Customs and immigration were the merest of formalities. The immigration man stamped his passport without checking if the photo inside corresponded with Julian’s face.

Two barefooted teenagers, thin and grimy, had scurried up to take his two heavy leather bags as soon as they had been checked. He could have carried the luggage himself. But he didn’t want to go through the hassle of telling them so, and simply followed the urchins out to the parking lot where he located a Chico Cab. They were, he had decided, the smallest taxis in the world: little Fiat 500s from Italy.

He put the bags on the seat next to the driver and climbed into the back.

“El Minzah Hotel,” he said, after giving both of the boys a quarter. They yelled for more, but he ignored them. They would have protested had he given them a dollar—or five dollars, for that matter.

The countryside into town was typical of North Africa from the Atlantic to the Nile: incredibly dusty, worn down, poverty stricken. It seemed impossible that any of the tiny farms could support the rag-clothed families who lived in the little one-room shacks made of tin cans, waste wood, cardboard from cartons. They passed a few scrawny dogs from time to time,, some scrawnier chickens, an occasional burro, a couple of motheaten camels, and a multitude of filthy children.

The driver entered town from the southwest, speeding along the Avenue d’Espana, which paralleled the half-crescent bay around which the city of Tangier is built.

Julian liked the city. It was one of the most exotic in the world. Founded by the Phoenicians several millennia ago, a dozen nations had controlled it since. Its palace-crowned Kabash overlooked the Spanish coast across the way, and in the distance Gibraltar, that most impressive landfall on earth, reared its bulk. It still appeared today much as the Baghdad of Scheherazade’s time must have looked, with its narrow winding streets which allowed for no vehicle, its teeming souks with their produce and handicrafts of all Morocco; filthy, swarming with flies, but overflowing with some of the most beautiful fruit and vegetables to be found, products of the oases to the south.