Entering the walled city
RACHEL PEARSON

I went to Morocco this week, and the first thing I want to describe is the Medina in Fes. Fes is a walled city; it was founded in the year 789, and the medina -- its central part, a maze of tiny streets and alleyways -- is believed to be the largest car-free urban area in the world.

You enter the medina on foot, or on donkey-back or bicycle or scooter, through one of several gates in the walls that surround it. Some of the streets inside are like tunnels, two to five feet wide and covered on top so they have to be lit by bulbs that dangle on extension cords because the stone houses were built so long ago that electric wiring and water pipes haven't been installed in the walls. Even on the streets that aren't covered, the walls of the buildings alongside loom in over you. You get lost.

You get lost on streets packed with carts and shops selling dates and strawberries and lemons, piles of lemons high and deep enough to fill your bedroom, which lead onto streets of shops selling track shoes and plastic masks and the long robes with the pointed hoods that both men and women here wear. And the men and women are rushing and laughing around you looking like goblins with their hoods up, and you can hear French and Arabic, mostly, but also some Spanish and English and other languages.

Someone behind you is yelling "Balak! Balak!" which means "Clear the way, I am coming through with my wheelbarrow full (for example) of live snails! Delicious live snails, clear the way!"

Some people hurry, squeezing past with their shoulders sideways, and some people lean on doorways and smoke cigarettes and invite you come in and look at their lemons or track shoes or robes.

On the street with the butcher shop, it is meat after meat, and men leaning out over their counters swatting flies away with brushes, and skinny cats licking chicken's feet that lie on the path, which is also made of stone, and German tourists taking pictures of a severed camel's head that is hanging from a hook. The camel's eyes are light grey and there is blood around its muzzle, and you wonder if it isn't some kind of a joke.

A man comes through with a dead sheep in a wheelbarrow; he is heading for the tannery probably, and if you follow him you will begin to smell the tannery where goatskins in various states are lying in the sun, and a man is asleep in a pile of freshly-sheared wool, and other men are leaping in and out of big ancient clay vats, dipping hides and pulling them out and scraping them and dipping them in again. It smells like blood and sulphur and leather and rot, and on the next street over a donkey in shoes made out of old car tires is clumping up the steps with a load of red-dyed sheepskins on its back.

You can walk away from the tannery and onto another street and you smell turmeric and mint, and you can stop and eat garbanzo soup and drink a hot mint tea with enough sugar to make your heart stop, and you can learn enough Arabic to say "thank you" and "good morning" and "goodbye," so that people smile at you and touch their right hand, palm open, to their chest. Go in peace.

Rachel Pearson is a graduate of Port Aransas High School and The University of Texas at Austin. She is living in Madrid, Spain. She may be reached via e-mail at rachelmpearson@gmail. com.