Hi Folks--Just back from Marrakesh via the infamous Express, and if you think it's hard to get a tune out of your head, let me assure you that it's really annoying when you can't, and it's a tune you really don't know very well in the first place. Sorry to send y'all a blank message the other day. I'm amused to find that it generated more response than almost anything else I've sent out. Let's just dedicate it to Casablanca and Marrakesh, on the Peter Rabbit principle: "If you haven't got anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

The big news from Morocco is Fez, for which I have fallen hard. It is the most thoroughly medieval place I have ever been, and for a Medievalist like me, that’s pretty exciting. It’s one of the great cities of Islam, the ancient center of trade and learning in the Maghrib, and the object of a major UNESCO rescue project today. A fabulous city of stones and mules and veils and smells and dark twisty passages, where the occasional door opens onto a courtyard of dazzling light, filled with minute geometric ornament so precise and so rich that it takes your breath away. Smells that catch the breath too, alternating as the wind blows--maybe the waft of hot bread from the communal wood-fired bakery, the musk of wet donkey, or the gut-churning stench from the tanneries. The only place I can compare with it is Varanasi, for sheer intensity, claustrophobic complexity, and tangible spiritual fervor--but without Varanasi’s motorized traffic, lepers, or burning ghats. Or maybe, like the whole of Istanbul's old city condensed and squished and then hidden in a low sloping valley surrounded by gaunt hills. Gads, I’m running ahead of myself! Here’s the story:

As soon as the ship cleared, I split Casablanca (ugh) for Fez by train. Stumbled around for a bit the next morning, wondering what to do, but then had the great good fortune to bump into friends from the ship. While I had agonized over how to avoid Fez’s infamously persistent guides, they had simply gone ahead and hired one. I swallowed my supertourist pride, and joined in. I love getting lost exploring complex markets, and had planned to try it here, but this one was way beyond me. I surrendered to the guide, and am so glad I did. He was a sweetie, enthusiastic and well-spoken, full of energy for all the climbing up and ducking under and slithering through that the Fez medina requires.

We made quite the little group, the five of us—a couple from Santa Fe. half of which serves as ship's shrink, their adopted lotus-eyed Cambodian three-year-old Sopahn, the guide and I. Most of the ship had gone off to Marrakesh instead (hah!) and it’s winter here, so we seemed to have the city largely to ourselves as tourists and weren’t hassled. It was the day before Ramadan, so everyone was hurrying--pushing and shoving through the alleys, dodging low projections, stepping over the beggars, ducking into dark corners to pee, herding schoolkids, protecting their groceries—too busy getting ready for Ramadan to pay any particular attention to us. We were pushed and yelled at only to get out of the way of the donkeys speeding down the steep lanes, piled high with stinking skins or crates of Coca-Cola. Picture us doing this while pushing a baby stroller down the steep cobblestone alleys, dodging silk-dyers doing their thing in the public fountains. Gawd, picture me pushing a stroller at all, or holding onto a willful three-year-old straining like a kite in a gale in the middle of a butchers' shambles, me trying to keep her out of the piles of cows' hooves and explaining to her whatwas what as live chickens were set on scales, then neatly decapitated for well-dressed ladies with shopping bags.

I could get into this rent-a-kid strategy--I'm sure she was half the reason we weren't getting the usual Moroccan market hassles. Sopahn is a busy but very precise child, much attracted to anything that glitters and particularly fond of glass and gems. Merchants of Fez had group heart attacks watching her inspect their stemware, but we knew from the months on the ship that she could handle crystal like a debutante. So one after another, the enchanted merchants loaded her down with jewelry as tribute. "She is...South American, madame?" "No, Cambodian." "Ah, of course..." The guide took his turning pushing the stroller and carrying the kid, who of course was far too wired to actually sit in the thing. But Fez is a market and craft center, a shopping heaven, and the stroller proved useful as we burdened ourselves with more and more treasures excavated from this glittering cave of a city. When Terry and I bought our inevitable jellabas, Sopahn was given a fairy princess robe of sheer blue satin and gold, with tiny curly shoes to match. She wore it like a queen. Thus equipped, we were quite the spectacle touring the tanneries, delicately sniffing our bunches of mint to counteract the smell, looking for all the world like civic plague inspectors in a medieval painting. Or like complete loonies--take your pick.

Light got dimmer, and it wasn’t just the weather. We’d gasp at each narrower, darker alley the guide led us down, ducking under timbers, dodging stinking cesspools, and then finding ourselves in another exquisite courtyard, invisible from the street. Jaded traveller, a medievalist long past romantic medievalism—so I thought I was—but Fez got to me, more than any other old market city I’ve been through. The lower down the slopes we pushed, the deeper into the medina, the more I had that cliché’d sense of going back in time. It was the donkeys, maybe, or the crowds of women around the shrines, or the uncompromising nature of the place. They were not going to let infidels into the busy mosques, any more than they’d let cars squeeze through the alleys, and that was that. Only late in the day did we remember to eat. We devoured a vast dinner of stews and soups in an impossibly ornate and otherwise empty old palace, with a portable heater, a hanging light bulb, a staff of twelve and a small dog. By now the medieval was normal; it was this restaurant scene that seemed surreal, eating guiltily during Ramadan with an upside-down three-year-old in my lap. The others spent a second day touring the countryside with the guide, but I took the train back that night, my head spinning with it all. Somewhere in Fez I lost my beautiful gold ring--a bummer to be sure, but I rather enjoy the thought that some future archeologist of the Fez medina will find it in the sewers with other bits of treasure and puzzle over its foreign workmanship, one more short chapter in the complex history of a great trading metropolis.

Oops--they're throwing me out. It's been a pleasure reliving Fez for an hour, forgetting the touts of Marrakesh and the taxi drivers of Casablanca ("We'll always have Fez..."). Tonight is our last full evening in port before Miami, and we're celebrating with a huge iftar, the evening meal to break the Ramadhan fast, with whatever music the indefatigable world-music prof has dug up amongst his numberless friends here.

Catch y’all in Miami--------------------------------lyauty.