Old Hands, part 7

At major attractions like the Saadian Tombs our street guide would leave us and we would be taken up by a separate (usually unofficial) guide inside the place, so everyone would get a little money from us. On our way out our street guide would find us again. We went to El Badi, a ruined palace stripped of its mosaics and marbles, and the Mellah, the very poor-looking Jewish quarter. There were supposedly still 3,000 Jews in Marrakesh, and with persistence and some cash our guide got us into the synagogue. It was decorated like something out of the 1950’s, with seating for about 200 people, and it was clearly still in regular use. Then we went to the jewelry and spice souks of the Mellah and bought some peppercorns.

We had our guide take us to El Bahia palace, built in the 1800s in imitation of traditional Moorish style by a wealthy government minister. We had a superb guide there who explained much about Moorish art and architecture and about Islam.

“The four elements of Moorish architecture are air, light, water, and symmetry,” he said. He showed us that many false doors had been placed in the palace to create symmetry, but the symmetry was rarely perfect—“because only God is perfect,” he said. The elaborate decoration included painted doors and ceilings, carved wood marquetry, mosaics, and always a fountain or basin to provide the sound of trickling water.

Around the corner we saw Maison Tiskiwin, once the home of a Dutchman who lived in Marrakesh for forty years. The house was now a museum displaying his collection of Moroccan handicrafts—pottery, rugs, belts.

We stopped for a cheap ($5) couscous lunch, watching perplexed as one guy after another came into the place jingling coins, then leaving. It took us a while to figure out that they were selling cigarettes by the cigarette, one dirham (about 12 cents) apiece.

On Friday we hired a private car and driver to take us south into the High Atlas mountains, where the Berbers live. The weather was good and the guide, Mohammed, was pleasant. We drove to Asni and the Ourika Valley, looking at snow-covered Mount Toukbal. There were small Berber villages, hard to spot because their mud huts matched the earth around them. We stopped at a Berber market on the way home—a big mud pit full of merchants. We were the only tourists there at the moment, and our guide did not go through the place with us, so people were hanging on us pretty intensely. When we first arrived there Mike got about twenty feet ahead of me, and I started to feel really scared. “Mike!” I called, but he didn’t hear me. “Mike! Mike!” Finally I yelled “MIKE!” at the top of my lungs, and he turned around and came back for me. But after that everybody in the market seemed to know Mike and suggested to Mike that Mike buy some silver bracelets for Mrs. Mike.

The next day we got up early for a bus tour to Ourzazate, “the gateway to the Sahara.” The bus took us through the High Atlas to the only pass between northern and southern Morocco. The mountain road made hairpin turns and dizzying drops as it rose above the snow line. Once we negotiated the pass and descended the mountains we began to see Arabs. We went to Ait Ben Haddou, a kasbah (fortifed residence) from medieval times. A maze of rooms and alleys made up the place, famous for having been filmed for Lawrence of Arabia and The Jewel of the Nile.

We continued on to Ourzazate, the starting point for journeys into the Sahara. It was dry and brown, but not shifting-sands-type desert. We were told that you have to travel several days into the Sahara to see that. We took a walk through the old part of the city and were amazed to see some women making flat, round loaves of bread in a primitive-looking bakery, and a Tuareg woman with green tattoos on her face.

It was a long, dark ride on those mountain roads to get back to Marrakesh, but on our descent we could see a million stars in the black sky. It felt as if we were very far from ordinary life.

On our last day we wanted to see some of the sights we’d missed in the northern Medina, so we got a guide and went to Dar Si Said Museum, with more good Moroccan handicrafts, and the Ben Youssef Medersa. The latter was an important stop, because it had once been a student residence adjacent to a mosque. Non-Muslims cannot enter a mosque, but the Medersa had architecture and decoration similar to what would be found in a mosque. There were mosaics and plaster carvings and marble columns that were quite beautiful. Upstairs was a warren of small rooms that had housed the Koran students.

Then we asked our guide to take us to one of the town’s tanneries, because the guidebook said they were both colorful and amazingly primitive. We saw some people at work in the open-air shop, taking skins out of vats and scraping hair off hides. It was dirty and smelly, but also striking, with many vats full of brightly colored dyes. We walked through some more souks, looking at ironwork and woodwork, then went back to Djemaa el Fna for lunch. We sat on a terrace overlooking the plaza and watched women selling baskets, water-sellers posing for photos, fortune tellers, medicine men, dentists, Koran chanters, dancers, snake charmers, and monkeys. “I could sit here forever and never get bored,” I told Mike. But eventually we found a taxi and went to see Jardin Majorelle, the garden of Yves St. Laurent’s house. It was like a little botanical garden, and there was another small museum of beautiful Moroccan crafts.

By 10 o’clock that night we were back in the house, saying goodbye to Dolores. “Did you have a good time with her?” I asked the kids.

“She was so much fun!” said Lisa. “And we watched all her Esther Williams movies. They were great!”