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No wonder the students of Kairouiyin say with the tortoise, "Burn me rather than take me away." Outside the sacred precincts of Moulay Idriss and Kairouiyin, on the other side of the Oued Fez, lies El Andalous, the mosque which the Andalusian Moors built when they settled in Fez in the ninth century.

It is only in the tumult and confusion of the souks that one can linger on the edge of the inner mysteries without becoming aware of attracting sullen looks, and my only impression of El Andalous is of a magnificent Almohad door and the rich blur of an interior in which there was no time to single out the details.

Fugitives from Spain came to the new city when Moulay Idriss founded it. One part of the town was given to them, and the river divided the Elbali of the Almohads into the two quarters of Kairouiyin and Andalous, which still retain their old names. But the full intellectual and artistic flowering of Fez was delayed till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

You have nearly all the world; you have robbed us of Algeria, and Andalous. Why don't you stop in the sea, where you are? We shall not come to you. We don't like the sea." Seeing I could make nothing of the old sinner, so cunning was he, I gave him a piece of sugar for his little son, and he went away. But has this principle alone reference to the wild tribes of The Sahara?

Its chief features are: the founding of Moulay Idriss and Fez, and the building of the mosques of El Andalous and Kairouiyin at Fez for the two groups of refugees from Tunisia and Spain.