Four were loaded on the donkey's back, secured in a crazy jumble by a tangle of plastic twine and bungee cords. The televisions, however, were big-boxy tabletop sets, not portables. He-or she, perhaps-was donkey-colored, that is, a soft mouse gray, with a light-colored muzzle and dark brown fur bristling out of its ears. His shoulders were about waist-high, no higher his chest was narrow his legs straight his hooves quite delicate, about the size of a teacup. In the case of my meeting the donkey, the collision was low-impact. They were laid out in the late eighth century by Idriss I, founder of the dynasty that spread Islam in Morocco, and they are so narrow that bumping into another person or a pushcart is no accident it is simply the way you move forward, your progress more like a pinball than a pedestrian, bouncing from one fixed object to the next, brushing by a man chiseling names into grave markers only to slam into a drum maker stretching goat skin on a drying rack, then to carom off a southbound porter hauling luggage in a wire cart. The Prophet Muhammad once counseled that the minimum width of a road should be seven cubits, or the width of three mules, but I would wager that some of Fez's paths fall below that standard. The best I can do is to say that the donkey and I met at the intersection of one path that was about as wide as a bathmat and another that was slightly larger-call it a bath sheet. Moreover, there wasn't any sun to be seen and barely a sliver of sky, because leaning in all around me were the sheer walls of the medina-the old walled portion of Fez-where the buildings are so packed and stacked together that they seem to have been carved out of a single huge stone rather than constructed individually, clustered so tightly that they blot out the shrieking blue and silver of the Moroccan sky. I might be able to be more precise about where I saw the donkey if I knew how to extrapolate location using the position of the sun, but I don't. If I could tell you the exact intersection where I saw him, I would do so, but pinpointing a location in Fez is a formidable challenge, a little like noting GPS coordinates in a spider web. Seemingly blind alleys lead to squares with exquisite fountains and streets bursting with aromatic food stands, rooftops unveil a sea of minarets, and stooped doorways reveal tireless artisans.The donkey I couldn't forget was coming around a corner in the walled city of Fez, Morocco, with six color televisions strapped to his back. It can seem like it’s in a state of perpetual pandemonium some visitors fall instantly in love, and others recoil in horror. Some 90,000 people still live in the Fez medina. Something of the medieval remains in the world’s largest car-free urban area: donkeys cart goods down the warren of alleyways, and while there are still ruinous pockets, government efforts to restore the city are showing results. Although Fez lost its influence at the beginning of the 19th century, it remains a supremely self-confident city whose cultural and spiritual lineage beguiles visitors. Craftsmen built them houses and palaces, kings endowed mosques and medersas (religious schools), and merchants offered exotic wares from the silk roads and sub-Saharan trade routes. In its heyday, Fez attracted scholars and philosophers, mathematicians and lawyers, astronomers and theologians.
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