A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (32 page)

The noise is incredible. All of them, riders, porters and boys with boards on their heads and anyone else in a hurry, are shouting at the tops of their voices,
‘Balèèèk! Balèèèk!’
‘Make way! Make way!’, and if you don’t they or their animals simply shove you out of it.

Here, men with more time to spare, having prudently made way, greet one another by pressing their fingertips together, then to their lips, then to their hearts, crying ‘God be praised!’ meanwhile gazing into one another’s eyes. From then on the air is full of cries of ‘Peace be unto you.’ ‘And to you be peace.’ ‘How art thou?’ ‘Thy house?’(an enquiry which contrives to include the women without actually naming them as such). ‘Thy relatives?’ To which the reply is, ‘All well, thank God.’ Or, if it isn’t, ‘God knows; everything is in the hands of God.’

There are many women. Those squatting in the rare open spaces selling bread and vegetables are often fairly negligent about the veil, or do not wear it at all. Those who are better-off, who are buying rather than selling, are dressed in the
häik
, the equivalent of the
k’sa
, a long, white, fine rectangular woollen wrapper. They also wear the
litham
– as do some of the men but for a different reason – which is a white veil bound round the face, hiding what to the Muslim is the sacredness of the nose, ears, nostrils and the mouth, but not the huge almond eyes with the edges of the lids blackened with antimony, which are left uncovered like huge, old-fashioned car headlamps, to dazzle and disturb the beholder.

Most of these people are Arabs and Berbers, people of the Atlas, the indigenous inhabitants of the Maghreb, otherwise Morocco, or a mixture of both. Some Berbers are light skinned, so pallid that romantic theories are advanced about their antecedents: that they are descendants of Vandals, some 80,000 of whom crossed the strait of Gibraltar to North Africa from Spain in 429, taking Carthage from the Romans, and thus depriving them of their principal granary, as a prelude to their attack and sacking of Rome itself; or that they are descendants of the tribes expelled from Palestine by Joshua; or that they were of the race of Shem, Amalekites descended from Esau, or kinsmen of the Agrigesh (Greeks), or are from the Baltic, or are descendants of Celts.

Other Berbers are as black as Negroes from Central Africa. Some have blue eyes and rosy cheeks, which may be due to the familiarity of their women with Christian mercenaries and slaves.

There are many Negroes. Men and women dressed as Moorish Muslims, descendants of the slaves, who, when the supply of Christians began to flag and long before that, made the awful hundred-and-fifty-day journey across the Sahara with the slave traders to Morocco, as well as to Algeria and Tunis, from Timbuktu and Bornu in the western Sudan, with their children slung on either side of mules, their price a block of salt large enough for one of them to stand on, six or seven inches thick.

And there are ourselves. To tell the truth, now that we have succeeded in casting off our shadows, we feel a little lonely, going down into the souks of Fès el-Bali. Few of these Fasi even deign to notice us, however outrageous we must appear in their eyes, both in our behaviour and in our dress. If they do look at us at all, it is incuriously. Then they put us out of mind. They do not want us in their holy city, or anyone else like us, unbelievers from the far side of the Mediterranean.

I wish we could speak with them, these Fasi, perhaps become friendly with one of them, that is as much of a friend as a Nasrany (Christian) or any other sort of unbeliever can ever be with followers of the Prophet. They, the most reserved of all Moroccans, are known for their intelligence, their skill in business, their particular intonation – which is made fun of by other Moroccans who intone less well – the niceness of their natures, their argumentativeness, their avoidance of sunlight which might darken their skins, their alleged lack of courage, their appreciation of the pleasures of conversation and of, what some say is the best of all, their food. Facets of their characters that casual visitors, such as ourselves, can never know or experience, pursued as they are by westernized Fasi (themselves the living embodiments of the change they fear so much), and locked in the equivalent of a prison by ignorance of all but the most basic fragments of their language and divided from them by impassable gulfs of belief and antecedence.

Here, at this upper end of Old Fez, in the Souk of Talaa, you can buy painted hard-boiled eggs,
seksou
or
couscous
, which if dried in the sun will keep for years,
smeen
, green-streaked rancid butter to eat with it, best when it has been buried in an earthenware pot for a year – by which time it smells a bit like gorgonzola – chick-pea paste, the best mint from Meknès to flavour the sweet tea the Moroccans love, and other flavourings: red rose, marjoram, basil, verbena,
toumia
(which tastes of peppermint) and orange blossom.

Here, the butchers display their products, some of them ghastly to look on: flayed sheep’s heads, still with their horns
in situ
, suspended from cords so that the owner of the stall can attract attention by setting them swinging under the light of the paraffin pressure lanterns (this part of the souk is always very dark); miles of entrails, cloven feet chopped off short, with the hair still on them, tongues and eyes and testicles. Who eats eyes voluntarily? Are they bought to be offered to a non-believer at a feast as a
pièce dé resistance
, to test his courage?

Up here, there are minute restaurants in which, if you are not too squeamish, you eat well for next to nothing. We shall return to one of them later on, after midday, to eat
harirah
, meat soup with egg and coriander, or
kodban
, meat on skewers, or
seksou
and the stew made specially to go with it, among the ingredients of which are ginger, nutmeg, coriander, turmeric, saffron, fresh marjoram, onions, bread, beans and raisins or, if we are not really hungry,
seksou
with fruit, such as quinces, or whatever is in season.

Grander restaurants are hidden away in fine old houses in the labyrinths further down the hill. They serve such dishes as
bastilla
, cakes of puff pastry stuffed with minced pigeon, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, which is not as sickly as it sounds; and
tajine
, dishes of chicken, pigeon or mutton, either cooked whole or stewed, and dressed with olives, beans, almonds, apples, artichokes, carrots, or whatever else is appropriate and in season.

To dine in one of these beautiful dim lofty silent places populated by grave, equally quiet, picturesquely clad serving men, one needs a companion while the ritual unfolds itself: while the cone-shaped, lidded dishes are lined up, and while, squatting in what is excruciating discomfort on the cushions, one washes one’s hands over an elegantly embellished copper pan. Alone, one would feel like an unloved sultan, without even his food taster.

The Talaa Kebira, the street in which the Bou Inanya College stands, continues to descend into the Old City, past mosques in various stages of dilapidation, blacksmiths’ booths, a
guelsa
, which is a sort of halting place on the way to the Shrine of Idriss II, with lamps burning before it, some tea houses, and down through
souks
with endless rows of shops on either side of it, shops that are nothing more than cupboards with doors that can be locked at night, each more or less a carbon copy of its neighbour and, in a
souk
selling the same commodities, displaying almost identical goods.

In them the shopkeepers sit – telling the beads of their rosaries, the
tasbeeh
, which can be of amber, fruit stones or simply plastic, ninety-five of them, with five more at the end to record repetitions – hour after hour, year after year, dreaming of money and the
houris
who will be at their disposition when at last they are wrapt away to Paradise, scarcely moving except to stretch out a languid hand to reach some item of stock in which a passerby has betrayed some interest. Shops into which the customer hauls himself up, sometimes with the help of a dangling rope, to settle down, slipperless, for – if the object is of sufficient interest to warrant it – a long period of bargaining which usually ends with the shopkeeper feigning despair or exasperation and saying to him, ‘Take it and begone!’ Shops in which the proprietors take siestas in the long, torrid, insufferable summer afternoons.

This street also has some
fondouks
in it.
Fondouks
were partly caravanserais and partly, some still are, warehouses in which the goods and raw materials for the craftsmen were stored before being auctioned and distributed throughout the various
souks
. At one time there were said to have been 477
fondouks
in Fez. They are the equivalent of the
han
in Asia. They are built round a central courtyard in which the caravan animals were tethered, with storerooms on the ground floors and with accommodation on the upper floors for the caravaneers where they awaited the auctioning of the merchandise and recuperated from the rigours of the journeys across the deserts. Some of these upper rooms in the poorer sorts of
fondouk
were barely large enough to allow the occupants to recline at full length. The guests provided their own bedding but the landlord supplied each of them with a large brass plate, a teapot, teacups and a receptacle in which to boil water. On either side of the entrance gate to the larger sort of
fondouk
there was usually a coffee stall where what was generally regarded as the best coffee in Fez was to be found.

Then the henna
souk
, where the Moristan, the mad-house built by the Merinids, stands, in the indescribably filthy cells of which, well into the twentieth century, the occupants were kept chained to the walls with iron collars round their necks.

Down here is the glazed white pottery
souk
, the
souk
of the carpenters, a
souk
selling salt and fish from the Sebou, the
souk
of the eggs, a
souk
which sells yarn in the morning and corn in the evening, and the
souk
in which, until the beginning of this century, the slaves were sold, having previously been fattened up, taught some vestigial Arabic, enough of the religion and ceremonial practices of Islam to enable them to be deemed to have embraced it, and having been given one of the particular names reserved for them, such as, for men, Provided for, Fortunate; and for women Ruby and Dear.

And beyond these are the
souks
of the tailors, the
souk
of rugs and fabrics, the
souk
selling
haiks, selhams, jellabs
and other clothing, a
souk
where antiques are sold, and the
souk
of the coppersmiths.

And there is the Kisaria, otherwise the Market Place, which is not a market place at all, but the final labyrinth within a labyrinth, a network of covered
souks
, with gates which are locked at night, each with its own nightwatchman, as in the Great Covered Bazaar in Istanbul, and, like the Great Bazaar, burned down innumerable times, always to rise once more, phoenix-like, from its ashes.

In Old Fez, the craftsmen are members of guilds according to the particular craft they are engaged in. At the beginning of the century there were 126 of them. Such guilds bear scarcely any resemblance to the trade unions of the western world. Their members think of themselves primarily as belonging to the
Ummah
, the community of believers which, in theory, although it is difficult to know to what extent in actual practice a Fasi craftsman today would subscribe to this, transcends nationality, creed, and even ties of race and blood, a community held together by belief in the Oneness of God. One of the best ways of giving this practical expression was by becoming proficient in a craft, as a member of a guild working first as a
mubtadi
, an apprentice, then for long years as a
sani
, an artisan under a
mu’allim
, a master craftsman. The master of such a guild, who had wide powers – he could order the most draconic punishments for those who behaved dishonestly, for example – was the
shaykh
, the descendant of a line of
shaykhs
going back to two companions of the Prophet, Ali ben Abi Talib and Salman al-Farisi, and beyond them to Shem, the son of Adam.

Here in Fez, looking at the works performed by these craftsmen in mosques and
médersa
and secular buildings, one begins to understand that there is no division between religion and secular activity in traditional Islam and that what they were working for, collectively, was the Glory of God: in plaster and cedarwood and stone, in ceramics, firing the amazing, lustrous tiles, forming the bowls and vases decorated with the dark blue and jade green arabesques in the potteries out by the Ftouh Gate in the Andalus quarter on the right bank of the river, working in brass, binding the books in the soft red goat leather which required twenty different operations to produce it, 13 carried out by the master, his artisans and apprentices, the remaining 7 by other specialists, embroidering the single coloured silks.

Behind the
souks
, many of them reached by the narrowest of alleys are what appear at a distance to be the great honeycombs of houses in which the Fasi live, those apparently interlocking cubes we had seen this morning from the hill, none of them, despite a superficial uniformity, ever quite repeats the form of another; a lack of symmetry which is an inherent part of the Muslim ethos, and one which manifests itself in every sort of art and artefact, from the asymmetry in the design and even the shape of a Berber rug, to the near perfection of a keyhole arch in a mosque courtyard.