Instruments · a Light

Fez has a water clock nobody has managed to restart

On a street in Fez, opposite the Bou Inania madrasa, is a wall with thirteen carved cedar beams jutting out of it and twelve brass bowls set below them. It is the front of a water clock built in 1357 for the Marinid sultan Abu Inan, and the building behind it is still called Dar al-Magana, the house of the clock. On the hour a weight is thought to have released a ball onto a bowl, so the hours were counted by sound. The mechanism inside is gone. Several restorations have cleaned and stabilised the facade, and the working of it remains a matter of competing reconstructions, none of them proved. Elsewhere al-Jazari's manual preserves the drawings that Fez lacks.

Dar al-Magana, Fez · 1357