FRENZIED ENCOUNTERS WITH THE FALLEN WOMEN OF MARRAKECH.

BY JEFFREY TAYLER | The Peace Corps had been good to me. No mud huts, no iodized drinking water, no malaria pills. I lived comfortably ensconced within the ramparts of the casbah of Marrakech, one of Morocco's imperial cities, a Berber-Arab fortress settlement 9 centuries old standing clay-pink on the arid brown plain of Al-Hawz, just across the Atlas Mountains from the Sahara. My job was to teach cane skills to the blind and work with the parents of handicapped children. I had not joined the Peace Corps to do good -- I wasn't sure what that really meant -- but because it seemed like a way to author my life, to make something novel out of all the days and weeks and years a life is made of.

Days in the Marrakech medina, or old city, were stiflingly hot, but evenings were cool and delicious: The sun bled itself to a crimson-and-carmine death behind the palms, the streets bustled with strollers and chanting mendicants. Through the alleys, in djellabas of emerald green and turquoise, sauntered jasmine- and saffron-scented young women fresh from the hammams, or baths, their hair looped damp and languorous under the folds of plush towels, their soaps and bottles of bath oils clattering in plastic buckets at their sides. There was nothing I relished more than passing through the auras of these hammam girls, inhaling and holding in my lungs that jasmine, that saffron, stealing something of them for myself. But mostly they lived cloistered in windowless, stone-and-tile homes, homes that opened only onto their own inner courtyards; their lives had already been scripted for them by family and religion.

There were, however, a few secret places in Marrakech where, it seemed, women escaped the confines imposed by tradition. I had found one.

One December eve I was sitting at home with an American friend, whom I will call Stan, awaiting the arrival of another American visiting Marrakech from the States. Soon there was a beep-beep and a din of children's cries. We rushed to unlatch the wooden door that opened onto the ocher-colored alley. At the alley's head, amid a swirl of urchins, a lone American struggled to pull a Samsonite suitcase out of the trunk of a battered rental Peugeot.

Sid, as I will call him, was gregarious and hulking, but his glasses gave him an intense, brainy demeanor. He was the kind of guest impecunious Peace Corps Samaritans welcomed to Morocco with the most open of arms -- a rich guest.

"I wasn't planning on staying with you," he said once we were safely inside again. "I thought I'd be spending a couple of hundred bucks a night on a hotel room. Now I've got this wad of cash I don't know what to do with."

I looked at Sid's bills and cleared my throat.

"I've got an idea."

N E X T+P A G E+| Behind the red door

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ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF CROSBY