On the Shores of the Mediterranean (45 page)

An extraordinary site for a city, in the middle of nowhere, but built here originally because it was on the main road from Carthage to Hippo Regius in Algeria, which was the port of western Numidia until it was added to the Roman province of Mauretania. St Augustine was bishop of Hippo Regius from AD 396–430. The inhabitants of Bulla Regia, a place cold in winter, enormously hot in summer, later became Christians (from the third until the seventh centuries it had its own bishop). They constructed a city in which a large part of the accommodation was underground. Some of these subterranean rooms have mosaic floors, perhaps the most beautiful of which shows Amphitrite, wife of Poseidon, the god of the sea and earthquakes, and mother of Triton, bestriding a sea monster and attended by cherubs who are surging through the water on the backs of dolphins.

We crossed the valley of the Medjerda and beyond it climbed through immense olive groves, vineyards and fields of sprouting wheat, a vast
domaine
of the White Fathers, French missionaries who still continue to administer it under Tunisian control, to
the escarpment of the Teboursouk range, lunching in a small place called Dougga where we were given omelettes and hot peppers, salad made with delicious olive oil and wine vinegar, presumably a by-product of the White Fathers’ wine-making, and, strange in a place with large numbers of Muslims eating in it, jugged wild boar.

Then to the ruins, at Dougga, of ancient Thugga, a city with more or less the same history as Bulla Regia, but more beautiful, unravaged by earthquakes and less troubled by vandals of any date, with a theatre looking out over beautiful rolling country; a magnificent temple built of golden stone, dedicated to Jupiter, the Roman Zeus, Juno, otherwise Hera, his queen, and Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, otherwise Athena; and, more astonishing, if less beautiful, the Mausoleum of Atebamn, a Numidian prince, who was buried here in this, one of the only Carthaginian buildings still standing, at the end of the third or the beginning of the second century BC, and built in the style – it is certainly very Asiatic in feeling – of the tombs of the Syrian kings. Neither very well executed nor very beautiful, it originally rose to a height of more than fifty feet, a pile of huge limestone blocks, each successive storey of which was decorated with pilasters, the whole construction being crowned by a small pyramid with the figure of a lion on top of it. The top sections of this rare monument were destroyed not by Vandals, or even by equally iconoclastic Arabs, but by Sir Thomas Reade, British Consul in Tunis, who, in 1842, obtained the permission of the then Bey of Tunis to knock it down in order to obtain an inscription in Phoenician and Libyan which states that Atebamn was the son of Iepmatah, who was the son of Pallu, which he then presented to the British Museum. The mausoleum then had to wait for more than sixty years before it was restored, but only as a shadow of its former self, by M. Poinssot, a distinguished French archaeologist who was
responsible for a great deal of the excavation and restoration within the city. After all this we felt that so far as Tunisia was concerned, and for that matter as far as the entire Mediterranean basin was concerned, we had had enough of ruins, by this time having seen an innumerable quantity.

So we struck south to the interior and went down some 250 miles to the edge of the Sahara.

We stood on an escarpment above Nefta, in southern Tunisia, looking down into what is called in Arabic the Kasr el-Aïn, the castle of the springs, what the French called la Corbeille, the Basket, a deep basin behind the ridge on which the town stands, at the head of which, hidden from view in a small but dense oasis of palms, hundreds of sweet water springs, said to be 152 altogether, erupt from the sands to form delicious, bubbling pools. No men are allowed near this place, and the women go down to it to bathe with their children in the early mornings and evenings, when the little grove resounds with the happy sounds of their laughter. From the pools the waters snake away downhill, still hidden beneath the palm trees which here form a narrow tunnel, eventually emerging by way of a miniature gorge into another pool, formed by a dam built by the Romans who lived here, or perhaps by the Numidians, or even by the Carthaginians before them, in which the men and boys from the town make their non-ritual ablutions, after which it disappears into the depths of the great Nefta Oasis.

The Nefta Oasis is the finest in all this region of the Djerid. It waters some 187,000 date palms and gives life to what grows beneath them, pomegranates, avocados, quinces, almonds, pears, olives and vines, and what in turn and in season grows beneath the palm shade, masses of flowers. This system of husbandry was invented by a man named Ibn Chaddat who is buried in a
zawiya
, an honoured shrine, in a village called Bled el-Haddar, near Tozeur, another oasis town of the Djerid.

Here at Nefta, and at Tozeur, where there are said to be 420,000 palms, the oases, perhaps the most fertile plots in northern Africa between the Nile Delta and the Atlantic Ocean, stand on the very edge of one of the most infertile land tracts anywhere in the world, the Chott Djerid, a saline marsh devoid of life and vegetation, fifty miles long and fifty wide at its widest point, the biggest of a whole series of dozens of similar
chotts
which extend for something like 1000 miles in a great arc across North Africa from the Gulf of Gabès on the east coast of Tunisia, across the whole of Algeria and into Morocco.

Not only were the Oasis of Nefta and the valley of the Kasr el-Aïin and the springs that watered them beautiful; so also was the town itself, but of a more rare and strange beauty, which, although it was intensely Islamic, was a beauty compounded of worldly and otherworldly ingredients that had very little about it of the picture postcard, pop-art visions of what might constitute paradise. Its narrow, often unpaved streets, which were nothing more than alleys, especially those high up on the ridge exposed to the winds that blew in from the desert, which here lapped it on all sides, were full of driven sand, and into them the sewage ran from the houses on either side down little channels that had been made in the sand either with a foot or a human hand. The houses themselves were mostly single-storey, built either with blocks of gypsum or more often with thin, sand-coloured bricks, the walls curiously ornamented with whole networks of them forming geometrical patterns in high and low relief, houses that I could not imagine anyone ever building in the ordinary sense of the word, but looking as if they had been brought into being by some magician waving a wand over a heap of dust.

It is a holy town. Its people are Sufis, members of a strict mystical and pantheistic sect within Islam which originated in Persia, the earliest exponents of which lived and died in the ninth
century. It is said, although we found no evidence of it, that its inhabitants, of whom even the most closely wrapped ladies never failed to say
‘Bonjour’
as they swayed past, are not happy when infidel visitors show too great an interest in what are reputed to be, and it is a relatively small place, its twenty-four mosques and hundred
zawiyas
. Of these the most revered is the Zawiya el-Kadia, which is both a shrine and a religious school dedicated to the much-revered Sufi Persian saint Sidi Abd el-Kader el-Djilani, the founder of the Kadria brotherhood, who is buried in a
marabout
, a chapel, near Oran, in Algeria.

The sun set while we were looking at this scene and when it was down, in the last of the light everything – the town, up to which the heavily swathed ladies were now hurrying homeward from the springs, the Oasis and the Chott beyond – was the colour of pearls.

The Chott stretched away for what seemed to be for ever into the distance, fifty miles of mud and salt, pale and mysterious, which when it rained turned into a sea that could and did engulf men and animals, across which, until the building of a causeway, the only way was along the line of a caravan route, used originally by the Romans, called the Trigh el-Oudiana. And beyond the Chott, due south from where we stood, there was nothing. If you drew a line due south from where we were standing and travelled along it you would be in absolute wilderness for the first 1250 or so miles, and by the time you reached Calabar in southern Nigeria on the shores of the south Atlantic you would have made a journey of some 2000 miles without encountering a town even as large as Nefta, which has about 14,000 inhabitants.

It was big, the Sahara, there was no doubt of that. More than 3,000,000 square miles. The biggest desert on earth. Six times as large as the next largest desert in the world, the Gobi. You could put India and Pakistan into it and lose them. If you knocked off
Alaska you could get the United States into it. It extended from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, and southwards from the Mediterranean to the Sudan in the east and in the west to the River Niger.

I felt that I had come far enough for someone whose interests were supposed to lie on the shores of the Mediterranean.

It is not the
muezzins
, the regular summoners to prayer, who are the first to sound reveille in Fès el-Bali, Old Fez, which they do with such notable effect at the first intimation of light in the east. Long before there is any suggestion that the
fejer
, the dawn, is on the way, back in the middle watches of the night, the Companions of the Sick, ten devout Muslims chosen, like the
muezzins
, for their voices and provided for by a bequest made long ago by one who was himself sick and required moral sustenance in the night, begin their weird and hauntingly beautiful chanting, changing over throughout the night at half-hourly intervals. Failing this, half an hour before the dawn, there is the
ábad
, the thrice-repeated cry of praise to God which begins, ‘the Perfection of God, existing for ever and ever’.

Haunting and unforgettable though these chants are when taken up and echoed from minaret to minaret, they also have a fearful capacity for murdering sleep. This is one reason we are here. The other is because we want to see the sun rise over Old Fez, just as we had seen it rise, in greater discomfort, beyond the Pyramids. So we are out beyond the northern walls, up on the hill called el Kolla, among the
kubbas
, the tombs of the Merinid Sultans, the nomad Berbers from the Sahara, looking in the direction of Old Fez and also of New Fez, which stands beside and above it.

Now cocks crow and packs of dogs howl and bark and bite one another on the outskirts, just as they did on the outskirts of Cetinje in Montenegro, just as they still do on the outskirts of any oriental city, which they are welcome to do, just so long as they don’t bite me. We can hear them out beyond the walls, in the orange, apricot, pomegranate and olive groves which now invest them at an ever-increasing distance, out there in the
msallas
, the great open-air praying places, out on the stony hillsides where the prickly pears grow, around the strongholds built by various conquerors to dominate the Old City without the necessity of getting too close to it, out among the
kubbas
and the
zawiyas
, the tombs and shrines of the illustrious and saintly dead, tombs around which cults, some of them rather strange cults, have arisen, such as that at the tenth-century tomb of Sidi Boujida, where young wives, swathed in white, who have lost their husbands’ esteem, pray to recover it.

Eventually, after what seems an age and the
ábad
has been repeated for the second time, first light seeps into the world away to the east over the northern outliers of the Middle Atlas, and the
muezzins
go into action from the minarets, the only really tall edifices in a city in which there appear to be no buildings of European inspiration at all (apart perhaps from some now
long-disused foreign consulates), announcing that ‘Night has Departed … Day Approaches with Light and Brightness … Prayer is Better than Sleep … Arise and to God Be Praise!’ The whole cry is repeated in its entirety four times, once to each cardinal point of the compass, in parts twice.

And now the Old City is revealed behind its crenellated, turreted walls. It is a city set in a valley, an amphitheatre or an open shell, tilted so that its western end is higher than its eastern and its northern end higher than its southern, with a river and other streams, most of them invisible until you actually stand on their banks or fall into them. All of these streams run down from the plateau up at the western end on which New Fez, Fès el-Jedid, which is not new at all, was founded in 1276.

The walls of Old Fez, thirty or forty feet high, twelve or thirteen feet thick at the base, are made of
tabia
, clay mixed with chalk and cement which sets rock-hard, and their angles are reinforced with masonry. They were built by Christian slaves for their masters, the Almohads, in the twelfth century. Many more centuries were to pass before there was any pressing need to import Negroes as slaves, to supplement what seems to have been an unending supply of Christian captives taken by Barbary corsairs or in battle – who, when they breathed their last, usually from over-work, were often added to the mixture to give it more body.

A completely Muslim city, one of the most revered in the Muslim world.

At this moment the city is still quiet. There are no motor vehicles, no motorcycles, not even a bicycle within its walls now, or at any time. Almost the only wheels to be found in it are water wheels, wheels that form parts of machines and the wheels of wheelbarrows. Now, with the coming of the day, even the dogs have fallen silent and dispersed. Apart from the
muezzins
, and some of them may be on tape, it could be a city of the dead.

But not for long. In a few minutes the sun comes racing up behind the tall, modern houses perched on an escarpment above the lower, eastern end of the amphitheatre in which the city stands and floods it with brilliant light, at first honey-coloured, then golden, transforming houses that a moment before were drab rectangles of a shade that someone, rather unkindly, compared to unwashed bedsheets, into golden ingots. It illuminates the green-tiled roofs of the mosques, the
medersa
, the Islamic colleges, and the tall, square minarets that are so different from the tall, slender, circular minarets of Cairo and Istanbul, some of which have golden finials and are embellished with ceramic tiles. And it shines on the leaves of those trees that have managed to force their way up into the open air from the courtyards of the houses, like grass forcing its way through concrete.

And as the city is drenched with light that is more and more golden as the moments pass, it comes to life. The air fills with the haze of innumerable charcoal fires and with what sounds like the buzzing of innumerable bees, the noise made by some 250,000 human beings telling one another that night has departed, prayer is better than sleep, wishing one another good morning across the deep, cobbled ditches between the buildings that serve as streets, or else having the first row of the day in Berber or Arabic.

There is perhaps no other city in the western world which exists so much out of time as Old Fez. There are few that so resemble a beehive and, like a real beehive, once the sun is up and the air becomes warm, the closer you get the more danger there is of being stung. At one time it was only too easy to be stung to death in it, as many an intruder who had the misfortune not to be Muslim discovered. Now one is only in danger of being driven insane.

In fact two sharply-dressed stingers have already spotted us from the ring road and are even now weaving their way up towards us among the tombs and other debris of past civilizations
on a motorcycle. How
unfair
Islam is to non-members, in spite of all that is in the Koran about respecting the beliefs of others. If
I
rode a motorcycle through even an out-of-date fourteenth-century Muslim cemetery, I would be hung, drawn and probably quartered. They turn out to be identical, juvenile twins with identical, embryonic moustaches and identically dressed. In Britain they would be thinking vaguely about not taking O-level examinations at some still distant date. In the United States they would still be in the tenth grade. Here, they seem as old as the surrounding hills and are planning retirement at our expense and other unfortunates like us.

They are not from Old Fez, it transpires, or New Fez. Nor are they from Modern Fez, which is something altogether different again: a colonial-type city, founded by Marshal Lyautey in about 1916, after the French had set up a Protectorate, to allow the two older cities to continue unchanged in a way of life which was already showing signs of becoming anachronistic. Enlightened though such an aim then was, it has not altogether succeeded.

They live, we later discover, in what was known when it was built as ‘The New Indigenous Town’, the brain-child of the French town planner Ecochard, which is sited, with the fine contempt for the potential inhabitants which characterizes town planners everywhere, on a bare and arid hillside, the sort of site traditionally reserved for the poor everywhere. It preserves little or nothing of traditional Muslim town planning which might make life in it more comprehensible to the 60,000 inhabitants who find themselves hoiked into the twentieth century in this dreary place. And it has solved none of the problems it was supposed to solve in the Old City. In fact it has produced worse ones. One of these problems is talking to me now, the one who is riding pillion. The driver is the quiet one.

‘Hallo, Sir! I will be your guide, Sir! You cannot visit Fez alone,
Sir! Bad mens, Sir, in Fez!’ And so on, similar tosh. Fez may be confusing but it is not dangerous, unless you play the fool at some shrine or mosque, or openly eat ham sandwiches in its streets. In fact we are speaking to two of the most dangerous people we are likely to meet.

‘Thank you. We have already had a guide. With him we have seen everything we wish to see with a guide.’ It is true. We have already spent an entire day with a highly cultivated guide, arranged for us by the Tourist Office, the only sort worth having. Now we want to retrace some of the routes we travelled together, but alone.

We both want to do this, but in our hearts we know that it is going to be very difficult, if not impossible. By climbing up here in the early hours we had hoped to escape, at least temporarily, the hordes of self-styled, self-appointed guides and touts, most of whom know less than the most ignorant visitor armed with the most primitive guide book can learn about Fez in twenty minutes. They invest every hotel and every place of interest, waiting for their prey to emerge, and their maddening and, if thwarted, threatening attentions make life such a misery that for many visitors travelling by themselves, as opposed to travelling with a group, the memories of innumerable encounters with these pests become the most enduring of all their memories of Morocco. The rest of this band, presumably, have not yet risen from whatever they spend their nights on – I for one hope it is a red-hot griddle – otherwise there would be other motorcyclists up here among the Merinid tombs. No need to travel as far inland as Fez to suffer their attentions. They have branches in all the principal towns and cities and they do their basic training in Tangier, down at the approaches to the Strait of Gibraltar.

Eventually we escape, but only at a run, swerving among the tombs of lesser men than Merinid sultans to the ring road which encircles the Old and New Cities where, by a miracle, we manage
to board a bus in which the passengers are so crushed together that if they adopted the same positions in the open air they would be arrested.

It lands us in the Place du Commerce, outside the royal palace in Fès el-Jedid, to the south of which lies the Mellah, our next refuge, and there we find the twins waiting for us astride their motorcycle, and the whole boring business begins again.

From about 1400, in the time of the Merinids, the Mellah has been inhabited by Jews, descendants of those from the Holy Land and those who had arrived from Spain with the Vandals when they invaded the Maghreb in the second century. The great majority of Jews had fled the Inquisition and first settled in the Fondouk el Ihoudi, the Jews’ Caravanserai, up in the north-east corner of Old Fez inside the Guissa Gate, but after a violent attack on them by the Muslim population, in the course of which numbers of them were killed, the Sultan gave them the choice of apostatizing and remaining where they were, or removing themselves outside the walls of the New City. The majority chose to move to the Mellah, but others chose to become Muslims, which is why in Fez there are still, or were until recently, numerous Muslim families of Jewish origin, identifiable as such because their names all begin with Ben – Benshokron, Benjeloon, Benguessos, and so on. In fact Moroccans from other parts of the country, who are always happy to make fun of the people of Fez, the Fasi, say that half the Berber and Arab families have Jewish blood.

Mellah
is the Arabic word for salt and the ghetto was so-called because one of the tasks the Sultan set the newly-installed Jewish butchers, although they may have already been doing this work for centuries in their
Fondouk
, was pickling the heads of his innumerable victims in brine so that they could remain on public display longer than would otherwise have been possible, work
which kept them and their successors busy into the early part of the twentieth century. When Lawrence Harris, a journalist who worked in the 1900s for
The Graphic
, a then-popular illustrated magazine, entered the city in 1908 by way of one of the gates, ‘two sun-dried ghastly objects grinned down to warn us of the fate of rebels …’

Indispensable to their Muslim masters in matters of external commerce, finance, the clandestine manufacture of wine and other alcoholic beverages, the consumption of which, if not the manufacture, was forbidden by the Koran, the Jews had a virtual monopoly of the working of gold and silver – they made the needles used by Muslim women to set their hair and fasten their garments, their finger rings, their bracelets and their heavy silver ankle rings – and the coining of money in the Sultan’s mint, which formed part of the Dar el-Makhzen, as the Palace of the Sultans was later known. They also had a reputation, which they were not at any pains to dispel, that they were magicians, magic and necromancy being, as it still is to this day, a major industry in Fez and throughout Morocco.

Yet in spite of, or perhaps because of, being so indispensable, the Jews were hated, and it is a remarkable testimony to their capacity for survival that they did survive. They were made to go barefoot, although according to Leo Africanus, the great African traveller who was a native of Fez, they were allowed to wear ‘sockes of sea-rushes’; they were forced to ride mules bareback and wear black, a colour abhorred by most Muslims; they were given the job of clearing obstructed drains and of disposing of the bodies of animals when they fell dead in the streets; they had to be in the Mellah by sunset when the gates were locked, and were forbidden to defend themselves. The rule of the Sultan was not always strong enough to protect them from religious extremists; when one of the more enlightened sultans of the nineteenth
century, Abd el-Rahman, who reigned from 1822–59, gave permission for Jews to dress as Muslims, the first and last to do so, and some of them appeared in public wearing the hooded white
jellab
¹
and the yellow slippers called
babouches
, they were instantly stoned to death.