A friend told me the other day that she had just enjoyed a sauna in a local health club.

Nowadays, of course, Finnish-style saunas are commonplace in health clubs and spas all over the world, but there are many other national baths that are not. One of those is a hammam, the Moroccan equivalent of a Finnish sauna. Recently, I spent an evening in a hammam in Marrakesh. It turned out to be an experience I won’t soon forget.

A friend and I found it on a back street off the city’s main square, the Jemma el-Fna. We were fleeing snake-charmers with hissing cobras and monkeys whose owners wanted them to perch on our backs. Then there were henna tattoo artists eager to paint colorful, exotic designs on our hands. We felt we needed a quiet break somewhere. I suggested the hammam that I had read about in a guidebook. My friend was a little leery of the idea at first, but came around to it.

It was easy to miss the one I had selected. Hammams can be private and luxurious, spa-like and expensive. These are to be found in such grand hotels as Marrakesh’s La Mamounia where Winston Churchill used to stay. I visualized him enjoying one of its three hammams in mosaic-tiled surroundings; a cigar clenched between his teeth as the steam rolled around his considerable girth. That sort of hammam includes cedar body wraps (whatever they may be) and rose petal massages. But there are more modest, public hammams, too, for the likes of ordinary Moroccans and me and my friend. These also serve as neighborhood clubs, and there is at least one in every city or town.

Hammams that cater to both sexes are open at separate hours for men and women to make sure their paths don’t cross immodestly. In my guidebook, I’d read that evenings were the women’s time. Even in daylight, it would have been difficult to find the hammam I’d selected, its name written only in Arabic. But we finally were in the right place, and the man at the desk brusquely wanted to know what sort of hammam we wanted. Did we just want a simple gommage (a form of exfoliation) or would we like a shampoo as well? Since we didn’t really know what we were in for, and had few dinar (local currency) anyway, we opted for the cheapest treatment, just the gommage.

A locker key on an elastic band was then put around one of each of our wrists and another band that probably showed whether we were going through the full or only a partial course of treatment around the other wrist. We were then led off by a woman attendant to remove our clothes and replace them with white plastic sandals and a g-string. Our next stop was a room with a domed top that rather resembled an igloo. Steam, however, was pouring into it through vents. We sat there long enough to become glistening wet. My friend preceded me to the next stage of the hammam.

A few minutes later, woozy and slippery as I was from the heat, I was taken by the hand and led to the stage 2 hammam room. My friend and I were the only customers in the women’s bath. Hardly the clubby atmosphere I had expected, but in my effort to insure we went in women’s hours, we may have been too late in the day

In that room, I was laid out on a marble table and the Arabic-speaking attendant signaled that I should lie on my back on a rubber mat with my head on a rubber pillow. With a coarse, scratchy glove, she then sandpapered me–the soles of my feet (which tickled, of course), the back of my neck, legs, arms, back, stomach, everywhere. Meanwhile, zither music meant to soothe played. Apparently the scrub was the gommage. The unnamed pre-steaming was to sweat the dirt out of our pores, acquired during our day of sightseeing among the cobras and monkeys.

After the sanding, water from a pail was poured all over my arms, legs, and head and I was lathered with black soap made, I learned, from the resin of olives. Finally, sweet-smelling, soothing almond oil was rubbed all over me before I was released to return to the locker room to dress.

After that, I was taken to a cushion-covered orange banquette in a mosaic-tiled room, dimly lit, with a miniature musical fountain playing in it. My friend was already there drinking mint tea that had been poured from a height in the proper Moroccan way—I guess so it could be properly aerated. Zither music played again as we drank our tea and our hair dried and we cooled down a bit before we went out into the dark street of meowing cats that led us back to Jemma el Fna Square. By this time, movable restaurants with charcoal braziers had replaced the snakes and monkeys and tattoo artists.

We strolled about briefly, but our $12 gommage—rough though it had been—clearly had been sleep-inducing. Or else it was the steam, the olive soap, the almond oil, the zither music, playing fountain and aereated mint tea.

I have steamed in saunas in Norway, lounged in a mud bath in Switzerland and crouched and soaped in mixed company in a Japanese bath, but, as international baths go, the hammam was probably the most exotic. My Island friend who goes to her health club sauna doesn’t know what she’s missing!