Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/85

Rh groups of figures moved about the entrances to the caves, men in white or brown bournouses and unveiled women in dark-blue abaiyias, which led one to surmise that they were in all probability from the Sahara.

Before we had gone very far from Tlemsen, we were abreast of the ruins of a city wall with the remnants of gates and towers, around and among which now grow rich vineyards, fig-trees, pomegranates and olives, watered by an irrigation canal from the mountains.

"This is Mansura," said Mahomet.

I had read of this Mansura, in which a stormy page of the history of Tlemsen was enacted. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the reigning sultans in Tlemsen were of the Abd el-Wadite dynasty and had continually to fight in defence of their country and capital with the Merinide sultans of Fez. It was at the end of the thirteenth century that the Moroccan ruler, Abu Yakub, appeared for the fifth time before the walls of Tlemsen and, as though to make it incontrovertibly evident that he had no thought of returning without having accomplished the conquest of the city, he caused to be built an immense permanent camp, containing a magnificent palace, extensive steam-baths, inns, a mosque and other buildings. Only the most fragmentary ruins still persist, but, even so, they give clear testimony to the grand scale of these buildings and of the besieging sultan's ideas in constructing this camp of El-Mahalla el-Mansura, or the Camp of the Victors. Now only the name Mansura remains.

The city had been under siege eight years and eight months, when suddenly the Morocco sultan was