"Look out--'ware heads!" our leader would call back at every turn, as
our way shrank to a black passage under a house bestriding the street,
or a caravan of donkeys laden with obstructive reeds or branches of
dates made the passers-by flatten themselves against the walls.

On each side of the street the houses hung over us like fortresses,
leaning across the narrow strip of blue and throwing out great beams and
buttresses to prop each other's bulging sides. Windows there were none
on the lower floors; only here and there an iron-barred slit stuffed
with rags and immemorial filth, from which a lean cat would suddenly
spring out, and scuttle off under an archway like a witch's familiar.

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

Fez--a reed-roofed street]

Some of these descending lanes were packed with people, others as
deserted as a cemetery; and it was strange to pass from the thronged
streets leading to the bazaars to the profound and secretive silence of
a quarter of well-to-do dwelling-houses, where only a few veiled women
attended by negro slaves moved noiselessly over the clean cobblestones,
and the sound of fountains and runnels came from hidden courtyards and
over garden-walls.

This noise of water is as characteristic of Fez as of Damascus. The Oued
Fez rushes through the heart of the town, bridged, canalized, built
over, and ever and again bursting out into tumultuous falls and pools
shadowed with foliage. The central artery of the city is not a street