s, a convent and a temple: a temple of which the god
(as in all ancient religions) frequently descends to visit his
cloistered votaresses. For where slavery and polygamy exist every
house-master is necessarily a god, and the house he inhabits a shrine
built about his divinity.

The first thought of the Moroccan chieftain was always defensive. As
soon as he pitched a camp or founded a city it had to be guarded
against the hungry hordes who encompassed him on every side. Each little
centre of culture and luxury in Moghreb was an islet in a sea of
perpetual storms. The wonder is that, thus incessantly threatened from
without and conspired against from within--with the desert at their
doors, and their slaves on the threshold--these violent men managed to
create about them an atmosphere of luxury and stability that astonished
not only the obsequious native chronicler but travellers and captives
from western Europe.

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

Rabat--gate of the Kasbah of the Oudayas]

The truth is, as has been often pointed out, that, even until the end of
the seventeenth century, the refinements of civilization were in many
respects no greater in France and England than in North Africa. North
Africa had long been in more direct communication with the old Empires
of immemorial luxury, and was therefore farther advanced in the arts of
living than the Spain and France of the Dark Ages; and this is why, in a
country that to the average modern European seems as savage as Ashantee,
one finds traces of a refinement of life and taste hardly to be matched
by Carlovingian and early Capetian Europe.

III

The brief Almoravid dynasty left no monuments behind it.

Fez had already been founded by the Idrissites, and its first mosques
(Kairouiyin and Les Andalous) existed. Of the Almoravid Fez and
Marrakech the chroniclers relate great things; but the wild Hilalian
invasion and the subsequent descent of the Almohads from the High Atlas
swept away whatever the first dynasties had created.

The Almohads were mighty builders, and their great monuments are all of
stone. The earliest known example of their architecture which has
survived is the ruined mosque of Tinmel, in the High Atlas, discovered
and photographed by M. Doutte. This mosque was built by the inspired
mystic, Ibn-Toumert, who founded the line. Following him came the great
palace-making Sultans whose walled cities of