Night and Day in Marrakech

The Labyrinth

There is a moment on your first morning in the Marrakech medina when you realize you are lost. Not the gentle, romantic kind of lost where you might stumble upon a charming cafe. Lost in the absolute sense — no landmarks, no bearings, no idea which of the seven narrow alleys branching from this intersection leads back to anything you recognize. The walls are high and featureless. The sky is a strip of blue above. A man on a donkey pushes past you without acknowledgment. A cat watches from a doorstep with the calm superiority of a creature that knows exactly where it is.

This is the correct experience. Getting lost in the medina is not a failure of navigation — it is the point. The medina was designed, over a thousand years of organic growth, to confuse outsiders. It is a defensive architecture turned lifestyle, a maze that protects its residents by bewildering its visitors, and the only way to learn it is to surrender to it. I spent my first morning turning left at every intersection, a strategy that in a rational city would have brought me back to my starting point but in Marrakech led me deeper and deeper into the labyrinth until I emerged, blinking, in a square I had never seen, in front of a fountain tiled in blue and green zellij mosaic, where an old man sat on a bench selling sprigs of fresh mint for a dirham each.

I bought one. I held it to my nose and the smell — bright, sharp, uncomplicated — cut through the sensory overload of the medina like a knife through silk. Mint is the organizing principle of Marrakech. It arrives in the tea, in the air, on the breeze from a garden wall, in the hammam steam, at the table before every meal. It is the thread you follow through the labyrinth when everything else is too much. And everything in Marrakech is always, gloriously, too much.

The souks unfolded as I walked deeper — each alley devoted to a single trade. The leather workers in one passage, the smell of drying hides so intense it had physical weight. The metalworkers in the next, hammering brass trays with a rhythm that served as both craft and percussion section. The spice merchants with their pyramids of turmeric and cumin and ras el hanout — the house blend that every stall owner swore was his grandmother's recipe and no two of which tasted alike. I bought saffron threads for a price that the seller and I arrived at through twenty minutes of theatrical negotiation that we both enjoyed more than the transaction required.

The Riad at Rest

My riad was a door in a wall. Nothing on the outside suggested what lay within — just weathered wood, brass studs, and a knocker shaped like the Hand of Fatima. The door opened into a courtyard that made me inhale audibly. Four orange trees framed a tile fountain in the center. The walls were carved plaster — geometric patterns so intricate they seemed to vibrate. A balcony ran around the second floor, draped in jasmine. The sound of the fountain masked the sound of the city outside so completely that the medina might have been a hundred miles away rather than six inches beyond the wall.

This is the genius of the riad — the traditional Moroccan house built around an interior courtyard, a private world carved from the chaos of the public one. In the morning, light falls through the open roof and turns the tile floor into a mosaic of shadow and sun. In the afternoon, the courtyard becomes a cool refuge from the heat, the thick walls and the fountain and the orange trees collaborating on a microclimate that the architects of a thousand years ago understood perfectly. At night, the sky appears above the courtyard in a rectangle of stars, and the jasmine releases its scent into the warm air, and you lie on a daybed and listen to the last call to prayer echo across the rooftops and think that whoever invented the riad understood something fundamental about the relationship between beauty and enclosure — that paradise, in the desert, is always a garden behind a wall.

The Hammam

The hammam attendant spoke no English and I spoke no Arabic, which simplified the transaction considerably. She pointed at a bench. I sat. She handed me a bucket of water so hot it made my eyes water. I poured it over my head. She produced a rough glove called a kessa and began to scrub my arms with a pressure that fell somewhere between vigorous and punitive. Dead skin rolled off in grey ribbons. I stared at it in horror and fascination. She laughed.

The hammam — the traditional Moroccan bathhouse — is not a spa treatment. It is a ritual that dates back to the Roman occupation and that Moroccans practice weekly as a matter of hygiene, sociality, and something that resists translation but sits close to the concept of renewal. The room was domed, tiled in white, thick with steam. Three other women were being scrubbed on marble slabs around the room, their conversations echoing off the wet stone. The attendant moved methodically — arms, shoulders, back, legs — and by the time she finished I felt like a different person. Not metaphorically. My skin was a different colour. She held up the kessa, grey with dead skin, and grinned with the satisfaction of a job well done.

Afterward, in the cooling room, I was wrapped in a towel and given mint tea and left alone on a marble bench to contemplate my own raw cleanliness. The steam drifted. The tea was scalding and sweet. My skin tingled. I understood, lying there in the dim light with the sound of water and women's voices echoing around me, why Moroccans do this every week. The hammam does not just clean you. It reminds you that you have a body, that the body can be attended to, that the simple act of being warm and clean and still is, in a city this intense, its own form of luxury.

The Square at Dusk

Jemaa el-Fnaa is a square that becomes a world. By day it is an open expanse of hot pavement, snake charmers and henna artists and the occasional monkey on a chain. But at dusk — at dusk the transformation begins, and it is one of the great spectacles of urban life anywhere on earth.

The smoke comes first. A hundred food stalls fire their grills simultaneously, and the square fills with a haze of charcoal and spice that blurs the edges of everything and turns the low sun into a diffused orange glow. Then the sound — drummers, storytellers, musicians playing gnawa music on three-stringed sintir lutes, the overlapping cries of stall vendors shouting their numbers at passing tourists. Then the crowds, thickening as the sun drops, Moroccan families and foreign visitors and local teenagers and men in djellabas all circling the square in a slow, collective promenade that has no destination and no end.

I sat on a rooftop terrace above the square with a glass of fresh orange juice — Marrakech runs on fresh orange juice the way Paris runs on coffee — and watched the scene below dissolve into its own smoke and noise. The Atlas Mountains were visible beyond the city, snow-capped, impossibly close, glowing pink in the last light like a hallucination pasted onto the skyline. The muezzin's call to prayer rose from a dozen minarets simultaneously, each slightly out of sync with the others, creating a chorus of overlapping voices that climbed above the drumming and the shouting and the sizzle of grills and hung there, in the warm air above the square, for two long minutes.

Then it faded. The drumming resumed. The smoke thickened. The square at night became a different place — darker, louder, more crowded, lit by bare bulbs strung between stalls, the air thick with the smell of lamb and cumin and something sweet I could not identify. I walked down from the terrace and into it. The city closed around me like a hand.