rise among the gardens and gleam in the sun, but above and beyond
every other feature of the far-away fantastic southern capital one
watch-tower rises over everything and rears itself into the sky--the
Kutobea, built, according to tradition, by Fabir for the Sultan El
Mansur. It stands in a vast empty space close to the Great Mosque: few
people pass that way--their footfalls are almost unheard in the soft
sand; and the lonely tower cuts the clear quiet sky. The Kutobea is built
of dark red stone. There is a pattern, alternately raised and sunk, on
the faces of the minaret, the sunk part cut deep, the raised part carved
and standing out. A broad band of wonderful black and green iridescent
tiles, snakes round the top like some opulent spotted serpent. Part of it
has dropped away: the gilded brass balls, the cupola, are here and there
tarnished; but the sun sets, and his indulgent rays swamp every defect,
burnish and polish and gild corner-stone and fretted marble and
emerald-green tile alike, until the "to-day" of the Kutobea is as
triumphant as its "yesterday" of many hundred years. The design of the
tower itself--the minaret--is said to have come from Constantinople, as
did the Giralda at Seville, which it so resembles.

Of the mosque, beside the Kutobea, nothing was to be seen except its
walls, and through an open door avenues of pillars. The huge building has
an Arabic name meaning "The Mosque of the Books"; for what reason--who
can tell?--tradition is silent.

Marrakesh itself is supposed to have been built upon the site of an
immensely old structure, the ancient Martok. As it is now,
Yusuf-ibn-Tachfin founded it in 1072, a city which covers almost as much
ground as Paris--a purely African city. Fez, Tetuan, Tangier, have
Spanish blood in them: Marrakesh is African to the core. Arabs here are
in a minority: the spare Saharowi type, the shaved lip and cheeks and
pointed chin-tuft of the Berber race, men from the mysterious sandy
steppes below Cape Bojador, Soudanese blacks, men from Wadnoon--one and
all congregate in this city. Even the music and songs are, naturally
enough, all African, with the strange interval, the rhythm which halts
and races where no European music ever halted or raced; and the tom-tom,
the gimbri, the ear-piercing Moorish flute, all fall upon the English ear
as things intensely strange and strongly fascinating.

Marrakesh boasts no aristocracy: it is a city of the people. It has few
Shar[=i]