The salesman at the edge of the Sahara

Zagora, Morocco — The rich blues in Yusef’s turban and attire suggest he is Berber.

His sheet of brown paper torn from a bag and the nubby pencil are irrefutable evidence.

Enlarge this image

EVE GRAY / Special

This is good stuff: The designs on a Berber carpet look like farm fields viewed from the air. It’s almost too bad you have to walk on it.

Enlarge this image

EVE GRAY / Special

Dressed in the blue of his Berber people, salesman Yusef is constantly smiling, always pitching the goods. But he’s never loud or overbearing.

• A camelback adventure in Morocco

International travel stories

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

• Photos: Travel / International Galleries
• Latest deals!
• Back to: Travel | U.S. and international destinations

Yusef is a Berber ready to bargain.

He is a salesman on the edge of the Sahara, in a crossroads emporium called Boutique Du Troq, where the rooms are rich with artifacts and trinkets.

As we enter the store’s carpet room — a 30-foot square stacked nearly to the ceiling with exotic examples of Moroccan tribal craft — Yusef takes the stage.

He is narrator, historian and above all, salesman.

In Marrakech, we had bargained for leather, for dinners and for jewelry boxes of camel bone colored with henna. None of it had prepared us for Yusef.

With choreographed swirls of fabric and nimble movements, Yusef and his assistant danced the ballet of the sale as they unfolded carpet after carpet.

“Perhaps it is that you find something that is interesting to you and the price is very interesting to you. And we bargain — it is the tradition; it is the sham of the business. If not, then we keep smiling,” he said.

Leave before this guy sells you a Yugo, I thought.

The history and the traditions were too alluring, and Yusef wasn’t selling, he was telling — about the work of Berbers, Bedouins, Saharans and Draa.

“Every family has their technique of work, their material and their pattern. It is not about color that tells us if it is Berber or Drawi; it is about the pattern that tells us what tribe it is,” Yusef said.

The stories on the carpets are written in camel or goat hair, with silk or lambs’ wool embroidery and dyes.

Yusef’s manner was always subdued, but I kept expecting TV pitchman Billy Mays’ “But Wait There’s More” sweetener.

It finally came, playing on Morocco’s favored nation trade status with the United States and with America’s favorite method of transaction.

“If you find something that interests you, we can ship it and you don’t have to pay any customs. And you can pay with any kind of money. Plastic is fantastic.”