FRENCH COLONISER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 January 1939, Page 9

FRENCH COLONISER

MARSHAL LYAUTEY'S WORK.

STATUTE AT CASABLANCA. The statue of Marshal Lyautey of Morocco has just been set up on the main square of Casablanca. The great French coloniser stands in the centre of the city he helped to found, a city where East and West live side by side but prove that never the twain can mee;.

Casablanca is a city of 170,000 inhabitants (58.000 Europeans), and has sprung up from the sands of the shore in less than a quarter of a century. A large port, with a breakwater more than a mile and a quarter long, its streets and avenues are wide, and its buildings white and high, often passing nine storeys. It has every form of entertainment of a European city. Its bathing pool on the sea shore can accommodate 10,000 bathers at a time and is said to be the largest in the world. The seal of Lyautey is on everything. and the fast moving traffic of its streets where but so short a while ago was only the waste is like a living embodiment of the Marshal’s favourite proverb, a line from Shelley, which he had engraved inside a ring. “The soul's joy lies in doing." The visitor who walks the streets of Casablanca passes successively from East to West and East again. At one street corner he is in Europe, and at the next before the entrance to the souks, or native bazaar. The smartly, uniformed policeman directing the traffic at a busy corner might be standing at the corner of the rue de la Paix and the Boulevards, but as he holds up his white truncheon to stop the cars, a woman veiled to the eyes walks across. Perhaps the strangest meeting of East and West is the newspaper boys rushing through the streets crying the latest edition of the local newspapers. Fresh from the press, the newspaper which is ever a symbol of progress with its news from every part of the world. is tucked in bundles under the arms of Arab vendors, barelegged, with flowing garments of fantastic colours unchanged in cut since the days of Mahomet.

Casablanca is the ideal starting ofl’ place for the tourist, with a railway and a fine motor road, built by engineers who were themselves motorists, leading to Rabat the aristocrat, Meknes the city of giant walls and gates, Fez with its rabbit-warren native city and 120 minarets, and Marrakesh, the city of lovely gardens and pools built among palm plantations for the pleasure of Sultans, where they might recline at eventide and watch the gorgeous sunset reflected on the unrippled surface of the artificial rectangular lakes.