Salé the white and Rabat the red frown at each other over the foaming
bar of the Bou-Regreg, each walled, terraced, minareted, and presenting
a singularly complete picture of the two types of Moroccan town, the
snowy and the tawny. To the gates of both the Atlantic breakers roll in
with the boom of northern seas, and under a misty northern sky. It is
one of the surprises of Morocco to find the familiar African pictures
bathed in this unfamiliar haze. Even the fierce midday sun does not
wholly dispel it--the air remains thick, opalescent, like water slightly
clouded by milk. One is tempted to say that Morocco is Tunisia seen by
moonlight.

The European town of Rabat, a rapidly developing community, lies almost
wholly outside the walls of the old Arab city. The latter, founded in
the twelfth century by the great Almohad conqueror of Spain,
Yacoub-el-Mansour, stretches its mighty walls to the river's mouth.
Thence they climb the cliff to enclose the Kasbah[A] of the Oudayas, a
troublesome tribe whom one of the Almohad Sultans, mistrusting their
good faith, packed up one day, flocks, tents and camels, and carried
across the _bled_ to stow them into these stout walls under his imperial
eye. Great crenellated ramparts, cyclopean, superb, follow the curve of
the cliff. On the landward side they are interrupted by a gate-tower
resting on one of the most nobly decorated of the horseshoe arches that
break the mighty walls of Moroccan cities. Underneath the tower the
vaulted entrance turns, Arab fashion, at right angles, profiling its red
arch against darkness and mystery. This bending of passages, so
characteristic a device of the Moroccan builder, is like an
architectural expression of the tortuous secret soul of the land.

[Footnote A: Citadel.]