Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/176

160 arrangement is only a form and may be better than the conditions existing in many European mines and factories, where men are condemned by the necessities of life to a servitude that often brings them premature death or an old age of illness and misery. Later in some Arabian homes I saw slaves and found that the master of the house treated with equality the honored guest, his brother and the slave who serves the meal or trots before his master's mule to clear a way for him through the crowd.

Following this unexpected contact with the traffic in slaves, while the Moroccan night, with the star-set black mantle of the sky lying close over the earth, hid and blurred the operations, Hafid led me the next day into a very different quarter of the city. Al-Bekri, the Arabian arbiter elegantiarum, poet, traveler and connoisseur of wine, art, horses, and arms as well as confidant of the powerful Omaiyades, who reigned in Seville at the beginning of the eleventh century, visited Fez and has left an account of the two sections into which the capital of Maghreb was then divided by the river and separate encircling walls, Adua el-Kairween and Adua el-Andaluse. In the former dwelt those who had come from Kairwan, fine-looking men, loving art, poetry, science and an easy, gay life. Their houses were set in gardens traversed by artificial canals bringing to them the clean, wholesome water of mountain streams and filled with the finest varieties of lemons, pomegranates, figs and apricots and with grapes of all colors. Art, commerce and the cult of the Prophet were the foundations of the life in this quarter of that Fez which lived a thousand years ago.