Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/242

226 the sultan, the great caids of the mountains, the pashas, imams and the rich merchants from Fez, Meknes and Rabat have their palaces and villas here, and not because Marrakesh is the Paris of Morocco and in season boasts all the metropolitan attractions of our ultra-modern civilization.

The morning following our arrival, before going to present our letter from Minister Blanc to the senior resident French official, we thought to wander through the town to orient ourselves a bit and to gather an initial, general impression of the place under our own guidance. At first we saw little out of the ordinary except the beautiful Kutubia minaret with its seven distinct stories and its unusual enamel decorations that reminded one of the turquoise of Persia and with its three golden balls set with jewels offered by the wife of Sultan El-Mansur. A whole regiment of spirits defends each of these balls, and woe to him who would dare to touch one of them. A little further on we found a kubba of peculiar construction, provided, as it was, with the usual four walls but without the stereotyped dome. Under the branches of a solitary tree that lent its shadow to the tomb there sat a well-dressed native, who, we found, spoke French and answered our curiosity by telling us that we were before the tomb of the sultan, Ibn Teshufin, founder of the Almoravide dynasty in Morocco, who had sprung up like a storm from his oasis in the Sahara at the beginning of the eleventh century to sweep through the mountains and conquer their tribes, to build Marrakesh, to confirm the faith in Allah and to leave for his descendants a