There is an office in town where people go to look for work, or for news of jobs. People wait in corners or sit on the floor, despondent. The office staff talk to their friends and cronies, drink coffee and tea brought in from the cafe around the corner, on a tray with a pole and a hook up the middle for easy carrying. Occasionally the staff shoo the workless people away from the counter.

One day, a man in a djellabah was there, watching all. He kept his djellabah hood up, so no one saw his face. But the next day, the story goes, all the office staff were fired and the workless were given their jobs.

It was another hot day in the labyrinthine city of Fez, and the reed-covered streets were a cool blessing. The tourist couple dawdled in front of a shop that sold verses from the Koran sewn in gold thread and framed in golden frames. A man standing nearby moved closer, a look of curiosity on his face. “Well?” he asked. “Well,” they grinned. “Married?” he asked, in French. “Yes,” they seemed pleased about it. So was the man. “Children?” he seemed to have a reason for asking. “Yes,” they nodded. “Good,” he looked relieved. “Children cement a marriage,” he said, and walked away, nodding and smiling.

The Plage des Nations runs along the coast from Rabat to Mehdia, near Kenitra. Along here the Atlantic is turquoise, with powerful waves and when there’s a swell it batters the brown red cliffs. When the tide is out the long white beach, with one little creek after another, is ideal for sunbathing and picnicking, although quite dangerous for swimming. On the cliff summit, yellowy balding grass allows the red earth to show through. Above it all the blue-white sky and a hot sun brings up the damp from the sea.

An old man who lives nearby has arranged a dirt track and a car park for bathers, and even a cliff path down to the beach. Most of the work was done with a pick and shovel. He supervises bathers, and blows a whistle from his summit if he notices anyone going out too far.

Beneath his feet in the car park are hundreds of flints, large and small, well-made and rejects. Fossil mussels too can be picked out of the cliff, mussels stuck in the ancient sand of some prehistoric epoch. There are still men who pick mussels off the rocks below, and cook them in large blackened barrels over an open fire. Then they shell them and take them to town to sell beneath the high medina walls, leaving the shells in today’s sand, for the archaeologists of the future.

Coming along the wide riverbed — a particular stretch now dry and full of pebbles and often used as a road except in severe flood — they met four men carrying a fifth on a homemade stretcher of branches. He lay quietly, his face covered as if he were dead. He had broken his leg and they were bringing him to a taxi which would take him to town. The nearest taxi was a small Peugeot van, about 10 kilometres further on.