When we rode forth the next day to visit some of the palaces of Eldjid
our pink-saddled mules carried us at once out of the bounds of time. How
associate anything so precise and Occidental as years or centuries with
these visions of frail splendor seen through cypresses and roses? The
Cadis in their multiple muslins, who received us in secret doorways and
led us by many passages into the sudden wonder of gardens and fountains;
the bright-earringed negresses peering down from painted balconies, the
pilgrims and clients dozing in the sun against hot walls, the deserted
halls with plaster lace-work and gold pendentives in tiled niches; the
Venetian chandeliers and tawdry rococo beds, the terraces from which
pigeons whirled up in a white cloud while we walked on a carpet of their
feathers--were all these the ghosts of vanished state, or the actual
setting of the life of some rich merchant with "business connections" in
Liverpool and Lyons, or some government official at that very moment
speeding to Meknez or Casablanca in his sixty h.p. motor?

We visited old palaces and new, inhabited and abandoned, and over all
lay the same fine dust of oblivion, like the silvery mould on an
overripe fruit. Overripeness is indeed the characteristic of this rich
and stagnant civilization. Buildings, people, customs, seem all about to
crumble and fall of their own weight: the present is a perpetually
prolonged past. To touch the past with one's hands is realized only in
dreams, and in Morocco the dream-feeling envelopes one at every step.
One trembles continually lest the "Person from Porlock" should step in.

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

Fez Eldjid (the upper city)]