A Home in Dades Valley, Morocco
"We were a great height up, probably some 50 to 55 feet from the ground; but towers rose still higher, though their only purpose seemed to be the defence of…
From: 1895 C.E. To: 1895 C.E.
Location: Dadès Vallei, Morocco
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“Dads,” from Tafilet; The Narrative of a Journey of Exploration in the Atlas Mountains by W.B Harris, 1895.
It seems so long since I have found an opportunity of writing of my personal experiences, and those of the good men who accompanied me upon my journey, that it is quite a pleasure to abandon for a time things geographical, and to enter for a chapter into the less important but interesting details of my stay at Dads, where a sojourn of five days in the Shereefs house, with innumerable kind but indigestible feasts elsewhere, allowed me to see much more of the Berber home-life than would otherwise have been the case.
The first new experience was to look upon the interior of one of these strange castles that the natives build themselves, the outsides of which had so impressed me by their size and the manner in which they are built. No sooner had we arrived at the Zauia Ait bu Haddu than the opportunity I had all along been wishing to find occurred, and on alighting from my donkey at the door of the Shereefs house, he bade me welcome with all the grace and rhetoric that the Arabs know so well how to use.
A stable-yard, a large enclosed space, divided the house from the street of the village, and, passing through this, a walnut-wood door, of roughly sawn planks, gave entrance to the house. Within all was darkness, and it was only by striking a match that I could perceive we had entered a wide and dusty passage which seemed to lead nowhere. Groping along a gradual ascent, which took the place of stairs, we readied the first floor, on which most of the living apartments were situated, the remainder of the ground floor serving as stabling, and opening by another entrance into the yard we had already passed through.
Still ascending, we entered at length a large unfurnished room some 30 feet square, the whole black with smoke. Here we found a number of women, mostly accompanied with babies in arms, attending to household affairs. Some were cooking the meal that was being prepared for our reception over fires of inferior and smoke-giving charcoal, while others were weaving on hand-looms a heavy woollen material, to serve eventually for the haidus or cloaks of the Berbers.
The walls of the room were of rough tabia and the floors of plastered mud, while the ceiling consisted of trunks of walnut trees supported on pillars of tabia, and covered with brushwood and clay above, the latter forming the floor of the next storey. A few huge copper cooking-pots and a rough unstained box or two formed all the furniture visible, together with a heap of dishes of considerable size, each a segment of the trunk of large walnut trees skilfully hollowed out. Some of these were already filled with the steaming kuskusu and boiled turnips that were to form the staple piece de resistance of the coming feast.
Again an ascent of clay, supported on walnut beams fastened into the wall, led us to a second chamber of much the same dimensions as the first, only, in place of the narrow loopholes which allowed a dim light to enter in the lower storey, there were here round holes in the roof, serving at once for windows and chimneys, and decidedly unsuccessful as either, for the heavy smoke of fig-wood charcoal hung like a cloud in the air, obstructing what little light might otherwise have entered. In other respects the rooms were in every way identically the same, the Avails black with smoke and covered with cobwebs near the ceiling, but with these exceptions tolerably clean. Again we ascended, this time emerging on to the flat roof, in the centre of which stood a highly-decorated room built of mud bricks, with a door of the usual walnut wood and two or three small windows with shutters.
We were a great height up, probably some 50 to 55 feet from the ground; but towers rose still higher, though their only purpose seemed to be the defence of the ksar, for they contained no rooms, but only galleries with narrow loopholes in the walls. The door of the room was thrown open, and we entered the clean and comfortable minzah and threw ourselves down on the rough rugs and carpets, delighting in being able to rest at last, and in a cool atmosphere, after the heat of our journey—and with every promise, too, of escaping the rigorous cold at night.
The old Shereef remained below in a small room, which in his younger days, when he resided at Dads, he had built himself, with plaster walls and some rough Moorish painting on the ceiling, and a horse-shoe window opening on to the street, some 20 feet above the roadway. Here, no doubt, he interviewed the members of his family that he had abandoned for so long, and doubtless, too, listened to the reproaches of the wives he had deserted for nine years or so.
However, all the male relations and a number of friends of the house trooped up to our quarters, and as most of them knew Arabic well, the conversation flowed cheerily enough over the excellent hot dishes of food that they brought us. Then came Moorish tea, with quantities of sugar and mint, I presiding at the tray, in the seat of honour, for I was the stranger of the party, and therefore the most honoured. A splendid handsome group of men they formed, these hosts of ours and their friends, and clean withal, which added very considerably to the pleasure of their company.
W. B. Harris. Tafilet. W. Blackwood.
By permission of Messrs. W. Blackwood and Sons.
Harris, Walter B. Tafilet. W. Blackwood and Sons. 1895.
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