centred in the market-place outside the
walls, where big expanding Rabat goes on certain days to provision
herself. The market of Sale, though typical of all Moroccan markets, has
an animation and picturesqueness of its own. Its rows of white tents
pitched on a dusty square between the outer walls and the fruit-gardens
make it look as though a hostile tribe had sat down to lay siege to the
town, but the army is an army of hucksters, of farmers from the r