Marrakesh: Through Writers' Eyes by Barnaby Rogerson
A wide-ranging selection of viewpoints by writers to Morocco, from the romantic
The every-changing scene is a kaleidoscope of Eastern fancy: Ali Baba and the forty thieves, Blue-beard, Aladdin and the Grand Vizier -- all in succession pass before us.--Budgett Meakin
to the brutally real
As the corpse went past the flies left the rstaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.--George Orwell
There is a mesmerizing as-told-to author Gavin Maxwell (Ring of Bright Water) eyewitness account of the brutal end of one regime
I was only a child when these things happened, but I remember them well, though I don't like to remember them or to think that I laughed to see a man burnt alive.
And you won't enjoy reading it, either, but you won't be able to stop yourself. There are marvelous word pictures
On the fringes of the square, letter-writers and fortune-tellers sit cross-legged with their clients; a solitary greybeard listens intently to his supplicant before handing him a minute philtre and a folded charm.'A Taleb -- student of the magic arts,' Quentin explains. 'The most experienced have the power to resolve unrequited passion by summon the object of your dreams, or to reunite you with a lost love.'
Moroccans seem very suggestible to occult practices, genies and the like.'
"The plural's "jinn."'--Anthony Gladstone-Thompson
Lots of good history here, too. Worth reading.
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