We walked across a long court lined with the Black Guard, passed under a gateway, and were met by a shabbily dressed negress.  Traversing a hot dazzle of polychrome tiles we reached another archway guarded by the chief eunuch, a towering black with the enamelled eyes of a basalt bust.  The eunuch delivered us to other negresses, and we entered a labyrinth of inner passages and patios, all murmuring and dripping with water.  Passing down long corridors where slaves in dim greyish garments flattened themselves against the walls, we caught glimpses of great dark rooms, laundries, pantries, bakeries, kitchens, where savoury things were brewing and stewing, and where more negresses, abandoning their pots and pans, came to peep at us from the threshold.  In one corner, on a bench against a wall hung with matting, grey parrots in tall cages were being fed by a slave.

[Illustration:  From a photograph from “France-Maroc"

A clan of mountaineers and their caid]

A narrow staircase mounted to a landing where a princess out of an Arab fairy-tale awaited us.  Stepping softly on her embroidered slippers she led us to the next landing, where another golden-slippered being smiled out on us, a little girl this one, blushing and dimpling under a jewelled diadem and pearl-woven braids.  On a third landing a third damsel appeared, and encircled by the three graces we mounted to the tall mirador in the central tower from which we were to look down at the coming ceremony.  One by one, our little guides, kicking off their golden shoes, which a slave laid neatly outside the door, led us on soft bare feet into the upper chamber of the harem.

It was a large room, enclosed on all sides by a balcony glazed with panes of brightly-coloured glass.  On a gaudy modern Rabat carpet stood gilt armchairs of florid design and a table bearing a commercial bronze of the “art goods” variety.  Divans with muslin-covered cushions were ranged against the walls and down an adjoining gallery-like apartment which was otherwise furnished only with clocks.  The passion for clocks and other mechanical contrivances is common to all unmechanical races, and every chief’s palace in North Africa contains a collection of time-pieces which might be called striking if so many had not ceased to go.  But those in the Sultan’s harem of Rabat are remarkable for the fact that, while designed on current European models, they are proportioned in size to the Imperial dignity, so that a Dutch “grandfather” becomes a wardrobe, and the box-clock of the European mantelpiece a cupboard that has to be set on the floor.  At the end of this avenue of time-pieces a European double-bed with a bright silk quilt covered with Nottingham lace stood majestically on a carpeted platform.