He is undoubtedly on the way, but Fez had not heard of him when we rode
out that morning. Fez Eldjid, the "New Fez" of palaces and government
buildings, was founded in the fourteenth century by the Merinid princes,
and probably looks much as it did then. The palaces in their overgrown
gardens, with pale-green trellises dividing the rose-beds from the
blue-and-white tiled paths, and fountains in fluted basins of Italian
marble, all had the same drowsy charm, yet the oldest were built not
more than a century or two ago, others within the last fifty years; and
at Marrakech, later in our journey, we were to visit a sumptuous
dwelling where plaster-cutters and ceramists from Fez were actually
repeating with wonderful skill and spontaneity, the old ornamentation
of which the threads run back to Rome and Damascus.

Of really old private dwellings, palaces or rich men's houses, there are
surprisingly few in Morocco. It is hard to guess the age of some of the
featureless houses propping each other's flanks in old Fez or old Salé,
but people rich enough to rebuild have always done so, and the passion
for building seems allied, in this country of inconsequences, to the
supine indifference that lets existing constructions crumble back to
clay. "Dust to dust" should have been the motto of the Moroccan
palace-builders.

Fez possesses one old secular building, a fine fondak of the fifteenth
century, but in Morocco, as a rule, only mosques and the tombs of saints
are preserved--none too carefully--and even the strong stone buildings
of the Almohads have been allowed to fall to ruin, as at Chella and
Rabat. This indifference to the completed object--which is like a kind
of collective exaggeration of the artist's indifference to his completed
work--has resulted in the total disappearance of the furniture and works