rsas is always much the same: the eternal plan of
the Arab house, built about one or more arcaded courts, with long narrow
rooms enclosing them on the ground floor, and several stories above,
reached by narrow stairs, and often opening on finely carved cedar
galleries. The chief difference between the Medersa and the private
house, or even the _fondak_,[A] lies in the use to which the rooms are
put. In the Medersas, one of the ground-floor apartments is always
fitted up as a chapel, and shut off from the court by carved cedar doors
still often touched with old gilding and vermilion. There are always a
few students praying in the chapel, while others sit in the doors of the
upper rooms, their books on their knees, or lean over the carved
galleries chatting with their companions who are washing their feet at
the marble fountain in the court, preparatory to entering the chapel.

[Footnote A: The Moroccan inn or caravanserai.]

[Illustration: _From a photograph by Schmitt, Rabat_

Rabat--interior court of the Medersa of the Oudayas]

In the Medersa of the Oudayas, these native activities have been
replaced by the lifeless hush of a museum. The rooms are furnished with
old rugs, pottery, brasses, the curious embroidered hangings which line
the tents of the chiefs, and other specimens of Arab art. One room
reproduces a barber's shop in the bazaar, its benches covered with fine
matting, the hanging mirror inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the
razor-handles of silver _niello_. The horseshoe arches of the outer
gallery look out on orange-blossoms, roses and the sea. It is all
beautiful, calm and harmonious; and if one is tempted to mourn the
absence of life and local colour, one has only to visit an abandoned
Medersa to see that, but for French intervention, the charming
colonnades and cedar chambers of the college of the Oudayas would by
this time be a heap of undistinguished rubbish--for plaster and rubble
do not "die in beauty" like the firm stones of Rome.

V

ROBINSON CRUSOE'S "SALLEE"

Before Morocco passed under the rule of the great governor who now
administers it, the European colonists made short work of the beauty and
privacy of the old Arab towns in which they established themselves.

On the west coast, especially, where the Mediterranean peoples, from the
Phenicians to the Portuguese, have had trading-posts for over two
thousand years, the harm done to such seaboard towns as Tangier, Rabat
and Casablanca is