The house was built in the usual Moorish style; with crenelated walls, flanking towers, and dome-shaped roofs. It had innumerable courts, a mosque, a women’s wing, a granary, store-houses, baths, and everything in the first style of modern Arab taste. All round the houses stood cypresses, many of great age and height; over the mosque two or three palm-trees waved, and oranges and olives extended for some acres upon every side. There was a garden in the Eastern taste, where water trickled in a thousand little rills; canes fluttered, rustling like feathers in the air; jasmine and honeysuckle climbed up the azofaifa trees, sweet limes and lemons with pomegranates were dotted here and there; some periwinkles, but larger and paler than those grown in Europe, grew in the grass; here and there stood geranium bushes, straggling and run to seed. Over it all brooded the air of decadence, mixed with content, which makes an Eastern garden that of all others where a slothful and religious man should find heart-ease, and reading in some book of things beyond the power of intellect, leave them without solution, and sit still giving thanks for gardens as a true Christian should.
The inside of the house was decorated in a sort of pseudo-Persian style, with double doors all gilt, each with a little horseshoe opening in the middle of it through which to pass, and on each side a formal tree like those upon the binding of a Persian manuscript. In fact, a modern replica of the Alhambra done without art, the gildings and the columns common, heavy and overcharged, and nothing really good except the iron gratings of the windows, and the tiles which, made to-day in Fez, seem to have but little deteriorated in glaze and colour from those left by the Moors in Spain.
The prayers over, the Sherif came back to keep us company, and sat till midnight talking of all sorts of things.
He appeared to think that we had great luck in not having been sent as prisoners to the Sultan’s camp, for if we had been sent, we might have remained for weeks journeying about with the army before we were released. I was not sure if on the whole I was glad to have missed the experience, but as it would have been impossible to explain my reasons, I held my peace. Mulai-el-Haj, being an English protected subject, felt or assumed to feel great interest in English things. He asked most ceremoniously after our Grand Vizir (Lord Salisbury), was curious about the Queen, talked of the rising of the Afridis, and hoped that God would give the victory to our armies, a consummation which in his heart of hearts he could not really have wished, for no Mohammedan ever desires that Kaffirs shall triumph over “those of the faith.” His questions answered with great detail, he launched into a disquisition on the present state of things in Morocco under the Vizir-ship of Ba Ahmed, “for the young Sultan rules but by his hand.”