CHAPTERVII.RUINS OF BATHS.After a few days spent as those I have described, we started in a south-westerly direction, and towards evening passed out of the land of the Ziaïdas. Their territory extends a summer day’s journey from north to south, and from east to west. We then entered that of the Ladzian. Our guardians inquired from the shepherds touching different douars, to select one for sleeping, but did not seem satisfied with the replies. I urged going to one of the Lachedumbra, a tribe of the Ladzian, and they reluctantly complied. This was the first douar we approached as perfect strangers. We rode up to within two hundred paces and halted. After we had waited about ten minutes we advanced half way and halted again. Then one man walked slowly out; one of our party in like manner advanced. They saluted. After some time the Arab shouted, and instantly a single man advanced from each of the tents on the side next us: they stood for some minutes as if holding council. The chief then turned round, and walking straight up to me, took my hand in their manner, and thrice repeatedMirababick; the others then advanced, and pronounced the salutation all together. Each of the party was thus greeted in turn. We were led inside. The whole douar set to work, and in a few minutes our tent was pitched, and strewed with fresh shrubs. A sheep was led up to the door, the customary present of the sheik, that we might see it before we made our supper on it. This was a Sherriff’s douar, and the government officers have no right to enter. Such was the explanation given to me. It is difficult to ascertain, and impossible to vouch for, the commonest fact in a country where one is not thoroughly conversant with its habits, and when information is received through interpreters, however intelligent and upright these may be; and, indeed, integrity is next to an impossibility in an interpreter; but this an eastern traveller learns, if at all, at the wrong end of his experience.I have seen no douar entered except by the free will, and in some cases the formal consent, of the tribe. I was much perplexed at this, as it appeared at first a contradiction to, and as I afterwards ascertained, modification of the fundamental rule of Arab society. It doubtless arose from the necessity of defence against acentral government.After they had pitched our tent, instead of pressing upon us as amongst the Ziaïda, they drew off about thirty yards, and squatted down in a circle: a few only came, and then it was to bring presents, or to petition for medicine for a greasy heel, or a barren wife, as the case might be. I proposed to the sheik a boar hunt, to which he readily assented; but it was fixed for a future day.From the high ground, as we approached it, Dar El Baida has an imposing appearance: inside it is a heap of ruins. A house consisting of a single room—a good one on a second floor, and entered from a terrace—was prepared for us. Our horses were piqueted in the street before it. We understood there was a French Consular agent and some Europeans here, and consequently we brought for them a camel-load of game.This place is said to have been retaken from the Portuguese by the following stratagem. A Moor pretended to become Christian, settled in the town, and obtained permission to have a gate opened in the wall close to his house for the convenience of sending in and out his flocks. He one night brought in a number of his countrymen covered with hides, as cattle among them. Such is the story of the place; and if you doubt it, they say, “There is the gate.”The Spanish name is Casa Bianca, just as if we chose to call it “White House.” Its ancient name, “Anafe,” involves some obscurity. The same name belonged to a colony in Asia Minor, and to an island close to Crete, which forms an episode in the Orphic epic of the Argonauts. The adventurers were rescued by Apollo, who discharging an arrow into the deep, the island arose, and was called Anafe, fromἀνφααίνειν,to appear. What this etymology is worth for the Cretan Island, it must also be for the Lybian promontory: its present name likewise implies brightness. It is on the other hand asserted, that this is the new case oflucus a non lucendo, and that Anafe means,—that is, in Hebrew not Greek,—dark and gloomy,[6]and that the island was so called, not from having appeared in the light, but by being shut out from the light by groves.[7]If so, the Lybian promontory must likewise in those days have been green and feathered, and not as now, naked and pale. The Phœnician Backs and Parrys did not dot their charts with the names of the Admiralty Lords of Tyre. They gave names descriptive or commemorative, as the other names of this coast will vouch. That the name is Phœnician, not Greek, is clear from finding it here. We have also Thymiatirium, where Arzilla now stands, and which is interpreted in Hebrew—an open plain. Ampelusa was on the northern promontory, and its interpretation coincides with the descriptions left of groves delightful to the eye, filled with fruit grateful to the taste. This must have been one of the spots first named, and this name seems to confirm what we derive from so many sources regarding the primeval horticulture of this land. Had the Phœnicians come to plant vines, and gardens—that is, to cultivate and civilize—they would not have given such a name. These glimpses of the well-being in the most early times bring up the contrast with the present. The parched and naked brow of the once shady Anafe, further recalls an island nearer home, once, also, named after its forests,[8]where now scarce a tree is to be found. Would that the resemblance were complete! If Moorish rule has blasted the oak, it has at least spared the man. What Moorish rule has worst done it has done with a purpose, and neither on principle nor for philanthropy.A quantity of grain was in store, and much arriving destined for England. The stores were filled all along the coast, but there are no means of shipment. This port is a principal place for the exportation of bark and wool, both managed by Scheik Tibi, who, last season, when the country was otherwise impassable, went and came, conducting caravans of seventy and eighty camels; by his personal character ensuring safety on the road. The schooner which had been in company with us during our voyage, lay on the beach high and dry. An English brig at anchor in the open roadstead was pitching bows under, though there was scarcely a breath of wind, and had narrowly escaped shipwreck two days before from her cables having been cut by the rocks.There is here a sort of bay. The southern horn is a headland running a little way out, and distant four or five miles. On its bald black brow I was told that traces of the Phœnician city were to be seen. I was all impatience to reach the spot, for it was just a site for them, and no one since would have gone there. So here was the site of a Lybo-Phœnician city, and any fragment was precious. I found nothing standing, yet was not disappointed; for the stones in the fields were rolled fragments of building: the mortar was of such consistency that it wore or split only with the stones imbedded in it, and these were crystalline: the stones were small, the mortar abundant; the masses looked like amygdaloid. For the first time was I assured that I beheld a piece of Tyrian rubble. I would have travelled many a mile for this. Mortar was used by them—and what mortar! But this was not the only architectural point I had to mark this day.As I sat on the brow of the headland, watching the great waves which went and came over long shelves of rocks, stretching out to the west and southward in the line of the declining sun, and playing under his rays, my eye was attracted to a singular mass immediately below: it was a cone indented all over with deep semicircular cavities, and, therefore, bristling with truncated points. The sandstone hollows out in this manner[9]by the action of the water, and the points which are left are sharp as a knife. The substance is black and porous, like a sponge. When the foam dashed over this rock, the basins filled; the white froth, as the wave retired, poured in cataracts from basin to basin, on every side, and so continued almost till the next long wave came to shroud it in spray, and replenish it with foam. As I watched these changes, familiar forms floated before me, till at last becoming more distinct, I distinguished those singular pendants that belong to the Moorish vault, and the indentures of its arch. The stalactites of caverns might have furnished the type of the last, but could not of the former. The fair creations of art have models in Nature, and here is that of the Moorish. The substance in which it is exhibited lines the whole coast, and must present an infinite variety of such effects. I had few occasions of seeing that coast, but the very next time I reached it, about twenty miles north of Rabat, I saw the same figure reversed, or as we see it in the Moresco vault, depending from the roof like the stalactites in a cave.[10]I returned to the same place next morning, but the tide was out, and the rock without the foam was a common stone. The ledges of rock which the evening before had been so lashed by the waves, were white (quartz) rock. On them were patches of coarse recent madrepores, looking like gigantic sponges. Further out the rocks were black, and on inspection proved to be so because completely covered with mussels, the largest I have ever seen, and the finest I have ever tasted. Such is the fury of the waves, that beautifully-rounded quartz-stones, some of them three-quarters of a hundred weight, have been cast up into a bank thirty feet above high-water-mark.Amongst the mass of ruins within the walls of Dar el Baida one building alone could be made out. It was a bath. If London or Paris were laid low, no such monument would survive of their taste, luxury, or cleanliness. The people called it “Roman,” meaning Portuguese. When I was at Algesiras, some excavations were making, and on examining them, the building proved to be a bath. Within the circuit of the walls of old Ceuta, which unquestionably belonged to a very remote period, the only edifice, the purpose of which is distinguishable, is a bath. The vestiges of the Romans, which from time to time we fall upon in our island, are baths. The Romans and the Saracens were the most remarkable of conquerors, and are associated in the relics which they have left-fortresses and baths. The first is of necessity, but how should the second be ever found conjoined, unless it played some part in forming that temper which made them great, or in conferring on them those manners which rendered them acceptable? A nation without the bath is deprived of a large portion of the health and inoffensive enjoyment within man’s reach: it therefore increases the value of a people to itself, and its power as a nation over other people. From what I know of the loss in both respects which those incur who have it not, I can estimate its worth to those who had it.I now had the opportunity of examining a public bath of the Moors belonging to their good times. The disposition varies from that of the ancient Thermæ and the modern Hamams. The grand and noble portion of the Turkish and the ancient bath was a dome, open to the heavens in the centre. Such a one, but not open in the centre, is here; it was the inner not the outer apartment. The vault has deep ribs, in the fashion of a clam shell, and is supported upon columns with horse-shoe arches spreading between. Instead of a system of flues through the walls, only one passed through the centre under the floor. To get at it, I had to break through the pavement of beaten mortar covering a slab of marble. It was nearly filled up with a deposit, partly of soot and partly of earthy matter, which I imagined to be the residuum of gazule, on the use of which hinge the peculiarities I have noticed in the structure and distribution of the building.I turned to Leo Africanus, expecting a flood of light upon a matter with which he must have been so familiar. All I found was this:—“When any one is to be bathed, they lay him along the ground,anointing him with certain ointmentand with certaininstruments clearing away his filth.” The ointment is evidently the gazule; the instrument can only be thestrigil. He mentions a “Festival of the Baths.” The servants and officers go forth with trumpets and pipes, and all their friends, to gathera wild onion; it is put in a brazen vessel, covered over with a linen cloth, which had been steeped in lees of wine; this they bring with great solemnity and rejoicings, and suspend in the vessel in the portal of the bath. This would indicate an Egyptian source, were it not for the absence of all trace of the bath on their storied walls, and among their ruins.The onion, however, being the emblem of the planetary system,[11]may be a trace of Sabæism. The festival and ceremony savour much of those of the “Great Mother,” and of course preceded Christianity. No original superstition arose here; no original bath appears among the Arabs. The Phœnicians brought their religion and found the bath, and to it the people adapted the new religious practices.Part of the funereal rites of the Moors was to convey the corpse to the bath.[12]Such a practice is unknown in any other country, and seems to identify the bath with the primitive usages.The gazule furnishes, however, the strongest intrinsic evidence in favour of my conclusion, which indeed it requires but scanty proof to establish, for the rudest people may have had the bath. The Red Indians are fully acquainted with it, and the means they employ are heated stones and a leather covering. They crawl in and throw water on the stones, and soak till the same effect is produced as the Balnea of Rome obtained. In Morocco they are of primitive and modest structure, and of diminutive proportions. Add to this, the rude simplicity of the process, and the exclusive use in them of natural and native productions. Before coming to this point, I wish to refer to historical evidence.Augustus borrowed a stool, calledduretum,[13]from Spain. Mauritania was inhabited by the same people, so that two thousand years ago the Romans copied the Moors.Few Iberian words have come down to us—one of them isstrigil. It applied to a species of metal; and strigils were made of metal. The early use of this strigil, and its connection with the East, is shown by one of the celebrated bronzes of antiquity—a group of two boys in the bath using the strigil, which was attributed to Dædalus.[14]The Etruscans and Lydians also had it.[15]The Phæacians, as elsewhere shown, were Phœnicians. Homer mentions their baths at the time of the Trojan war, when the Greeks had none. The termἩρακλεία λούτραseems to identify baths with that people as much as letters were by the termΚαδμεία γράμματα; and as the Greeks got everything from them, the baths of the Greeks are in themselves a testimony in favour of the Phœnicians, my inference being, not that the Phœnicians brought thither the tice, but that they learnt it here.That the Arabs, when they issued from their deserts, should have adopted the Thermæ and Balnea of the sinking Roman empire, does not necessarily follow; indeed it is rather to be assumed that they would not, and that it was from a people who became by religion incorporated with them, and from whom, indubitably, they derived their architecture, that they had it. This view is supported by the use of the glove, which is not Roman, and the disuse of the strigil, which was so. It would thus appear that Morocco had conferred on antiquity and the East of the present day, the chief luxury of the one, and the most beneficial habit of the other.There being a bath in the unoccupied house of the Governor of the Province, I made the attempt to complete my investigation by experience, and privately applied to the guardian of the mansion, who, to my surprise, immediately acceded to my request. Soon after, he came to inform me that the Caïd had been very angry, and had forbidden him to let me use it. It was suggested that there were mollifying methods, such as a civil message, a box of tea and some loaves of sugar. While these were preparing, an elderly Moor walked in and seated himself. This was no other than the Caïd. He plunged at oncein medias res, and the following dialogue ensued.Caïd.No Christian or Jew can go to the bath. It is forbidden by our law.Can a law forbid what it enjoins?Caïd.It is the law.Where is that law?Caïd.(After a pause.) The wise men say there is such a law.The wise man is he who speaks about what he knows.Caïd.Do the wise men err?Have you read the book?Caïd.I have heard it read.Did you hear the word—the Jews and Christians shall not bathe?Caïd.I may or may not have heard.I have read the book, and have not seen that word, for in it there is no name for bath. The Mussulmans, when they came to “the West,” found the bath in your towns as they are to-day, and here first learned how to bathe, and you were then Christians. How then do you say you have a law which forbids the Jews or the Christians to go to the bath?Caïd.(laughing). The Nazarenes are cunning. In what Mussulman land do Christians go to the bath?Missir, is it not a Mussulman land? Stamboul (Constantinople), is it not a Mussulman land? Now, I will ask you questions. Where, except in this dark West, do Christians not go to the bath with the Mussulmans? Why do I want to go to the bath? Have we got the bath in Europe? From whom did I learn it?Caïd.How can I tell?I have gone to the bath with doctors of the law (Oulema), and Rejals of the Ali Osman Doulet: I have been shampooed by vizirs. From Mussulmans I have learned how to wash myself, and here I come to Mussulmans, and they say, “You shall not bathe.” This is not Islam, this isJahilic.[16]Caïd.You shall not say our faces are black. You shall go, but—only once. To-morrow I will keep the key: it shall be heated when the Mussulmans are asleep. I will come, and you shall go and be satisfied.He then got up and walked off. Presently a sheep arrived as an earnest and propitiation.It was so often and so confidently repeated to me by the resident Europeans that I could place no reliance upon his word, that I gave up all idea of it. Next night, as we were disposing our beds and preparing to occupy them, there was a rap at the door, and on its being opened, who should walk in but the Caïd. His abrupt salutation was, “The bath is ready—come.” While I was re-dressing, he told us that he had forgotten, and having business of importance with a neighbouring sheik before sunrise, had started on his journey, when recollecting his promise, he had returned.Finding he was making dispositions to accompany me, I begged he would not take the trouble; but not staying to answer, he seized with one hand a candle out of the candlestick, laid hold of my hand with the other, conducted me down stairs, lighting me and lifting me through the dirty streets over the different places, as if I had been a helpless child. Arrived at the place, he took the keys from his breast, and opened the doors. I thought his care was to end here, but he squatted himself down on a mat in an outhouse, as if to wait the issue. Every other argument failing, I said, that if he remained there, I could not stay long enough. He answered, “I will sleep. If I went home I could not sleep, for something might happen.” The deputy-governor stripped to officiate as bath-man. But for this weighty matter I must take breath, and honour it with a special chapter—a chapter which, if the reader will peruse it with diligence and apply with care, may prolong his life, fortify his body, diminish his ailments, augment his enjoyments, and improve his temper: then having found something beneficial to himself, he may be prompted to do something to secure the like for his fellow-creatures.[6]ענפה, Anepha. Ramosa et opaca.—Boch.Pheleg.[7]The spot is thus described by Apollonius:—τοὶ δ’ ἀγλαὸν ἈπόλλωνιἌλσει ὲνὶ σκιερῷ τέμενος σκιόεντά τε βωμὸνΠοιέον.—L. 4. v.1714.[8]Ireland was anciently known as Fiodha Inis, or the Woody Island.[9]The “Chaudière Falls” are so called from cavities like kettles hollowed out by stones of harder consistency getting into a hollow, and there revolving by the action of the water. On the Clyde the operation may be seen.[10]These pensile figures are by all writers on Moorish architecture held to be animitationof stalactite. Nothing can be more absurd: stalactite is produced by successive coatings or deposits, whereas the process by which they must have been formed is abrasion, the salient points being obtained by the concavity of the intervening surfaces.[11]The slices representing the orbits of the planets. We have derived our word fromOn i on; a reduplication ofOn, the Sun, in his chief temple in the city, called after him, where the onion, being the symbol, was supposed to be worshipped.[12]Mision Historial de Marueccos,p.45.[13]“Ungebatur enim sæpius, et sudabat ad flammam: deinde perfundebatur e gelida aqua vel sole multo calefacta. At quoties nervorum causâ marinis Albulisque calidis utendum esset, contentus hoc erat, ut insidens ligneo solio, quod ipse Hispanico verbo 'duretum’ vocabat, manus ac pedes alternis jactaret.”—Sueton.inAugust., c.82.[14]See Pliny’s Catalogue of Celebrated Statues.[15]Naked youths with strigils appear on a vase.—Mus. Gregor.II., tav.lxxxvii.—SeeSchol. Juvenal,Sat.iii. v.262.See plates in Fellows’s “Lycia.”[16]The word means “folly,” but it is applied to the period before conversion to Islam, and here insinuates infidelity.
After a few days spent as those I have described, we started in a south-westerly direction, and towards evening passed out of the land of the Ziaïdas. Their territory extends a summer day’s journey from north to south, and from east to west. We then entered that of the Ladzian. Our guardians inquired from the shepherds touching different douars, to select one for sleeping, but did not seem satisfied with the replies. I urged going to one of the Lachedumbra, a tribe of the Ladzian, and they reluctantly complied. This was the first douar we approached as perfect strangers. We rode up to within two hundred paces and halted. After we had waited about ten minutes we advanced half way and halted again. Then one man walked slowly out; one of our party in like manner advanced. They saluted. After some time the Arab shouted, and instantly a single man advanced from each of the tents on the side next us: they stood for some minutes as if holding council. The chief then turned round, and walking straight up to me, took my hand in their manner, and thrice repeatedMirababick; the others then advanced, and pronounced the salutation all together. Each of the party was thus greeted in turn. We were led inside. The whole douar set to work, and in a few minutes our tent was pitched, and strewed with fresh shrubs. A sheep was led up to the door, the customary present of the sheik, that we might see it before we made our supper on it. This was a Sherriff’s douar, and the government officers have no right to enter. Such was the explanation given to me. It is difficult to ascertain, and impossible to vouch for, the commonest fact in a country where one is not thoroughly conversant with its habits, and when information is received through interpreters, however intelligent and upright these may be; and, indeed, integrity is next to an impossibility in an interpreter; but this an eastern traveller learns, if at all, at the wrong end of his experience.
I have seen no douar entered except by the free will, and in some cases the formal consent, of the tribe. I was much perplexed at this, as it appeared at first a contradiction to, and as I afterwards ascertained, modification of the fundamental rule of Arab society. It doubtless arose from the necessity of defence against acentral government.
After they had pitched our tent, instead of pressing upon us as amongst the Ziaïda, they drew off about thirty yards, and squatted down in a circle: a few only came, and then it was to bring presents, or to petition for medicine for a greasy heel, or a barren wife, as the case might be. I proposed to the sheik a boar hunt, to which he readily assented; but it was fixed for a future day.
From the high ground, as we approached it, Dar El Baida has an imposing appearance: inside it is a heap of ruins. A house consisting of a single room—a good one on a second floor, and entered from a terrace—was prepared for us. Our horses were piqueted in the street before it. We understood there was a French Consular agent and some Europeans here, and consequently we brought for them a camel-load of game.
This place is said to have been retaken from the Portuguese by the following stratagem. A Moor pretended to become Christian, settled in the town, and obtained permission to have a gate opened in the wall close to his house for the convenience of sending in and out his flocks. He one night brought in a number of his countrymen covered with hides, as cattle among them. Such is the story of the place; and if you doubt it, they say, “There is the gate.”
The Spanish name is Casa Bianca, just as if we chose to call it “White House.” Its ancient name, “Anafe,” involves some obscurity. The same name belonged to a colony in Asia Minor, and to an island close to Crete, which forms an episode in the Orphic epic of the Argonauts. The adventurers were rescued by Apollo, who discharging an arrow into the deep, the island arose, and was called Anafe, fromἀνφααίνειν,to appear. What this etymology is worth for the Cretan Island, it must also be for the Lybian promontory: its present name likewise implies brightness. It is on the other hand asserted, that this is the new case oflucus a non lucendo, and that Anafe means,—that is, in Hebrew not Greek,—dark and gloomy,[6]and that the island was so called, not from having appeared in the light, but by being shut out from the light by groves.[7]If so, the Lybian promontory must likewise in those days have been green and feathered, and not as now, naked and pale. The Phœnician Backs and Parrys did not dot their charts with the names of the Admiralty Lords of Tyre. They gave names descriptive or commemorative, as the other names of this coast will vouch. That the name is Phœnician, not Greek, is clear from finding it here. We have also Thymiatirium, where Arzilla now stands, and which is interpreted in Hebrew—an open plain. Ampelusa was on the northern promontory, and its interpretation coincides with the descriptions left of groves delightful to the eye, filled with fruit grateful to the taste. This must have been one of the spots first named, and this name seems to confirm what we derive from so many sources regarding the primeval horticulture of this land. Had the Phœnicians come to plant vines, and gardens—that is, to cultivate and civilize—they would not have given such a name. These glimpses of the well-being in the most early times bring up the contrast with the present. The parched and naked brow of the once shady Anafe, further recalls an island nearer home, once, also, named after its forests,[8]where now scarce a tree is to be found. Would that the resemblance were complete! If Moorish rule has blasted the oak, it has at least spared the man. What Moorish rule has worst done it has done with a purpose, and neither on principle nor for philanthropy.
A quantity of grain was in store, and much arriving destined for England. The stores were filled all along the coast, but there are no means of shipment. This port is a principal place for the exportation of bark and wool, both managed by Scheik Tibi, who, last season, when the country was otherwise impassable, went and came, conducting caravans of seventy and eighty camels; by his personal character ensuring safety on the road. The schooner which had been in company with us during our voyage, lay on the beach high and dry. An English brig at anchor in the open roadstead was pitching bows under, though there was scarcely a breath of wind, and had narrowly escaped shipwreck two days before from her cables having been cut by the rocks.
There is here a sort of bay. The southern horn is a headland running a little way out, and distant four or five miles. On its bald black brow I was told that traces of the Phœnician city were to be seen. I was all impatience to reach the spot, for it was just a site for them, and no one since would have gone there. So here was the site of a Lybo-Phœnician city, and any fragment was precious. I found nothing standing, yet was not disappointed; for the stones in the fields were rolled fragments of building: the mortar was of such consistency that it wore or split only with the stones imbedded in it, and these were crystalline: the stones were small, the mortar abundant; the masses looked like amygdaloid. For the first time was I assured that I beheld a piece of Tyrian rubble. I would have travelled many a mile for this. Mortar was used by them—and what mortar! But this was not the only architectural point I had to mark this day.
As I sat on the brow of the headland, watching the great waves which went and came over long shelves of rocks, stretching out to the west and southward in the line of the declining sun, and playing under his rays, my eye was attracted to a singular mass immediately below: it was a cone indented all over with deep semicircular cavities, and, therefore, bristling with truncated points. The sandstone hollows out in this manner[9]by the action of the water, and the points which are left are sharp as a knife. The substance is black and porous, like a sponge. When the foam dashed over this rock, the basins filled; the white froth, as the wave retired, poured in cataracts from basin to basin, on every side, and so continued almost till the next long wave came to shroud it in spray, and replenish it with foam. As I watched these changes, familiar forms floated before me, till at last becoming more distinct, I distinguished those singular pendants that belong to the Moorish vault, and the indentures of its arch. The stalactites of caverns might have furnished the type of the last, but could not of the former. The fair creations of art have models in Nature, and here is that of the Moorish. The substance in which it is exhibited lines the whole coast, and must present an infinite variety of such effects. I had few occasions of seeing that coast, but the very next time I reached it, about twenty miles north of Rabat, I saw the same figure reversed, or as we see it in the Moresco vault, depending from the roof like the stalactites in a cave.[10]
I returned to the same place next morning, but the tide was out, and the rock without the foam was a common stone. The ledges of rock which the evening before had been so lashed by the waves, were white (quartz) rock. On them were patches of coarse recent madrepores, looking like gigantic sponges. Further out the rocks were black, and on inspection proved to be so because completely covered with mussels, the largest I have ever seen, and the finest I have ever tasted. Such is the fury of the waves, that beautifully-rounded quartz-stones, some of them three-quarters of a hundred weight, have been cast up into a bank thirty feet above high-water-mark.
Amongst the mass of ruins within the walls of Dar el Baida one building alone could be made out. It was a bath. If London or Paris were laid low, no such monument would survive of their taste, luxury, or cleanliness. The people called it “Roman,” meaning Portuguese. When I was at Algesiras, some excavations were making, and on examining them, the building proved to be a bath. Within the circuit of the walls of old Ceuta, which unquestionably belonged to a very remote period, the only edifice, the purpose of which is distinguishable, is a bath. The vestiges of the Romans, which from time to time we fall upon in our island, are baths. The Romans and the Saracens were the most remarkable of conquerors, and are associated in the relics which they have left-fortresses and baths. The first is of necessity, but how should the second be ever found conjoined, unless it played some part in forming that temper which made them great, or in conferring on them those manners which rendered them acceptable? A nation without the bath is deprived of a large portion of the health and inoffensive enjoyment within man’s reach: it therefore increases the value of a people to itself, and its power as a nation over other people. From what I know of the loss in both respects which those incur who have it not, I can estimate its worth to those who had it.
I now had the opportunity of examining a public bath of the Moors belonging to their good times. The disposition varies from that of the ancient Thermæ and the modern Hamams. The grand and noble portion of the Turkish and the ancient bath was a dome, open to the heavens in the centre. Such a one, but not open in the centre, is here; it was the inner not the outer apartment. The vault has deep ribs, in the fashion of a clam shell, and is supported upon columns with horse-shoe arches spreading between. Instead of a system of flues through the walls, only one passed through the centre under the floor. To get at it, I had to break through the pavement of beaten mortar covering a slab of marble. It was nearly filled up with a deposit, partly of soot and partly of earthy matter, which I imagined to be the residuum of gazule, on the use of which hinge the peculiarities I have noticed in the structure and distribution of the building.
I turned to Leo Africanus, expecting a flood of light upon a matter with which he must have been so familiar. All I found was this:—“When any one is to be bathed, they lay him along the ground,anointing him with certain ointmentand with certaininstruments clearing away his filth.” The ointment is evidently the gazule; the instrument can only be thestrigil. He mentions a “Festival of the Baths.” The servants and officers go forth with trumpets and pipes, and all their friends, to gathera wild onion; it is put in a brazen vessel, covered over with a linen cloth, which had been steeped in lees of wine; this they bring with great solemnity and rejoicings, and suspend in the vessel in the portal of the bath. This would indicate an Egyptian source, were it not for the absence of all trace of the bath on their storied walls, and among their ruins.
The onion, however, being the emblem of the planetary system,[11]may be a trace of Sabæism. The festival and ceremony savour much of those of the “Great Mother,” and of course preceded Christianity. No original superstition arose here; no original bath appears among the Arabs. The Phœnicians brought their religion and found the bath, and to it the people adapted the new religious practices.
Part of the funereal rites of the Moors was to convey the corpse to the bath.[12]Such a practice is unknown in any other country, and seems to identify the bath with the primitive usages.
The gazule furnishes, however, the strongest intrinsic evidence in favour of my conclusion, which indeed it requires but scanty proof to establish, for the rudest people may have had the bath. The Red Indians are fully acquainted with it, and the means they employ are heated stones and a leather covering. They crawl in and throw water on the stones, and soak till the same effect is produced as the Balnea of Rome obtained. In Morocco they are of primitive and modest structure, and of diminutive proportions. Add to this, the rude simplicity of the process, and the exclusive use in them of natural and native productions. Before coming to this point, I wish to refer to historical evidence.
Augustus borrowed a stool, calledduretum,[13]from Spain. Mauritania was inhabited by the same people, so that two thousand years ago the Romans copied the Moors.
Few Iberian words have come down to us—one of them isstrigil. It applied to a species of metal; and strigils were made of metal. The early use of this strigil, and its connection with the East, is shown by one of the celebrated bronzes of antiquity—a group of two boys in the bath using the strigil, which was attributed to Dædalus.[14]The Etruscans and Lydians also had it.[15]
The Phæacians, as elsewhere shown, were Phœnicians. Homer mentions their baths at the time of the Trojan war, when the Greeks had none. The termἩρακλεία λούτραseems to identify baths with that people as much as letters were by the termΚαδμεία γράμματα; and as the Greeks got everything from them, the baths of the Greeks are in themselves a testimony in favour of the Phœnicians, my inference being, not that the Phœnicians brought thither the tice, but that they learnt it here.
That the Arabs, when they issued from their deserts, should have adopted the Thermæ and Balnea of the sinking Roman empire, does not necessarily follow; indeed it is rather to be assumed that they would not, and that it was from a people who became by religion incorporated with them, and from whom, indubitably, they derived their architecture, that they had it. This view is supported by the use of the glove, which is not Roman, and the disuse of the strigil, which was so. It would thus appear that Morocco had conferred on antiquity and the East of the present day, the chief luxury of the one, and the most beneficial habit of the other.
There being a bath in the unoccupied house of the Governor of the Province, I made the attempt to complete my investigation by experience, and privately applied to the guardian of the mansion, who, to my surprise, immediately acceded to my request. Soon after, he came to inform me that the Caïd had been very angry, and had forbidden him to let me use it. It was suggested that there were mollifying methods, such as a civil message, a box of tea and some loaves of sugar. While these were preparing, an elderly Moor walked in and seated himself. This was no other than the Caïd. He plunged at oncein medias res, and the following dialogue ensued.
Caïd.No Christian or Jew can go to the bath. It is forbidden by our law.
Can a law forbid what it enjoins?
Caïd.It is the law.
Where is that law?
Caïd.(After a pause.) The wise men say there is such a law.
The wise man is he who speaks about what he knows.
Caïd.Do the wise men err?
Have you read the book?
Caïd.I have heard it read.
Did you hear the word—the Jews and Christians shall not bathe?
Caïd.I may or may not have heard.
I have read the book, and have not seen that word, for in it there is no name for bath. The Mussulmans, when they came to “the West,” found the bath in your towns as they are to-day, and here first learned how to bathe, and you were then Christians. How then do you say you have a law which forbids the Jews or the Christians to go to the bath?
Caïd.(laughing). The Nazarenes are cunning. In what Mussulman land do Christians go to the bath?
Missir, is it not a Mussulman land? Stamboul (Constantinople), is it not a Mussulman land? Now, I will ask you questions. Where, except in this dark West, do Christians not go to the bath with the Mussulmans? Why do I want to go to the bath? Have we got the bath in Europe? From whom did I learn it?
Caïd.How can I tell?
I have gone to the bath with doctors of the law (Oulema), and Rejals of the Ali Osman Doulet: I have been shampooed by vizirs. From Mussulmans I have learned how to wash myself, and here I come to Mussulmans, and they say, “You shall not bathe.” This is not Islam, this isJahilic.[16]
Caïd.You shall not say our faces are black. You shall go, but—only once. To-morrow I will keep the key: it shall be heated when the Mussulmans are asleep. I will come, and you shall go and be satisfied.
He then got up and walked off. Presently a sheep arrived as an earnest and propitiation.
It was so often and so confidently repeated to me by the resident Europeans that I could place no reliance upon his word, that I gave up all idea of it. Next night, as we were disposing our beds and preparing to occupy them, there was a rap at the door, and on its being opened, who should walk in but the Caïd. His abrupt salutation was, “The bath is ready—come.” While I was re-dressing, he told us that he had forgotten, and having business of importance with a neighbouring sheik before sunrise, had started on his journey, when recollecting his promise, he had returned.
Finding he was making dispositions to accompany me, I begged he would not take the trouble; but not staying to answer, he seized with one hand a candle out of the candlestick, laid hold of my hand with the other, conducted me down stairs, lighting me and lifting me through the dirty streets over the different places, as if I had been a helpless child. Arrived at the place, he took the keys from his breast, and opened the doors. I thought his care was to end here, but he squatted himself down on a mat in an outhouse, as if to wait the issue. Every other argument failing, I said, that if he remained there, I could not stay long enough. He answered, “I will sleep. If I went home I could not sleep, for something might happen.” The deputy-governor stripped to officiate as bath-man. But for this weighty matter I must take breath, and honour it with a special chapter—a chapter which, if the reader will peruse it with diligence and apply with care, may prolong his life, fortify his body, diminish his ailments, augment his enjoyments, and improve his temper: then having found something beneficial to himself, he may be prompted to do something to secure the like for his fellow-creatures.
[6]ענפה, Anepha. Ramosa et opaca.—Boch.Pheleg.
[7]The spot is thus described by Apollonius:—
τοὶ δ’ ἀγλαὸν ἈπόλλωνιἌλσει ὲνὶ σκιερῷ τέμενος σκιόεντά τε βωμὸνΠοιέον.—L. 4. v.1714.
τοὶ δ’ ἀγλαὸν ἈπόλλωνιἌλσει ὲνὶ σκιερῷ τέμενος σκιόεντά τε βωμὸνΠοιέον.—L. 4. v.1714.
τοὶ δ’ ἀγλαὸν Ἀπόλλωνι
Ἄλσει ὲνὶ σκιερῷ τέμενος σκιόεντά τε βωμὸν
Ποιέον.—L. 4. v.1714.
[8]Ireland was anciently known as Fiodha Inis, or the Woody Island.
[9]The “Chaudière Falls” are so called from cavities like kettles hollowed out by stones of harder consistency getting into a hollow, and there revolving by the action of the water. On the Clyde the operation may be seen.
[10]These pensile figures are by all writers on Moorish architecture held to be animitationof stalactite. Nothing can be more absurd: stalactite is produced by successive coatings or deposits, whereas the process by which they must have been formed is abrasion, the salient points being obtained by the concavity of the intervening surfaces.
[11]The slices representing the orbits of the planets. We have derived our word fromOn i on; a reduplication ofOn, the Sun, in his chief temple in the city, called after him, where the onion, being the symbol, was supposed to be worshipped.
[12]Mision Historial de Marueccos,p.45.
[13]“Ungebatur enim sæpius, et sudabat ad flammam: deinde perfundebatur e gelida aqua vel sole multo calefacta. At quoties nervorum causâ marinis Albulisque calidis utendum esset, contentus hoc erat, ut insidens ligneo solio, quod ipse Hispanico verbo 'duretum’ vocabat, manus ac pedes alternis jactaret.”—Sueton.inAugust., c.82.
[14]See Pliny’s Catalogue of Celebrated Statues.
[15]Naked youths with strigils appear on a vase.—Mus. Gregor.II., tav.lxxxvii.—SeeSchol. Juvenal,Sat.iii. v.262.
See plates in Fellows’s “Lycia.”
[16]The word means “folly,” but it is applied to the period before conversion to Islam, and here insinuates infidelity.