CHAPTERIII.ARZELA.It was evening before we returned to Larache. The city, which looked so beautiful under the morning sun, was concealed from us as he set behind it; but the gardens on the opposite hills received his declining rays. The ancient cities, which I had visited at these outlets, are placed on the western side, and therefore with the evening sun at their back. At Constantinople it is considered in the rent of a house whether its view of the Bosphorus is with or against the setting sun. A garden was pointed out to me which, it was said, produced the finest oranges in the world: its produce was reserved for the Sultan. I afterwards had time to visit the Spanish fortifications from the land side, which present the peculiar features of that age—sharp angles, lofty bastions and curtains, massive walls, and deep moats. I saw some beautiful jars, quite antique, the manufacture of Casar, ten miles from this.When I was passing the gate, a Moorish gentleman accosted me in good English, but with a strong Scotch accent; he volunteered information about mines, and promised to visit me in the evening. He came accordingly: he had been three years in Gibraltar, and had been on board our fleet during the war. He began to expatiate on the advantages of European civilization, and expressed his anxiety to have it introduced into Barbary. I said to him, that would be all very well if they could discriminate, but that men were like Adam in Paradise; that they had to balance their present state with all its evils against change with all its chances; that for them change involved one of two consequences—slavery or pauperism.He asked me, to my great surprise, for news about Nadir Bey. This is an adventurer of Russian origin, who has been going about Europe and Turkey representing himself as cousin of the Sultan, and claiming his throne. He had come to Morocco, where he had succeeded better than elsewhere, obtaining money and honours, and a firman recognising him as legitimate sovereign of Turkey! I took occasion from this incident to show him how perfectly unqualified they were for dealing in any foreign matter, being so shamefully hoaxed in such a case as this; upon which he abruptly jumped up and took his departure. I thought he had been taken suddenly ill; but I afterwards learnt that he had been Nadir Bey’s patron, and had introduced him to the Sultan.The baggage having been sent across the river in the evening, next morning at day-break we found the horses ready laden. The beach-road is practicable only when the tide is out, and in any case only for persons well mounted. The tide was not very favourable, and we were very ill mounted, but I insisted on going by this road—the sea was so grand, and I wished to look out forarchitecturalphenomena. But the bank of sand is here interrupted, and the cavernous and stalactitic effects were not to be observed. There were, however, the patterns of the coloured sands. The river of Larache brings down the bluest-black iron sand, which indeed is strewed all along the coast from Meden to Cape Spartel. The distance to Arzela is only five hours; but, what with the drag of the sand on the beach, and getting bogged when we struck into the interior, and wandering backwards and forwards from the hills to the beach, and from the beach to the hills, we made it a long and fatiguing day’s journey.The country was here as unlike as anything could be to that which we had passed: it changes suddenly in appearance and character. At one moment it would be completely bare, being either cultivated or fallow, and a few miles on it would be covered, hill and valley, with brushwood; at one time the palmetto and ordinary brushwood, and presently a crop of broom occupying every inch of ground within sight, covering it with a mantle of brilliant yellow, and perfuming the air with its sweet odour; then it would be all as if under snow from the white broom, that most airy and delicate of shrubs; then would succeed the gum cistus, with its mingled flowers of white and red, and its cool refreshing scent.The odour from the cistus does not lose its savour: by being exposed to it, it is a gentle refreshing breeze, of which the nose is conscious, rather than an odour. The gum from it, the ladanum, is much esteemed as incense, and is also mixed with mastic to flavour the breath by chewing it. It is not collected in this district. The ancient story of its being scraped from goats’ beards does not seem improbable; for in breaking through the copses one’s head and clothes become quite clammy.The odour is not from the flower, but from the leaves of the plant: the flowers are of the slightest texture, but make a lively show, bespangling the bushes with stars of white or red. They look like roses, and I was constantly reminded of York and Lancaster. These flowers live but for a day; and, constantly tempting the eye and inviting the hand, the prize is relinquished as soon as reached, and never was a cistus blossom twined into chaplet or gathered for a nosegay. Yet, when it clothes the rocky steep, or mantles the swelling slope, there is no plant can rival it in the pleasure it gives and the attention it awakens. It is shrub and flower; the frailty of its blossoms, the down of its waxy leaves, the balm of its fragrance, are so unlike the glancing foliage of other shrubs—the hot-house forms, the dyer tints, and perfumer scent of other flowers,—that it makes them look children of art and care: wild and tender, it is to other flowers as a shepherdess among women, and to other shrubs as an Arab among the races of men.Shrubs with their sturdy life, flowers in their fleeting passage, serve to embellish the scene, and to adorn the actors. This one rather shares in our humanity: as our generations go to the grave and are renewed again, so it knows vicissitude, and joy, and mourning. It spreads forth its birth of blossoms with the early dawn, and strews with the fallen leaves the earth of eve. Was it from this that the Greeks called it “flower of the sun;” because, like the rainbow, it drew its being from his rays? Like the peri, its life was in a charm, and it died when that charm was gone.The name “flower of the sun” (helio-anthemum) reminds me of the grossest of Flora’s daughters—a garden Cleon, too gaudy for a vegetable, too meagre for a shrub, too thick and hard for a flower. And to this—the very contrast of the cistus—do we abandon the name selected for it by the Greeks!There is a variety of the broom which might be esteemed a garden flower; it is a miniature plant, eighteen inches or two feet, and—so to speak—one incrustation of yellow blossom. While underwood is reduced to the size of a garden-flower, the common daisy is raised to the pretensions of one, with its large head on a stalk of twenty inches. All the plants were our garden tribes, or what would be wild with us, and were well qualified for a garden—the broom as I have said, the ivy, then the ranges of cactus and aloe, hyacinths, jonquils, irises with the petals coloured green.About five miles from Arzela, upon a rising ground close to a douar (here they begin to be stationary), the palmetto occurred in a new form. It is a bush two or three feet high, and showing no stem. Here it rose to ten feet, with snake-like stems carrying the sharp spicular masses of fans of glossy or glittering green. I several times made an endeavour to stop, that I might pass the night in one of the villages, as I should now call them; not only seduced by the amenities around, but also partly out of consideration for our jaded cattle and scarcely less exhausted self: but guides and guards were inexorable. It was a settled thing that that night we should sleep at Arzela; so we pushed or dragged along, as it seemed, in chace of it, for it never could be in the map the distance we found it by the road. At last we descried its lines, tinged by the last reflected light, against the leaden mass of the Atlantic. We soon after entered “The Gardens,” and then approached the castellated gate, where, to our infinite surprise, an anxious people awaited us.For several days we had been expected. Rumour had preceded us, and dealt kindly by us; and we were gazed at with eager countenances and smiling eyes, and some of them bright ones. By some process, strange and capricious, we were no strangers, and the denizens vied with each other in doing us any good turn which fell in their way, in expressing their delight at our arrival, and in welcoming us to their town. The crowd was hurrying us in a direction which they had evidently settled in their minds we should take. I having some voice, as I thought, in the matter, made bold to ask, “Whither away?” “To Abraham’s! to Abraham’s!” was shouted. On this I reined in—I mean, I ceased thrashing; for the memory of sleepless nights among those conversational Jews, and some other discomforts which need not be repeated, and a habit of looking somewhat higher than an Israelite’s abode, with a disinclination to step down in the world, came all upon me, and prompted the emphatic declaration, “We will pitch without the walls.” No sooner had the words passed my lips than I could have bitten my tongue off. My eye had fallen on a countenance of singular amenity, and—although that of an aged man—of grace: a long white beard hung down his breast, giving to the figure the patriarchal cast, which his lineaments vindicated as legitimately their own by blood as well as bearing. A cloud passed over his features;—the impress was so slight that I cannot say I saw, but I felt it. So recovering, as it were, my sentence, and inclining to him, I added to the interpreter in Spanish, “unless we are to go to my father’s house.”We entered a small court: the floor was red, the walls were pure white. There was no window. Four Moorish arches opened to four separate chambers: two sons with their wives occupied two, his brother and uncle the third, and himself the fourth. Whether these were houses or apartments it was not easy to determine: our words cannot explain. Notwithstanding many attempts at description, no one who has not seen these houses has any distinct idea of them. The same holds with respect to the descriptions left us of ancient dwellings. The one explains the other: perhaps, by making them serve mutually for this purpose, I may be in some degree successful.This court and hall, for which we have no word, is thepatioof the Spaniards, thewoostof the Arabs, thehyroobof the Hebrews, theμέσονof the Greeks, and theimpluviumorcavadiumof the Romans.The patio is covered with an awning, which the Moors callclas; they have also a covering for the floor, which they use on festivities, and which they callyellis: theclas, the same as thevelum, which the Romans spread over their atrium—in Greek it wasτέγη. The roof wasτέγος, hence the confusion respecting the paralytic man being let down “through the roof”τέγη, which was simply the removal of the tent or awning to let him down, not into the house, but into the court. They ascended to the roof among the tiles,[245]and unroofed the roof,[246]and so let down the bed into the middle. Here are all familiar words, and nothing can be plainer than the words, however incomprehensible may be the thing conveyed; for how should a roof be unroofed (ἀπεστεγάτην τὴν στεγὴν), and how should the people below have remained quiet under the tiles and rafters? But, translate the passage by the aid of the Moorish house, and all difficulty is removed: “They ascended to the top of the house, among the tiles (ἀναβάντες ἐπὶ τὸ δῶμα διὰ τῶν κεράμων); and then, removing the awning which was spread over the place where he was, they let him down into the patio.” The tiles were for flooring the terrace-top, and coping the parapet walls. Thus the centre of the house remained, as it were, the tent, and explains the passage, “the tabernacle of my house;” as also that one, “Thou spreadest out the heavens as a curtain;” and again, “He stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.”The French wordmaisoncomes from the Greekμέσσον,architecture. The French house is a solid figure, the ancient house a hollow one. The building of the house in Greek isοἶκος: the court in the middle is calledμέσσον. The families of the poor inhabit different apartments: the court becomes the common place of resort, and its name will stand for that of the whole dwelling, as “hall” in English is, in the country, used to designate a gentleman’s seat. But here it is the abode of the lower orders, which would undergo the change, and the word would become vernacular:οἶκοςbecomingμέσσον, we have at oncemaison. In Spain, common courts are calledmeson coral.Coro,coral,cortecame, in like manner, to signify residence of the monarch: thus, the Court of Madrid. (“Solo Madrid es corte.”)[247]Architecture spread in France from the Phocian colony of Marseilles, and through Europe from the peninsula, and so the one word spread in France, the other through Europe. It is curious that the French word for a house should mean the same thing as the English word for a chamber, both being in direct contradiction to the thing conveyed, which is not “space,” but “enclosure.”This form of Canaanitish building is preserved in our monasteries, cloisters, and colleges. Spain and Sicily preserve some beautiful specimens of the passage of Moorish into Gothic forms, where the luxury and gaiety of thewoostis associated with the sombre severity of the cloister,—the stone-framed and fretted Gothic arches and windows—the Moorish tiles—the gloomy corridors around, and flowers smiling in the centre amidst water and refreshed by fountains.To the apartment of the chief of the establishment there was an entrance-hall twelve feet square and sixteen to eighteen feet high; the floor red like the court, and the walls white. A balcony at one side, reached by a ladder, served for two or three persons to sleep, and gave entrance to a small “chamber on the wall,” such as that of Elisha in the house of the Shunamite. The “upper chamber,” such as David’s, “over the gate,” judging from what we at present see, was a building on the roof, being reached by a ladder or external staircase:—a ladder is a common domestic instrument. The chambers built there are strictlybeit; but to the westward it receives the name from the Arabs ofolea, which is the word in the Old Testament translated “upper chamber.” It was thehyperoonof the Greeks, in which Homer places Penelope toavoidher suitors. The Lacedemonians called the same apartmentoon; and Athenæus explains by it the fable of Helen born from an egg. Thegynaicumof the Greeks was the upper story; and at present, amongst the Moors, who have no harem for the women, the tops of the houses are appropriated to them, and no man can ascend to make repairs, or for any other purpose, without proclaiming aloud three times that he is going up to the roof. David, in the story of Bathsheba, was clearly where he ought not to have been, and where no man was expected to be, and had neglected to give the customary warning.But this door, or archway, led to the inner apartment,—one of the ordinary long Moorish rooms, about seven feet wide and thirty feet long, and receiving light only from the door. The floor was covered with their beautiful mats, and the walls all round, to the height of four feet: the rest was white. The entrance to these rooms is by the centre, and they thus form separate apartments to the right and left, at the end there being generally a raised bed divided off by hangings. When I first saw the bedsteads, I took them for an imitation of us, for they are altogether repugnant to Eastern ideas. In the East a bed-room is unknown: even in the harem there is no apartment so appropriated, far less is there a bed-stead. Where “bed-rooms” are mentioned, what is meant is a place for stowing beds. Large presses are filled at the “lower” parts of rooms for this purpose. The bed, when made, is taken out and raised three or four mattresses, one over the other. In the centre of theodait looks like a long ottoman. The pillows are composed as a “formation” of very thin, broad flaps or cushions of cotton, so that you get exactly the required height, and they fit into the neck, and do not require a head-board to keep them in. No standing post is required; and all this is from the matrix of the tent. Here it is exactly the reverse, and might well surprise at first. The matrix here is the fortress, the walled cities of Canaan. Here every apartment is a bedroom: not only are the beds composed of standing posts, but they are the standing parts of the rooms, divided off by hangings, like those of the Temple, for it is not curtains round them, but hangings that are before them. The room is built of the width requisite for them. There is sometimes a standing top, which serves as a balcony, and also to sleep on. The bed is calledfarash, the hangingsnumasia, and there are generally behind two square holes through the wall, for light and air.Mittahis the word used in Scripture: it is spoken of as a standing thing, and the expressiongoing up, exactly corresponds with what we see here. The standing bedstead of Og King of Bashan is referred to in testimony of his gigantic dimensions. At a feast the Moors place the honoured person in the bed. On marriage-feasts the bridegroom, amidst his party, and the bride amidst hers, recline on the bed. When afêteis made in honour of any person, he is placed on the bed, looking down on the parties assembled round the trays, the whole length of the room. It might, in fact, be translated rather throne than bed.So also at a Jewish wedding, you may see in one bed three tiers of blooming virgins, sparkling in gold and jewels, with their shot green and red silk handkerchiefs—and within the hangings of one curtain, one bouquet, presenting more beauty than you could select from any European court.In the Highlands a strange piece of furniture is the bedstead, which is of wood, with doors like a press, and standing enclosed and against the wall: it is, doubtless, derived from the customs I describe. The Highlanders used to make these bedsteads themselves, as Ulysses did his.A peculiarity of the Moorish room is, that the beams are visible, being ornamented with either carving or colour, or both: this we have preserved in the grander Gothic architecture. So it was among the Jews: “Ceiled with cedar and painted with vermilion.” Vermilion is the ground of their patterns, and predominates. The colour is neither laid on with oil, nor in fresco, but with white of egg; it works well and lasts long. The beams are of the arar, which in ancient and modern times has been confounded with cedar.In the Roman and Greek house, as in the Hebrew, the rooms were entered from the centre court; but the former had their greatest extension in the length, that is from the court; the latter, in the breadth, that is parallel to the court. The same contrast holds between the Turkish and the Moorish. The former has not theImpluvium, but theDivan houé, or central hall of the house, corresponds to it; out of this you pass to the rooms, which are squares, exactly as Vitruvius describes theTriclinium, with a rectangle added, the top being opposite the door and giving the light, being nearly an unbroken side of window.[248]The Moorish is the most complete antithesis, having an extensive breadth; having two “tops” opposite each other; having no window, and receiving its light from an enormous door. An apartment may be thirty feet by seven feet, or in length nearly five times its breadth. We have had at Nimroud the perfect confirmation that this was the ancient form in the East: the same proportions are there observed in far grander dimensions.[249]Mr. Layard accounts for the form by the want of timber to construct wider roofs; but that would not give the inordinate length; and, besides, they were acquainted—as he shows—with the arch. The form being adopted to suit the settled manner, and with reference to the bed, then of course the heavy roof could be laid on with short beams; and that the same masses of pounded earth for the terraces were there employed as in Barbary, the condition of the Assyrian ruins plainly shows. The Greeks had a mixed architecture. They had the Phrygian tombs; and they must have had also roofs made in this fashion—at least, at an early time—as is recorded in the story of Melampus; who, being confined by Iphiklos, for attempting to carry off his cattle, heard the worms in the roof discoursing on the unsafe condition of the beams.They have such gates as Samson carried from Gaza, or Lord Ellenborough sent for to Cabul, and are traced on the sepulchre of the kings at Jerusalem: they do not fit into the wall, but lie against it. They are not shaped to the arch; they close, but rectangularly and folding; they cover it as the hurdle did the orifice of the rush mosques I saw along the lake. There is no hinge, but the joints of the door descend into a socket in the stone, and in like manner the door is secured above in a projecting bracket of wood. In the smallest buildings it is colossal. To exclude the air or the cold they close the folding doors, and open a small wicket as in the gate of a fortress; above it there are small apertures through the wall to let in the light when it is closed, and these are arranged in a figure or a pattern. Every corner of a Moorish house is ornamented, although merely in the form that is given to the whitewashed wall: there is no glaring oil paint upon the doors; they are scrubbed with ochre, which is left upon them.In the apartment of a single old man there was but one farash at one end; a European sofa occupied the other. The floor was flush; and as I was examining and admiring the building, he said to me, “It is of my own construction. I don’t mean that I made the plan, but that I hewed the stone, and carried the mortar with my own hands.”I paid a visit to this patriarch’s uncle; he was, of course, very old, and though bedridden, had lost none of his faculties. The whole family and a good many of the neighbours were soon assembled around us, and he unlocked the stores of his memory. He recollected the accession of Soliman, the uncle of the present Sultan, who reigned half a century. He then went back to Mahmoud, whom he claimed as his “friend.” I launched out in praise of the dignity of his reign, and the justice of that of Soliman. He related various anecdotes of both.A governor brought presents of one hundred of everything that the country contained: horses, oxen, mules, sheep, slaves, quintals of silver, packets of gold-dust (about a pound weight each), measures of corn, oil, butter, &c. The Sultan asked him whence came this wealth. He said from the government which his bounty had conferred upon him. He asked him if the people had not paid their tenths. The governor said they had. The Sultan then said, “I sent you to govern, not to rob,” and gratified him with the bastinado and prison.The grandfather of Ben Abou, the present Governor of Riff, when Caïd of Tangier, made a great feast at the marriage of his daughter. One of his friends, Caïd Mohammed Widden, observed a poor man in mean attire in the court, and ordered him out; and, he not obeying, pushed him so that he fell. That same night the keeper of an oven (there are no sellers of bread, every one makes his own bread at home and sends it to the oven) had barred his door and retired to rest, when some one knocked at the door. He asked, “Who is there?” and was answered, “The guest of God,” which means a beggar. “You are welcome,” he said, and got up and unfastened the door; and having nothing but some remnants of the koscoussou from his supper, and the piece of mat upon which he lay, he warmed the koscoussou in the oven, and after bringing water to wash his guest’s hands, he set it before him: he then conducted him to the mat, and himself lay down on the bare ground.In the morning when he awoke, he found the door unbarred, and the poor man gone; so he said to himself, “He had business and did not wish to disturb me, or he went away modestly, being ashamed of his poverty.” On taking up the mat he found under it two doubloons; so he was afraid, and put the money by, and determined not to touch it, lest it had been forgotten, or lest the poor man had stolen it, and put it there to ruin him.Some time afterwards an order came from Fez for Mohammed Widden and the baker to repair thither. They were both conducted to the place before the palace to await the Sultan’s coming forth. When he appeared they were called before him, and, addressing the first, he asked him if he recollected the feast at the marriage of the daughter of the Caïd of Tangier, and a poor man whom he had pushed with his left hand, and kicked with his right foot. Then Caïd Mohammed knew whom he had thus treated, and trembled. The Sultan said, “The arm that struck me, and the leg that kicked me, are mine: cut them off.” The baker now said to himself, “If he has taken the leg and the arm off the caïd, he will surely take my head,” so he fell down upon the earth, and implored the Sultan to have mercy upon him. The Sultan said to him:—“My son, fear not; you were poor, and took in the beggar when he was thrust forth from the feast of the rich. He has eaten your bread, and slept on your mat. Now ask whatever you please; it shall be yours.” The caïd returned to Tangier maimed and a beggar, and his grandson was lately a soldier at the gate of the Sicilian consul. The baker returned riding on a fine mule richly clothed, and possessed of the wealth of the other; and the people used to say as he passed by, “There goes the oven-keeper, the Sultan’s host.”[250]The old man, however, went further back than Mahmoud, and spoke a great deal of Ismael, who, though doubtless a sanguinary monster, was one of the most extraordinary men that has sat upon the throne of Morocco. He constantly said of him, “Govenaba mucho,” he governed much; and illustrated this disposition as follows: “If a man spoke to a woman in the streets he was immediately put to death.”The conversation falling on the Brebers, I asked if they were really the people of Palestine driven out by the Jews; upon which there was a general exclamation of surprise, and even of anger. “Must not we,” said the old man, “who are Jews, and the Brebers, who are sons of Canaan, know what we are and they are?” and then they all vociferated together: “Have we not known them, and do we not know them—the Yebusee, the Emoree, the Gieryesee, the Hevee, the Perezee, the Canaanee, the Hytee, the Hurchee, the Sunee, the Aarvadee; and are they not known amongst their tribes to the present day? and of the seven nations driven out, are there not four still here? and did not Joshua drive them out, and did not Joab the servant of David pursue them even to the mountains above Fez?” And then one ran for the Old Testament, and they commenced reading passages, and giving names as used by them and the corresponding names as used to-day amongst the Moors, and explaining how the nations that had been lost, had remained in the Holy Land and been confounded there with the remnant of the other people.I must not here omit the honourable mention made of the late British consul at Tangier, Mr. Hay. They spoke of him with enthusiasm: his integrity and affability were illustrated by anecdotes. Nor was less said or felt towards Mrs. Hay,—her charity to the poor, her attention to the sick. Repeatedly, when Moors have been expressing to me their indignation at England for inciting them to resist the French, and then betraying them, they have paused to say that it brought Mrs. Hay to her grave.We spent a great portion of the night in conversation on these subjects; but my host was constantly turning to a matter that had the mastery of his thoughts. He had two daughters-in-law: both were barren. As I had been questioning him about the hashish, and various other plants, nothing would satisfy him but that I was deeply versed in such matters, which the people of Morocco believe Christians to be thoroughly acquainted with, and to be able to control by charms.[251]He brought down a volume on physics, by Tudela, a Jew of Adrianople, and insisted on having my opinion on various fragments, which he translated. Familiar as one is in this country with the longing for children,[252]I never saw it so exemplified. Next morning he called his two daughters-in-law, and presenting them, said, “Now, look at them, and tell me if they will have children.” I turned away to relieve them, saying, “I know nothing of such matters;” but they had no mind to be so relieved, and came themselves right round before me.[245]Lukev.19.[246]Markii.4.[247]Ford, in the “Hand-book of Spain,” quotes this sentence as if it were a presumption of the Spaniards, that there was no other court in the world save their own.[248]See the chapter on “the Oda,” in the “Spirit of the East.”[249]“The great narrowness of all the rooms, when compared with their length, appears to prove that the Assyrians had no means of constructing a roof requiring other support than that afforded by the side walls. The most elaborately ornamented hall at Nimroud, although above one hundred and sixty feet in length, was only thirty-five feet broad. The same disparity is apparent in the edifice at Konyunjik. It can scarcely be doubted that there was some reason for making the rooms so narrow.”—Nineveh,vol. ii. p.255.[250]An oven-keeper of Tangier, from whom I sought the verification of this story, told me that it was not an oven-keeper who had received the sultan, but a worker in iron named Mallem Hamet. Mallem designates his calling, an honourable one here, but so despicable among the wandering Arabs, that a conquered foe has his life spared if he stretches out his arm as if beating with a hammer: degraded by the act, his enemy will not condescend to shed his blood.[251]The women will try to get a bit of a Christian’s clothes, or a button, to wear as an amulet to confer fruitfulness.[252]“He which that hath no wif, I hold him lost,Helpless, and all desolat. He that hath no child,Like sun and winde.”—Chaucer.
It was evening before we returned to Larache. The city, which looked so beautiful under the morning sun, was concealed from us as he set behind it; but the gardens on the opposite hills received his declining rays. The ancient cities, which I had visited at these outlets, are placed on the western side, and therefore with the evening sun at their back. At Constantinople it is considered in the rent of a house whether its view of the Bosphorus is with or against the setting sun. A garden was pointed out to me which, it was said, produced the finest oranges in the world: its produce was reserved for the Sultan. I afterwards had time to visit the Spanish fortifications from the land side, which present the peculiar features of that age—sharp angles, lofty bastions and curtains, massive walls, and deep moats. I saw some beautiful jars, quite antique, the manufacture of Casar, ten miles from this.
When I was passing the gate, a Moorish gentleman accosted me in good English, but with a strong Scotch accent; he volunteered information about mines, and promised to visit me in the evening. He came accordingly: he had been three years in Gibraltar, and had been on board our fleet during the war. He began to expatiate on the advantages of European civilization, and expressed his anxiety to have it introduced into Barbary. I said to him, that would be all very well if they could discriminate, but that men were like Adam in Paradise; that they had to balance their present state with all its evils against change with all its chances; that for them change involved one of two consequences—slavery or pauperism.
He asked me, to my great surprise, for news about Nadir Bey. This is an adventurer of Russian origin, who has been going about Europe and Turkey representing himself as cousin of the Sultan, and claiming his throne. He had come to Morocco, where he had succeeded better than elsewhere, obtaining money and honours, and a firman recognising him as legitimate sovereign of Turkey! I took occasion from this incident to show him how perfectly unqualified they were for dealing in any foreign matter, being so shamefully hoaxed in such a case as this; upon which he abruptly jumped up and took his departure. I thought he had been taken suddenly ill; but I afterwards learnt that he had been Nadir Bey’s patron, and had introduced him to the Sultan.
The baggage having been sent across the river in the evening, next morning at day-break we found the horses ready laden. The beach-road is practicable only when the tide is out, and in any case only for persons well mounted. The tide was not very favourable, and we were very ill mounted, but I insisted on going by this road—the sea was so grand, and I wished to look out forarchitecturalphenomena. But the bank of sand is here interrupted, and the cavernous and stalactitic effects were not to be observed. There were, however, the patterns of the coloured sands. The river of Larache brings down the bluest-black iron sand, which indeed is strewed all along the coast from Meden to Cape Spartel. The distance to Arzela is only five hours; but, what with the drag of the sand on the beach, and getting bogged when we struck into the interior, and wandering backwards and forwards from the hills to the beach, and from the beach to the hills, we made it a long and fatiguing day’s journey.
The country was here as unlike as anything could be to that which we had passed: it changes suddenly in appearance and character. At one moment it would be completely bare, being either cultivated or fallow, and a few miles on it would be covered, hill and valley, with brushwood; at one time the palmetto and ordinary brushwood, and presently a crop of broom occupying every inch of ground within sight, covering it with a mantle of brilliant yellow, and perfuming the air with its sweet odour; then it would be all as if under snow from the white broom, that most airy and delicate of shrubs; then would succeed the gum cistus, with its mingled flowers of white and red, and its cool refreshing scent.
The odour from the cistus does not lose its savour: by being exposed to it, it is a gentle refreshing breeze, of which the nose is conscious, rather than an odour. The gum from it, the ladanum, is much esteemed as incense, and is also mixed with mastic to flavour the breath by chewing it. It is not collected in this district. The ancient story of its being scraped from goats’ beards does not seem improbable; for in breaking through the copses one’s head and clothes become quite clammy.
The odour is not from the flower, but from the leaves of the plant: the flowers are of the slightest texture, but make a lively show, bespangling the bushes with stars of white or red. They look like roses, and I was constantly reminded of York and Lancaster. These flowers live but for a day; and, constantly tempting the eye and inviting the hand, the prize is relinquished as soon as reached, and never was a cistus blossom twined into chaplet or gathered for a nosegay. Yet, when it clothes the rocky steep, or mantles the swelling slope, there is no plant can rival it in the pleasure it gives and the attention it awakens. It is shrub and flower; the frailty of its blossoms, the down of its waxy leaves, the balm of its fragrance, are so unlike the glancing foliage of other shrubs—the hot-house forms, the dyer tints, and perfumer scent of other flowers,—that it makes them look children of art and care: wild and tender, it is to other flowers as a shepherdess among women, and to other shrubs as an Arab among the races of men.
Shrubs with their sturdy life, flowers in their fleeting passage, serve to embellish the scene, and to adorn the actors. This one rather shares in our humanity: as our generations go to the grave and are renewed again, so it knows vicissitude, and joy, and mourning. It spreads forth its birth of blossoms with the early dawn, and strews with the fallen leaves the earth of eve. Was it from this that the Greeks called it “flower of the sun;” because, like the rainbow, it drew its being from his rays? Like the peri, its life was in a charm, and it died when that charm was gone.
The name “flower of the sun” (helio-anthemum) reminds me of the grossest of Flora’s daughters—a garden Cleon, too gaudy for a vegetable, too meagre for a shrub, too thick and hard for a flower. And to this—the very contrast of the cistus—do we abandon the name selected for it by the Greeks!
There is a variety of the broom which might be esteemed a garden flower; it is a miniature plant, eighteen inches or two feet, and—so to speak—one incrustation of yellow blossom. While underwood is reduced to the size of a garden-flower, the common daisy is raised to the pretensions of one, with its large head on a stalk of twenty inches. All the plants were our garden tribes, or what would be wild with us, and were well qualified for a garden—the broom as I have said, the ivy, then the ranges of cactus and aloe, hyacinths, jonquils, irises with the petals coloured green.
About five miles from Arzela, upon a rising ground close to a douar (here they begin to be stationary), the palmetto occurred in a new form. It is a bush two or three feet high, and showing no stem. Here it rose to ten feet, with snake-like stems carrying the sharp spicular masses of fans of glossy or glittering green. I several times made an endeavour to stop, that I might pass the night in one of the villages, as I should now call them; not only seduced by the amenities around, but also partly out of consideration for our jaded cattle and scarcely less exhausted self: but guides and guards were inexorable. It was a settled thing that that night we should sleep at Arzela; so we pushed or dragged along, as it seemed, in chace of it, for it never could be in the map the distance we found it by the road. At last we descried its lines, tinged by the last reflected light, against the leaden mass of the Atlantic. We soon after entered “The Gardens,” and then approached the castellated gate, where, to our infinite surprise, an anxious people awaited us.
For several days we had been expected. Rumour had preceded us, and dealt kindly by us; and we were gazed at with eager countenances and smiling eyes, and some of them bright ones. By some process, strange and capricious, we were no strangers, and the denizens vied with each other in doing us any good turn which fell in their way, in expressing their delight at our arrival, and in welcoming us to their town. The crowd was hurrying us in a direction which they had evidently settled in their minds we should take. I having some voice, as I thought, in the matter, made bold to ask, “Whither away?” “To Abraham’s! to Abraham’s!” was shouted. On this I reined in—I mean, I ceased thrashing; for the memory of sleepless nights among those conversational Jews, and some other discomforts which need not be repeated, and a habit of looking somewhat higher than an Israelite’s abode, with a disinclination to step down in the world, came all upon me, and prompted the emphatic declaration, “We will pitch without the walls.” No sooner had the words passed my lips than I could have bitten my tongue off. My eye had fallen on a countenance of singular amenity, and—although that of an aged man—of grace: a long white beard hung down his breast, giving to the figure the patriarchal cast, which his lineaments vindicated as legitimately their own by blood as well as bearing. A cloud passed over his features;—the impress was so slight that I cannot say I saw, but I felt it. So recovering, as it were, my sentence, and inclining to him, I added to the interpreter in Spanish, “unless we are to go to my father’s house.”
We entered a small court: the floor was red, the walls were pure white. There was no window. Four Moorish arches opened to four separate chambers: two sons with their wives occupied two, his brother and uncle the third, and himself the fourth. Whether these were houses or apartments it was not easy to determine: our words cannot explain. Notwithstanding many attempts at description, no one who has not seen these houses has any distinct idea of them. The same holds with respect to the descriptions left us of ancient dwellings. The one explains the other: perhaps, by making them serve mutually for this purpose, I may be in some degree successful.
This court and hall, for which we have no word, is thepatioof the Spaniards, thewoostof the Arabs, thehyroobof the Hebrews, theμέσονof the Greeks, and theimpluviumorcavadiumof the Romans.
The patio is covered with an awning, which the Moors callclas; they have also a covering for the floor, which they use on festivities, and which they callyellis: theclas, the same as thevelum, which the Romans spread over their atrium—in Greek it wasτέγη. The roof wasτέγος, hence the confusion respecting the paralytic man being let down “through the roof”τέγη, which was simply the removal of the tent or awning to let him down, not into the house, but into the court. They ascended to the roof among the tiles,[245]and unroofed the roof,[246]and so let down the bed into the middle. Here are all familiar words, and nothing can be plainer than the words, however incomprehensible may be the thing conveyed; for how should a roof be unroofed (ἀπεστεγάτην τὴν στεγὴν), and how should the people below have remained quiet under the tiles and rafters? But, translate the passage by the aid of the Moorish house, and all difficulty is removed: “They ascended to the top of the house, among the tiles (ἀναβάντες ἐπὶ τὸ δῶμα διὰ τῶν κεράμων); and then, removing the awning which was spread over the place where he was, they let him down into the patio.” The tiles were for flooring the terrace-top, and coping the parapet walls. Thus the centre of the house remained, as it were, the tent, and explains the passage, “the tabernacle of my house;” as also that one, “Thou spreadest out the heavens as a curtain;” and again, “He stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.”
The French wordmaisoncomes from the Greekμέσσον,architecture. The French house is a solid figure, the ancient house a hollow one. The building of the house in Greek isοἶκος: the court in the middle is calledμέσσον. The families of the poor inhabit different apartments: the court becomes the common place of resort, and its name will stand for that of the whole dwelling, as “hall” in English is, in the country, used to designate a gentleman’s seat. But here it is the abode of the lower orders, which would undergo the change, and the word would become vernacular:οἶκοςbecomingμέσσον, we have at oncemaison. In Spain, common courts are calledmeson coral.Coro,coral,cortecame, in like manner, to signify residence of the monarch: thus, the Court of Madrid. (“Solo Madrid es corte.”)[247]
Architecture spread in France from the Phocian colony of Marseilles, and through Europe from the peninsula, and so the one word spread in France, the other through Europe. It is curious that the French word for a house should mean the same thing as the English word for a chamber, both being in direct contradiction to the thing conveyed, which is not “space,” but “enclosure.”
This form of Canaanitish building is preserved in our monasteries, cloisters, and colleges. Spain and Sicily preserve some beautiful specimens of the passage of Moorish into Gothic forms, where the luxury and gaiety of thewoostis associated with the sombre severity of the cloister,—the stone-framed and fretted Gothic arches and windows—the Moorish tiles—the gloomy corridors around, and flowers smiling in the centre amidst water and refreshed by fountains.
To the apartment of the chief of the establishment there was an entrance-hall twelve feet square and sixteen to eighteen feet high; the floor red like the court, and the walls white. A balcony at one side, reached by a ladder, served for two or three persons to sleep, and gave entrance to a small “chamber on the wall,” such as that of Elisha in the house of the Shunamite. The “upper chamber,” such as David’s, “over the gate,” judging from what we at present see, was a building on the roof, being reached by a ladder or external staircase:—a ladder is a common domestic instrument. The chambers built there are strictlybeit; but to the westward it receives the name from the Arabs ofolea, which is the word in the Old Testament translated “upper chamber.” It was thehyperoonof the Greeks, in which Homer places Penelope toavoidher suitors. The Lacedemonians called the same apartmentoon; and Athenæus explains by it the fable of Helen born from an egg. Thegynaicumof the Greeks was the upper story; and at present, amongst the Moors, who have no harem for the women, the tops of the houses are appropriated to them, and no man can ascend to make repairs, or for any other purpose, without proclaiming aloud three times that he is going up to the roof. David, in the story of Bathsheba, was clearly where he ought not to have been, and where no man was expected to be, and had neglected to give the customary warning.
But this door, or archway, led to the inner apartment,—one of the ordinary long Moorish rooms, about seven feet wide and thirty feet long, and receiving light only from the door. The floor was covered with their beautiful mats, and the walls all round, to the height of four feet: the rest was white. The entrance to these rooms is by the centre, and they thus form separate apartments to the right and left, at the end there being generally a raised bed divided off by hangings. When I first saw the bedsteads, I took them for an imitation of us, for they are altogether repugnant to Eastern ideas. In the East a bed-room is unknown: even in the harem there is no apartment so appropriated, far less is there a bed-stead. Where “bed-rooms” are mentioned, what is meant is a place for stowing beds. Large presses are filled at the “lower” parts of rooms for this purpose. The bed, when made, is taken out and raised three or four mattresses, one over the other. In the centre of theodait looks like a long ottoman. The pillows are composed as a “formation” of very thin, broad flaps or cushions of cotton, so that you get exactly the required height, and they fit into the neck, and do not require a head-board to keep them in. No standing post is required; and all this is from the matrix of the tent. Here it is exactly the reverse, and might well surprise at first. The matrix here is the fortress, the walled cities of Canaan. Here every apartment is a bedroom: not only are the beds composed of standing posts, but they are the standing parts of the rooms, divided off by hangings, like those of the Temple, for it is not curtains round them, but hangings that are before them. The room is built of the width requisite for them. There is sometimes a standing top, which serves as a balcony, and also to sleep on. The bed is calledfarash, the hangingsnumasia, and there are generally behind two square holes through the wall, for light and air.
Mittahis the word used in Scripture: it is spoken of as a standing thing, and the expressiongoing up, exactly corresponds with what we see here. The standing bedstead of Og King of Bashan is referred to in testimony of his gigantic dimensions. At a feast the Moors place the honoured person in the bed. On marriage-feasts the bridegroom, amidst his party, and the bride amidst hers, recline on the bed. When afêteis made in honour of any person, he is placed on the bed, looking down on the parties assembled round the trays, the whole length of the room. It might, in fact, be translated rather throne than bed.
So also at a Jewish wedding, you may see in one bed three tiers of blooming virgins, sparkling in gold and jewels, with their shot green and red silk handkerchiefs—and within the hangings of one curtain, one bouquet, presenting more beauty than you could select from any European court.
In the Highlands a strange piece of furniture is the bedstead, which is of wood, with doors like a press, and standing enclosed and against the wall: it is, doubtless, derived from the customs I describe. The Highlanders used to make these bedsteads themselves, as Ulysses did his.
A peculiarity of the Moorish room is, that the beams are visible, being ornamented with either carving or colour, or both: this we have preserved in the grander Gothic architecture. So it was among the Jews: “Ceiled with cedar and painted with vermilion.” Vermilion is the ground of their patterns, and predominates. The colour is neither laid on with oil, nor in fresco, but with white of egg; it works well and lasts long. The beams are of the arar, which in ancient and modern times has been confounded with cedar.
In the Roman and Greek house, as in the Hebrew, the rooms were entered from the centre court; but the former had their greatest extension in the length, that is from the court; the latter, in the breadth, that is parallel to the court. The same contrast holds between the Turkish and the Moorish. The former has not theImpluvium, but theDivan houé, or central hall of the house, corresponds to it; out of this you pass to the rooms, which are squares, exactly as Vitruvius describes theTriclinium, with a rectangle added, the top being opposite the door and giving the light, being nearly an unbroken side of window.[248]The Moorish is the most complete antithesis, having an extensive breadth; having two “tops” opposite each other; having no window, and receiving its light from an enormous door. An apartment may be thirty feet by seven feet, or in length nearly five times its breadth. We have had at Nimroud the perfect confirmation that this was the ancient form in the East: the same proportions are there observed in far grander dimensions.[249]Mr. Layard accounts for the form by the want of timber to construct wider roofs; but that would not give the inordinate length; and, besides, they were acquainted—as he shows—with the arch. The form being adopted to suit the settled manner, and with reference to the bed, then of course the heavy roof could be laid on with short beams; and that the same masses of pounded earth for the terraces were there employed as in Barbary, the condition of the Assyrian ruins plainly shows. The Greeks had a mixed architecture. They had the Phrygian tombs; and they must have had also roofs made in this fashion—at least, at an early time—as is recorded in the story of Melampus; who, being confined by Iphiklos, for attempting to carry off his cattle, heard the worms in the roof discoursing on the unsafe condition of the beams.
They have such gates as Samson carried from Gaza, or Lord Ellenborough sent for to Cabul, and are traced on the sepulchre of the kings at Jerusalem: they do not fit into the wall, but lie against it. They are not shaped to the arch; they close, but rectangularly and folding; they cover it as the hurdle did the orifice of the rush mosques I saw along the lake. There is no hinge, but the joints of the door descend into a socket in the stone, and in like manner the door is secured above in a projecting bracket of wood. In the smallest buildings it is colossal. To exclude the air or the cold they close the folding doors, and open a small wicket as in the gate of a fortress; above it there are small apertures through the wall to let in the light when it is closed, and these are arranged in a figure or a pattern. Every corner of a Moorish house is ornamented, although merely in the form that is given to the whitewashed wall: there is no glaring oil paint upon the doors; they are scrubbed with ochre, which is left upon them.
In the apartment of a single old man there was but one farash at one end; a European sofa occupied the other. The floor was flush; and as I was examining and admiring the building, he said to me, “It is of my own construction. I don’t mean that I made the plan, but that I hewed the stone, and carried the mortar with my own hands.”
I paid a visit to this patriarch’s uncle; he was, of course, very old, and though bedridden, had lost none of his faculties. The whole family and a good many of the neighbours were soon assembled around us, and he unlocked the stores of his memory. He recollected the accession of Soliman, the uncle of the present Sultan, who reigned half a century. He then went back to Mahmoud, whom he claimed as his “friend.” I launched out in praise of the dignity of his reign, and the justice of that of Soliman. He related various anecdotes of both.
A governor brought presents of one hundred of everything that the country contained: horses, oxen, mules, sheep, slaves, quintals of silver, packets of gold-dust (about a pound weight each), measures of corn, oil, butter, &c. The Sultan asked him whence came this wealth. He said from the government which his bounty had conferred upon him. He asked him if the people had not paid their tenths. The governor said they had. The Sultan then said, “I sent you to govern, not to rob,” and gratified him with the bastinado and prison.
The grandfather of Ben Abou, the present Governor of Riff, when Caïd of Tangier, made a great feast at the marriage of his daughter. One of his friends, Caïd Mohammed Widden, observed a poor man in mean attire in the court, and ordered him out; and, he not obeying, pushed him so that he fell. That same night the keeper of an oven (there are no sellers of bread, every one makes his own bread at home and sends it to the oven) had barred his door and retired to rest, when some one knocked at the door. He asked, “Who is there?” and was answered, “The guest of God,” which means a beggar. “You are welcome,” he said, and got up and unfastened the door; and having nothing but some remnants of the koscoussou from his supper, and the piece of mat upon which he lay, he warmed the koscoussou in the oven, and after bringing water to wash his guest’s hands, he set it before him: he then conducted him to the mat, and himself lay down on the bare ground.
In the morning when he awoke, he found the door unbarred, and the poor man gone; so he said to himself, “He had business and did not wish to disturb me, or he went away modestly, being ashamed of his poverty.” On taking up the mat he found under it two doubloons; so he was afraid, and put the money by, and determined not to touch it, lest it had been forgotten, or lest the poor man had stolen it, and put it there to ruin him.
Some time afterwards an order came from Fez for Mohammed Widden and the baker to repair thither. They were both conducted to the place before the palace to await the Sultan’s coming forth. When he appeared they were called before him, and, addressing the first, he asked him if he recollected the feast at the marriage of the daughter of the Caïd of Tangier, and a poor man whom he had pushed with his left hand, and kicked with his right foot. Then Caïd Mohammed knew whom he had thus treated, and trembled. The Sultan said, “The arm that struck me, and the leg that kicked me, are mine: cut them off.” The baker now said to himself, “If he has taken the leg and the arm off the caïd, he will surely take my head,” so he fell down upon the earth, and implored the Sultan to have mercy upon him. The Sultan said to him:—“My son, fear not; you were poor, and took in the beggar when he was thrust forth from the feast of the rich. He has eaten your bread, and slept on your mat. Now ask whatever you please; it shall be yours.” The caïd returned to Tangier maimed and a beggar, and his grandson was lately a soldier at the gate of the Sicilian consul. The baker returned riding on a fine mule richly clothed, and possessed of the wealth of the other; and the people used to say as he passed by, “There goes the oven-keeper, the Sultan’s host.”[250]
The old man, however, went further back than Mahmoud, and spoke a great deal of Ismael, who, though doubtless a sanguinary monster, was one of the most extraordinary men that has sat upon the throne of Morocco. He constantly said of him, “Govenaba mucho,” he governed much; and illustrated this disposition as follows: “If a man spoke to a woman in the streets he was immediately put to death.”
The conversation falling on the Brebers, I asked if they were really the people of Palestine driven out by the Jews; upon which there was a general exclamation of surprise, and even of anger. “Must not we,” said the old man, “who are Jews, and the Brebers, who are sons of Canaan, know what we are and they are?” and then they all vociferated together: “Have we not known them, and do we not know them—the Yebusee, the Emoree, the Gieryesee, the Hevee, the Perezee, the Canaanee, the Hytee, the Hurchee, the Sunee, the Aarvadee; and are they not known amongst their tribes to the present day? and of the seven nations driven out, are there not four still here? and did not Joshua drive them out, and did not Joab the servant of David pursue them even to the mountains above Fez?” And then one ran for the Old Testament, and they commenced reading passages, and giving names as used by them and the corresponding names as used to-day amongst the Moors, and explaining how the nations that had been lost, had remained in the Holy Land and been confounded there with the remnant of the other people.
I must not here omit the honourable mention made of the late British consul at Tangier, Mr. Hay. They spoke of him with enthusiasm: his integrity and affability were illustrated by anecdotes. Nor was less said or felt towards Mrs. Hay,—her charity to the poor, her attention to the sick. Repeatedly, when Moors have been expressing to me their indignation at England for inciting them to resist the French, and then betraying them, they have paused to say that it brought Mrs. Hay to her grave.
We spent a great portion of the night in conversation on these subjects; but my host was constantly turning to a matter that had the mastery of his thoughts. He had two daughters-in-law: both were barren. As I had been questioning him about the hashish, and various other plants, nothing would satisfy him but that I was deeply versed in such matters, which the people of Morocco believe Christians to be thoroughly acquainted with, and to be able to control by charms.[251]
He brought down a volume on physics, by Tudela, a Jew of Adrianople, and insisted on having my opinion on various fragments, which he translated. Familiar as one is in this country with the longing for children,[252]I never saw it so exemplified. Next morning he called his two daughters-in-law, and presenting them, said, “Now, look at them, and tell me if they will have children.” I turned away to relieve them, saying, “I know nothing of such matters;” but they had no mind to be so relieved, and came themselves right round before me.
[245]Lukev.19.
[246]Markii.4.
[247]Ford, in the “Hand-book of Spain,” quotes this sentence as if it were a presumption of the Spaniards, that there was no other court in the world save their own.
[248]See the chapter on “the Oda,” in the “Spirit of the East.”
[249]“The great narrowness of all the rooms, when compared with their length, appears to prove that the Assyrians had no means of constructing a roof requiring other support than that afforded by the side walls. The most elaborately ornamented hall at Nimroud, although above one hundred and sixty feet in length, was only thirty-five feet broad. The same disparity is apparent in the edifice at Konyunjik. It can scarcely be doubted that there was some reason for making the rooms so narrow.”—Nineveh,vol. ii. p.255.
[250]An oven-keeper of Tangier, from whom I sought the verification of this story, told me that it was not an oven-keeper who had received the sultan, but a worker in iron named Mallem Hamet. Mallem designates his calling, an honourable one here, but so despicable among the wandering Arabs, that a conquered foe has his life spared if he stretches out his arm as if beating with a hammer: degraded by the act, his enemy will not condescend to shed his blood.
[251]The women will try to get a bit of a Christian’s clothes, or a button, to wear as an amulet to confer fruitfulness.
[252]
“He which that hath no wif, I hold him lost,Helpless, and all desolat. He that hath no child,Like sun and winde.”—Chaucer.
“He which that hath no wif, I hold him lost,Helpless, and all desolat. He that hath no child,Like sun and winde.”—Chaucer.
“He which that hath no wif, I hold him lost,Helpless, and all desolat. He that hath no child,Like sun and winde.”—Chaucer.
“He which that hath no wif, I hold him lost,
Helpless, and all desolat. He that hath no child,
Like sun and winde.”—Chaucer.