A Morocco Anthology: Travel Writing through the Centuries

Today, Morocco, perched on the northwest edge of Africa, still carries a hint of past mystique, glimpses of an alluring charm where social and economic contrasts of bounty and poverty linger. Despite its modern setting, the four royal cities carry memories recorded by travelers and gathered by editor Martin Rose in an elegantly provocative and entertaining book. For better and worse, Fez provides the most spellbinding attraction. In the past, the smell of dead cats and incense in the old commercial district, the bath houses accommodating men in the morning, women in the evening and from under the floor ‘demons who come to bathe themselves at night’. Market stalls strung along the main street sell all manner of leather and metal and fabric wares and masses of vegetables grown in nearby tribal villages.

Rose chose travelers who created wonderful images of Morocco from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. Among several a Spanish spy known in Morocco as Alli Bey al-Abbassi traveled there in the early nineteen hundreds, and, later, the pharmacist, Gabriel Veyre, chosen to be Sultan Abdel Azis’s photography teacher in Marrakech and who encouraged his cycling passion.

Readers with a penchant for gossip and joy will be delighted by peeks into an exotic past.