become two-dimensional while the white procession goes by.

[Footnote A: The Sultan's government.]

Then the populace closes in again, so quickly and densely that it seems
impossible it could ever have been parted, and negro water-carriers,
muffled women, beggars streaming with sores, sinewy and greasy "saints,"
Soudanese sorcerers hung with amulets made of sardine-boxes and
hares'-feet, long-lashed boys of the Chleuh in clean embroidered
caftans, Jews in black robes and skull-caps, university students
carrying their prayer-carpets, bangled and spangled black women,
scrofulous children with gazelle eyes and mangy skulls, and blind men
tapping along with linked arms and howling out verses of the Koran,
surge together in a mass drawn by irresistible suction to the point
where the bazaars converge about the mosques of Moulay Idriss and El
Kairouiyin.

Seen from a terrace of the upper town, the long thatched roofing of El
Attarine, the central bazaar of Fez, promises fantastic revelations of
native life; but the dun-colored crowds moving through its checkered
twilight, the lack of carved shop-fronts and gaily adorned
coffee-houses, and the absence of the painted coffers and vivid
embroideries of Tunis, remind one that Morocco is a melancholy country,
and Fez a profoundly melancholy city.

_Dust and ashes, dust and ashes_, echoes from the gray walls, the
mouldering thatch of the _souks_, the long lamentable song of the blind
beggars sitting in rows under the feet of the camels and asses. No young
men stroll through the bazaar in bright caftans, with roses and jasmine
behind their ears, no pedlars offer lemonade and sweetmeats and