On the Shores of the Mediterranean (47 page)

Two months after the death of Idriss I his wife gave birth to a son, Idriss II. Idriss, it was said, could read at the age of four, write when he was five and knew the whole of the Koran by heart by the time he was eight. His father was buried in a mausoleum some twenty-five miles west of Fez. Around it a town called after him sprang up and to this day, together with the tomb of Idriss II in Old Fez, it is the most venerated shrine in all Morocco.

The Idrissid dynasty was destroyed in 973 by the Umayyad Caliph of Cordoba, Hakam II, whose dynasty presided over what was the Golden Age of the Moors. The whole Cordoban Caliphate, which included El Maghreb el-Aqsa and Fez, was in turn overrun in the eleventh century by the Almoravids, religious
Berber warriors from Mauretania, known as the Veiled Ones, the Lemtounline. Their leader Yousef ben Tachfin made Marrakech his capital in 1063 and captured Fez in 1069. In 1087 he invaded Spain.

The Almoravids were in turn destroyed by the Almohads of the High Atlas who crossed into Spain in 1149. From Fez, for nearly a hundred years, the Almohads ruled an empire which extended as far north as Castile in what was for the Moors a second Golden Age, until they, too, were worn out; by 1244 they had lost Andalucia to the Christians and had been forced to ask the Merinids, nomad Berbers from the Sahara, for assistance. It was among the tombs of the Merinids we had been exercising ourselves earlier in the day. They finally took Old Fez in 1250.

Once inside the Bab Bou Jeloud you are in the Souk of Talaa (Talaa being one of the eighteen wards into which the city is divided), and as if by the waving of a wand, back in the Middle Ages. In it a street is an alley about 9 feet wide, in which five people might with difficulty walk abreast, off which lead innumerable alleys, no wider than trenches, in which it is often impossible for two people to pass one another without one of them turning sideways. For long stretches of their courses, these various ways are roofed with rushes, through which the sunlight, if it reaches into them at all, filters down on the crowds moving purposefully and apparently endlessly below, casting on them a tremulous light, as if they were underwater. It falls on men wearing a fine variety of clothing: skull caps decorated with geometrical designs, felt caps called
shashia
, like sugar loaves, with silk tassels hanging from them, turbans, hooded
jellabs
and
selhams
,
²
and on their feet yellow
babouches
with their backs turned down exposing heels as hard as rawhide.

It falls equally fitfully on men in rags lugging bunches of live chickens in either hand as if they were bunches of bananas, or pushing wheelbarrows, the only wheeled vehicles to be seen; on porters bent double under the weight of huge sacks and packing cases; on donkeys loaded with charcoal, brasswork, brushwood, maize, newly-fired pottery, mounds of pallid, slimy goatskins on the way to the dyeing vats down at the bottom of the hill, or else on the way back from them to some drying ground on the outskirts of the city, now a brilliant red, dyed with what may still be, if a dye of the highest quality is required, the juice of a berry. And it dapples the boys balancing boards on their heads, loaded with round loaves which they have collected unbaked from the housewives and are taking to the ovens for them, and on the bearded merchants perched on corn-fed mules, dressed in a sort of fringed, cream-coloured toga, six yards long and nearly two yards wide, made of woollen gauze, which they wear with one end lapped over the head, a garment, called the
k’sa
, which gives them – for they are already stern-looking – a really awesome air.

The noise is incredible. All of them, riders, porters and boys with boards on their heads and anyone else in a hurry, are shouting at the tops of their voices,
‘Balèèèk! Balèèèk!’
‘Make way! Make way!’, and if you don’t they or their animals simply shove you out of it.

Here, men with more time to spare, having prudently made way, greet one another by pressing their fingertips together, then to their lips, then to their hearts, crying ‘God be praised!’ meanwhile gazing into one another’s eyes. From then on the air is full of cries of ‘Peace be unto you.’ ‘And to you be peace.’ ‘How art thou?’ ‘Thy house?’ (an enquiry which contrives to include the women without actually naming them as such). ‘Thy relatives?’
To which the reply is, ‘All well, thank God.’ Or, if it isn’t, ‘God knows; everything is in the hands of God.’

There are many women. Those squatting in the rare open spaces selling bread and vegetables are often fairly negligent about the veil, or do not wear it at all. Those who are better-off, who are buying rather than selling, are dressed in the
häik
, the equivalent of the
k’sa
, a long, white, fine rectangular woollen wrapper. They also wear the
litham
– as do some of the men but for a different reason – which is a white veil bound round the face, hiding what to the Muslim is the sacredness of the nose, ears, nostrils and the mouth, but not the huge almond eyes with the edges of the lids blackened with antimony, which are left uncovered like huge, old-fashioned car headlamps, to dazzle and disturb the beholder.

Most of these people are Arabs and Berbers, people of the Atlas, the indigenous inhabitants of the Maghreb, or a mixture of both. Some Berbers are light skinned, so pallid that romantic theories are advanced about their antecedents: that they are descendants of Vandals, some 80,000 of whom crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to North Africa from Spain in 429, taking Carthage from the Romans, and thus depriving them of their principal granary, as a prelude to their attack and sacking of Rome itself; or that they are descendants of the tribes expelled from Palestine by Joshua; or that they were of the race of Shem, Amelekites descended from Esau, or kinsmen of the Agrigesh (Greeks), or are from the Baltic, or are descendants of Celts.

Other Berbers are as black as Negroes from Central Africa. Some have blue eyes and rosy cheeks, which may be due to the familiarity of their women with Christian mercenaries and slaves.

There are many Negroes. Men and women dressed as Moorish Muslims, descendants of the slaves, who, when the supply of Christians began to flag and long before that, made the awful hundred-and-fifty-day journey across the Sahara with the slave
traders to Morocco, as well as to Algeria and Tunis, from Timbuktu and Bornu in the western Sudan, with their children slung on either side of mules, their price a block of salt large enough for one of them to stand on, six or seven inches thick.

And there are ourselves. To tell the truth, now that we have succeeded in casting off our shadows, we feel a little lonely, going down into the
souks
of Fès el-Bali. Few of these Fasi even deign to notice us, however outrageous we must appear in their eyes, both in our behaviour and in our dress. If they do look at us at all, it is incuriously. Then they put us out of mind. They do not want us in their holy city, or anyone else like us, unbelievers from the far side of the Mediterranean.

We could assume their dress, as a sort of compliment to them – but the result would be a parody, the very opposite of the effect intended. As it is, our presence reminds them that although their city is physically preserved, with assistance from UNESCO – itself another alien presence, largely financed by unbelievers – the way of life that they have cherished and pursued here for more than a thousand years will soon be no more.

I wish we could speak with them, these Fasi, perhaps become friendly with one of them, that is as much of a friend as a Nasrany (Christian) or any other sort of unbeliever can ever be with followers of the Prophet. They, the most reserved of all Moroccans, are known for their intelligence, their skill in business, their particular intonation – which is made fun of by other Moroccans who intone less well – the niceness of their natures, their argumentativeness, their avoidance of sunlight which might darken their skins, their alleged lack of courage, their appreciation of the pleasures of conversation and of, what some say is the best of all, their food. Facets of their characters that casual visitors, such as ourselves, can never know or experience, pursued as they are by westernized Fasi (themselves the living embodiments of the change
they fear so much), and locked in the equivalent of a prison by ignorance of all but the most basic fragments of their language and divided from them by impassable gulfs of belief and antecedence.

Here, at this upper end of Old Fez, in the Souk of Talaa, you can buy painted hard-boiled eggs,
seksou
or
couscous
, which if dried in the sun will keep for years,
smeen
, green-streaked rancid butter to eat with it, best when it has been buried in an earthenware pot for a year – by which time it smells a bit like gorgonzola – chick-pea paste, the best mint from Meknès to flavour the sweet tea the Moroccans love, and other flavourings: red rose, marjoram, basil, verbena,
toumia
(which tastes of peppermint) and orange blossom.

Here, the butchers display their products, some of them ghastly to look on: flayed sheeps’ heads, still with their horns
in situ
, suspended from cords so that the owner of the stall can attract attention by setting them swinging under the light of the paraffin pressure lanterns (this part of the
souk
is always very dark); miles of entrails, cloven feet chopped off short, with the hair still on them, tongues and eyes and testicles. Who eats eyes voluntarily? Are they bought to be offered to a non-believer at a feast as a
pièce de résistance
, to test his courage? If such sights upset you then steer clear of the abattoirs at the bottom of the hill, astride the river.

Up here, there are minute restaurants in which, if you are not too squeamish, you eat well for next to nothing. We shall return to one of them later on, after midday, to eat
harirah
, meat soup with egg and coriander, or
kodban
, meat on skewers, or
seksou
and the stew made specially to go with it, among the ingredients of which are ginger, nutmeg, coriander, turmeric, saffron, fresh marjoram, onions, bread, beans and raisins or, if we are not really hungry,
seksou
with fruit, such as quinces, or whatever is in season.

Grander restaurants are hidden away in fine old houses in the labyrinths further down the hill. They serve such dishes as
bastilla
, cakes of puff pastry stuffed with minced pigeon, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, which is not as sickly as it sounds; and
tajine
, dishes of chicken, pigeon or mutton, either cooked whole or stewed, and dressed with olives, beans, almonds, apples, artichokes, carrots, or whatever else is appropriate and in season.

To dine in one of these beautiful dim lofty silent places populated by grave, equally quiet, picturesquely clad serving men, one needs a companion while the ritual unfolds itself: while the cone-shaped, lidded dishes are lined up, and while, squatting in what is excruciating discomfort on the cushions, one washes one’s hands over an elegantly embellished copper pan. Alone, one would feel like an unloved sultan, without even his food taster.

The mosque with what look like two golden apples impaled on a spike on top of it in the Talaa Kebira beyond this
souk
is the Bou Inanya. It was also a
medersa
, a college of Koranic theology, one of twelve such schools in Old Fez that, together with the Kairouyyin Mosque and the Library, made up the University. When its builder, Sultan Abu Inan, read the first pages of the accounts and saw that expenditure had already exceeded the estimate by some 40,000 ducats, he threw them in the river with the words that a thing of such beauty could not be thought of in terms of money. The most beautiful of all the colleges built by the Merinids, and the last to be built by a Merinid sultan, it was finally completed in 1357, after seven years’ labour.

To the left of the entrance there is what remains of a carillon of bells or gongs. A pair of wooden doors, embellished with engraved bronze plaques and brass knockers, open into a sort of porch with a cupola above it, ornamented with painted plaster and what look like painted wooden stalactites. These stalactites
are not made by carving blocks of wood, as they appear to be, but by binding together smaller blocks of various lengths, then carving the points and afterwards painting them, a work called
muqarnas
, for which the craftsmen of Fez are still famous.

From this porch, which is where the porter’s lodge would be in a college at Oxford or Cambridge, a staircase ornamented with faience and onyx leads up into a courtyard embellished with mosaic panelling, decorated plasterwork, arches of cedarwood, and with an inscription in black cursive script around it. From the upper storey the windows of the cells once occupied by the students look down into it.

In 1900 there were still seventy-five
tolba
, students, living in this college, at a time when seven of the twelve original colleges, housing more than a thousand
tolba
, were still active. How did they live, or rather exist, after their parents had paid for the ‘key’, the equivalent of fees, purchased from their predecessors, at a cost of what at that time was the equivalent of anything from $20–200, two hundred dollars being a very large sum in Morocco in those days, which entitled them to live in the college and study for anything from three to ten years? As they did in every other college in Old Fez well into the 1950s, in exactly the same way as they had done for six hundred years.

They existed, at least the great majority did – we know nothing of how the better-off ones, if there were any, lived – on a monotonous diet of
seksou
, the rancid
smeen
and, if they could come by it, lean, sometimes dried meat, often clubbing together with other students to make a communal stew, a
tajine
. The cooking was done over charcoal fires in their cells. Some had relatives who brought them presents of food from the country, but they always shared what they received with their fellows.