Shoppin' the kasbah

Lee Atkinson gets more than she bargains for as she spends up in the souks of Morocco's mediaeval medinas.

YOU'VE got to love a sales pitch that includes a marriage proposal. "You buy this carpet, we give you husband," is the quick-as-lightning response to my friend's plea that she cannot afford the beautiful but expensive Berber rug laid out before her because she has "no husband to pay for it". Quickly followed by "you give us plastic, we give you art. See how lucky you are!" Who can resist? She certainly couldn't.

The carpet sellers of Morocco are legendary for their powers of persuasion and, with or without the obligatory glass of mint tea, it's almost impossible not to succumb to the sales pitch and the carpet's charm, despite your best intentions.

If you can somehow, magically, detach yourself from the encounter you'll be treated to an hour or so of performance art that is better than any street theatre.

Shopping for carpets, or anything for that matter, in the souks (markets) of Fez, Rabat or Marrakesh is an extreme sport. A tiny hesitation outside a shop's doorway, or even the slyest sideways glance at a shiny bauble or silk slipper will set the shopkeeper quivering with excitement and the certain knowledge that he has you hooked. Enter the shop at your peril - it is virtually impossible and highly improbable you will exit empty-handed.

You can buy just about anything you've ever wanted, or are likely to, in the souks of Morocco's mediaeval medinas, or old walled towns. Silken slippers called babouches, black tin lanterns with softly glowing coloured glass, tassels and kaftans and brightly coloured ceramics, scarves and hooded jellabas, leather poufs, Berber carpets, gold jewellery and silver teapots. Move away from the tourist-thronged main streets and you'll find the local souks, where old women haggle over the price of vegetables, swarms of bees hover above displays of sweet pistachio-studded pastries drenched in honey, live chickens squawk in cages waiting to be weighed and cats prowl underneath the counters of cubby-size butcher shops festooned with tongues and lungs, sheep and camel heads, complete with their horns and hair.

Spice souks display their red and yellow seasonings in perfect pyramids, fruits stalls groan under the weight of mountains of dried dates and young men try to entice passers-by with a staggering array of marinated olives. In the perfume souk walls are lined with large old-fashioned glass bottles of sweet smelling oils and tin drums are overflowing with sticky black goo, the traditional black soap used in the public bath houses, or hammams.

Through it all weave donkeys and mules laden with heavy sacks of grain, crates of fruit or piles of leather skins, women on pushbikes, young boys pushing two-wheeled trolleys and men of all ages on motorbikes weave, too. He or she who hesitates is indeed lost, or at least overrun.

Stepping into a Moroccan medina is a journey back in time, a glimpse of what life was like in the middle ages, because in essence, not much has changed since then in these winding alleyways and labyrinthine laneways so narrow that two people must turn sideways to pass one another. When the French took control in the early 20th century, they decreed that no new building be carried out in the ancient fortified cities, known as medinas.