The Project Gutenberg eBook ofVirgin Spain

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofVirgin SpainThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Virgin SpainScenes from the spiritual drama of a great peopleAuthor: Waldo David FrankRelease date: August 8, 2024 [eBook #74212]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: NYC: Boni & Liveright, 1926Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIRGIN SPAIN ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Virgin SpainScenes from the spiritual drama of a great peopleAuthor: Waldo David FrankRelease date: August 8, 2024 [eBook #74212]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: NYC: Boni & Liveright, 1926Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.)

Title: Virgin Spain

Scenes from the spiritual drama of a great people

Author: Waldo David Frank

Release date: August 8, 2024 [eBook #74212]

Language: English

Original publication: NYC: Boni & Liveright, 1926

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIRGIN SPAIN ***

CONTENTSFOOTNOTESTRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

VIRGIN SPAIN

by WALDO FRANK

The Unwelcome ManThe Dark MotherRahabCity BlockHolidayChalk FaceThe Art of The Vieux ColombierOur AmericaSalvosVirgin Spainand Introductions toAdventures in The Arts, by Marsden HartleyCane, by Jean ToomerThe Plays of Molière(Modern Library)Lucienne, by Jules Romains.

The Unwelcome ManThe Dark MotherRahabCity BlockHolidayChalk Face

The Art of The Vieux ColombierOur AmericaSalvosVirgin Spain

and Introductions to

Adventures in The Arts, by Marsden HartleyCane, by Jean ToomerThe Plays of Molière(Modern Library)Lucienne, by Jules Romains.

VIRGIN SPAIN SCENES FROM THE SPIRITUAL DRAMA OF A GREAT PEOPLE WALDO FRANK NEW YORK BONI & LIVERIGHT 1926

Tothose brother Americanswhose tongues are Spanish and Portuguesewhose homes are between the Rio Grandeand Tierra del Fuegobut whose Americalike minestretches from the Arctic to the Horn.

Often, meditating on the fervor with which Spain has ever defended and proclaimed the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, I have thought that in the depths of this dogma there must be a mystery akin with the mystery of our national soul: that perhaps this dogma is a symbol ... of our being....Angel Ganivet.

Angel Ganivet.

¶ The wanderer upon the face of the earth will love these lands whose drama is the burden of my book, if for no other reason for the pure hospitality of their peoples. To move from the Sahara of the Arabs to Biscay of the Basques, is to move from hospitable home to hospitable home: is to be chained forever in the remembrances of kindness. Unto all my friends, whose names are not too numerous to mention but whose grace would feel itself abused by public thanks, my thanks, then.

¶ Acknowledgments more intellectual are more easy. Above others, I am indebted to Federico de Onís, Head of the Department of Spanish Literature at Columbia University. Professor de Onís, whom I was fortunate to find in Spain, carried me to his native Salamanca (whence alas! Unamuno had just been exiled). After my book was written, he took time to read the proofs and to give me the unstinted, generous, invaluable aid of his erudition. I must name also José Ortega y Gasset, the outstanding intellectual master of the younger generation in Spain; Juan Ramón Jiménez, the poet; Luis Araquistáin, the satirist and social critic; Manuel Cossío, the authority on Greco; Azorín and Pío Baroja, Spain’s leading novelist; Ramiro de Maeztu and Enrique Díez-Canedo, critical leaders in Spain’s cultural renascence; Ramón Carande, the historian, and Pedro Salinas, the poet. All of these eminent men of Spain, in long conversations, helped me with a hospitality truly of their land, to my search for understanding of a people notoriously poor in critical and historical tradition. Nor can I neglect to mention Alfonso Reyes, the Mexican poet and Ambassadorto the Argentine Republic, and Baldamiro Sanín Cano, the Colombian essayist, who helped to clarify for me that so urgent aspect of the Spanish spirit which is American. It must, however, be understood that none of these men is to be held responsible for the conception or for any of the ideas of this book.

¶ Much of the materials of my work has appeared in article form in magazines. To the Editors ofThe Commonweal,The Dial,The Menorah Journal,The Nation,The New Republic,The North American Review,La Revista de Occidente(Madrid),The Saturday ReviewandThe Virginia(University)Quarterly, my acknowledgments, also.

¶ Finally, a word by way of explanation. What I have attempted might be called a Symphonic History. Spain is a complex integer: some of the elements which compose it are known commonly under such terms as climate, geography, historical events, literature, manners, custom, laws and art. Since I felt the Personality of Spain to hold all of theseimmediately, as a body holds all its organs, I have essayed, not to discuss them severally, not to relate their passage and chronological order, not primarily to picture or to dissect them. But I have let them come, each in its measure and its turn, upon the scene: and like actors in a play, like themes in a symphony, they have spoken their parts. If I could have my way, the pages of my book would come unto my reader as a drama he sees acted in an evening, or as a work of music he hears performed in an hour. I cannot command this proper and impossible hearing. I can but pray my reader, in some such spirit and attention, to take the book which lies now in his hand. Let him do this for me, and I shall gladly leave to him the judgment of my failure or success.

W. F.

New York, December, 1925.

The sky of Spain is high. It is above earth very high. It is above Spain very high. It is separate from Spain.... It is a clear white sky. Sunlight is white in it. And the clouds are white.... It is a still sky. The clouds stand still in a great height and fixed as in a crystal.... The light of the sun becomes the light of the sky, becomes the light of the clouds, far from the dark red earth of Spain. Spain is her earth and her sky.... I am within the pasture plains of Extremadura. Behind me lies Badajoz....

. . . . . .

I have walked at dawn upon an ancient bridge of granite across the summer-shrunken river. The water curls and swerves through gold sand. In little steel-blue pools it lies deep; then it runs off in thinning saffron ribbons. Soldiers sit on black horses who drink the water silkening at their knees. The bridge swings in yellow arches. There is a bastioned gate cut with the conquering arms of Leon and Castile.

In the east, a low sun. Its horizontal hand touches my face. It is hot, striking across cool dawn. Badajoz is houses gray and gold over shut streets around a Gothic church. The sun is outside the cool city. On the Cathedral porch sit two old women. Their day has begun: it is to sit with open claw and to close on coin and to bless the giver of coin.

In my pocket is naught but the moldy paper of Portugal and the silver duros of Spain. I shake my head at the two aged women. “No tengo suelto. Lo siento.” I smile. She to my left smiles back. The other frowns and mutters. They are one, save for the difference between a frown and a smile.

Hairy goats clatter, swinging creamy udders. Burros pass with men and women, stolid, on their haunches.Through the crevice of leaning walls the sun lays a hot finger on my brow. My body is chill.

The bread in the fonda tastes coarse. It is sour and hurts my mouth. The coffee is tasteless ... a sort of gray heat ... good. Now I have a pocket full of coppers. I cross to the Cathedral porch. The two old women ... one, split by a frown and a smile. To the frown, I give five coppers, to the smile I give one. The smile and the frown do not change. I am in Spain!

The shut town is expanding. The sun is still outside; streets twist to avoid it. But the sun works. The city expands. Men and women are a melting on the street. Men and women are motes of life within the melting city....

. . . . . .

Badajoz is behind. The sun is high, and here the pasture plains. The Guadiana treeless wanders to the south. It is a thirsty river. It is a river homesick for the hills of its youth; moved by a dream of coolness southward, languidly stirred to win this dream in the south. Cities have no sky. Beyond the walls of Pax Augusta which centuries have mellowed from the Roman Camp holding harsh soldiers to this Badajoz ... now the sky of Spain....

I have never seen a sky so far from my head: I have never seen a world so sharp in my eye. The sky lifts me to a realm of visions. And as I pass into its moveless search, still I stand fixed within this graphic world.... Sheep bleat in a wave of dust.... The dust is dense. Curling, swirling, puffing, streaking down, the dust is clear as glass. The sheep are solid masses of tempestuous wool; each sheep is a writhe about four feet, about stalks of sinewed bone jerking it on. Here’s a man. A solid body. Hands crustaceous; face crisp skin drawn on a gaping skull: and over the skin porous as soapstone, bristles of separate hair, sweat, huddles of dust. The smoke from the cigarette cuts rising through the air. Over his shoulder, miles and miles away, a ruined village rests on the hump of a hill. Barbary figs stand at the walls of a splinteredchapel. Solid Spain! The earth is clotted, corrugation, furrow. In a red gulch a blackish water drips. And there are flowers, purple like shreds of morning.

Everywhere sky. So far away, and everywhere. Its apartness is a force lifting the broken things of Spain as in a great dance Godward. Dust and sheep-hoof, ash of cigarette, pound of the shepherd’s staff on the earth, swish of his chaps, the dog’s soft pads against stone ... rise all in this various clarity, as in a dance, to the sky.

. . . . . .

I have a vision which has not left me. I shall love this people and this world. For in my vision I have been born as they.... There is a Funnel. Its walls are the round, white sky. It is thewed together by the rays of the sun. And at the Funnel’s mouth is the mouth of God, speaking the words which are the things of earth. Down this Funnel as in birth, we fall. Until we strike upon the land of Spain.

a. Oasisb. Moghrebc. Ishmael and Israel

Inthe desert, night is reason; the day is magic and madness. This is a law of the desert, and of the desert dwellers.

The light of the sun turns air into an incantation; it is dangerous to man as the sharpest steel or the fire. And the air possessed makes marvels of the land. The sky is opaque like a baking stone. The sterile hills are in perennial motion. They are not hills docile and quiet for the feet of man. They are enactments of geologic drama. By æons they displace not man alone, but the first life that crawled. Each rim of the hills is an age; they gyre in cosmic emotion.

Under a cloudless sky that is too still, earth veers; and under the hills, sand by some magic teems with forms of flesh. The light on a dune turns it into a thigh. Far off the waste becomes a sea, a snow-field. But this exquisite flesh and snow and sea are aloof. Man is contemporary only with the birth and with the death of worlds. And the hushed counterpoise of life, which is his mortal span, is desert.

But with the night the world becomes a world that he can dwell in. The evening star, sending its ray through opalescent dusk, is a sun he can dwell with. The sky grows soft. The hills are shrouded like his body; they are compounded like his soul of silences; they behold a sky that does not sear and an earth he can walk. The moon strides like a master, subduing the caravans of stars. The moon is male, and human.

The world of the day is a world of violence. It has no water and it has no sweetness. It is the world of this life: best spent in marching, passionate-shrewdly, towarddusk. Night is man’s kingdom, his dear reality: it is a place of gardens under which flow waters: it is a place of measurable fires: a place of shadows and of meditation: a place of dew and of love.

Wonder therefore not at the triumph of Mohammed, master of lands of desolation, who leads his peoples still across a day of flame to the revealing sleep of his dusk paradise.

. . . . . .

This magic of the desert day is ironic; at odd places the irony turns smile. Just enough welcoming the smile to tempt man to live on within the toils of the desert. The name of the smile is Oued—whence our word Oasis. The Oued is a spill of water from the breast of a mountain. Hidden springs converge and burst the rusty slope; and there is a tiny river till the sands have drunk it. Where it flows, the desert smiles: smiles date-palms, fig trees, thickets of oleander. So the desert keeps its perennial victims living.

At the bottom of the Oued is the town.

The mountains raise their convolutions in a great struggle, ere they break and die under these southern sands. The heights grow steep. Water falls through rock, pours through curtains of brush that hang upon the gorges. There is verdure: cataracts of stone with silver veins of water, flats of sand where the palms rise seeking the sun above a precipitous gulch, water mills hid in orange-groves, terraced houses with many roofs and every roof a place for looms, for women. The water broadens, is caught into a hundred irrigating ditches. The date-palms thicken and camp like an army; the town huddles with its white walls windowless.

The morning sun comes late to the Oasis, for it must rise above the hills. But dawn dwells already on the desert. It is a subtle radiance of decaying night. Infinitesimal browns and blacks fleck the dim waste: these are the camps of nomads who use the Oasis as a trading center. Their tents are of undyed camel wool, strung low so thatthey look like camels crouching. The great slow beasts are at anchor by the tent. Dry grass is piled for them; they turn their delicate heads on the arched neck that fronts the body like the prow of a ship. Camel grass burns within. The Arab, swathed in his white burnouse, squats at the mouth of the tent and strikes his brow to the dust, saying his dawn-prayer. Unveiled behind him is his wife over the flame of twisted grass, and cooks and watches her children. On the horizon stand two caravans of twenty camels, bulging with dates. Now the thread of their approach writes upon the desert. It is market day in the Saharan center. There will be many caravans. And the wide scatter of nomads will close in like fragments of iron magnetized; making an irradiant design from the town to the horizons.

The market place is a low square, on the edge of the town away from the Oasis. One side of it is a mosque, a Koran school, a string of Moorish cafés where already merchants huddle with their coffee. The corner breaks into a labyrinth of streets strident with tiny shops. Upon a third side, the desert road cuts into the breast of sand-dunes; far away is the white solitary shell of a Marabout’s tomb.

The crowd is the town and the desert: an Arab world, drawn by hunger from far gold slopes, to make this thick and hardy organism. Most of the men wear burnouses of unbleached wool; their heads are covered by the ample hood and the skirt falls low over the inner jacket, over the naked legs, to the feet which are either bare or shod with sandal soles of grass thonged to the ankle. Time has dyed the virgin wool and use has torn it; the shreds and rents are fantasies in dirt. Within the hoods, sun-baked faces stare. The hands are talonous; the legs are like the tendoned legs of some great bird. And yet the dirtiest garment falls to the dust with grace; and the most squalid head is high.

The merchants sit on straw mats: they bake round acorn cakes on brasiers; they sell dates gold-dry, bronze-rich;they measure thimblefuls of palm oil dripped from reeking goatskins; they cobble sandals; they sell liver of camel andcouss-couss, a staple dish of wheat, flaked with vegetables or with meat. (Donkeys stand mournful, charged with juniper from the distant Atlas.) They sell dust and fragments of silver, potsherds, amulets against devils, halters, tea; they sell the dry leaf of the favorite henna. The crowd sways, bartering, laughing. The Arabic is vowelless and the burnouse is proud. The Arab is shrewd; his eyes glint, his fingers snap, his voice pelts. He is the survivor of countless children who have died.

Children not yet dead weave through the intricate clamor. The boys wear a burnouse over a naked body; the girls are bound in a thick wool garment that will announce to the men when the breasts bud. They beg, they snatch a date, they nibble. Half of them are blind in an eye. For Islam makes no answer to the Ophthalmia of Egypt: is not Allah good to the blind son, giving him fortune as a beggar, as a ballad singer, as a muedzin to call the prayer from the mosque tower? Blind eyes, ravaged flesh, hard voices—most of the children will die. And their survivors are these hooded men at barter.

Therefore, the men are strong: it is the law that they eat first and what remains may go to the women and the brood. Women are here, too. Ancients with foul rags to bind their bulging udders and their bony legs; ancients almost bald with hands and faces splotched in the henna. They sell wool or weave mats from the coarse camel grass that bunches in the sand dunes like the hair on a mole. Younger women hold the veil so that a single eye peers at the ominous world. They buy wood, slices of liver, oranges from the East. In the weave of laughter, guttural and fleshless, of bray of donkey, of rumble of camels like the ebbed roar of a furnace, twines the call of children ... the call of begging, the life-call. A hand plashes a drum, a strain of song rises and binds this chaos.

He sits between a cobbler and a nomad ebon-black with the drooped tender lip of the Semite. He is the blindsinger. He wears a clean tunic of white and his head is swathed in the turbash. His bare legs gleam like metal. His hands are delicate as prayer within the market clamor. He clasps the shallow drum; and his fingers fall like rain.

He sings the deeds of the warriors of Allah. From Mecca they came, and Al-Medinah; they spread from Araby to Egypt and down to Sudan and east to India. They brought the sword of the Prophet to the hand of the world. Like the sun, they went west; like Gabriel they rose into the Spanish north, bridging the sea with minaret and prayer....

Metal he sings: his song is sparse like shreds of grass on a sand hump. Five notes, naked, timbreless, make this intricate weave. They start like arrows, like catapulted stones, like horse-hoofs on the desert. This music is stripped like war; and like war single-willed.

The blind bard’s face is gray beneath the sumptuous swathes of his turbash. His lips twist like cord; his face like an engine discharges the song of Islam—single of key, terrible in singleness.

. . . . . .

The sun stands beside the minaret that forms part of the west wall of the town. The eastern mountain is gold and over it lies a pallid crescent moon. There will be moon tonight upon the desert! From thefondoukhs, camels are beaten forth. They are prodded to their knees which are then bound so that they cannot rise. And the fragile humps are heaped with the exchange of the mart. Great bags, here, oozed sugar of the date: now there is wheat and wool. Fifteen camels, lashed and hobbled, groan: then sway into the air like an armada moved by the wind of guttural call and staff-blow. Fifteen camels swerve through a narrow gate into the desert.

The town stands behind, low mosqued: the minarets rise from the flat roofs like acrobats. Palms make a misty coronal to the east: thousands of palms, mazed like a camel’s hair: and over all the sterile mountain, a chart of ages, working to the sky. Now, from the minarets comes a voice.

Alláh acbar.... Echhed en la ila ella Alláh.Echhed en Mohammed Rasou Alláh.Haï ala Elsalat. Haë ala Elfaláh.Alláh Acbar.... La ila ella Alláh.

It is the call of the muedzin. Invariable his word, his key: invariable the five points of the day ... dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and dark ... when from all the minarets of town, in all the towns of the land, in all the lands of Islam, the muedzin calls to prayer. The voice is of iron. Myriad muedzin voices, like strokes of some intricate machine, weave together, and bind Islam holy.

Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God save only Allah.I affirm Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah.Come ye to prayer. Come ye to adore him.Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God, save only Allah.

Belal, first muedzin, crier for Mohammed, spoke these words. They are a redolent poem: ecstasy was in them, and resolve. They have not changed in syllable since Belal received them from his master, a year after the Hegira, the year of our era 623. But they have hardened. They are a terrible horizontal stroke upon a prostrate people. Harder than bells of Christendom they are; harder than the Jewish plaint which Mohammed hated, which Mohammed strove to wipe from the ears of the earth.

The caravan has halted. The camels stand docile, pathetic, shifting their great loads; for it hurts the soft pads of their feet to stand laden, it is easier to walk. The men scatter and squat, each by himself, but each turned from the setting sun toward Mecca. The water of the desert is the sand; and with the sand the men make their ablutions. They place their sandals beside them; all that is unclean in the folds of the burnouse they lay aside. Their mouths mutter fast; their hands perform intricategestures. To swerve from the immemorial forms, even by a finger twitch, is to be in heresy and to be damned. Their brows touch the sand....

... For man is earth. The brow is his highest and his noblest part. Let his brow therefore, five times with each day, be lowered to earth. This is ISLAM....

The camels fall into the rhythmic swing which will not swerve while the moon swings over the sand and the sand swings under the night, and the silent men round the ocean of the desert.

. . . . . .

From the town, as from a smoldering fire, smoke. There are no chimneys; Allah takes care of the smoke. After the bright street, the house is a cavern. The eyes, refocused to the dark, observe a long, high chamber, its walls black with ages of grime, its ceiling stanchioned by wooden posts that shine like ebony. There is no table, there is no chair, there is no bed. Dry grass is piled in corners, and serves for sleeping. Four families live in this lower half of the house. Four women squat in its several quarters; about them nurslings, before them a little brasier to which the children feed chips of wood, shreds of rush. The women cut turnips, bake wheat for thecouss-couss. There is a stair that is scarce a stair: ages of feet have worn it to an incline. The upper story has more light; there is a hole in the center of the ceiling which leads to the roof. If it rains, the water falls through the heart of the house; but light comes in, smoke rises out. Here, too, there is no furniture. A chicken pecks in the crumbled floor; an old woman weaves at a loom. Her hands know an immemorial process of weaving, like the mouth of her husband praying.

The roof is the domain of the women. The street is for the men and all that the street leads to. But the housetop is the street and the playground of women. On sunny afternoons of the cool season, here is their escapefrom the drudge and dark of their homes. This house is high among the houses whose flat roofs move away in waving whiteness. A minaret thrusts up ... there is a gap, a square ... then the packed counterpoint of roof and turning wall and wall again to the green dense at last of palms, to the gorge of the Oued, to the sand-stretch southward where the sun lies in a mist as in a sea of opal.

The white roofs are gay with the color of women. Veils are put aside. Babes suck at ruddy breasts. Red shawls and red babouches touch the color of laughter. Women are carefree. Even the onus of prayer that sits on Islam is not for them. Let them but bear children and hold the good will of their men.[1]One woman, the rich blood clear beneath the bronze of her cheek, presses to her bosom a child who will soon die. Children come and often children go. The way of the child, to manhood or the grave, is in the hand of Allah. A girl, candid and great-eyed with a flinty note upon her luscious flesh, like steel on velvet, holds to her lovely breast which motherhood has not distorted from its apple-rondure, a babe whose eyes are already shut with pus. She will have a blind son—perhaps a muedzin, perhaps a poet: certainly a Seer.

. . . . . .

When the sun is good, many women follow up the Oued, with their brood, for a day’s washing. The river is gracious within its precipitous banks. The winter sun, sweet like our sun of June, has yet the reverberant Saharan weight. It strikes the top of the hills, it rolls down over the clay-maze; it strikes the level sand, down once more it bounds into the gorge, over drenched bushes, over hanging rock and fills the Oued. Here, knee-deep, with their thin gowns lashed to the thigh and the rondures of their bodies speaking, stand women: and the sun comes to them. Other women lay the washed clothes on rocks and with bare feet dance on them, mangling and rinsing in song.The sun and the vigil of the hills, and the town distant, release the spirit of this flesh. Allah is far away, and the pure violence of Mohammed. Women are pagans again, and the Oued has gods. Children peal. Girls let fall their tunics and their breasts dance with their feet. Old women have eyes hot with memories, as they watch the crisp bodies of their daughters.

But beyond the Oued, beyond its walled mouth where the water disappears in sand, and beyond the date-palms, lies another town. It is more drear than its graveyard. So far, doubtless, in old days the river ran ere it had clotted and shortened its way with silt. The town is almost a ruin. A few children play, but the houses are silent. No windows break the seared patched blocks of clay. The graveyard is higher, and it has a wall. Here one can sit and watch the ruined town and the maze of gardens by the Oued and the palms, and the present town and the desert sea. The muedzin has thrust his call to sunset prayer. The muedzin is gone. The sun is gone. The mountains are sapphires in a cornelian heaven. The Sahara moves in copper from the town: grows argent: its dunes are swathed in mist like women’s bodies in irradiant shawls. The desert fades into a fume of opal under a bronze horizon.

Intricate designs stir in the graveyard chaos. Between the head stones and the foot stones the thin earth is raised so that the body may lightly rise to Heaven. (Jackals and dogs, as well as souls, find the shallow graves to their taste.) And now, to meet this subtle stir of dust, comes music. Common notes, sordid notes, between the sand and the sky. Drone of men in prayer, sudden motley of boys who sit in a black room and shout the Koran, girl laughter, donkey bray, banter—a music secret as this world. It comes with the night, swift, like any revelation. It fuses with the graveyard stones, with the world. The labyrinth of walls, enclosing gardens down to the Oued, is one with it. Fig tree, palm, volute Barbary cactus, winding path to the river, muddy river stretch, litter of refuse, excrement,manure, fuse with the music and the graveyard stones, rhyme in the oneness of Allah.

A late worker jogs past on a burro. A Caïd—Judge—swings with his basket-saddle on a mule. Another worker sticks his rod into the open sore on his burro’s haunch. On one side of the glimmering Oued is the town—a wall with many breaks, cobbles on mud, that lead into alleys and that grow into streets. The walls, within, flank out into a square from which turn several streets. The houses here are open to the night, and on the doorsteps before brasiers red with coal, sit women. Allah is one. They wear gay shawls, striped skirts. They wear massive barbarous bracelets, anklets, necklaces. Their faces, in the gloom, are heavy with designs: brow, cheek, chin painted with henna or with kohl. From eye to temple run delicate starry lines. And the hands are henna-splashed. When man approaches they sing the song of invitation. Behind them crouching on their brasiers, freshening their faces, gleams a room with a samovar and a couch. Now, the classic song of lust from their still lips. The crystal and the song of Islam! One note for all prayer, one note for all begging, one note for lust. Allah is one.

The whole town has caught the day’s fair fever. A man sits with a metal pipe whose saccade cadence flies ... splinters of steel ... into the night. And women dance. They move in strange reply to the music. For it is violent, swift and lean; it is the clang and charge of martial hoofs. But the women are slow, almost imperceptible their feet; almost moveless their thick bodies. The arms wave languid like branches of the willow. The whole town in the dead day’s fever. Dance and laughter and flame blossom in the shadows of the street. A ballad singer sits among the girls: he sings of the chieftain whose head was left upon the field and how the Prophet came and joined it to his body, for the Resurrection. But girls dance in a rising tide of Spring. His hands upon the drum make running of swift steeds, his voice is a javelin: the girls move like their breathing breasts.

Here is a large blank house. The court is high, and all about ring little doors of oak. Below is a hall. Its walls are muffled in rugs, its floor is far under carpets. Before the divans are tables, and the tea is spiced. Men in white squat and play upon pipes, and their black eyes gleam. The music’s shrillness shrieks. Now come women. They are four. Unminding loveliness moves within thick brocades and clashing gems. The faces are exquisitely painted. Verdant and nervelessly, they dance. The body is quiet as a tree, the hands are pliant and susurrous like leaves. The male music works.... A stomach wrench, violent as childbirth, shatters upon the mellifluous woman’s body. Above the music comes a cry from her mouth; it is a piercing call made pulsant with the hand clapped periodically to the open lips. It dies; the elemental bodies stir again within the dress and a sleep. But the male music works. The women pause. The musicians turn about, so that they cannot see. With unfeeling hands, the dancers loose the bonds of their thick robes. They step from the splendor fallen to their feet; they are naked. Only the jewels flash and bite upon their musing flesh. They dance. The muscles of their thighs flow upward toward their breasts; the arms twine sleepy. The male music works. The stomach, sudden, as if in unseen violation, wrenches, cascades, in passional response. The shrilling pipes are visited whole upon the naked women. They shriek: their cry, overtoned, fluted, pulsant, marries flesh and iron: blots out the music, and the music falls.

The town is asleep. Swarming reeking streets of the town are gray and are shells. The walls stand white under the sky, and over the depths of brooding human darkness. The crescent moon, with the dark sphere visible within its horns, sends scimitar rays into the sleep of Islam.

A semi-desert land holds well the squalors and the splendors of its past. This edge of Africa is the western end of the world whence the sun slides down to the sea. The bleak steppes, studded with sage and cactus, rise to sudden mountains; snow fields balance palm groves. It was a harsh place for a great world to grow in. But glories long since dust in Bagdad and Damascus have still their form in the cities of Morocco.

The prehistoric source lives in the prehistoric mountains. The Moor here is Berber. No one knows who is the Berber save that his speech is kin to the speech of Abyssinia and Egypt. His villages are perched on the slopes of the Atlas and in the stony fastness of the Rif, much as the Roman found them—and the Phœnician. Squat rectangular houses with thatch roof form a semicircle on the crest of a divide. Below is a thousand feet of air and a torrent; above are the clouds. The houses are of mud and grapple like goats to the earth. In the low, flat lands between the tiers of mountain, the houses are round. Closer to them than the houses of Europe are the huts of the Congo. They form a full circle within which dwell the cattle at night and sleeps safety.

The archaic world lies whole in the stratified history that is the Moghreb. Ages before Christ the Semite scattered markets on the coast and Carthage grew great. Rome became a mere machine for periodic taxes. Roman order and Vandal havoc left the Berber untouched. He is a hard, dark, leathery man. His head is close-cropped. He is prone to silence. Despite the myth of the Moroccan Sultanate—that feeble creature of the French and Spaniard—he is still unconquered.

Between the coast and the valley of Meknes and Fez he has lived, sullen and declining. The spark in his eye, the curl of his black lip tells that as he has outlived a long parade of empires, he will outlive this French one. In such mood, he dons his woolen tunic broidered red or blue, loads his olives on his donkey’s back and goes down to effete Fez or Marrakech for barter. Yesterday he bartered with the Arab, with the Vandal, with the Roman. Earlier, he knew the men of Carthage, the silver lords of Tartessos.Heis a Berber.

Islam alone has won him. But not until Islam had passed him many times, conquering half the Mediterranean world. The first Arabs converted some Berbers and took them along, not loitering in these mountains. Berber horsemen were soldiers and captains in Spain. But the Berber at home did not stir from his stone somnolence. Córdoba and Toledo kindled fires that warmed the monastic cells of Italy and England. Egypt awoke once more. Mecca and Bagdad grew great. Morocco, halfway between the east and the west, was invaded by new waves of Arabs. Hillalians and Idrissides built fine towns in Algeria and Tunis. Morocco was surrounded by splendors. The mountains remained mountains.

Three hundred years the streams of culture flowed through this frustrate land, from Spain to the east and from the east to Europe. Now came a Berber tribe from the southern desert: the Almoravides with their great chieftain Yusuf. Twenty-two hundred years since the Phœnician had builded in the Moghreb, and now the Moghreb in its own name grew great. Fez, Marrakech, Rbat bloomed and their power spread to Tunis and to Spain. Many ages did this stubborn world take to blossom; many ages has it taken to die. The greatness of the Almoravides, of the Almohades, of the Merinides lives still in Morocco.

. . . . . .

Fez is the metropolis of a world that is gone: the head of a missing body. A hundred thousand Moors in Fez-el-Bali live in an age synchronous with the Crusades andwith the Gothic. The modern world is here like a mirage—or like a curse of Allah.

A river, plenteous in water for Morocco, makes of the hills a single grove for olive, fig and eucalyptus. The town lies solid, within them. Most cities are a crust of houses split into streets and squares. Old Fez is a solid carapace of roofs, its rise and fall like the articulations of a body.

Underneath the roofs are thesoukhs, intricate like the wrinkles on an old man’s face. These are streets of myriad and tiny shops. In one section there will be only goldsmiths—hundreds of men squatting before their little bellows and their little gems. In another congregate the sellers of fish, the vendors of soap and grease, the ironmongers, the makers of leathern ware. The typicalsoukhis not more than three paces wide; and each shop is an open box, slightly above the level of the walk, and large enough for a single squatting man. Overhead, is a roof of grapevine or of rush, joining the two sides of the street together and letting in mere crevices of light.

Back and forth in this myriad-textured warren move the Fasi. The rich swathe through on mules; asses laden with produce are led by uncouth Berbers from the mountains or by black slaves from the south of the Sahara. The human pigment is bewildering. The city Arab is pale as a dweller of the northern towns of Europe: the Kabyl is dark-skinned, blue-eyed: the Ethiop is black as the shadows in the tiny shops. Burnouse and turbans are pied. Vendors shout for the passers-by to stop. And from time to time there is a break in the ceaseless lineage of bazaars: the carved, closed shutter of a Koran school shields the incessant coil of adolescent voices, strident, wild, unmeditative—shouting the words of their Prophet. Along the bare walls of the mosques and the medersas, beggars are posted. Their stintless catch-word weaves with the beat of ass-hoof, with the thresh of human feet, with the shop-calls, with the chanting of students.

Each beggar has his phrase. It invokes alms with thepatronage and to the glory of a particular saint. It guarantees to the almsgiver a saint’s word in Heaven. He sits in the shadow of the holy buildings. The carven door leads through a passage of mosaic to a court, gorgeous with tile and woodwork laid perhaps with mother-of-pearl. The holy students of the medersa live in cells, mounting in honey-comb mass to the minaret.

From the crowdedsoukhs, streets toweringly high and sinisterly narrow twist in all directions. A band of Moorish minstrels moves from dark door to dark door. The voices of drum and pipe give forth a ghost of music. The voices are shrill like the calls of mountain life. Arab music was lean and violent, a gray fusion of thrusts. This song of the true Moor is almost disembodied. It has accent, but no texture. It stands against the intricate mellow noise of the city, enfolded in the liquid sconce of hills, like a savage summons. A door opens, a copper falls in a drum. The leader of the band gives his toned blessing; the slender men move on, weaving with their song a pall on Islam.

On a hill stands the mosque of Bab-Guissa (one of the 785 mosques built in Fez by the Almohades, exclusive of monasteries and medersas). By this mosque is the north gate through which the Berber from the Rif passes with donkey-charge of olive or of grain. Each donkey-load pays duty to the Sultan; and each appraisal calls for threats from the custom officer—degenerate Moors who are truly slaves of France. The Riffian pays his pence in sullen silence. And his non-resistance maddens the Fasi. Nearby is an olive market,Fondouk el lhoudi. The olives ripen in winter. Vast rush troughs and baskets hold the black fruit in the open Square, under the sun and the flies, and the sweating men and donkeys. With the barter come blows. A negro catches a bargainer with his teeth and is flung off with a ripped cheek. The crowd buzzes, deeply unmoved. The open baskets of olives, black-gemmed in the air, give an intenser note....

On the heights above Bab-Guissa are the ruined tombs—thekoubbas—of the Merinides. Their crumbled arabesques look down on the long valley of Oued Fez. A spirit of those ancient rulers could still find his Fez-el-Bali: know this shut and terracing carapace of stone, blue tile, gold ceramic, fumy beneath the sun. The old walls are there, too, although time and cactus have splintered them. And the mosques rise like a thousand claws toward Allah—the hold of the pious town on the One God.[2]

The sun is sinking on the Almohadian wall that forms a corner with the mosque Bab-Guissa. Soon will come from myriad minarets, the call for evening prayer. The mountain donkeys no longer lurch through the Gate; and the slaves of the imprisoned Sultan are gone. This rocky height studded with moldering tombs, this wall and this tower form a natural amphitheater. It is crowded with Moors. They squat on the ground, swathed in burnouses. Water-boys thread silently. All indeed is silent, facing down to a central point within the wall where sits a man.

His beard is white and his voice is gentle: he is a man with exquisite hands and manners of the Court. And he is speaking so quietly, that the massed crowd must hold silent indeed, if it would hear him. He is the Chronicler of Fez—poet, historian, journalist: one of the great sons of the Moghreb. Each day at nightfall, for an hour, he bespeaks in his own verse the glory of Islam. Each of his tales lasts three months: there are four of them to the year. His unemphatic words give to the men of Fez two realities of Islam: the splendor which was, and the splendor which is eternal. He speaks, not without humor; his immobile body radiates peace. He tells of the gardens underneath whichflows water—the Garden whither Islam somnolently moves through this demonic hour of wireless, guns and rail-ways....

. . . . . .

The capital of the Sultanate is Rbat. From here, the Almohadian troops set sail for Spain; and after the triumph of Alarcos in 1195, Rbat-el-Fath—“Camp of Victory”—received its name. Fez, in hills, is gold: Rbat is a dazzling white over the sea. The bou Regreg slopes down within its sands, between two gentle promontories. On one of them Rbat, on the other Sla—ancient cities, equally white above the sea, equally proud, equally hostile. You can row from thesoukhsof Rbat to the palaces of Sla in a minute. But these are worlds kept separate in an ageless confrontation. Time was when the two cities were independent; blood stained the sands of the Regreg. Each town slants to the sea upon a mighty dune; and this dune is a divided graveyard.

The ocean has opened Rbat. Its bright streets run with the breeze. Its masonry is less delicate and more resolute than that of Fez. In its soukhs is a tang of salt. The Moors themselves are less shut up. Though their burnouses swathe them and the women walk as hidden in their veils, an Atlantic rhythm has crept within these folds; the somnambulance is brighter.

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