A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (31 page)

Eventually, after what seems an age and the
ábad
has been repeated for the second time, first light seeps into the world away to the east over the northern outliers of the Middle Atlas, and the
muezzins
go into action from the minarets, the only really tall edifices in a city in which there appear to be no buildings of European inspiration at all (apart perhaps from some now long-disused foreign consulates), announcing that ‘Night has Departed … Day Approaches with Light and Brightness … Prayer is Better than Sleep … Arise And to God Be Praise!’ The whole cry is repeated in its entirety four times, once to each cardinal point of the compass, in parts twice.

And now the Old City is revealed behind its crenellated, turreted walls. It is a city set in a valley, an amphitheatre or an open shell, tilted so that its western end is higher than its eastern and its northern end higher than its southern, with a river and other streams, most of them invisible until you actually stand on their banks or fall into them. All of these streams run down from the plateau up at the western end on which New Fez, Fès el-Jedid, which is not new at all, was founded in 1276.

The walls of Old Fez, thirty or forty feet high, twelve or thirteen feet thick at the base, are made of
tabia
, clay mixed with chalk and cement which sets rock-hard, and their angles are reinforced with masonry. They were built by Christian slaves for their masters, the Almohads, in the twelfth century. Many more centuries were to pass before there was any pressing need to import Negroes as slaves, to supplement what seems to have been an unending supply of Christian captives taken by Barbary corsairs or in battle – who, when they breathed their last, usually from over-work, were often added to the mixture to give it more body.

A completely Muslim city, one of the most revered in the Muslim world. We are looking at it from out beyond the northern walls up on the hill called el Kolla among the tombs of the nomad, Berber Merinid sultans and others.

In a few minutes the sun comes racing up behind the tall, modern houses perched on an escarpment above the lower, eastern end of the amphitheatre in which the city stands and floods it with brilliant light, at first honey-coloured, then golden, transforming houses that a moment before were drab rectangles of a shade that someone, rather unkindly, compared to unwashed bed-sheets, into golden ingots. It illuminates the green-tiled roofs of the mosques, the
médersa
, the Islamic colleges, and the tall, square minarets that are so different from the tall, slender, circular minarets of Cairo and Istanbul, some of which have golden finials and are embellished with ceramic tiles. And it shines on the leaves of those trees that have managed to force their way up into the open air from the courtyards of the houses, like grass forcing its way through concrete.

And as the city is drenched with light that is more and more golden as the moments pass, it comes to life. The air fills with the haze of innumerable charcoal fires and with what sounds like the buzzing of innumerable bees, the noise made by some 250,000 human beings telling one another that night has departed, prayer is better than sleep, wishing one another good morning across the deep, cobbled ditches between the buildings that serve as streets, or else having the first row of the day in Berber or Arabic.

The night is over and two sharply-dressed youths have already spotted us from the ring road and are even now weaving their way up towards us among the tombs and other debris of past civilizations on a motorcycle. They turn out to be identical, juvenile twins with identical, embryonic moustaches and identically dressed. In Britain they would be thinking vaguely about not taking O-level examinations at some still distant date. In the United States they would still be in the tenth grade. Here, they seem as old as the surrounding hills and are planning retirement at our expense and other unfortunates like us.

They are from Modern Fez. They live, we later discover, in what was known when it was built as ‘The New Indigenous Town’, the brain-child of the French town planner Ecochard, which is sited, with the fine contempt for the potential inhabitants which characterizes town planners everywhere, on a bare and arid hillside, the sort of site traditionally reserved for the poor everywhere. It preserves little or nothing of traditional Muslim town planning which might make life in it more comprehensible to the 60,000 inhabitants who find themselves hoiked into the twentieth century in this dreary place.

‘Hallo, Sir! I will be your guide, Sir!’ says the one who is riding pillion. ‘You cannot visit Fez alone, Sir! Bad mens, Sir, in Fez!’ And so on, similar tosh. Fez may be confusing but it is not dangerous, unless you play the fool at some shrine or mosque, or openly eat ham sandwiches in its streets. In fact we are speaking to two of the most dangerous people we are likely to meet.

‘Thank you. We have already had a guide. With him we have seen everything we wish to see with a guide.’ It is true. We have already spent an entire day with a highly cultivated guide, arranged for us by the Tourist Office, the only sort worth having. Now we want to retrace some of the routes we travelled together, but alone.

We both want to do this, but in our hearts we know that it is going to be very difficult, if not impossible. By climbing up here in the early hours we had hoped to escape, at least temporarily, the hordes of self-styled, self-appointed guides and touts, most of whom know less than the most ignorant visitor armed with the most primitive guide book can learn about Fez in twenty minutes. They infest every hotel and every place of interest, waiting for their prey to emerge, and their maddening and, if thwarted, threatening attentions make life such a misery that for many visitors travelling by themselves, as opposed to travelling with a group, the memories of innumerable encounters with these pests become the most enduring of all their memories of Morocco.

Eventually we escape, but only at a run, swerving among the tombs of lesser men than Merinid sultans to the ring road which encircles the Old and New Cities where, by a miracle, we manage to board a bus in which the passengers are so crushed together that if they adopted the same positions in the open air they would be arrested.

It lands us in the Place du Commerce, outside the royal palace in Fes el-Jedid, to the south of which lies the Mellah, our next refuge, the onetime ghetto of the Jews and there we find the twins waiting for us astride their motorcycle, and the whole boring business begins again.

‘You do not like Moroccan peoples,’ says the pillion-riding twin, a cunning ploy at this stage of the torture, when the victim, now nearly insane, may quite easily hoist the white flag, fall on his knees and blubber,
‘Please, please
, be my guide.’

‘I
do
like Moroccans,’ I shout. ‘We
do
like Moroccans.’ By this time a small crowd has collected and is looking at me as if I had committed some misdemeanour. There is not a policeman in sight. ‘We’re just fed up with
you!
NOW FOR CHRIST’S SAKE GO AWAY!’

And to escape them we set off together at a shambling trot which eventually leads us into the Mellah.

‘FUCK YOUR MOTHERS!’
shouts the boy on the pillion, before dismounting and setting off in leisurely pursuit.

‘AND FUCK YOUR FATHERS ALSO!’
shouts his brother at the helm, the one who up to now had preserved a sombre silence, doing a kick-start and revving up preparatory to heading us off in case we make a swerve in some other direction. All of which seems to prove that in Fez, among the motorcycle-owning classes at least, there has been a marked decline in the use of religious imagery, if not in the actual practice of the religion. A few years ago they would have called us Christian dogs and hoped that our parents’ bones might rot in their graves.

In the Grande Rue, we stop to buy a very large tray of beaten aluminium with a folding stand which took our fancy during our guided tour. A Fasi craftsman’s answer to the problems of the air-age, previously it would have been unthinkable to make such an object in anything but solid copper or brass and therefore untransportable. It would, nevertheless, give Air Maroc a few headaches. I only hope they won’t fold it in half to get it into the machine. While we are negotiating this purchase, a twin arrives and, in a decidedly threatening manner, demands commission on the sale, in which he has taken no part, from the shopkeeper. One would have expected the shopkeeper, who is twice his size and age, to give him a thick ear and send him packing, something I have been longing to do for some time myself, being something like four times his age and three times his size. Instead, the shopkeeper shows every sign of being cowed and frightened. Is there a protection racket? We leave them to it.

The Grande Rue leads into a big open space, a
mechouar
, enclosed by high, crenellated walls, at the far end of which is a gate, the Bab es-Seba. Above this gate, the Infante Ferdinand of Portugal was exposed, pickled, naked and upside down in his entirety for four days or years, no one seems quite sure which, six years after he had been taken prisoner while on an unsuccessful expedition against Tangier in 1437: after which he was exhibited, stuffed as well as pickled, in an open coffin, for another twenty-nine days, or years. It was here, also, that the Franciscan, Andrea of Spoleto, far from home, was burned to death in 1523. Here, too, a Merinid sultan is said to have had himself walled up above the gate after his death. The Bab es-Seba is not a particularly cheerful spot, but then very little of either Old Fez, New Fez or Modern Fez can be said to be exactly jolly.

The Bab es-Seba leads into the Old Mechouar, another walled courtyard, with, so far as can be made out with the aid of an old map, the Oued Fès, the principal river of Fez, flowing secretly beneath it.

Like the square at Marrakech, the Old Mechouar has always been a gathering place for story-tellers, snake-charmers, who carry coils of snakes wound round their necks, jugglers and such like, but now in decreasing numbers. A gate in the wall to the right leads into the Bou Jeloud gardens, which are a kind of no-man’s land between New Fez and Old Fez. Here we acquire several more ‘guides’, but Wanda manages to get rid of them by speaking only Slovene. Puzzled, angered and, finally, half-convinced and unable to understand her, they go off in search of easier prey with much fucking of our mothers.

In these gardens the Oued Fès emerges to form a series of pools among groves of bamboo, weeping willows, olives and cypresses, all of which flourish here. From them a waterwheel, said to have been brought here by the Genoese, scoops up water and distributes it into conduits lower down, which take it down through the gardens of the palaces in what was the Belgravia of Old Fez. Here the rich and cultivated used to live, families who kept their own bands of musicians, and here the consulates, around which the always very small foreign colony would congregate in the hope of not being slaughtered, used to be found.

In the Bou Jeloud Gardens, looking down on the abundant waters of the Oued Fès before it continues through the amphitheatre in which the old city stands, one begins to understand why the two cities came to be built where they were. Enormous quantities of water were needed for drinking purposes, for watering pleasure gardens, for fountains, for all the other more mundane domestic uses and for the ritual ablutions of countless thousands of Muslims.

The way into Fès el-Bali, the Old City, is through the Bab Bou Jeloud. A fine gate with an arch in the form of a keyhole and embellished with brilliant blue and green tiles, it looks old but isn’t. It was only built in 1919, but like almost everything in Morocco made or built by craftsmen using traditional methods and materials, it is an instant and total success.

Once inside the Bab Bou Jeloud you are in the Souk of Talaa (Talaa being one of the eighteen wards into which the city is divided), and as if by the waving of a wand, back in the Middle Ages. In it a street is an alley about 9 ft wide, in which five people might with difficulty walk abreast, off which lead innumerable alleys, no wider than trenches, in which it is often impossible for two people to pass one another without one of them turning sideways. For long stretches of their courses, these various ways are roofed with rushes, through which the sunlight, if it reaches into them at all, filters down on the crowds moving purposefully and apparently endlessly below, casting on them a tremulous light, as if they were underwater. It falls on men wearing a fine variety of clothing: skull caps decorated with geometrical designs, felt caps called
shashia
, like sugar loaves, with silk tassels hanging from them, turbans, hooded
jellabs
and
selhams
,
^*
and on their feet yellow
babouches
with their backs turned down exposing heels as hard as rawhide.

It falls equally fitfully on men in rags lugging bunches of live chickens in either hand as if they were bunches of bananas, or pushing wheel-barrows, the only wheeled vehicles to be seen; on porters bent double under the weight of huge sacks and packing cases; on donkeys loaded with charcoal, brasswork, brushwood, maize, newly-fired pottery, mounds of pallid, slimy goatskins on the way to the dyeing vats down at the bottom of the hill, or else on the way back from them to some drying ground on the outskirts of the city, now a brilliant red, dyed with what may still be, if a dye of the highest quality is required, the juice of a berry. And it dapples the boys balancing boards on their heads, loaded with round loaves which they have collected unbaked from the housewives and are taking to the ovens for them, and on the bearded merchants perched on corn-fed mules, dressed in a sort of fringed, cream-coloured toga, six yards long and nearly two yards wide, made of woollen gauze, which they wear with one end lapped over the head, a garment, called the
k’sa
, which gives them – for they are already stern-looking – a really awesome air.