Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

‘Too many,’ he says.

  Before turning in, I walk into the Plaza. By night, the great space is very different; more mysterious, but more personal. Irregular stabs of light pierce half-closed doors and shuttered windows. There is subdued chatter, some music, faces at upper windows, figures silhouetted on back-lit balconies. If this had been a town in Britain the noise would surely have been growing by now; there would be laughter, fights, shouting and raucousness. Then a familiar smell drifts across from the half-lit balconies, spicing the cold night air with a sweet aroma and bringing on a flush of nostalgia.

  Now I understand why it’s so quiet. Everyone’s stoned.

  Day Five

  CHEFCHAOUEN TO FEZ

  Wake feeling distinctly queasy in the digestion department. Bowel control will be essential this morning as the prospect of being washed and scrubbed and massaged before the cameras looms. Am tempted to take a tab of Immodium, but this turns intestines into Elgin Marbles and I’m not ready for that. I’ll have to rely on mind over matter, never one of my strong points.

  It turns out I’m not the only one affected this morning. Anyone who had the minced lamb in the main square last night is feeling similarly delicate.

  The hammam is neither health club nor massage parlour. Its function is primarily religious; to provide ritual cleansing and purification. Before attending prayers in the mosque, every good Muslim must wash hands, lower arms, nose, mouth, ears, feet and ankles. If he or she has had sexual intercourse that day, a complete body wash is expected.

  The abundant amounts of hot water required for such ablutions were, and often still are, beyond the means of most households, hence the importance of the public facility.

  I’m not surprised to hear that there appears to be difficulty in obtaining permission to film. In fact, I feel slight relief.

  But our police escort manages to talk them into it, provided we film before the baths open for men at eleven. Women’s hours are in the afternoon.

  This raises the question of who will be there if it’s closed to the public. Our drivers and our police escort sportingly agree to be extras, though, to my deep concern, they assure me that I will be stretched by a professional.

  The baths are located in an old building at the bottom of a steep, cobbled street. You wouldn’t know they were there, except for a blackened hole high on the outer wall, from which a telltale plume of steam issues from the boiler.

  The door is low, studded and painted pale blue. It gives onto a cool stone-flagged passageway, at the end of which is an open changing area, laid with coloured raffia mats and lit by daylight from above.

  My Chefchaouen shorts, though long and suitably modest, are a trifle narrow at the waist, not helping an already delicate digestive situation. I put my clothes in a locker and heave open a hulking metal door. A concrete counterweight on a rope slams it shut behind me. I find myself in the first of three chambers graded by heat. Gentle in the first, stronger in the second and in the third and final room, where the action takes place, powerful enough to send the sweat surging. The rooms are dimly lit, with vaulted ceilings and white tiles halfway up the walls. There are alcoves in the first two rooms, for resting and cooling down, and in the hot room a series of partitioned stalls where the intimate parts may be washed in some privacy.

  As the heat pumps up through the floor the washing begins. You can wash yourself or be washed. In my case Ali, my driver, round as a Buddha, takes on the task of cleaning me up, first with extensive lathering and shampooing, then by rubbing me with a viciously abrasive mitt, which reduces my outer skin to thin rolls of dirt.

  Meanwhile, the masseur, thin and wiry, with a villainous slash of a moustache, is at work on one of our other drivers. By rocking him backwards and forwards, with legs and arms interlocked, he seems intent on elongating Youssef even beyond the 6 foot 5 he already is.

  Then it’s my turn on the human rack. As I slither into his clutches it occurs to me that this could be dangerous. My Arabic is of no help. ‘Good morning’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘Tea, please’ are the only three phrases I can remember, and none of these is going to help me here. Anything useful, like ‘pulled hamstring’, ‘food poisoning’ or ‘I confess!’ will require a dictionary, which I don’t have.

  He indicates to me to lie flat and works thoroughly but compassionately, body on body, stretching, bending and using a lot of what the late great Charles Atlas used to call ‘dynamic tension’. His manipulations remain this side of agonising but our intricate couplings leave me feeling pleasantly loose-limbed.

  After the massage, Ali dumps several buckets of warm water over me. He aims each one at the crown of my head and the force of the water leaves me gasping. But as I sit and recover in a marble-tiled alcove in one of the cooler outer chambers, head back, staring up at the peeling plaster, it occurs to me that not only have I survived what could have been a dreadful embarrassment, but also my stomach feels much better. I mean, much better.

  Our drivers go back to being drivers, but there’s a sort of camaraderie amongst us that didn’t exist before the hammam. I’m quite blase, especially about the massage. It was nothing. Just a scratch. They grin knowingly, and it’s only when we’re on the road again that I hear they had specially asked the masseur to go easy on me. Roger, very amused, tells me the exact words they used translate roughly as ‘treat him like a virgin’.

  The mountains of Morocco were formed millions of years ago by the collision of the land masses of Africa and Europe, which created a series of folds, running southwest to northeast and providing a spectacular roller-coaster landscape. The road we take to Fez crosses the first of these great ranges, the Rif. Rising over 8000 feet, the mountains are creased and cracked into an often inaccessible network of valleys and peaks, providing cover for local warlords, who have always been more powerful here than central government. Though we pass cork forest and olive groves and flocks of goats along the way, the mountain soil is not fertile. The only crop that grows anywhere is Cannabis indica, kif.

  It is illegal to possess, deal in or move kif within Morocco, yet somehow it’s always available, and there’s a big demand for it abroad (the chaplain at St Andrew’s in Tangier told me that part of his responsibilities were to administer to the dozen or more English and Americans currently in prison on smuggling charges).

  All of which makes these mountains potentially dangerous and lawless places, and we are warned not to stop under any circumstances. Any accident or breakdown will usually have been arranged as a trap.

  Occasionally I see young men loitering, but mostly the road is empty, curling round dark and craggy outcrops, high enough at one moment to see eagles wheeling below, then falling steeply down through pine and cedar forest to meadows and verges thick with oleander.

  As we emerge from the Rif the land ahead of us opens out into a panorama of rolling hills and fields, a wide Moroccan prairie. From this, in turn, emerges one of the great cities of the Arab world.

  Five hours after leaving Chefchaouen, the city of Fez appears due south on the horizon. Low, treeless and compact.

  Day Six

  FEZ

  To an ear disoriented by deep sleep it sounds like bagpipes warming up or a very ancient siren being cranked into life. Then, after a moment of struggling wakefulness, it coalesces into a rough approximation of a voice, albeit weirdly stretched and distorted. Just as it seems to grow clear and explicable another voice chimes in, at a different pitch and much further away, then another, close by, hard, hooting and metallic, then another and another, until waves of overlapping, over-amplified exhortation burst from the darkened city. If I knew Arabic I would know they were saying, ‘God is Great. There is No God But God. Prayer is Better than Sleep.’

  I check my watch. It’s 4 a.m.

  Soobh Fegr, the dawn summons, is one of five calls to prayer that mark the Muslim day. I have heard it many times, but never anything as spectacular or prolific as the prayer calls of Fez, a rolling wall of sound rising from over fifty mosques, cr
adled in a bowl of hills.

  Infidel that I am, I fall to sleep rather than prayer, and by the time I wake sunlight is thumping against the window and the only sound is the trilling of birds.

  I step out on my fifth-floor balcony. All the trees in Fez seem to be clustered in the hotel gardens below me. Three enormous jacarandas, wispy casuarinas, orange and lemon trees, fat, spreading palms and amongst them a great congregation of birds, rushing from one tree to another, perching, pecking, preening and darting away. It occurs to me that they may well be birds from Lincolnshire or the Wirral down here for the winter. They recently tagged an osprey that had flown from Rutland Water to Senegal, over 3000 miles, in twenty-one days. Which is a lot quicker than we’re going.

  Like Chefchaouen, old Fez was a security-conscious city. Until 1912 and the arrival of the French, no-one could enter without a pass, and even then they would be expected to conduct their business and leave within forty-eight hours. The city gates were locked at sunset and those who failed to abide by the rules would likely as not end up, along with others who fell foul of the law, with their heads on spikes outside. And all this well into my own father’s lifetime.

  As was their wont, the French built their own separate new town and left the medina alone. Thanks to this enlightened, if crafty, policy, it remains, according to my Cadogan guidebook, ‘the most complete Islamic mediaeval city in the world’. It’s also a mysterious, labyrinthine place, enclosed and secretive. I need an interpreter. To interpret not just the language but the city itself.

  Which is how I meet Abdelfettah Saffar, known to his English wife as Fats and to his friends as Fettah.

  ‘Like the cheese,’ he says with a well-worn smile.

  He has a house in the old town, which he’s been restoring for three years, speaks impressively good English, once lived on a houseboat on the Thames and at one time designed a Moroccan-style bathroom for Mick Jagger’s house in Richmond.

  He’s shorter than me and about twenty years younger, with a neatly trimmed black beard, white djellaba, bare feet tucked into a pair of babouches, backless yellow slippers, and an efficient black briefcase.

  Twenty-first-century Fez may look mediaeval, but it’s a working town. Thousands live, shop, worship and do business without ever having to leave the medina. The streets are narrow, and though all motor traffic is forbidden, you’re quite likely to be run down by a mule or squashed against the wall by an overladen donkey. In the Arab fashion, domestic life is discreet and hidden away, but commerce is open, visible and upfront. It’s also organised traditionally, into guilds of craftsmen. Each guild area announces itself with a distinctive scent, what Fettah calls ‘a geography of smell’. The acrid whiff of pigment in Dyeing Street, cedar wood shavings in Carpenters Street, leather in Tanners Street, the fragrance of fresh-made sweets and nuts in Nougat Street, the seductive sizzle of grilling meat along Butchers Row.

  A traffic jam in old Fez can be a treat for the nostrils. At one point on Talaa Kebira (Main Street) I’m thrust to one side by a man with a tray of freshly-baked bread on his head, who is trying to avoid a woman carrying a basket of fresh vervain, who, like him, is trying to avoid a mule laden with fresh oranges.

  We pass along an alleyway of open-fronted stalls, which rings with the sound of metal beating. The din is cacophonous and comforting, and through the smoke from their fires I can see men and boys, forging, beating and shaping copper and brass into an inexhaustible supply of low-tech utensils. There are huge bowls, some 3 or 4 feet wide, in which meat, dried with salt and spices, will be preserved through the winter (a throwback, says Fettah, to the siege days, when the city gates sometimes remained shut for months). There are tall fluted instruments for distilling perfumes like rose-water, crescent moon and star fixtures for cemeteries and mosques, and stacks of teapots. Down the street a young boy and an old man with thick gold-rimmed glasses are stooped over a low table, stitching together pointy-toed leather slippers like the ones Fettah is wearing, and a little further on a man is turning table legs on a spindle, using one foot to drive it and the other to guide a chisel tucked between his toes.

  An arched gateway, sandwiched between two small shops, gives onto a courtyard where lime is being daubed on animal hides to strip them clean. This funduq is a monochrome world, full of ghostly surfaces so thickly coated with white lime and plaster that it’s difficult to see where the layers of paint end and the buildings begin. A tall black African stirs a vat of fresh lime with a wooden pole, as stocks of fleeces sway through the archway on the backs of donkeys.

  There is not a single piece of machinery here. It is a glimpse of a pre-industrial age.

  Fettah says he has something special to show me. It doesn’t look promising. We squeeze up narrow stairs covered in threadbare red carpet into a shop packed tight with leather goods of all kinds. We pass through ever smaller and more claustrophobic rooms, until, without warning, we’re at the back of the building and light is spilling onto a wide terrace.

  With a dramatic flourish, this tight, concealed old city, is thrown wide open. Below us, like a giant paintbox, is a honeycomb of fifty or sixty stone vats, each one around 4 feet across, filled with pools of richly coloured liquid ranging from snow white through grey, milky brown and pale pink to garnet red, metallic blue and saffron yellow. It is a complete and immaculately preserved mediaeval tannery.

  Water, heaved up out of the Fes river by a massive wheel, is distributed amongst the vats, in which the tanners mix the heavy combination of water, hides and dye using only prehensile feet and the pressure of the muscles in their legs. This is a young man’s game. The tanners have no protection from the sun, and temperatures can rise above 50degC/122degF in high summer. For a day’s work in these conditions Fettah reckons they take home 100 deram. Around six pounds.

  And it’s not only the heat they have to endure. A sharp acidic stench rises from the kaleidoscope of colours below, a combination of the sheep’s urine and pigeon shit used in the dyeing process. The tanners have had to get used to it. A tour group watching them from an adjacent balcony are offered sprigs of mint as nosegays.

  Apart from the slow, rumbling creak of the water wheel, there is no sound other than voices, splashes and the sound of wet hides slapping on the side of the kilns. If I close my eyes I could be in a great open-air bathhouse.

  Fettah reminds me that the Fez of 600 years ago would have had 200 such tanneries, as well as 467 funduqs, 93 public baths and 785 mosques.

  There is a minor jam along one of the passageways on our way out of the medina, caused by a donkey shedding a load of mattresses. No-one seems impatient to pass, nor to pass comment on the Laurel and Hardy-like attempts at reloading. It’s the way life is in this extraordinary city. The walls of Fez have kept the modern world at bay. What I have sensed today is little different from the impressions of two French travellers, the Tharaud brothers, who came through here in the 1930s.

  ‘In Fez there is only one age and one style, that of yesterday. It is the site of a miracle. The suppression of the passage of time.’

  Day Seven

  FEZ

  Today Fettah has asked me round to his house.

  The entrance gives nothing away. A discreet little doorway set into the high walls of one of the warren of passageways in the medina. This gives onto another much narrower passage, dimly lit and smelling of cool, damp plaster, another modest doorway and then, a revelation. A covered courtyard, its walls decorated with intricate arabesque patterns and glazed zellij tiles, rises 60 feet to the roof of the house. This soaring space opens onto a blue and white-tiled terrace, almost as broad as the courtyard is tall, with a garden beyond, full of flowers, shrubs and various fertile trees, which are pointed out to me in detail by Narjiss, one of Fettah’s two young daughters, with occasional promptings from her mother.

  ‘We’ve got lemon, we’ve got orange … we’ve got, er …’

  ‘Pomegranate …’

  ‘Yes … we’ve got pomegranate …’


  ‘Olives …’

  ‘Yes, we’ve got olives.’

  ‘Kumquat …’

  ‘I know! I know!’

  As at the tanneries yesterday, the contrast between the close-packed streets outside and the airy spaciousness inside is more than remarkable; it’s almost an optical illusion.

  ‘Doors within doors within doors,’ is how Fettah describes the phenomenon of public and private Fez. ‘The more you get into it, the more you’re lured into it.’

  His property has a floor space of 22,000 square feet, but it’s by no means the largest private house in the medina. Many of them are in poor condition, and it is only over the last three years that there has been much interest in restoring them. In London, such a mansion would be worth many millions. It cost Fettah PS60,000.

  Abdelfettah is proud of his city. As the craftsman son of a craftsman father, he believes passionately in the preservation of the medina and the traditional styles and skills of the craftsmen within it. He does not see his enthusiasm as narrow or nationalist. Since he and his wife returned here after seven years in England they have welcomed people from twenty-eight different countries to a house which they see as a meeting place for musicians, writers, filmmakers and, of course, artists from all over the world.

  Off to one side of the property, through small rooms where lunch is being prepared by smiling relatives, is another spacious courtyard with workshops set around it. Amongst them is Fettah’s studio, where he works on elaborate and complex plaster-work decorations.

  I ask him why Islamic art has to be abstract. Is representation of nature and the human body really forbidden?

  Fettah thinks there is no express ban in Islam but that creating the likeness of man and nature is, as he puts it, stepping into God’s field.

  ‘Islamic art,’ he says, ‘is the story of the line … the Muslim artist just exploits it to the maximum.’

  His own work is painstakingly and meticulously carved by hand. He starts with a blank space and fills it up as the ideas come to him.