Edris himself, says another legend, worked at the foundations among his laborers, who, in gratitude, offered him a hatchet made of gold and silver; and he chose to perpetuate, in the name of the city, the memory of their homage. According to another account, the secretary of Edris had asked one day of his lord what name he meant to give the city. “The name,” answered the prince, “of the first person we shall meet.” A man passed by, who, being questioned, said his name was Farés; but he stammered and pronounced it Fez. Another account says that there was an ancient city called _Zef_, on the Pearl River, which existed eighteen hundred years, and was destroyed before Islam shone upon the world; and Edris imposed upon his metropolis the name of the old city reversed. However it may be, the new city grew rapidly, and already at the beginning of the tenth century rivalled Bagdad in splendor; held within its walls the mosque of El-Caruin and that of Edris, still existant, one the largest and the other the most venerated in Africa; and was called the Mecca of the West. Toward the middle of the eleventh century Gregory IX established there a bishopric. Under the dynasty of the Almoadi it had thirty suburbs, eight hundred mosques, ninety thousand houses, ten thousand shops, eighty-six gates, vast hospitals, magnificent baths, a great and rich library of precious manuscripts in Greek and Latin; also schools of philosophy, of physics, of astronomy, and languages, to which came all the learned and lettered men of Europe and the Levant. It was called the Athens of Africa, and was at one time the seat of a perpetual fair, into which flowed the products of three continents; and European commerce had there its bazaar and its inns; and there—between Moors, Arabs, Berbers, Jews, Negroes, Turks, Christians, and renegades—five hundred thousand people lived and prospered. And now, what a change! Almost all traces of gardens have vanished; the greater part of the mosques are in ruins; of the great library, only a few worm-eaten volumes remain; the schools are dead; commerce languishes; its edifices are falling into ruin; and the population is reduced to less than a fifth of the former number. Fez is no more than an enormous carcase of a metropolis abandoned in the midst of the vast cemetery called Morocco.