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Color and laughter lie mostly along the trade-routes, where the peoples of the world come and go in curiosity and rivalry. This ashen crowd swarming gloomily through the dark tunnels represents the real Moghreb that is close to the wild tribes of the "hinterland" and the grim feudal fortresses of the Atlas. How close, one has only to go out to Sefrou on a market-day to see.
Moroccan oases differ one from another far more than those of South Algeria and Tunisia. As for Sefrou, which Foucauld called the most beautiful oasis of Morocco, it is simply an extremely fertile valley with vineyards and orchards stretching up to a fine background of mountains. But the fact that it lies just below the Atlas makes it an important market-place and centre of caravans.
But into the Mellah of Sefrou it never comes, for the streets form a sort of subterranean rabbit-warren under the upper stories of a solid agglomeration of tall houses a buried city lit even at midday by oil-lamps hanging in the goldsmiths' shops and under the archways of the black and reeking staircases. It was a Jewish feast-day.
Until recently, therefore, it has been inaccessible to visitors, and even now a strongly fortified French post dominates the height above the town. Looking down from the fort, one distinguishes, through masses of many-tinted green, a suburb of Arab houses in gardens, and below, on the river, Sefrou itself, a stout little walled town with angle-towers defiantly thrust forth toward the Atlas.
Perhaps even in the Mellah of Sefrou, among the ragged figures shuffling past us, there were some few with bags of gold in their walls and rich stuffs hid away in painted coffers, but for patios and flowers and daylight there seemed no room in the dark bolgia they inhabit.
Sefrou is a military outpost in an oasis under the Atlas, about forty miles south of Fez. To most people the word "oasis" evokes palms and sand; but though Morocco possesses many oases it has no pure sand and few palms. I remember it as a considerable event when I discovered one from my lofty window at Bou-Jeloud. The bled is made of very different stuff from the sand-ocean of the Sahara.
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