megalomania of the great southern chiefs. It was built by Ba-Ahmed, the
all-powerful black Vizier of the Sultan Moulay-el-Hassan.[A] Ba-Ahmed
was evidently an artist and an archaeologist. His ambition was to
re-create a Palace of Beauty such as the Moors had built in the prime of
Arab art, and he brought to Marrakech skilled artificers of Fez, the
last surviving masters of the mystery of chiselled plaster and ceramic
mosaics and honeycombing of gilded cedar. They came, they built the
Bahia, and it remains the loveliest and most fantastic of Moroccan
palaces.

[Footnote A: Moulay-el-Hassan reigned from 1873 to 1894.]

Court within court, garden beyond garden, reception halls, private
apartments, slaves' quarters, sunny prophets' chambers on the roofs and
baths in vaulted crypts, the labyrinth of passages and rooms stretches
away over several acres of ground. A long court enclosed in pale-green
trellis-work, where pigeons plume themselves about a great tank and the
dripping tiles glitter with refracted sunlight, leads to the fresh gloom
of a cypress garden, or under jasmine tunnels bordered with running
water; and these again open on arcaded apartments faced with tiles and
stucco-work, where, in a languid twilight, the hours drift by to the
ceaseless music of the fountains.

The beauty of Moroccan palaces is made up of details of ornament and
refinements of sensuous delight too numerous to record, but to get an
idea of their general character it is worth while to cross the Court of
Cypresses at the Bahia and follow a series of low-studded passages that
turn on themselves till they reach the centre of the labyrinth. Here,
passing by a low padlocked door leading to a crypt, and known as the
"Door of the Vizier's Treasure-House," one comes on a painted portal