Paul Bowles on Tangier

Paul Bowles Week continues at A Natural Curiosity with this passage from his autobiography, Without Stopping. Though Bowles was strongly drawn to the more traditional culture and architecture of Fez, Tangier was the city where he chose to spend fifty years of his life.

If I said that Tangier struck me as a dream city, I should mean it in the strict sense. Its topography was rich in prototypal dream scenes: covered streets like corridors with doors opening into rooms on each side, hidden terraces high above the sea, streets consisting only of steps, dark impasses, small squares built on sloping terrain so that they looked like ballet sets designed in false perspective, with alleys leading off in several directions; as well as the classical dream equipment of tunnels, ramparts, ruins, dungeons, and cliffs. The climate was both violent and languorous. The August wind hissed in the palms and rocked the eucalyptus trees and rattled the canebrakes that bordered the streets.... Just as the absence of traffic made it possible to sit in a cafe on the Place de France and hear only the cicadas in the trees, so the fact that the radio had not yet arrived in Morocco meant that one could also sit in a cafe in the center of the Medina and hear only the sound of many hundreds of human voices.

Photo from tourtoo.com.