Whiling Away the Night In the Salon of the Sahara

MARRAKECH, Morocco As darkness settled over Marrakech's Djemma el-Fna Square and the crowds flowed in to pass the evening, a stylish young Moroccan couple in one corner of the plaza crouched by a necromancer, urgently whispering their troubles into his ear.

Their counselor, a maker of magic charms, listened attentively, pen ready to jot down the right incantation on one of the scraps of paper lying at his feet on the gray stone of the plaza.

In another corner, a Tuareg tribesman from the Sahara of southern Morocco was having a bad sales night. On a sheet before him lay withered ostrich legs, chunks of petrified wood from the rippling grasslands that once covered the Sahara, and numerous balms, potions, powders and scents. For now, no one was buying.

From a plastic bin at the Tuareg's feet, dried chameleons used in magic and folk medicine -- their eyes bulging and their tongues extruding -- glared sullenly at passersby. Under his blue turban, so did the Tuareg.

Open fires roasting mutton for sale sent orange flames and towers of greasy smoke over Djemma el-Fna, adding to the medieval air of the ancient square, which is bounded by mosques dating to the 10th century.

Entertainers picked a stretch of pavement, plunked down low plastic stools and placed battered acetylene lamps at their feet, bathing in a soft glow the rings of listeners that soon formed around them, silhouetted against the dark.

Strolling families from the city and boys from the towns beyond meandered from circle to circle, sampling stories, music, jokes and sales pitches that have been delivered nightly in the square for at least five centuries, all rendered in Morocco's Berber language. If St. Mark's Square in Venice is the drawing room of Europe, as Napoleon is supposed to have said, Djemma el-Fna is the salon of the Sahara.

In one circle, a peddler sold aphrodisiacs to a crowd of earnest men who frowned in concentration as they listened, arms crossed on their chests. The aphrodisiac-seller threw in plenty of free advice, counseling his audience that women looked for serious men, hardworking men, men who didn't use drugs.

Merchants hawked amulets against rheumatism, the evil eye or the interventions of malicious jinn, or spirits.

Elsewhere, a group of young men burst into startled laughter around a joke-teller. Even if they'd had such a thought about a sheep before, they weren't used to hearing it spoken aloud in public.

Near the center of the square, Rachid Hriza, 32, sat on a stool alongside his fellow drummers, swinging his head about and smiling eagerly at all comers. His untended teeth splayed out to the four corners of the square.

Hriza and his friends drummed out the traditional Gnawa music of black Africans carried to Morocco by Arab slave traders from the 11th century on. One Gnawa standard testifies to the enslaved Africans' enduring sadness and resilience:

They brought us from the Sudan.

The nobles of this country brought us.

They brought us to serve them. They brought us to bow to them. They brought us.

Oh, there is no god but God. We believe in God's justice.

Hriza, in embroidered cap and robe, paused politely to explain how he came to his line of work.

"My grandfather did it. My father did it. And I do it," he said.

By 10 p.m. or so, as the late summer evening turned damp, 59-year-old Khabzaoui Abdelhakim was shutting his show down for the night.

Abdelhakim counts himself a storyteller, a halaqi. Most nights, he tailored his tales -- less stories than innocently salacious jokes and songs, revved up to PG from G by grins and gestures -- to the crowd.

He swung into a riff about a man who sold all his wife's clothes to buy wine. A lone older man, wearing the white robes, cap and beard that mark a man as a conservative Muslim, pushed his way into the circle, curious, just as a beaming Abdelhakim started describing women from southern Morocco with bosoms like this and behinds like that.

The bearded man backpedaled out of the circle, vanishing.

Next morning, as Djemma el-Fna's day crews of snake charmers, monkey handlers and acrobats moved into the plaza, Abdelhakim shook his head and smiled when told of warnings by sociologists that many of the ancient ways of Djemma el-Fna were in danger of dying off -- the storytellers' art first of all.

"It's lasted a long time," he said, and laughed. "How can it disappear now?"