EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALJune
20, 1999
Fez, Morocco
Magic Carpet Ride
There’s a door and beyond it is a place that calls itself The Famous Exhibition of
Antique and Modern Carpets. Hassan introduces us to Hassan and Hassan I instructs us to
sit in an adjoining room while Hassan II closes a sale. "Would you like your mint tea
with sugar or without?"
It’s a large room, three storeys high, and hanging from the railings and rafters
are carpets of every size and colour. There’s a sound, too. It’s a snipping
noise. There’s snipping and it echoes throughout the place.
We follow Hassan II’s assistant up a coil of stairs, stepping over stacks of
carpets and brushing against hanging tapestries. At the top is a small area with two looms
strung with wool. The lower part is knotted with an intricate design, and behind each are
three girls. The girls are vacant, staring at nothing, heads down, grabbing a loose length
of wool and tying it to the loomed wool, all with the left hand and quickly enough to deny
actual technical observation. They do it all with the left hand. In the right hand they
hold a pair of scissors. When the knot is tied and pushed down onto the existing design,
the wool is snipped.
They don’t stop when we come close. They don’t look up. They tie and snip,
tie and snip, and watch the floor between the woolen threads in front of them.
They’re here for us. This is not a factory. These six girls are here to show the
tourists how the carpets are made -- months and months of tying and snipping in the
mountains, to be carried by donkey into the cities to cover the floors of the palaces and
sold by middlemen to foreigners.
On the roof is a terrace, where the skyline is dotted with Mosques, and a series of
small carpets lie in the sun, all pointing towards Mecca.
Hassan II spends an hour with us, with a team of unrollers and rollers, carrying
carpets from other rooms and laying them out before us in a cloud of dust. He’s
official. He calls me Ma’am. He has a framed tariff sheet that lists the prices of
the carpets by square metre. Hassan II finally gets around to the tariff sheet. When we
protest the price, he puts the tariff sheet away and starts negotiating. Nevertheless, he
can’t come to down to the tenth of his asking price we managed in Meknes, and so we
leave empty-handed.
Hassan I joins us again and takes us to other places where we might part with our
money. There’s a Spanish Fly wielding Berber pharmacist. He crushes a mysterious
black powder into a patch of cloth, twists it between his finger and holds it up to my
nose. He closes my other nostril and tells me to snort. "Good for pollution." He
shows us the saffron and the nut oils and all the things good for energy and headaches and
coughing. The aphrodisiacs are plentiful. He’s anxious to make a perfume for me out
of the sweat glands of a lizard and cured amber sap. I settle for a vile of jasmine.
"What are the stuffed turtles and lizards for?" I ask, retreating from a
frightening wall display. "Oh those," he says, "Those are for
decoration!"
