A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco Read Online Free PDF Page A

Sandy had engaged the city engineer to inspect the house. What I managed to decipher of his report was amusing, but hardly encouraging.
    Bending to the level of the floors of the room left lateral façade; detachment of the beams made of wood coupled supporting the catwalk; presence of beam of iron that encouraged the cracks of the wall and the lowering of the floor; presence of cracks deep to the level of the wall façade lateral internal left supporting the floor of the aforesaid room; rot of the tips floors of wood to the level of the hamman giving on the public way;
flambement
to the level of the base wall and presence of humidity exaggerated caused by infiltrations of the public way toward the wall in question; detachment of the beams of the parallel walls to the wall of the giving façade on the alley; the soil of occupation of the patio is stuck out because of the roots of the trees that treaty would be necessary so that it reached the walls carriers of the building there. The physical state of the building is a little graduated and necessity of the funding works has know, including repairing the coming down of the pluvial waters
.
    The ‘
flambement
to the level of the base wall’ sounded like a real problem. I visualised the entire thing erupting in flames like a baked Alaska. It all sounded dangerous, and horribly expensive to flx. Nor was it clear to me how one made a treaty with the trees. Wall carriers were presumably the foundations, but ‘repairing the coming down of the pluvial waters’? I guessed that meant mystified plumbers shaking their heads and doubling their prices.
    I felt hesitant. This house needed far more work than the one we had failed to buy. True, it was lovely, but I was reluctant to take on a project of such magnitude. Had I been by myself, I think I would have passed it up. Prior experience with renovations in Australia had taught me that whatever you think is needed is almost always an underestimation.
    Sandy was hovering impatiently, waiting for my decision. I put him off, saying I would think about it. He was clearly disappointed, wanting me to share his enthusiasm, but my architect father had drummed into me from an early age the need to look carefully before committing.
    The following morning, I went over the riad again with the engineer, deciphering his report, while Sandy stayed at the hotel nursing a bad case of the flu. The engineer, Salim, worked for the Agency for the Dedensification and Rehabilitation of the Fez Medina, but was more than happy to do a spot of well-paid moonlighting. He had a moustache that would have done George Harrison proud in his Sergeant Pepper days and he stroked it thoughtfully as he followed me from room to room.
    ‘What about this?’ I asked, pointing out the huge bow in the catwalk that joined the two upstairs wings, where two rotting beams were slowly parting company.
    ‘No problem,’ he replied breezily, and began drawing elaborate diagrams of how scaffolding could be placed to effect a repair. I tried to ignore the guillotine shape it seemed to resemble, although I did remember that a few months earlier a house had collapsed into a mosque, killing eleven people as they worshipped.
    Salim’s optimism was as rampant as Sandy’s, and listening to either of them you would have thought that restoring a 300-and-something-year-old house was as easy as knocking up a garden shed . Still, compared to many of the houses in the Medina, this one was in prime condition. And it did have a terrace with one of the most spectacular views in Fez, all the way down the valley to the Atlas Mountains. The panorama was breathtaking: hills covered with cube-shaped houses to the left, sweeping down to Mount Zalagh. Here and there were the spires of minarets. In the far distance was a plume of black smoke from the potteries, which burned olive pits as fuel in the kilns. If you removed the satellite dishes, the view could have been straight out of the Old