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Claret-coloured gabardines were fashionable, and a black skull-cap inevitable. On hot days the Mellah stank; on wet it was deep in black slime. Once upon a time it ran close to the Jama-el-Kebeer; and when a hundred years ago the Sultan who had built the big mosque sent his envoy to examine it, all was approved of except the proximity of the Jews' Quarter.
For their sake some of the material benefits of modern knowledge should be brought to Jewry in Marrakesh. Schools are excellent, but children cannot live by school learning alone. Going from the Mellah one morning I saw a strange sight. By the entrance to the salted place there is a piece of bare ground stretching to the wall.
He, Pinchas, would write Judaea a real Patriotic Poem, which should be sung from the slums of Whitechapel to the Veldts of South Africa, and from the Mellah of Morocco to the Judengassen of Germany, and should gladden the hearts and break from the mouths of the poor immigrants saluting the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
And still others grow up in a stifling Mellah, trip unveiled on its blue terraces overlooking the gardens of the great, and, seen one day at sunset by a fat vizier or his pale young master, are acquired for a handsome sum and transferred to the painted sepulchre of the harem.
The Kaisariyah lingers in the memory, and on hot days in the plains, when shade is far to seek, one recalls a fine fountain with the legend "drink and admire," where the water-carriers fill their goat-skins and all beggars congregate during the hours of fire. The Mellah, in which the town Jews live, is reached by way of the Olive Garden.
None doubted whose hand it was it was the hand of young Israel the Jew. When the three old usurers had bought themselves out of the Kasbah, they put their heads together and said, "Let us drive this fellow out of the Mellah, and so shall he be driven out of the town."
But presently the wing of night fell over both Moorish town and Mellah; the traffic of the streets came to an end; the "Balak" of the ass-driver was no more heard, the slipper of the Jew sounded but rarely on the pavement, the fires on the Feddan died out, the hubbub of the fondak and the wild shouts of the shoemakers' quarter were hushed, and quieter and more quiet grew the air until all was still.
The Mellah, or Jewish Quarter, has lost its boundary, as at Tangier, and the gates dividing the various wards have disappeared too. Hardly anything remains of the city walls, new ones having arisen to enclose the one European and two native suburbs.
Your merchant of the better class has commercial relations with Manchester or Liverpool; he has visited England and France; perhaps some olive-skinned, black-eyed boy of his has been sent to an English school to get the wider views of life and faith, and return to the Mellah to shock his father with both, and to be shocked in turn by much in the home life that passed uncriticised before.
In the south-east corner of the Mellah he placed it, and he built it partly in the Moorish and partly in the English fashion, with an open court and corridors, marble pillars, and a marble staircase, walls of small tiles, and ceilings of stalactites, but also with windows and with doors.
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