[Footnote A: The Ghetto in African towns. All the jewellers in Morocco
are Jews.]

The houses were humble ones, such as grow up in the cracks of a wealthy
quarter, and their inhabitants doubtless small folk, but in the
enchanted African twilight the terraces blossomed like gardens, and when
the moon rose and the muezzin called from the minaret, the domestic
squabbles and the shrill cries from roof to roof became part of a story
in Bagdad, overheard a thousand years ago by that arch-detective
Haroun-al-Raschid.



II

FEZ ELDJID

It is usual to speak of Fez as very old, and the term seems justified
when one remembers that the palace of Bou-Jeloud stands on the site of
an Almoravid Kasbah of the eleventh century, that when that Kasbah was
erected Fez Elbali had already existed for three hundred years, that El
Kairouiyin is the contemporary of Sant' Ambrogio of Milan, and that the
original mosque of Moulay Idriss II was built over his grave in the
eighth century.

Fez is, in fact, the oldest city in Morocco without a Phenician or a
Roman past, and has preserved more traces than any other of its
architectural flowering-time, yet it would be truer to say of it, as of
all Moroccan cities, that it has no age, since its seemingly immutable
shape is forever crumbling and being renewed on the old lines.