Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 22, 2025
It stands in a vast empty space close to the Great Mosque: few people pass that way their footfalls are almost unheard in the soft sand; and the lonely tower cuts the clear quiet sky. The Kutobea is built of dark red stone. There is a pattern, alternately raised and sunk, on the faces of the minaret, the sunk part cut deep, the raised part carved and standing out.
The design of the tower itself the minaret is said to have come from Constantinople, as did the Giralda at Seville, which it so resembles. Of the mosque, beside the Kutobea, nothing was to be seen except its walls, and through an open door avenues of pillars. Marrakesh itself is supposed to have been built upon the site of an immensely old structure, the ancient Martok.
At last we felt a breeze, topped a low rise: an old greybeard all in white jogged up towards us on a donkey, a man running behind; a village lay below; but our eyes only went to one spot in the wide blue plain, which was spread out like a praying-carpet before us. That spot lay twenty-five miles off a single tower, the Kutobea in Morocco City. "Marrakesh!" cried Omar and Saïd simultaneously.
After leaving the plains of Marrakesh and its waving palm-trees, and seeing the tall Kutobea disappear at last, we found ourselves in the "Little Mountains," and along the rough road began to fall in continually with parties of tribesmen, Arab country people, all mounted, who had been commandeered to accompany the Sultan as far as Fez, and who were now coming back to their homes.
We had a long hot ride to Tamsloect: the breeze, which was westerly, was useless to us; the track led over stony yellow hills; now and again we caught glimpses of the Kutobea standing up very far away; and all the time the great snow-fields, on the vast mountains, close upon our right, looked tantalizingly near and cold.
The palm-trees wave above Marrakesh, turtle-backed mosques and tall towers rise among the gardens and gleam in the sun, but above and beyond every other feature of the far-away fantastic southern capital one watch-tower rises over everything and rears itself into the sky the Kutobea, built, according to tradition, by Fabir for the Sultan El Mansur.
Part of it has dropped away: the gilded brass balls, the cupola, are here and there tarnished; but the sun sets, and his indulgent rays swamp every defect, burnish and polish and gild corner-stone and fretted marble and emerald-green tile alike, until the "to-day" of the Kutobea is as triumphant as its "yesterday" of many hundred years.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking