The Moses Stone Read Free Page A

smells bothered him. He much preferred the foreign—but infinitely more familiar—seaside resorts that lined the Spanish costas , their usual holiday destination. But this year Margaret had wanted to try something more exotic, somewhere different, and Morocco had seemed a good compromise.
    It was on a different continent—Africa—but still close enough to avoid having to endure a long-haul flight. They’d rejected Casablanca, because everybody had told them it was just a typically dirty and noisy seaport—a far cry from the classic romantic image created by Holly-wood. So they’d settled on a budget flight to Casablanca and hired a car for the drive north to the midpriced hotel they’d booked in Rabat.
    And early that evening, their last in Morocco, they were walking toward the souk once more, Margaret excited, Ralph with a resigned expression on his face.
    “What, exactly, do you want to buy in there?”
    “Nothing. Everything. I don’t know.” Margaret stopped and looked at her husband. “There’s no romance in your soul, is there?” It was a statement more than a question. “Look, we leave here tomorrow, and I just wanted to walk through the souk again and take some more photographs, something to help us remember this holiday. After all, I doubt if we’ll be coming back here again, will we?”
    “Not if I’ve got anything to do with it,” Ralph muttered, as his wife turned back toward the medina , but not quite sotto voce enough to prevent Margaret hearing him.
    “Next year,” she said, “we’ll go back to Spain, OK? So just stop complaining, smile, and at least pretend you’re enjoying yourself.”
    As on every previous occasion since they’d arrived in Rabat, they approached the medina from the Kasbah des Oudaïas , simply because it was, for Margaret, the most attractive and picturesque route. The kasbah itself was a twelfth-century fortress erected on a cliff-top, its crenellated battlements and solid stone ramparts overlooking what was originally the pirate town of Sale, and within its walls the place was a delight. The whitewashed houses all sported a band of sky-blue paint, the color identical on every property, that ran around their bases, from ground level up to, usually, about three feet in height, though on some it reached as high as eight or ten feet. Though the color had clearly not been applied recently, it nevertheless gave the area the feeling of having been newly painted.
    It was a strangely attractive decorative feature that neither Margaret nor her husband had ever seen before and, though they’d asked several people, nobody appeared to have any idea why it had been done. Their requests for elucidation had been met with puzzled faces and elaborate shrugs. The houses within the kasbah , it seemed, had always been decorated like that.
    From the kasbah , they wound their way steadily down a wide walkway, flat sections of the sloping path broken by individual groups of three steps, obviously constructed to cope with the gradient, toward the medina . The river ran beside them on their left, while to the right lay an open grassy area, a popular spot for people who wanted to sit and admire the view, or simply to lie there and watch the world go by.
    The entrance to the medina looked dark and uninviting, partly because of the brilliance of the late-afternoon sunlight outside, but mainly because of the curved metalwork that formed an elegant semicircular roof over this part of the old town. The metal panels were geometric in design and didn’t seem to allow much light to penetrate, but imparted a kind of opaque and shimmering iridescence to the sky above, almost giving it the appearance of mother-of-pearl.
    Once inside, the now-familiar smells reasserted themselves in the gloom—smoke, metallic dust, herbs and spices, newly cut wood, and a strange and pervasive odor that Margaret had finally identified as coming from the tanneries. The noise level rose markedly as they walked into the