ouse, whether merchant's dwelling or chieftain's palace, is
laid out on the same lines, with the addition of the reserved quarters
for women; and what remains in Spain and Sicily of Moorish secular
architecture shows that, in the Merinid period, the play of ornament
must have been--as was natural--even greater than in the medersas.

The Arab chroniclers paint pictures of Merinid palaces, such as the
House of the Favourite at Cordova, which the soberer modern imagination
refused to accept until the medersas of Fez were revealed, and the old
decorative tradition was shown in the eighteenth century Moroccan
palaces. The descriptions given of the palaces of Fez and of Marrakech
in the preceding articles, which make it unnecessary, in so slight a
note as this, to go again into the detail of their planning and
decoration, will serve to show how gracefully the art of the mosque and
the medersa was lightened and domesticated to suit these cool chambers
and flower-filled courts.

With regard to the immense fortifications that are the most picturesque
and noticeable architectural features of Morocco, the first thing to
strike the traveller is the difficulty of discerning any difference in
the probable date of their construction until certain structural
peculiarities are examined, or the ornamental details of the great
gateways are noted. Thus the Almohad portions of the walls of Fez and
Rabat are built of stone, while later parts are of rubble; and the touch
of European influence in certain gateways of Meknez and Fez at once
situate them in the seventeenth century. But the mediaeval outline of
these great piles of masonry, and certain technicalities in their plan,
such as the disposition of the towers, alternating in the inner and
outer walls, continued unchanged throughout the different dynasties,
and this immutability of the Moroccan military architecture enables the
imagination to picture, not only what was the aspect of the fortified
cities which the Greeks built in Palestine and Syria, and the
Crusaders brought back to Europe, but even that of the far-off
Assyrio-Chaldaean strongholds to which the whole fortified architecture
of the Middle Ages in Europe seems to lead back.

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

Marrakech--the gate of the Portuguese]

IX

BOOKS CONSULTED

Afrique Francaise (L'). Bulletin Mensuel du Comite de
l'Afrique Francaise. Paris, 21, rue Cassett