Under Morocco's sheltering sky: the timeless magnetism of the desert lures modern travelers into the mysticism of an ancient North African land

"Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next moves slowly, over periods of years, from one of the earth to another.

Those simple words forever altered the world's perception of what it means to travel. They were written in Morocco in 1948 by Paul Bowles, the bisexual author of the timeless novel The Sheltering Sky. Of all the Western artists who have been irrefutably drawn to this numinous land residing beneath the tip of Spain, no other evoked with such precision its dreamlike mood, its "flaming sky in the west," and its "sharp mountains." In The Sheltering Sky, a world-weary American couple are fatefully drawn deeper and deeper into the great emptiness of the North African desert, and they are never the same again.

Bowles, who lived in Morocco from the '50s until his death in 1999, is the touchstone to a generation of wide-eyed travelers, both gay and straight, whom he single-handedly opened up to Morocco, and who still approach this luminous country with a mix of awe, fear, and reverence.

My Moroccan guide, Driss, has a different take on the matter. We are speeding 'along in a minivan across the cold, rock-strewn landscape that dominates Morocco with a tangible pressure, the High Atlas Mountains of legend standing quietly to the side, watching us. Driss had written a college thesis on Bowles and Western attitudes towards Moroccan culture. "Bowles could be so negative in his portrayal of us, painting our culture as dark and violent and incomprehensible," he says. "With many tourists, the road is already paved. They think they have stock knowledge of this place, but they don't. Coming here corrects what is mistaken about Muslim culture, about Africa in general."

I watched the dry land pass by me, reminding me of Bowles's ominous description of the desert: "It was too powerful an entity not to lend itself to personification. The desert--its very silence was like tacit admission of the half-conscious presence it harbored." I thought about my own stock knowledge of the country, painted on the walls of my mind by legends like Bowles and William Burroughs. Of closeted men in the '50s obtaining handsome youths in an uncomplicated bisexual culture where few sexual lines are drawn. Of dark, hallucinatory episodes where Westerners grappled with existentalist demons in a land they didn't understand their mesmeric attraction to.

The Moroccan city of Tangier 50 years ago was the notorious International Zone, where laws and mores had no meaning, where the personages of Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Joe Orton, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, and other queer literati washed ashore and fed their newly bohemian appetites for sex and drugs. But as this country at the beginning of the 21st century began to reveal itself to me, I saw a more intricate and complex pattern, as elaborate and adamant as the the work that had withstood the centuries in the quiet chambers of the country's arched palaces.

Modern Morocco is a place with more paved roads than 10 of its African neighbors combined, where satellite dishes atop stucco roofs beam in global images from afar, where in a few short years all trade barriers with its giant brother Europe to the north will be abolished. It's a shining example amid troubled neighbors Algeria, mired in civil conflict, and Mauritania, one of the most destitute countries on earth. But Morocco is also a country where humans drenched in poverty drown while trying to cross the Strait of Gibraltar to prosperous Spain, where tired donkeys pull lemon carts across open sewers, where half of 30 million people cannot read or write. Morocco is ruled in mythical fashion by a new modern king with a genial fist, and it's slowly becoming poised to lift itself up from its long history of conquest, like the Greek demigod Arias when he held up the sky from here.

The legendary city of Marrakech, nestled deep in the center of the country behind the Arias Mountains, is, like most places once populated with hippies, now a magnet for those with money and taste. During my first night in the city, I sauntered down the wide avenue from the art deco palace of La Mamounia (Morocco's most famous and lush hotel) past a 12th-century minaret and onward to the pulsing heart of the city, the Djeema el-Fna. Like something out of a dream, this huge open square rose toward me the reverberations of ancient flutes, the tang of roasting meats, the clicking of horse-drawn carriages, the calls of fortune-tellers and touts. Throngs of robed men crowded around spectacles like friendly impromptu boxing matches, swirling dances, and gambling games. A mazelike labyrinth souk (an old marketplace of narrow alleys) beckoned beyond. Bowles once said that without the ageless Djeema el-Fna, Marrakech would just be another city. The passage of time has no meaning in a place like this anyway--the overflowing energy of life is a constant, despite the ancient mud walls built around the city in an attempt to keep it hedged in.