mattings for which the town is still famous; the tunnelled passages
where indolent merchants with bare feet crouch in their little kennels
hung with richly ornamented saddlery and arms, or with slippers of pale
citron leather and bright embroidered _babouches_, the stalls with
fruit, olives, tunny-fish, vague syrupy sweets, candles for saints'
tombs, Mantegnesque garlands of red and green peppers, griddle-cakes
sizzling on red-hot pans, and all the varied wares and cakes and
condiments that the lady in the tale of the Three Calanders went out to
buy, that memorable morning in the market of Bagdad.

[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_

Salé--entrance of the Medersa]

Only at Salé all is on a small scale: there is not much of any one
thing, except of the exquisite matting. The tide of commerce has ebbed
from the intractable old city, and one feels, as one watches the
listless purchasers in her little languishing bazaars, that her long
animosity against the intruder has ended by destroying her own life.

The feeling increases when one leaves the bazaar for the streets
adjoining it. An even deeper hush than that which hangs over the
well-to-do quarters of all Arab towns broods over these silent
thoroughfares, with heavy-nailed doors barring half-ruined houses. In a
steep deserted square one of these doors opens its panels of
weather-silvered cedar on the court of the frailest, ghostliest of
Medersas--mere carved and painted shell of a dead house of learning.
Mystic interweavings of endless lines, patient patterns interminably
repeated in wood and stone and clay, all are here, from the tessellated