The Lighthearted Quest (21 page)

Her cogitations were interrupted at this point by a rather raggle-taggle Arab servant, who entered to say that a Monsieur demanded Mademoiselle below. Julia said “I descend”, and then did not do so; she paused to reflect while she put on some lip-stick. If it was St John again, what should she ask him? About
cantines,
certainly; but should she risk also asking, flat out, the name of Colin's red-haired companion? That was a thing she needed to know, letters or no letters. It was still so early that the idea of the Monsieur being the airman had never entered her head, but when she at last went downstairs it was
Steve Keller who came towards her, in uniform this time, a cheerful grin on his nice plain face.

“Well, here I am! How are you making out?”

“Beautifully, thank you. But where on earth have you come from, at this hour?”

“Meknes. Got there last night, and drove over this morning. Now what do we do? Will I show you Fez?”

“Not unless you have a helicopter and a parachute,” said Julia. “Those hills have half killed me already.” Then as he looked rather dashed she said quickly—

“There's one place I do very much want to see, if it isn't too far.”

“Nowhere's too far! Where is it?”

“Volubilis.”

“That's easy—fine. I have the car right here. Don't you want a coat, though?”

Yes, Julia wanted a coat, and thicker shoes too—she went up to put them on, and with the
huilerie
in mind stuffed a notebook, pencils, and a centimetre-tape into the pockets of her short loose leather jacket. This was of a warm reddish-orange shade, and set off the peculiar tawny tones of her hair and complexion wonderfully—Steve stared in open admiration when she reappeared.

“You look wonderful!”

“Ought we to take some food along?” Julia asked, ignoring this tribute.

“No need to—we'll be back in time for lunch, latish. Let's go.”

In the entrance to the hotel they nearly ran into the minute figure of Mr. St John; he greeted Julia gaily. “Good morning! Good morning! Do you feel strong enough for another round of Fez?”

Bunched together in the small entry-way, Julia effected introductions. “Mr. St John, this is Mr. Keller, of the American Air Force.”

“American
Naval
Air Force,” the airman corrected her. Julia swam over this obstruction—“And this is Mr. St. John, who lives in Fez, and knows everything.” The two men shook hands, Keller looking slightly damped by the interruption.

“Mr. Keller has just driven over from Meknes,” Julia proceeded equably; “we thought of going to Volubilis. I want to look at the Roman oil-mill there.”

“Admirable! I did not know that you went in for archaeology. There are several
quite
good examples—“ the old gentleman went into details.

Even Steve Keller saw that there was nothing for it but to invite Mr. St John to accompany them, which he did with a good enough grace to win Julia's admiration; for obviously this was not in the least the sort of outing he had intended. Mr. St John was delighted, and they set off, Julia sitting in front gazing about her; a certain packing of Moroccan agriculture would fill out a general article for
The Onlooker.

She was immediately impressed, in fact, by the excellence of the cultivation. The pruning of the olive-trees was in itself a work of art—their flattened tops were cut so regularly that on level ground a ruler a kilometre long could have been run the length of the rows and hardly shown an inch of variation; new plantings were to be seen everywhere, the white bindings of the fresh grafts standing out sharply in the sun. Under the trees in the almond-orchards Moors were hoeing rows of vegetables, beneath the curious dull greyish pink of African almond-blossom; out in the open fields dwarf peas, barely a foot high and already in flower, spread for miles—the chickpeas now used for canning, Julia imagined—or could you not can chick-peas? She must ask sometime.

Presently they left the main highway to Meknes and Rabat and began to climb up into hilly country; here, though the olives and almonds still persisted, there was less tillage, and flocks of sheep grazed on the open slopes. Up in the hills they passed Berber farms, groups of rough buildings surrounded by
high irregular fences of dried camel-thorn, a curious mauve-brown in colour, or the far more spectacular hedges of agaves, brandishing their huge curved saw-toothed leaves like giant pale-blue swords; these lines of great silvery-blue plants, so menacing in form, so startling in colour against the drab tones of the countryside, enchanted Julia. They dropped into another valley, where small oil-derricks stood up incongruously here and there—yes, they yielded a little oil, Mr. St John told her, when she leaned back to ask; it went down to Petit-Pean in tankers. They climbed up onto an outlying spur of the Djebel Zerehoune, and dropped on a long slant into the valley to west of it; here, facing the sun, sheltered from the north and east, the olive-trees grew thickly, and of enormous size—Mr. St John leaned forward to tell Julia that from pre-Roman times this had always been a famous centre for olive-growing; even before the Phoenicians came Volubilis, lying in the valley below, had been a wealthy Berber settlement, and the Romans had developed the oil industry to such a pitch that in and around the city not less than thirty oil-mills were still to be seen.

“Gracious,” said Julia, aghast. “One will do for me.” Keller laughed.

Volubilis is an exquisite place. The French have carried out the excavation and preservation of the ruins with the same thoughtful skill and competent thoroughness that they invariably display on the spot in Morocco, when the local administration has a free hand. A pleasant building houses a small museum, where the principal treasures are on view; neat paths through pretty plantings of shrubs and flowers lead up to the remains themselves, with unobtrusive sign-posts to indicate the way to the various points of interest. One of these, which the small party came on almost at once, said
Huilerie,
and there they went forthwith; a guide sought to accompany them—Mr. St John brushed him off as easily as he had brushed off the horrid Abdul on Julia's first morning in Fez.

Julia found the
huilerie
rather bothering, since it in no way resembled the one at Mme La Besse's site. There was no circular block of stone with a cemented channel round it: instead they saw a huge flat slab of what Julia took to be granite, with a number of narrow shallow runnels carefully chased out in the stone, leading down into two great oblong tanks, also floored and lined with dressed stone. Julia made measurements and wrote them down, Mr. St John the while explaining that the two tanks were for two different types of oil: the best from the first pressing, the less good from the second. Steve Keller lit a Chesterfield and looked bored—Julia was relieved when she had done her duty, and they were free to wander about the charming ruins of a remote but exquisitely civilised past. Storks, newly returned from the South, were turning over the remains of last year's nests on the top of the triumphal arch and some high columns topped by ornate capitals, with clattering beaks, enquiring claws, and a general expression of disgust—storks have a capacity for looking disgusted almost equal to that of camels. A small mauve wild-flower bloomed everywhere among fallen marble; the sun shone down, African and hot, on the gay mosaic flooring of rooms nearly two thousand years old, still depicting in brilliant colours the scenes from classical antiquity ordered by interior decorators twenty centuries before Elsie de Wolfe and Sybil Colefaxe began.

It was the private houses which above all entranced Julia. Mr. St John knew his stuff quite as well at Volubilis as he did in Fez, and led her and the still bored American up beyond the triumphal arch and the Forum into the residential quarter of the city, where Roman citizens had lived, presumably loved, and above all undoubtedly bathed. In many of these houses they came on small round baths, six feet or more across and about the depth of a modern bath, cemented within, their raised rims decorated with designs in mosaic: one of these bore a pattern of goldfish. Julia was instantly reminded of
Linda's bath, with the swimming goldfish in its glass sides, in
The Pursuit of Love,
and was ravished; she drew Mr. St John's attention to this resemblance, and he gave his dry prehistoric chuckle—they had to explain the joke to the airman, who had not read Nancy Mitford, and was less amused.

Walking back towards the entrance the sky was suddenly rent by a high mechanical whine, a piercing and threatening note—it seemed to come from the east, and Julia looked up, but nothing was to be seen there but a trail of white vapour leading across the blue; the American, laughing, took her elbow and turned her towards the west just in time to see a plane vanishing behind the hills, while the noise continued to fill the empty sky.

“That's one of ours,” he said. “Great, aren't they?”

Julia thought them appalling, and somehow the more so, standing among the lovely relics of an age which had never been tormented by jet propulsion or atom bombs; but Mr St John promptly entered on a conversation with Steve Keller about the jets, the air-base at Port Lyautey, the instruction being given to the French air-force at Meknes, and concerning the other great American bases further South, near Casablanca. In this the American showed up well—he was intelligent, keen, and knew the technical side of his subject thoroughly; but presently he got on to the political aspect, and again gave utterance to some vague anti-colonial sentiments. “The poor toads of Moors, why should they live in shanty-towns and work for a silly wage, when the French are living in grand apartments or smart villas?”

“Why, indeed?” Mr. St John asked, with deceptive mildness. “Who brings the Moors to the towns?”

“Why, they just come, I guess.”

“Exactly. You don't suggest that the French Administration brings them? They come of their own free will, and constitute a great problem—the eternal problem of the lure of city lights, and the possibility of making money more quickly than by the
long monotonous processes of agriculture. What do you suggest that the French should do about it?”

“Well, they could put them in decent houses,” the young man said, looking rather surprised.

“Could they? Could they? At a rent they could pay? And would this
check
the flow to the big towns? Would not more come, and still more? What was the result of building the new Medina for the Moorish workers in Casablanca?”

“I don't know.”

“No, I supposed not. And have you seen the new
bidonvilles améliorées,
the improved shanty-towns which the French have arranged on empty spaces outside Casablanca with piped water and drains laid, ready for the Moors to use if they persist in coming and putting up their horrible petrol-tin shacks?”

No, the airman hadn't seen them.

“Again, I supposed not. It would seem that you have not seen very
much
of what the French have done here. However, these new sites represent an honest attempt at a solution of an almost insoluble problem. Criticism, to be of value or even admissible, should be based on facts, do you not think?” said Mr. St John primly.

Julia stole a glance at Steve to see how he took this. As she feared, the rebuke was too elegantly wrapped up really to register; Steve just felt vaguely that he was being ‘ribbed', and said rather sulkily—“Oh well, one can't help the way one feels. I just feel anti-colonial.”

“Regardless of the facts before your eyes?”

“Facts don't alter feelings,” the American said stubbornly. “Anyway, I just tell all the Moors I come across that they'd be better off without the French, in my opinion.”

“You count your feelings as an opinion, then?” said Mr. St John, with dry exasperation.

Julia felt it was time to intervene. Poor Steve was utterly hopeless, in his crass ignorance and his refusal to look facts in the face, but trying to teach less lettered Americans about the
Old World was obviously about as much use as setting out to empty the Atlantic with a teaspoon—and anyhow they were in his car. She glanced at her watch.

“Is there anything else to see near here?” she asked. “Mr. Keller, how far are we from Meknes? Didn't you say there was a pretty gate there?”

Keller said there was. Mr. St John, however, quick to take a hint, proclaimed that Moulay Idriss, the holy city of Morocco, was only a few kilometres away—should they not rather see that? As they got into Steve's roadster again Julia noticed another car waiting on the sandy space outside the museum; an Arab driver lounged over the wheel, and Abdul, her inquisitive guide of the day before, leant against the wing—the wart on his handsome nose made him unmistakable. He glanced at her and her two companions with some interest, and spoke to the driver.

“Look, there's Abdul,” she said to Mr. St John.

“Where? Oh yes. He's a pestilential fellow,” the old Englishman said. He seemed rather upset.

The road to Moulay Idriss wound round the contours of the Djebel Zerehoune among those enormous olive-trees, bordered by more hedges of the savage agaves; silver-green above, silver-blue below—what a landscape, Julia thought, while Mr. St John was telling them from the back seat that Moulay Idriss was one of the most purely Islamic cities in existence, since owing to its great holiness neither Europeans nor Jews were allowed to settle there. From the road they had a view of the twin bosses of hill, covered with the white flat-topped cubes of Moorish houses, with a green-tiled mosque away to the left.

One cannot take a car at all far into Moulay Idriss, because the streets are mere alleys, and anyhow far too steep, steeper even than those of Fez; but the party took a rather brief walk through the exquisite little holy city. Now and again they emerged onto terraced paths almost as narrow as goat-tracks, which wound round outside the town, and afforded views of
the hilly slopes around them and the valley below, a shimmering sea of olive-groves shaken in the breeze—Mr. St John reiterated that the olives were bigger and thicker to the acre here than anywhere else in the world. Moors as usual constantly offered their services as guides, and were as constantly waved aside by the Englishman with courteous skill; but as the party was descending towards the car again one caught him by the arm and said in French—“Come, see Berber oil-mill!”