G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Maybe so; but it can also calm the mind in unpredictable ways that staying home does not. This happened to me once before, when I returned to New York on the eve of 9/11, deeply imprinted by the tranquility I had experienced at a certain untamed garden in the South of France. As fear spread across America that September and in the months that followed, I kept returning in my mind to that garden, and regaining a center. And it happened again on the cusp of Covid-19.
I flew to Morocco in early March 2020, as the shadows of illness and fear again began to spread across America and the world. The virus had not yet hit in full force, but relatives begged me not to go. Despite a sense of foreboding, I was drawn there by my curiosity, and the promise of sun and warm weather.
I wasn’t disappointed. Again, I found in a far-flung place a peace of mind that arrived at unexpected moments, and buoyed me long after my return a week later to a suddenly stricken and terrified New York.
It began in the medina (old city) of Fès, which was founded in 789 C.E. as the seat of the Idrisid Dynasty, and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I was staying with a small group at a riad, or guesthouse, called Dar El Ghalia, in the heart of the medina. Dar El Ghalia is an elegant old family mansion that’s been chopped up into odd (and dark) but comfortable rooms; it was the sort of place you hesitated to leave on your own for fear of getting hopelessly lost. But within the building’s high walls, surprises awaited.
An initial epiphany came on the first morning, just before breakfast. I was sitting in the atrium of the hotel, a lounge that doubles as the dining area, listening to the sound of the splashing fountain in the center of the room. Such interior fountains are a common grace note of the Arab world, from the North African Maghreb to the Middle East. Yet now the sound of the water brought to mind a single ethereal word: eternity.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a New Age type, or a stoner, and I’ll believe in an afterlife when I see it. But somehow, in that moment, time truly seemed endless. Call it a delusion, or a metaphor; but the idea of eternity, as the physicist Brian Greene writes, “has a powerful pull on the mind.” Suddenly the bubbling seemed like much more than water.
I recalled a favorite poem, “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra” by Richard Wilbur, in which the poet’s words burble and flow like the very fountain in Italy that they describe. And eternity continued to ring in my head like a soft gong.
The rest of that day was spent touring the ancient medina, a warren of some 9,600 narrow streets and alleyways teeming with life. Everywhere, the streets were full of vendors, beggars, children, donkeys, and cats. Wandering through Fės is both stimulating and exhausting. All five senses get a thorough workout (except taste, for the more prudent or finicky traveler).
Our tour was punctuated by visits to local artisans, including a rug co-op (I bought two small ones), a ceramic factory (one small table), and a weaving studio (a few scarves). Finally, we came to the ancient Chouara tannery, where, despite a penchant for leather, I managed to resist the urgings of the merchants and came away with my weary credit card in tact. It might have been the smell.
By late afternoon we were back at the guesthouse, and I decided to explore the Dar El Ghalia’s roof garden. There was a vague rumor of drinks on the rooftop, which never materialized. But as it turned out, alcohol would have been superfluous. In the early evening light, the panoramic view across the medina, to the olive-covered hillsides beyond the city and the Rif Mountains on the northern horizon, was intoxicating enough.
It isn’t the architecture that dazzles – though the minarets of several mosques catch your eye as they rise above the cityscape. The details are mostly prosaic: small gardens, narrow alleys, humble dwellings with laundry hanging out to dry, thousands of rooftop satellite dishes. What’s most impressive here is the sheer panorama – and the seeming wholeness of it all.
But as I sat alone on the rooftop terrace (friends would eventually join me and share the sense of bewitchment) I noticed something more remarkable than the view, and unique in my experience. It was the sound of a peaceful human city at day’s end.
Imagine the constant low hum of thousands of collective voices. There is no traffic noise, no blaring of horns, because the Fès medina is the largest car-free urban zone in the world. The soundscape is more like the dull thrum of rolling surf, along with the gravelly crackle of discernible voices, like waves washing a beach.
An occasional lone voice, often a child’s playful shout, is heard above the rest. Every so often, a dog barks or a rooster crows. But one hears no music, no vehicles, no grinding or whirring of machines. The chirping of birds adds percussion to the woodwind of human voices. Like the fountain in the atrium several floors below, this aural sensation of humanity without technology evoked a deep sense of peace. (Cell phones don’t count).
I was hardly the first to discover this phenomenon. Seventy years ago, Paul Bowles, the American writer and composer who settled in Tangier and chronicled Moroccan life for decades, wrote this about Fès for Holiday Magazine: “Everything that moves inside the walls moves on legs, so one hears no horns or bells. What rises from the city by day is a humming: two hundred thousand human voices blended into one sound. At night there is absolute silence, unless the women of some house have gone upstairs to the terrace and are beating drums.”
I’d arrived on the rooftop of the riad at 6 p.m., and by seven o’clock there was a noticeable change: a slight softening of the hum as the sunlight faded. People were starting to go indoors. At 7:30, the spell was finally broken as blaring loudspeakers across the city called people to prayer. It seemed as jarring as the sound of air raid sirens. When the calls to prayer stopped, the hum was also gone. Virtual silence prevailed – the same silence Bowles heard in 1950 – only interrupted, somewhere nearby, by the happy shriek of a little girl.
A few days later, the spell cast by Fès would be rudely interrupted. Amid a growing sense of impending chaos, some of our group (including me and my partner) managed to squeeze onto the last plane back to New York from Casablanca before the airport, and much of the city, closed down. It was a veritable parody of the final scene of “Casablanca,” in which Ingrid Bergman flies off to safety and Bogart stays behind. Some friends, although ticketed, had to wait a few hectic days and take a circuitous route home.
The whole trip to Morocco, in fact, was shadowed by uncertainty about what awaited us at home. But I returned with a newfound strength. From the burbling fountain in the atrium and the hush on the rooftop above it came a sense that eternity is found in such expandable moments.
The world may outlast us, I thought; but for now, these special moments were enough to get me by. The sounds of the fountain and of Fès at twilight were things to live for, and I clung to them as the crisis unfolded. In those sounds, there’s the soothing sense that at least we’re still here, and that time, after all, just may be on our side.
