Salé--market-place outside the town]



VI

CHELLA AND THE GREAT MOSQUE

The Merinid Sultans of Rabat had a terribly troublesome neighbour across
the Bou-Regreg, and they built Chella to keep an eye on the pirates of
Salé. But Chella has fallen like a Babylonian city triumphed over by the
prophets; while Salé, sly, fierce and irrepressible, continued till well
on in the nineteenth century to breed pirates and fanatics.

The ruins of Chella lie on the farther side of the plateau above the
native town of Rabat. The mighty wall enclosing them faces the city wall
of Rabat, looking at it across one of those great red powdery wastes
which seem, in this strange land, like death and the desert forever
creeping up to overwhelm the puny works of man.

The red waste is scored by countless trains of donkeys carrying water
from the springs of Chella, by long caravans of mules and camels, and by
the busy motors of the French administration; yet there emanates from it
an impression of solitude and decay which even the prosaic tinkle of the
trams jogging out from the European town to the Exhibition grounds above
the sea cannot long dispel.

Perpetually, even in the new thriving French Morocco, the outline of a
ruin or the look in a pair of eyes shifts the scene, rends the thin veil