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No Moor knows when it is time to call a halt and deem his house complete, and so the country is full of palaces begun by men who fell from power or died leaving the work unfinished. The Grand Wazeer Ba Ahmad left a palace nearly as big as the Dar el Makhzan itself, and since he died the storks that build upon the flat roofs have been its only occupants.
At each corner a flight of steps has been; two have almost disappeared, and the others are very shaky. At the east end is the Makhzan el-Mayah, or "smaller reservoir," an oblong of 7.80 by 6.60 metres: the waggon-tilt roof has disappeared, and the fissures show brick within the ashlar.
One sees portly men of the city wearing the blue cloth selhams that bespeak wealth, country Moors who boast less costly garments, but ride mules of easy pace and heavy price, and one or two high officials of the Dar el Makhzan. All classes of the wealthy are arriving rapidly, for the sale will open in a quarter of an hour.
Whether he sat outside the Kasbah of his native town and administered the law according to his lights, or, summoned to the capital, rode attended so far as the Dar el Makhzan, there to take his part in a council of the Sultan's advisers, or whether, removed for a time from cares of office, he rested at ease among his cushions as he was doing now, this Moorish gentleman's placid and unruffled features would lead the Western observer to suppose that he was a very simple person with no sort of interest in affairs.