hard to estimate. The modern European colonist
apparently imagined that to plant his warehouses, _cafes_ and
cinema-palaces within the walls which for so long had fiercely excluded
him was the most impressive way of proclaiming his domination.

Under General Lyautey such views are no longer tolerated. Respect for
native habits, native beliefs and native architecture is the first
principle inculcated in the civil servants attached to his
administration. Not only does he require that the native towns shall be
kept intact, and no European building erected within them; a sense of
beauty not often vouchsafed to Colonial governors causes him to place
the administration buildings so far beyond the walls that the modern
colony grouped around them remains entirely distinct from the old town,
instead of growing out of it like an ugly excrescence.

The Arab quarter of Rabat was already irreparably disfigured when
General Lyautey came to Morocco; but ferocious old Sale, Phenician
counting-house and breeder of Barbary pirates, had been saved from
profanation by its Moslem fanaticism. Few Christian feet had entered its
walls except those of the prisoners who, like Robinson Crusoe, slaved
for the wealthy merchants in its mysterious terraced houses. Not till
two or three years ago was it completely pacified; and when it opened
its gates to the infidel it was still, as it is to-day, the type of the
untouched Moroccan city--so untouched that, with the sunlight
irradiating its cream-coloured walls and the blue-white domes above
them, it rests on its carpet of rich fruit-gardens like some rare
specimen of Arab art on a strip of old Oriental velvet.

Within the walls, the magic persists: which does not always happen when
one penetrates into the mirage-like cities of Arabian Africa. Sale has
the charm of extreme compactness. Crowded between the river-mouth and
the sea, its white and pale-blue houses almost touch across the narrow
streets, and the reed-thatched bazaars seem like miniature reductions of
the great trading labyrinths of Tunis or Fez.

Everything that the reader of the Arabian Nights expects to find is
here: the whitewashed niches wherein pale youths sit weaving the fine
mattings for which the town is still famous; the tunnelled passages
where indolent merchants with bare feet crouch in their little kennels
hung with richly ornamented saddlery and arms, or with slippers of pale
citron leather and bright embroidered _babouches_