The Thirteen Windows

<p>On May 6, 1357, something extraordinary appeared on Tala'a Kebira, the main artery of Fes el-Bali. Across the street from the newly completed Bou Inania Madrasa, the Marinid sultan Abu Inan Faris unveiled a hydraulic clock built into the facade of a building that would be called Dar al-Magana — the House of the Clock.</p>

<p>Thirteen wooden beams protruded from the wall. Below them, twelve small windows. Beneath each window, a bronze bowl. Every hour, one of the windows would open and a metal ball would drop into the bowl below, ringing out across the street. By the twelfth hour, all twelve bowls held a ball. The entire medina could hear the time.</p>

<p>The mechanism was hidden behind the wall. A horizontal cart, driven by a system of weighted ropes, moved slowly behind the twelve doors. One rope held a hanging weight. The other was attached to a float in a water reservoir that emptied gradually. As the water level dropped, the float descended, releasing the rope that triggered each door in sequence. Weights, water, gravity, and bronze.</p>

<p>This was not the first water clock in Morocco. The historian Abdelhadi Tazi documented an earlier one at the Koutoubia mosque in Marrakech, described by the fourteenth-century encyclopedist Ibn Fadhl Allah al-'Omari as hanging fifty cubits in the air and emitting sounds audible from a distance. Another had been installed at al-Qarawiyyin in 1286, designed by Abu Abdellah Ibn al-Habbak, because the sundials and hourglasses were no longer sufficient for a mosque that every other mosque in the city followed for prayer times.</p>

<p>But Dar al-Magana was the most visible. It stood on the busiest street in the medina, opposite the most ambitious building project of the Marinid dynasty. Abu Inan Faris was a patron of science and learning who wanted Fes to be a capital of knowledge, not just commerce. The clock was a statement: we measure time with mathematics and engineering, not just the sun.</p>

<p>The local chronicler al-Jazna'i recorded the unveiling. He noted the date. He described the spectacle. What he did not do — and what nobody did — was write down exactly how the mechanism worked.</p>

<p>At some point in the centuries that followed, the clock stopped. Nobody could restart it. The knowledge of its inner workings had passed with the men who built it. The bronze bowls collected dust instead of metal balls. The ropes frayed. The reservoir dried.</p>

<p>The bowls were removed in 2004 by ADER-Fes, the foundation responsible for restoring monuments in the medina, with the aim of studying and reconstructing the mechanism. Old postcards from more than a century ago show the bowls still sitting on the beams beneath each window. The restoration project has so far been unable to replicate how the clock functioned. The mechanism can be compared to the Clock of Ridwan al-Sa'ati at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, but the Fes clock's specific engineering remains a puzzle.</p>

<p>Today, Dar al-Magana is a facade with thirteen wooden beams and twelve empty windows on a busy street in the oldest medina in the world. Thousands of people pass it daily without looking up. A small sign explains what it was. The building is also sometimes called the House of Maimonides, based on a popular legend — unconfirmed — that the Jewish philosopher once lived there during his years in Fes.</p>

<p>A clock that told time by dropping balls into bronze bowls, built by a sultan who wanted his city to measure the hours with precision, lost because nobody thought to write the instructions down. It rang for the last time centuries ago. The street is still the same street. The madrasa across the road is still standing. The bowls are in a workshop somewhere, waiting.</p>