In an unfinished corner of the Tower Hassan, I found the wall as it had been prepared for the stucco: it was divided off in lines, crossing at right angles, like the frame-work that artists sometimes use, to verify the exactness of a copy. Over these were drawn a succession of intersecting segments of circles. By these they could work with certainty and celerity, and the mere intersection of the plain and curved lines formed the suggested patterns. This may account for the interminable variety of these, and the uniformity of their character. The stuccoes were of plaster of Paris, and on getting one of the workmen to describe the process of making it, I found that near Fez there is a large supply of arrowheaded selenite, corresponding with that of Montmartre, near Paris.[244] The colour is laid on with white of egg. The great instrument of the Moorish artist is the compass. The Moorish compass is not composed of two limbs of metal jointed. It is a fixed measure and tied by a string; so that for each different dimension there is a separate compass, and its name is _davit_, which we retain for the bent stanchions used in vessels to hoist up boats. Arabs have no buildings: their tent was their habitation. No traces of their architecture are to be found in the two ancient cities of Mecca and Medina. The Caaba itself was a square building, as if the two poles of the transverse one of the flying tent had been doubled for the stationary one, and the Caaba, in sign and memory thereof, is hung with drapery to this day.[245] The Arabs, however, appear to have spread architecture over Europe, Asia, and Africa;--they who possess neither ancient ruins nor modern dwellings. These, with the materials and models, are found in Morocco, preserved in the midst of ignorance, unobscured and unchanged. Architecture is the peculiar feeling and passion of this people. The figures which we find in our cathedrals and ancient churches, are scattered about their domestic establishments, are to be seen in their trays, on their stools, and in endless variety upon their tombstones. They have not, like us, a domestic and a public, a religious and a civil architecture. Alone have they combined delicacy and strength. In their edifices there is the durability of the rock and the delicacy of the flower. It would seem as if they at once thought only of to-day and only of eternity. Nor have there been with them different ages and styles--one of strong and busy war, another of idle elegance: their strongest and rudest military works preserve the choicest specimen of arts, which elsewhere have required, that they might spring and blossom, times of peace and ages of refinement. I cannot resist the temptation of quoting from the “Quarterly Review,” a glowing description of Moorish dwellings.