ich
black lands along the river, of swarthy nomads and leather-gaitered
peasant women from the hills, of slaves and servants and tradesmen from
Rabat and Sale; a draped, veiled, turbaned mob shrieking, bargaining,
fist-shaking, call on Allah to witness the monstrous villanies of the
misbegotten miscreants they are trading with, and then, struck with the
mysterious Eastern apathy, sinking down in languid heaps of muslin among
the black figs, purple onions and rosy melons, the fluttering hens, the
tethered goats, the whinnying foals, that are all enclosed in an outer
circle of folded-up camels and of mules dozing under faded crimson
saddles.

[Illustration: _From a photograph by Schmitt, Rabat_

Sale--market-place outside the town]

VI

CHELLA AND THE GREAT MOSQUE

The Merinid Sultans of Rabat had a terribly troublesome neighbour across
the Bou-Regreg, and they built Chella to keep an eye on the pirates of
Sale. But Chella has fallen like a Babylonian city triumphed over by the
prophets; while Sale, sly, fierce and irrepressible, continued till well
on in the nineteenth century to breed pirates and fanatics.

The ruins of Chella lie on the farther side of the plateau above the
native town of Rabat. The mighty wall enclosing them faces the city wall
of Rabat, looking at it across one of those great red powdery wastes
which seem, in this strange land, like death and the desert forever
creeping up to overwhelm the puny works of man.

The red waste is scored by countless trains of donkeys carrying water
from the springs of Chella, by long caravans of mules and camels, and by
the busy motors of the French administration; yet there emanates from it
an impression of solitude and decay which even the prosaic tinkle of the
trams jogging out from the European town to the Exhibition grounds above
the sea cannot long dispel.

Perpetually, even in the new thriving French Morocco, the outline of a
ruin or the look in a pair of eyes shifts the scene, rends the thin veil
of the European Illusion, and confronts one with the old grey Moslem
reality. Passing under the gate of Chella, with its richly carved
corbels and lofty crenellated towers, one feels one's self thus
completely reabsorbed into the past.

Below the gate the ground slopes away, bare and blazing, to a hollow
where a little blue-green minaret gleams through fig-trees, and
fragments of arch and vaulting reveal the outline of a ruined mosque.

Was ever shade so