Low life | 8 October 2011

On Sunday morning we got up early, met the guide, Khalila, on the hotel steps and went on a cultural landmark and shopping tour of Marrakesh. We’d done the Majorelle garden, which we all thought we liked. We’d done the Koutoubia mosque and the Jemaa el-Fnaa square. We’d had a look around an empty palace, former home of a prime minister with 52 wives, didn’t catch the name, now the home of a small colony of feral cats. And we’d strolled between the baked mud walls of the old quarter, where Khalila had pointed out the old synagogue, now closed.

And it was about here, in front of this synagogue, around ten o’clock, that the heat from the sun began to tell. I was therefore relieved when Khalila led us into our first shop of the morning, a herbalist’s shop, and delivered us into the hands of the smiling chief executioner, who in turn led us into his air-conditioned inner sanctum and bade us take a seat.

We arranged ourselves on the U-shaped padded bench especially designed for small parties of tourists from the more upmarket hotels on prearranged visits. From floor to ceiling the room was lined with dried herbs in glass jars. And I could see the herbalist casting his canny eye over us, trying to figure out in his mind what kind of social relations might exist between the three astonishingly beautiful and elegantly dressed young Englishwomen — a PR representative, a broadsheet journalist and a poet — and the sweating, piggy-eyed, 55-year-old man in their midst wearing the same black pinstripe suit that King Mohammed VI wears in his official portraits.

I’ve been in Marrakesh once before; 20 years ago I came up from the south in an overland truck from Nairobi via the Congo and the Sahara desert.