Outside the inner city, in the direction of Hassan, there was a small, low group of open lights. Here the houses were not dark lanterns; the houses had windows out upon the street. A trill of horizontal fires came against the upright monotone of Islam. “It is the Mellah,” said mine host, “the Mellah of the Jews.” We went into another chamber. Slave girls brought fresh glasses, candied fruits, dainties from Arabia Felix. Through the open door, the wide night air was a discord from this polyphony of silks and gems, of cedar and spice and ceramic. And there arose the voices of distant women in song. It was the women of the house, locked from the rooms where men of the profane world might come and drink tea with the masters. The song drifted palpitant and humble. My thought went out to the Mellah--to the place where windows faced outward, where women showed their faces.... _c._ _Ishmael and Israel_ Forty men, women, children fill the room with a voice. They are Jews, Jews of the Moorish Mellah. The unveiled faces of the women are fertile, less metallic, harder than the faces of their sisters. The eyes are deeper, their consistency more solid. Gaunt determination holds the warmth of these women like an armor. The men are more variant and less harmonious. A burnouse or red fez in place of the black would pass most of them as Arabs. In their eyes the same cunning, the same swift hardness. Yet underneath dwells a distinction: an enduring spiritual source--a quiet water--of which the agitation of their external lives is tributary. After the song of the Arab minstrels; after the singers of Fez beneath the Merinidean tombs shouting to the twang of a string; after the fakirs of the Socco in Tangiers who bounce and prance their monkey shines to the lilt of an apish cry, to the crash of a scissors; after the mystic monotone of the Darwish whirling his soul into the Absolute; after the service of the Ouled-Naïl who sway like trees deep-rooted and who shriek like Liliths--now, this Jewish music. Ten women step to the center of the room and squat in a circle around a copper cauldron. They sing, and as they sing they beat with open palms upon the upturned cauldron. Their song is in Arabic; it has similitudes with Moorish songs: there are the ceaseless verses, the narrative design with rhythm and note recurring. But the women are ample-breasted, leoninely gay. The beat of palms upon the copper drum rises like a copper wall about the women and the women’s song.