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Updated: August 14, 2024
Their exquisite tombs at Marrakech commemorate in courtly language the superhuman virtues of a series of rulers whose debaucheries and vices were usually cut short by assassination. Finally another austere and fanatical mountain tribe surged down on them, wiped them out, and ruled in their stead. The new rulers came from the Tafilelt, which has always been a troublesome corner of Morocco.
Here are to be found not only the silks and pottery, the Jewish goldsmiths' work, the arms and embroidered saddlery which the city itself produces, but "morocco" from Marrakech, rugs, tent-hangings and matting from Rabat and Salé, grain baskets from Moulay Idriss, daggers from the Souss, and whatever European wares the native markets consume.
It is the square of the living now, the centre of all the life, amusement and gossip of Marrakech, and the spectators are so thickly packed about the story-tellers, snake-charmers and dancers who frequent it that one can guess what is going on within each circle only by the wailing monologue or the persistent drum-beat that proceeds from it.
The brief Almoravid dynasty left no monuments behind it. Of the Almoravid Fez and Marrakech the chroniclers relate great things; but the wild Hilalian invasion and the subsequent descent of the Almohads from the High Atlas swept away whatever the first dynasties had created. The Almohads were mighty builders, and their great monuments are all of stone.
This was more especially the case with Marrakech, a city of Berbers and blacks, and the last outpost against the fierce black world beyond the Atlas from which its founders came. When one looks at its site, and considers its history, one can only marvel at the height of civilization it attained.
Besides this learned bibliophile, the Sultan Abou-el-Abbas brought back with him an immense booty, principally of ingots of gold, from which he took his surname of "The Golden"; and as the result of the expedition Marrakech was embellished with mosques and palaces for which the Sultan brought marble from Carrara, paying for it with loaves of sugar from the sugar-cane that the Saadians grew in the Souss.
One is told that in cities like Fez and Marrakech the Hebrew quarter conceals flowery patios and gilded rooms with the heavy European furniture that rich Jews delight in.
In the bazaars all these peoples meet and mingle: cattle-dealers, olive-growers, peasants from the Atlas, the Souss and the Draa, Blue Men of the Sahara, blacks from Senegal and the Soudan, coming in to trade with the wool-merchants, tanners, leather-merchants, silk-weavers, armourers, and makers of agricultural implements. Dark, fierce and fanatical are these narrow souks of Marrakech.
At the various Exhibitions much space was allotted to these revived industries, and the matting of Salé, the rugs of Rabat, the embroideries of Fez and Marrakech have already found a ready market in France, besides awakening in the educated class of colonists an appreciation of the old buildings and the old arts of the country that will be its surest safeguard against the destructive effects of colonial expansion.
Not the scantest and toughest of rock-growths thrust a leaf through its brassy surface, not a well-head or a darker depression of the rock gave sign of a trickle of water. Everything around us glittered with the same unmerciful dryness. A long way ahead loomed the line of the Djebilets, the Djinn-haunted mountains guarding Marrakech on the north.
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