ROMANTIC FEZ

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 June 1936, Page 4

ROMANTIC FEZ

DELIGHT OF THE TRAVELLER So Fez is” a real place after all. One had thought of it all one’s life as some fabulous imaginary city for the dreams of a Kubla Khan or even designed like Timbuktu to fit a rhyme, writes Professor C. H. Reilly to the “Manchestei’ Guardian.” Certainly it was a forbidden city not so long ago. During my tew days here, in what was once the Grand Vizier’s palace, with its own entrance through the city walls, I have already met that splendid but inevitable English lady who nas always resided in every forbidden place. This one has been here twenty years, v living all the while in tne heart of the Arab city, the sultan of those days providing her with Arab dress and making the wearing of it a condition of her stay. Any earlier European, English or other, one is given to understand, was a slave.

That Fez, however, is a real place only makes it the more disturbing. Unless one is to succumb 1 to an orgy of picturesque bits, to a continual pageant of strange personalities, one has to fight the place from the start, for it is like one continual and continuous production of “Hassan” by Mr. Basil Dean. With a sketchbook in hand one might so easily become a sweet old lady whose dear little drawings are the admiration of the Brighton boardipg-houses. Every street is arched over or bridged in some way at intervals, and the sunlight shoots down, as Basil Dean would love it to, in shafts between the high buildings, picking out. a Rembrant face here, a donkey there. Where they are not built over, a trellis of vines makes an even better theatrical effect with sparkling lights on the moving crowds wandering in and out of the wings. If one stayed here more than a week the only decent thing to do would be to learn Arabic and go native. That would be right and splendid. One would at a stroke slip back into the Middle Ages, into a finer, simpler, even cleaner world, for one would wash before prayers five times a day. One can see that from the dignified, courteous mien the poorest possess. Burton and Lawrence at last become understandable, nay, admirable. MOSLEM COLLEGES

The guide books say the older city, complete with its walls, was built in A.D. 800, not so long after the death of the Prophet, and the New City, still so called, in the thirteenth century. There seems little difference between them. Both are equally ageless. Except to an expert, even comparatively modern Moslem buildings of. say. a hundred years ago look very much tlxe same as that of a thousand, so conservative is the detail, so the methods of construction. One feels sure it is all laid down in the Koran like everything else, indeed, I was told that at. one 01 the Medersas. or religious colleges, of which there are several in both cities, architecture is taught. It is, of course, in its interpretation of life a religious subject to every serious practitioner everywhere, but not in the way I imagine it is taught in Fez.. These Medprsas are really monastic institutions, like our Oxford and Cambridge coueges. The stu r dents live in, but are allowed to walk in the streets in special and very handsome dress in the daytime. (After midnight all streets are closed with great wooden doors). In their thirteenth-century hostels, the students’ rooms are about the size of gyp rooms at Cambridge, perhaps six feet by four, the only light coming through the open door on to a galleried well several storeys high. The bed is on the floor and there is a little hole in tne wall lor books. In contrast to these study bedrooms, the teaching halls are great mosque-like structures, but like the mosques, unfortunately, not yet open, to infidels. Where Fez differs from Marrakech, which has about the same population of 120,000, and other Arab towns here in Morocco is that it has, in spite of, its winding lanes, its absence of open public places, and its mosques and public buildings too buried to be seen except -from the surrounding hills, a metropolitan air. The other towns are country towns. This is the capital whatever the state of affairs. Its buildings are massive and lofty. In one quarter one passes great studded door after door, each with an iron symbolic hand to keep away the evil eye, comparable to those of Renaissance palaces in Italy. There are other signs too of wealth, like the elaborate carving of the soffits of the overhanging storeys. If one could see inside they would no doubt be like this palace in which I am writing, with their tiled courtyards filled with fountains and palms, and their rooms lined with richly covered but uncomfortable divans. The ladies would wear the rich silks and elaborate slippers .0 be seep in all the bazaars, as did the troupe of dancers who visited this hotel last night, and their music no doubt would have the same strange rhythms and their dances the same contortionist twists, so. strangely primitive, for the grave men, their husbands, to watch.

in this quarter of the town, in the narrowest streets, so that they can hardly pass, one meets magnificentlyclad gentlemen mounted on delightful little Arab horses each with a little black boy holding the horse’s tail at full stretch behind. The boy is to hold the horse while his master pays his visit, and has attached himself to •the tail so as not to be separated in the throng. These nobles, all tracing descent from the Prophet, the only claim to nobility, own, I am told, most of the land in the rich valleys round the city, which accounts for the absence of farmsteads and perhaps for the povertv of the little Berber villages of thatched hovels where the labourers live. A FAILURE. At last the French have failed. Their new Fez, fortunately and wisely a mile from either of the old ones, is an ordinary French suburb with sky-signs anil great advertisements on the buildings, and none of that elegance and suavity to be found in the new Rabat or even the new Marrakech. There are one or two gigantic new apartment-houses certainly,

but the mere height and size of these compared with the rest only give that irregular American appearance the absence of which was so noticeable elsewhere. Clearly the same architects cannot have been in control. The same clean and com fori able'electric railway, however, with its bright, happy little stations and gardens, brings one from the coast in as many hours as the heroic English lady already mentioned used to spend weeks in the fearly days. It brings one into the most glorious panorama of mountains and hills (among them the snow-clad Lesser Atlas) it is possible to imagine, and nestling in a cup among them, with an occasional tow-

er rising above the roofs, is the old grey city, round the walls of which one circles at a distance on wonderful French roads cut in the hillsides until one finds the gate one seeks. Then and then only does - one enter the Forbidden City.