Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/136

120 As we turned back through the tunnel-like entrance that pierced the thick wall and entered a cafe just off the suk Tala, Hafid began his tale.

"Old Fez—for we are now in the quarter of Fez el-Bali—has had a long and eventful history. Following the sultans of the Idris family came the Almoravide dynasty, and after them the Almohades, Merinides and others. As the city was ever a stronghold of the Faith, of wisdom, literature and art, it towered in its glory above other cities, occasionally declining somewhat only to rise again to greater heights than before. In one of these periods of recession the Sultan Abd el-Mumen deflected the river from its regular bed and captured and destroyed the city. However, his grandson, Yakub el-Mansur, rebuilt what his grandfather had ruined, though little of even his reconstruction work remains to us today save the gate of Bab el-Maroukh.

"And have you heard how this portal of Mansur, which has stood here since 1204, came to have the name of 'the Gate of the Burned"? It arose from the fact that when the sultan was strengthening the walls of Fez el-Bali, the Berber tribes living in the Ghomara mountains rose in rebellion against him under the leadership of Mahdi el-Obeid, a relative of the last of the Almoravides. After a long struggle the Mahdi was vanquished and made prisoner, following which Sultan Yakub el-Mansur ordered a great fire lighted under the arch of the massive gate and in it tortured the captured chief throughout several days until finally his body was consumed. Then the suk of the basket-weavers was established here within the gate, as Mansur ordered the ashes of the Mahdi and