It's been awhile since I was in Marrakesh and I miss it's dusty charms.
For no particular reason I offer a story of an odd experience had there, for the idle or curious..
It's an excellent city to get lost in - many streets coil into dead ends where armies of young boys boot old soccer balls around and laugh at the bewildered traveler. Engaged in these very pursuits one day I decided to try to find the Ben Youssef Mosque. This is a place I could hardly hope to enter without I had embraced Islam, but attached to it's 12th century grounds is the Medersa, an Islamic school perhaps 200 years younger than the Mosque, where a foreigner can wander. This scholarly enclave had operated for hundreds of year only ceasing activities somewhere in the 1960's.
I hailed a taxi, a very cheap means of travel there, where your cabbie is possibly of higher education attainments than you, only unable to find work in his profession. Initially reluctant to take me near the mosque, brother cabbie eventually consented and took me thru the winding roads and finally into mazes of curving streets between high ancient walls, which narrowed to a footpath. He left his cab behind and led me walking to a tall wooden door dark with age and showing faint glimmers of coiling metal work, implied thru graceful gestures that I owed him a fat tip, and departed. It was the Medersa.
At this point a small boy approached me and repeated ly said "steel-o" shyly but persistantly.
Puzzled at first I realized he was saying 'pencil' in french and hoping I would give him one.
Since I was carrying a nice ball point pen I'd stolen in a bookstore in Paris, (Precisely timed as a man with a rat on his shoulder stepped thru the door - another story), I exonerated myself of this tiny sin by passing the pen to the boy who 'merci'-ed and scurried.
Now at this point in the year, unusual winds out of the Sahara were bringing scalding air into the city and the days had been baking hot. Everything had slowed to a lazy crawl (altho Moroccans seldom seem hasty folk anyway). But as I stepped thru the doorway I was greeted by almost total darkness and a blessed coolness. As my eyes adjusted i saw an old man sitting near a table with a bowl on it. He gestured to the bowl and I put a few coins into it and walked down a long narrow dark corridor. The old man seemed to have splashed water over the paving stones and the coolness rose from them.
What happened next is one of the more memorable events of my life. Possibly resulting at least in part from extended travel, alienation, missing sleep and meals, I arrived at the end of the passage and had what some might describe as a psychic or psychotic event. I myself cannot catagorize it.
The corridor ended at a large wooden gate of intricately carved wood and light from a large open courtyard beyond streamed thru the pierced shapes of the design.
On first glimpse of this gate, I experienced a shivering rush of intense feeling, and remembered this gateway vividly. It corresponded to a recent lucid dream I'd had - of arriving with one of my friends at a school where another friend was a student, just as the students were taking a break for a meal in the courtyard.
Both of these friends are well known and loved people from my current life, in the dream they had different identities. As I stood gaping in amazement I realized that the dream was of another dream which was of another dream and so on. I saw all these infinite layers of dreams somehow evoking the view that one has standing between two mirrors with endless reflections of reflections. These layers all seemed folded into each other as a telescope collapses together. Body, emotions, mind, all were caught up in this extremely strong feeling.
I lost my sense of time of course but found myself passing thru the gate into the courtyard. A quiet gentle space filled with sunlight and the remains of a long dry fountain. Enormous panels of carved wood lined the walls, the cedar wood aged to just this side of the point of crumbling. Doorways led off into various chambers which in turn led to various chambers, eventually to small cells where a student might sleep. All of this was in carved stone and the floor plan was in oddly repeated patterns.. There was not a single soul anywhere in this large building beyond the gate keeper with the exception of a small grey cat which stalked me thru the rooms, never allowing me to approach closely. From time to time I cautiously approached the gate again, always thereby invoking the same sensations altho now considerably less intense. Years later, a photo of that structure still carries a faint echo of the mysterious feeling.
That I have some deep connection with that location is my undenyable conviction altho what a rationable interpretation might be, I instinctively avoid concluding.
Those desiring an explanation may arrive at their own, based on their individual wisdoms and insights into human nature and our world.