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raised in song giving way to the rasp of small saws from an inner courtyard.
    The populace ran the spectrum from African black to Mediterranean olive, with the occasional Nordic features and even blue eyes looking out of Arab brown skin. Jews, Arabs, Europeans, Sufis, each in a different form of dress. Transportation was mostly tiny sweet-faced donkeys and sullen mules, but I also saw a few horses, a handful of wheel-barrows, two camels (at a distance, not within the suq streets), and one heavy-laden, flat-tyred bicycle being used to deliver lengths of bamboo.
    And the wares on offer! One street held shops displaying tall cones of varicoloured powder, from the deep red of paprika to brilliant yellow turmeric, interspersed with vendors selling bags of sticks, leaves, seeds, and what appeared to be sand, bowls of dusty blue chunks of indigo, and carefully arranged hillocks of mice skulls and desiccated lizards. One shop displayed hundreds of prayer beads on its three walls—ivory and amber, lapis and coral, sandalwood and ebony. Its neighbour held teetering stacks of cylindrical tarbooshes , or fezzes , mostly red, with tassels of every colour imaginable.
    Few of the shops had signs. I took care to read any that did, and once spotted the word horloge on a display of timepieces near a gate at the southern edge of the suq , but there was no mention of sorcerers.
    Apart from the absence of magicians’ timepieces, the town held a richness of sensory stimulation and information, when a person had nothing to do but wander and listen. And as the morning wore on, I found that the previous day’s sense of confusion had settled considerably.
    I was, I determined, in Fez, a walled Moroccan town built where the hills meet the plains. Water was all around; wherever I walked I could hear a rush or a trickle, and decorative fountains in various states of repair and cleanliness were on many corners. Now that daily life was under way again, the flow of traffic (all either pedestrian or four-legged) led me from one neighbourhood to another, each centre composed of a mosque and its attendant religious buildings, food markets, a baker’s oven, and the ever-tempting hammam baths. Specialised craftsmen clustered in given areas. As I made my way north out of the central mosque district, I found that even the more general tradesmen—grocers, tailors—tended to gather together, interspersed with stretches that were largely residential.
    Some of the streets were packed with furious activity—men bearing loads, women haggling for greens, and artisans creating tools for daily life; other streets stood in a state of suspended animation, with nothing more lively than a sleeping cat (I saw no dogs, but then, this was a Moslem country). Earlier, the rooftops had brought to mind a honeycomb; now, the streets around me evoked the life within a hive, some corners almost deserted, others bustling with the same sense of incomprehensible purpose.
    I continued north until I came to the city walls, and another gate. There I spooned up a bowl of harira that tasted entirely different from yesterday’s, followed it with a bowl of spicy fava beans swimming in oil, made my dessert out of three sugary dried figs, then bought a handful of pistachios and perched on a bit of collapsing wall in front of a Moroccan druggist’s shop, tossing away the shells and watching the French guards.
    Sitting before the gates brought an odd sensation. I did not think that I had ever been there before—certainly there was no sense of memory attached to the scene—yet it was deeply familiar: the wall, the gate, and the guards; the aged olive tree overhead, under which women sat with their children and rested before carrying their burdens to homes outside the walls. A water-seller with tiny tinkling bells filled cups with water from a swollen goatskin slung across his shoulder (the sight stimulated another sensory rush: taste of metal/mouth filled with warm and musty water/two dark