Idriss I founded Fez, which became the core of Arabic Morocco. The way into the medina passes through a bab, one of its great gates. But the rewards are instant, for here an intricate and grand human engine is in perpetual motion. Under the lattice mats that filter the sun are street stalls selling goats' feet, entrails, fresh cheese, quinces and piles and piles of mint. Workshops the size of walk-in closets hold tailors, woodcarvers, engravers, weavers, embroiderers, calligraphers and just about any other trade.
Professions usually cluster in the same alley.
Here and there, weighers offer the services of their large iron scales. You are pressed against walls and stalls as porters and mule drivers shout, demanding the right of way. Going deeper inside the labyrinth, Driss led the way into an even earlier world, a place of alchemists. There were men with bellows firing the hearths for the copper workers. A stream of blood gushed down one passage.