of a few rooms with a two-storied loggia looking across the water to the
palm-groves, and surrounded by a garden of cypresses and orange-trees.
The Menara, long since abandoned, is usually uninhabited, but on the
day when we drove through the Agdal we noticed, at the gate, a group of
well-dressed servants holding mules with embroidered saddle-clothes.

The French officer who was with us asked the porter what was going on,
and he replied that the Chief of the Guild of Wool-Merchants had hired
the pavilion for a week and invited a few friends to visit him. They
were now, the porter added, taking tea in the loggia above the lake, and
the host, being informed of our presence, begged that we should do him
and his friends the honour of visiting the pavilion.

In reply to this amiable invitation we crossed an empty saloon
surrounded with divans and passed out onto the loggia where the
wool-merchant and his guests were seated. They were evidently persons of
consequence: large bulky men wrapped in fresh muslins and reclining side
by side on muslin-covered divans and cushions. Black slaves had placed
before them brass trays with pots of mint-tea, glasses in filigree
stands, and dishes of gazelles' horns and sugar-plums, and they sat
serenely absorbing these refreshments and gazing with large calm eyes
upon the motionless water and the reflected trees.

So, we were told, they would probably spend the greater part of their
holiday. The merchant's cooks had taken possession of the kitchens, and
toward sunset a sumptuous repast of many courses would be carried into
the saloon on covered trays, and the guests would squat about it on rugs
of Rabat, tearing with their fingers the tender chicken wings and small
artichokes cooked in oil, plunging their fat white hands to the wrist
into huge mounds of saffron and rice, and washing off the traces of each