What's it like to wake to the dawn call to prayer in Morocco?

It arrives before the light does, in that deepest, stillest part of the night when even the medina has finally fallen quiet. You're asleep in your riad, and then a single human voice cuts through the dark — close, unaccompanied, rising and falling in a long, melancholy line that's been called from that same minaret five times a day for centuries. For a disoriented moment you don't know where you are, and then you remember: Morocco, before dawn, the fajr.

Then it multiplies, and that's the part that gives you chills. The nearest muezzin begins, and within seconds another answers from across the rooftops, slightly out of time, in a different key; then a third, a fourth, more and more, near and far, until the whole city is layered in overlapping voices calling the same words from every direction at once. It isn't tidy or unison — it's this vast, echoing, slightly eerie canon of sound rolling over the sleeping town, and lying there in the dark you feel held inside something enormous and old.

How you feel about it the first morning depends on your bed and your jet lag. If a minaret happens to stand right outside your window, that opening call can be startlingly loud and jolt you bolt upright at half past four, and there's no pretending otherwise — some travellers ask for a room set back from the street for exactly this reason. But more often it reaches you softened by distance and walls, a beautiful intrusion you surface into, listen to with your eyes closed, and then sink back beneath as it fades.

By a few mornings in, something shifts and it stops being an interruption and becomes part of the texture of being here. You start to half-wait for it, to recognise the particular voice of your neighbourhood's muezzin, to find the sound oddly comforting in the dark. It marks the rhythm of a whole country in a way nothing at home does, and long after you've flown out it's one of the first things that comes back to you — that pre-dawn chorus drifting up over the rooftops, and the strange peace of lying in the dark inside it.