Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/206

190 left Volubilis to its fate of solitude and such further depredation as man might lay upon it. On their march of conquest toward the Atlantic the Asiatic and Arab soldiers of the Prophet came upon it and destroyed what little remained of the statues of men and animals in obedience to the prohibition of the Koran against the material representation of living forms. It was then that the Berber dynasties completed the work of ruin by taking the building materials to construct and ornament their palaces and temples.

We had no more than turned our backs upon the ruins of Volubilis before we found ourselves beneath the summit of a fairly high mountain spur, crowned by a minaret with shining, green tiles. Only two miles separate the old Roman city and this holy Moorish town of El-Zerhun, which helped to despoil the outpost of the Caesars for its own adornment. It is the first stage for the pilgrims of western Maghreb in the journey to Mecca, for a faithful hadj must visit it seven times before starting on the longer road to the sacred city on the Red Sea. It is here next to the splendid mosque that is located the tomb of the greatest saint of Morocco, Mulay Idris el-Akbar, a direct descendant of the Prophet through his daughter and the originator of the Arab dynasty of the Idrisides, whose son, Mulay Idris II, was the founder of Fez.

El-Zerhun is encircled by a powerful wall with massive gates, supplemented at a little distance with a second enclosing defensive circle of Berber figs, so rank and thick as to be practically impenetrable by man. We left our car and began scrambling up steep, broken lanes, or rather paths among the rocks, with the idea of reaching a