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Rabat is busy as a bee all day; the centre of activity is the palace where King Mohammed V and his son, the Crown Prince Moulay Hassan, not only rule but govern. Nevertheless, despite the fact that there is as yet no Parliament, there is plenty of freedom and democracy in Morocco —a lot more than in many countries on the other side of the Mediterranean.

The people of Morocco are impatient for change, and though they may prefer sweet mint tea to coffee they also prefer to live in small modern villas rather than the old, magnificent but chilly family mansions. Social habits are changing fast in Morocco. You see this, for example, in the extraordinary variety of costume. Well-to-do government officials and business­men pass by in smart Western dress, some of the older ones wearing a long white jellaba over their suit. Women and girls may be in modern dress—the latest fashions from Paris—or, by contrast, completely covered in long dark jellaba and veil; or in jellaba with no veil. The great majority of young girls do go unveiled, but women are not as emancipated as in Egypt and Tunisia.

Some four hours’ drive to the north of Rabat is Tangier, the stepping-stone to Europe and Morocco’s most cosmopolitan city. Already perhaps the best-known town for foreign tourists, it is now also becoming a holiday-centre for Moroccans themselves. The thing I like most about Tangier is its natural beauty; the thing I like least is the eccentric foreigners, most of whom turn out to be crashing bores.

Much as I love the sea, and to live near the sea, I also have a passion for mountains, and Morocco is one of the fortunate countries where you can conveniently indulge both. The Riff Mountains in the north and the Middle Atlas are crowned with cedar forests. The High Atlas, on the other hand, is the real thing for the climber. This summer I explored for the first time the high valleys of the central range and climbed to the summit of Toubkal, Morocco’s highest peak (13,600 feet), and discovered a whole new world of mountain people living locked away amid their tiny patches of maize and spreading walnut trees.

The road to the High Atlas and the far south leads through the southern capital—the great old pink-walled city of Marrakesh. I like Marrakesh for many reasons: for its feeling of space, its sharp dry cold air in winter, its surrounding sea of green palms, and above all for the vista of snow-capped peaks beckoning from the south. Marrakesh is the meeting-place of people from the mountains and the plain; in the immense central square, shepherds mingle with shop­keepers, strolling minstrels perform side by side with the traditional story-tellers or the vendors of amulets and charms.

Once in Marrakesh your heart is lost to the south. The signposts point to the high passes with Berber names—the Tiz N Test, the Tiz N Tishka —and through them on the other side down to the Kasbah road, along which picturesque forts are strung out from Ksar es Souk in the east down to Ouarzazate. Contrary to what I expected, this is not the desert, the Sahara is still many miles to the south, but it is an immense stony plain where at first it appears that nothing grows and no birds sing. But there are birds, and animals in plenty—gazelle and wild boar—and strange plants. Along this road are many surprises: the hidden rose gardens from which are extracted the essence, and, not far off, the majestic gorges of the Todra and the Dades­tremendous gashes in the mountainside cut by the ferocity of the waters seeking their outlet from the heights above.

Morocco, like most rich and complex things, is difficult to sum up and impossible to compare. It is a mosaic of strange and complicated design: beautiful, baffling and mysterious.

MOROCCO is a country of infinite contrasts. In Arabic, it is called the Maghreb—the land of the setting sun; and so indeed it is. Nowhere in the world is the sunset so unforgettable: the golden light tumbles in cascades into the lakes and rivers and into the deep valleys of the High Atlas, touches the snow-capped summits and a thousand minarets, sweeps the cork forests and the grain fields of the coastal plains and spills far out into the ocean; the division between land and sea is obliterated, the whole world is drenched in golden light, and far out on the horizon the great red ball of the sun topples, almost spins, into oblivion. One, two, three seconds pass—then the disc has disappeared, leaving trails of violent red and purple across the sky. There is no twilight. The Moroccan night has fallen.

Moroccans call this moment the cup of gold. If you hold a glass up to the setting sun, they say, it fills with a strange magic. Could you drink it, you would become deliriously happy. Perhaps. But I know of nothing quite so moving and mysterious as the quality of the light over the Moroccan landscape, particularly at sunset.

Morocco is also an extremity of the East, for it is the most westerly point of the Orient. As the traveller breakfasts on the balcony of his 20th-century hotel in the new town of Fez, he can peer down into the Middle Ages. For in that Medina, the old heart of the city, with its crazy design of winding alleys, flat roofs and tiled mosques and sanctuaries, streets thronged with pack-animals and pedlars, portly merchants and pale-faced students, is a design of life that goes back 1100 years—and still goes on.

Before I went to Morocco I had heard so much about Fez and the Fassis that I did my best to keep aloof from its spell-binding effect. Fez is a great rambling overcrowded city. Not every­thing is picturesque—I have never been able to appreciate the charms of poverty—and much of what is sold in the famous Fez markets is shoddy. There is nothing in my opinion so hair-raisingly vulgar as the great bales of plush and velour furnishing material which many Moroccans admire so much and buy in enormous lengths, to bedeck their otherwise delightful divans and cushions. The Medina of Fez, I told myself, is where one gets jostled and exhausted, and weighed down with history. There is really too much Old City about it, yet I have to admit that every time I go to Fez the same thing happens: no sooner have I passed under the great gate, the Bab-Boujeloud, firmly resolved, of course, not to go near the bazaars—than I am lost. Down I go a few steps, and inevitably out of the corner of my eye I glimpse a perfectly exquisite wrought-iron lantern, dangling from the porch of an antique shop, next a pair of fine brass candle­sticks. Then I decide that I may as well invest in yet another pair of those deliciously supple leather slippers. Before long I am sitting mes­merized in the middle of an immense carpet shop, sipping mint tea and, by now absolutely penniless, watching a cunning Fassi merchant display, one after another, his superb collection of handwoven carpets—thick pile beauties for palaces, long wool rugs from the High Atlas, camel-hair blankets in their old and curious designs. And so my Odyssey continues, past the wood-carvers and cabinet-makers, the potters, the engravers, the gold- and silversmiths—each craft in its own particular quarter exactly as it was organized in the mediaeval guilds. Finally, hours later, I emerge at the Gate—laden with treasures, exhausted but happy.

Last time I visited Fez it was on the occasion of the 1100th birthday of the University of Karawiyeen. Visitors were invited to come down and take a look at the exhibition of manuscripts in the Karawiyeen Library. As we approached the door I was amazed to see that just under the windows was the coppersmiths’ quarter, with hundreds of craftsmen hammering away. The clamour was deafening. ‘How can anyone concentrate in a library with that fearful noise outside the windows?’ I shouted to our guide, a professor from the University. He smiled wryly and beckoned me into the library. And then as the great oaken door was shut behind us I under­stood. Within these thick walls all was calm: the only sound was that of the splashing of the fountain in the midst of the tiled courtyard. In the reading rooms venerable scholars in white jellabas and young students in slacks and sweaters pored over manuscripts, some of them written by scholars from this university 800 years ago.

Well, that is Fez. In and out of time. I still insist that I prefer other cities of Morocco. Yet I must admit that Fez is the most remarkable.

Rabat is the administrative capital of Morocco —a city of gardens and villas, government offices and apartment houses, all rather new and dazzlingly white. I am very fond of Rabat: it is a pleasant small town steeped in history but not weighed down with it like Fez. A river called the Father of Reflections (Bou Regreg) divides it from the sister city of Sale, and in the evening you can sip an aperitif and watch the sun go down from the parapet of a café that was once a pirate’s fort.