Ease The MainWith Benevento and its crew

(Editor’s Note: We have no pictures of the snake charmers but have posted other pictures of Dante in Marrakech.)

My favorite memory of Marrakech was seeing the snake charmers. They were set up in the middle of the square and they sit on a large mat with an umbrella to shade them. The snakes are under baskets which keep them contained. The snake charmers will lift up the basket to release the snake, and then they will play a flute which lulls the snakes to sleep. Sometimes they would even be beating a drum. The flutes were very loud and high pitched. But in the heat of the day they seemed quiet because of all of the crowds, shouts and talking. All of the snakes that they charm are poisonous and sometimes when they stop playing the snakes will start to slither away, open their mouths wide and start to lurch at the snake charmers. They had two different types of snakes, one was a spitting cobra and the other, I think, was a sidewinder. They also had a green “nonpoisonous” snake that they would put around your neck. There were a lot of different snake charmer mats around the square. I liked to watch them from a distance so that they wouldn’t try to charge my parents money. My parents told me that I could go closer because they can’t charge us for looking. The snake charmers were my favorite of all of the things that I saw in Morocco.