ems put on in honour of my visit, had a dignified dowdiness in odd
contrast to the frivolity of the Imperial harem. But what chiefly
struck me was the apathy of the younger women. I asked them if they had
a garden, and they shook their heads wistfully, saying that there were
no gardens in Old Fez. The roof was therefore their only escape: a roof
overlooking acres and acres of other roofs, and closed in by the naked
fortified mountains which stand about Fez like prison-walls.

After a brief exchange of compliments silence fell. Conversing through
interpreters is a benumbing process, and there are few points of contact
between the open-air occidental mind and beings imprisoned in a
conception of sexual and domestic life based on slave-service and
incessant espionage. These languid women on their muslin cushions toil
not, neither do they spin. The Moroccan lady knows little of cooking,
needlework or any household arts. When her child is ill she can only
hang it with amulets and wail over it, the great lady of the Fazi palace
is as ignorant of hygiene as the peasant-woman of the _bled_. And all
these colourless eventless lives depend on the favour of one fat
tyrannical man, bloated with good living and authority, himself almost
as inert and sedentary as his women, and accustomed to impose his whims
on them ever since he ran about the same _patio_ as a little
short-smocked boy.

The redeeming point in this stagnant domesticity is the tenderness of
the parents for their children, and western writers have laid so much
stress on this that one would suppose children could be loved only by
inert and ignorant parents. It is in fact charming to see the heavy eyes
of the Moroccan father light up when a brown grass-hopper baby jumps on
his knee, and the unfeigned tenderness with which the childless women of
the harem caress the babies of their happier rivals. But the
sentimentalist moved by this display of family feeling would do well to
consider the lives of these much-petted children. Ignorance,
unhealthiness and a precocious sexual initiation prevail in all classes.
Education consists in learning by heart endless passages of the Koran,
and amusement in assisting at spectacles that would be unintelligible to
western children, but that the pleasantries of the harem make perfectly
comprehensible to Moroccan infancy. At eight or nine the little girls
are married, at twelve the son of the house is "given his first
negress"; and therea