The shade, the sound of springs, the terraced orange-garden with irises
blooming along channels of running water, all this greenery and coolness
in the hollow of a fierce red hill make Chella seem, to the traveller
new to Africa, the very type and embodiment of its old contrasts of heat
and freshness, of fire and languor. It is like a desert traveller's
dream in his last fever.

Yacoub-el-Mansour was the fourth of the great Almohad Sultans who, in
the twelfth century, drove out the effete Almoravids, and swept their
victorious armies from Marrakech to Tunis and from Tangier to Madrid.
His grandfather, Abd-el-Moumen, had been occupied with conquest and
civic administration. It was said of his rule that "he seized northern
Africa to make order prevail there"; and in fact, out of a welter of
wild tribes confusedly fighting and robbing he drew an empire firmly
seated and securely governed, wherein caravans travelled from the Atlas
to the Straits without fear of attack, and "a soldier wandering through
the fields would not have dared to pluck an ear of wheat."

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

Chella--ruins of mosque]

His grandson, the great El-Mansour, was a conqueror too; but where he
conquered he planted the undying seed of beauty. The victor of Alarcos,
the soldier who subdued the north of Spain, dreamed a great dream of
art. His ambition was to bestow on his three capitals, Seville, Rabat
and Marrakech, the three most beautiful towers the world had ever seen;
and if the tower of Rabat had been completed, and that of Seville had