Back of Beyond (17 page)

My head is spinning with the oddness of it all. Over at the top end of the Djemaa, lines of instant kitchens complete with tables and chairs have appeared, as if by magic. Here you have a choice of a dozen aromatic
tagines
(slow-cooked stews featuring an array of vegetables with chicken, beef, or lamb and olives galore) poured over golden pyramids of couscous, followed by deliciously crisp fried fish, lamb and kofte kebabs served with large ovals of sweetish bread, superb little
b’stila
pies (a rich mix of chopped pigeon breast, more usually chicken, and eggs wrapped in layers of wafer-thin pastry sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon).

It’s hard to leave the Djemaa. I’m foot weary and mind weary, but I don’t want to go. I’ve run the range of my emotions in a single day—delight, revulsion, intrigue, rejection, love, distaste, understanding, and utter confusion. An old Berber tribesman told me, “The Djemaa is the world and the world is Djemaa,” and you begin to believe it if you allow yourself to become part of this unique place.

But it’s time to move on to fresh adventures. The Sahara is calling again, so early the following morning I leave Marrakech behind and head due south into the foothills of the High Atlas. Serpentine curlings take me deeper into the green gorges terraced with tiny fields. Berber villages huddle on hilltops, tight-knit and earth-colored. Groups of women in bright costumes are washing clothes in the mountain streams. The Roman geographer, Pliny the Elder (not known for his exuberant hyperbole) was awed by the grandeur of “these most fabulous mountains in all of Africa.”

My little Renault 4 seems to drive itself, switchbacking higher and higher toward the Tizi N’Tichka pass (7,415 feet). The villages become
kasbahs
, fortresslike and bounded by crenellated walls and towers. I am entering the wild domain of the “Lords of Atlas,” fierce Berber chieftains who once ruled these lofty realms and repelled all invaders well into this century. It still feels like a land apart, a place where traditions die hard and the old ways are very much in place among the snow-clad peaks. Part of me wants to stop, to abandon the car and take off with a backpack into the remote valleys. But I keep on moving.

Ahmed accosted me at a roadside cafés. He asked for a lift to his family village over the pass (everyone seems to hitchhike in Morocco) and presented me a section of Atlas geode as a goodwill gesture. He spoke passable English and made a lively companion as we zigzagged down the southern slopes of the mountains, passing tiny brown boys holding ferocious-looking lizards by horny tails and rickety roadside stands selling chunks of sparkling Atlas quartzite.

The pause at Ahmed’s house was welcome. The simple setting in which he and his family lived seemed a reflection of the land itself—powerful, even majestic, in its lack of superfluous detail. Outside the mountains soared abruptly from shadowy canyons; a plateau ended in sudden eroded bluffs and beyond that, blue haze and nothing else. Inside, the walls were the same color as the earth, built of earth. There were few trimmings beyond the layered carpets on which we sat, cushions, and the ornate tray used for the tea; no pictures, no tables, chairs, sofas, TV sets, china cabinets—none of the usual paraphernalia with which we fill our Western homes. Ahmed told me that when the family was ready to sleep they rolled out thin camel-hair mattresses and covered them with wool rugs they had woven themselves. When they ate they shared a large communal dish and served themselves with their fingers; when they wanted distraction they talked together or sang or asked the old man of the family (a rambunctious character with a face as crinkled as old parchment and a mischievous glint in his eye) to tell them the long ancient tales they knew so well yet heard fresh every time.

“
Bismallah
.”

For a moment there is total silence.

Inside the mud house we pause and whisper the ritual grace before mint tea is served from a battered tin teapot with a conical lid. The room is black; my eyes are still blinded by the brilliance of the desert outside. Then comes the splatter of tea in small glasses, the aroma of steeped mint, the sheepy smell of babouche slippers and djellabas, the purr of a tabby cat close by, and the soft chatter of the women outside the room in the high-walled courtyard.

This is the way to do it, I told myself.

I could—maybe should—have stayed. But I was impatient for the Sahara. I wanted to see and sense the infinities—the thrill of a space that sweeps for two thousand miles deep into the heart of Africa. I had hoped Morocco would let me experience Africa, but Africa is too big, too grand a scale, for the mind to encompass all at once. Like trying to think of the universe.

After the pass the descent is rapid and the scene change sudden. There is little green now, no terraced hillsides. The mountains are baked brittle in the hot sun; shattered ridges rise from purple shadow canyons; buzzards circle seeking infrequent flickers of life among the rocks. Villages are rare and look hard, pounded-down places, scratching an existence from little patches of earth among the soaring scarps. I see few people except one young boy ploughing a hardscrabble piece of ground with two mules.

Gradually the mountains ease themselves into vast sandy plains. A hot wind is blowing, the Saharan sergi, and my eyes sting. I pass twisted argan trees with barks like reptile skins; high in their branches goats nibble the tiny leaves. I pause at the picture-book hilltop kasbah of Tifoultout, once a stately palace of El Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakech, and now an impressive pile of towering adobe walls and labyrinthine alleys skittering down to a dry riverbed, bronzed in a setting sun and wrapped in wispy silences. A couple of dogs barking and nothing else.

After Agdz, a hectic hilltop town with a main square full of Moroccan carpets and “antique” Berber jewelry, I slipped down into the linear oases of the Draa Valley. All around were dry shattered crags and buttes, but alongside the meandering river was a veritable jungle of date palms and almond and orange orchards set on green carpets of wheat. The Drawa are different from the mountain Berber tribes; many are black, descendents of slaves brought north generations ago by Saharan nomads. The men have shaved heads bound by white turbans. The women shroud themselves in black dresses and shawls trimmed with thin strips of brightly colored ribbon and silver trinkets. The veil is an imperative here; this is no “cool” Casablanca scene with tight T-shirts and jeans. Here the women fold up like bats if they suspect the presence of an outsider (they have an almost telepathic sensitivity and hate being photographed).

The villages or
ksour
are straight out of the Arabian Nights—high square towers and turreted mud walls, slits for windows, six-inch-thick slabs of wood for doors—a sturdy massing of Cubist forms softened by feathery palm tops. The women gather around the communal well, always chattering; the men discuss affairs of state in the dust by the main gate; children scamper everywhere.

Inside their high ochre walls are the same labyrinthine alleys and shadowy passages as in Marrakech. I had learned my lesson and keep close to the main gates.

An old man, wrinkled as an oyster shell, sits by the outer wall selling oranges.

“Salaam alaikum.” (“Peace be with you.”) I’m learning the language slowly.

“Alaikum as salaam,” (“On you be peace”) he replies.

I ask the price and he raises one finger, so I give him a single dirham (about ten cents), expecting one orange. Instead he carefully selects fifteen of the finest fruits I’ve ever seen and places them gently in my arms.

“Shoukran,” I thank him sincerely and give him another dirham.

He obviously thinks I’m crazy.

For the next two days of driving I live on oranges.

I marvel at the power and variety of this sub-Saharan landscape—the soaring strata behind the ancient palace of Taliouine, the peculiar village of Tafraout hidden among barn-sized boulders, and the exotic pink-walled city of Tiznit on the flat coastal plain. I could have dallied for days in each place as I meandered around the southern Atlas foothills but Goulimine is my goal, end point of the ancient camel caravans, where I was assured I would find the elusive Tuareg nomads, the famous “Blue People” of the Sahara. So, reluctantly, I keep moving on.

I can sense the Sahara now. Horizons flatten and sand devils swirl across the plains. But I want dunes. That’s my idea of the Sahara. So I’m told to go further south to M’Hamid where I’ll find camels and the “Blue People” and all the dunes I need. Only no one mentioned the road was closed after sixty miles due to some border conflicts with the Algerians!

Back in Zagora a young guide senses my despondency and leads me through a ksar south of town, along half a mile of sandy lanes enclosed by high bamboo fences and, finally, into my dunes! Miles and miles of them stretching in golden glory to hazy mountain horizons. I thank him and set off to exorcise my Lawrence of Arabia fantasies under a still-burning sun. Two camels sleep nearby making odd snoring noises. A flock of white sheep and black goats nibble incessantly on stubble at the edge of the sands. Then after that, nothing but those endless undulations of silver-beige waves.

At last I felt I had arrived somewhere—or more precisely—nowhere. For it was the nowhereness, the Saharan infinity, that had brought me all this way in my rattle-trap Renault. I walked for what seemed like hours across the dunes, floundering in
fêche-fêche
(talcum powder-textured sand) and amazed by the range of colors—rich blendings of orange with beige, gold with brilliant silver, brick red against white, sienna with primrose, burnished gold streaked with amber—always changing as I wandered across this silver landscape, swimming in light.

A sense of timelessness began to creep in. I saw spectacular mirages where the whole landscape became a lake-studded panorama of blue and gold. But after a while I got used to that, I almost expected it, and my mind became totally divorced from my body in the heat-stunned stillness. It focused on little details, childhood memories, conjuring up brilliant kaleidoscopes of fantasies, all rolling together under the blazing sun.

I found shade in the lee of a dune and watched the day slowly fade into a fireball. For a few magic minutes everything became a brilliant scarlet—the sand, the sky, and me—and then just as quickly the color leached away, leaving a strange dead grayness and a chill evening breeze.

By the time I retraced my steps to the ksar it was dark and the stars were out by the billion, strewn across a velvet-black dome. I felt invigorated; I had touched a little of the desert and it had touched me back in return.

Poring over my sand-scarred maps the next day I found a tempting alternate route to Goulimine across the desert on
piste
roads of hard-packed sand. I boasted to the French-speaking manager of the Hotel Tinsouline (English is rare in these parts) of my intention to take the desert road to the tent town of Foum Zquid.

“I don’t think so,” was his wry reply.

After fifteen miles of chassis-shattering corrugations I had to admit that I didn’t think so either, and retraced my route up the Draa Valley. I gave a lift to two fully costumed Berber women, who smiled wonderfully with their eyes (all I ever saw of their faces) and left behind an enticing aroma of barbecued lamb and cumin that lasted all day.

Then came hills of solid iron ore, rusted, gleaming like anvils under that pounding sun. No oases here, just more endless horizons of rocky plains broken by abrupt ranges, which, after sixty or so miles, begin to swirl in hypnotic curlicues. Tight square ksour huddled under the writhing strata.

I was entertained—way out in the desert—at the tent of a lonely nomad who had been left behind by his camel caravan. (I never found out why.) He was so delighted by unexpected company that he insisted on killing a goat to honor the occasion. Fortunately, I managed to dissuade him.

We sat together by his tent for a long time and in the stillness I could smell the desert. Just over the next low ridge of hills, or maybe the one after, I knew I would soon find the
real
Sahara.

On the third day, I arrive in Goulimine smothered in dust and weary of driving across eye-burning half desert. I had expected something of a climax, a high point of Moroccan architecture, a ksar supreme. Instead I enter a rather bedraggled city of nondescript cement-block buildings set on boring boulevards, with no hotel worthy of the name and few features of any interest to anyone.

“There are no more Blue People, no camel caravans,” I am told with bureaucratic bombast by a fat little customs officer in Goulimine. “You can see the nice camel market on Saturday…very nice pictures there.”

I don’t believe him. Officials have a tendency to discourage travelers seeking the unusual. But I go to the market anyway and get some “very nice pictures” as scores of turbaned desert farmers, herdsmen, and nomads come to pinch, poke, and haggle over livestock. But I also find something much more valuable; I find M’stafa, a bright-eyed boy with a quick smile and a knack for solving problems. “I can help,” he whispers and pulls his seat close to mine at the teahouse in the market. “There are some Tuareg in the hills. They will be leaving for the south very soon. Perhaps you can go with them.” I am delighted with the prospect. “Of course,” M’stafa whispers again, “it is not permitted for you to do this….”

The Tuareg, a proudly independent subrace of Berbers, have been Saharan traders par excellence for centuries. From the north their long caravans of one hundred or more camels carried rugs, blankets, swords and daggers, leather goods, prayer mats, and silver jewelry and returned from Timbuktu and cities farther south, weeks or sometimes months later, laden with ivory, spices, gold, exotic plumage, even live monkeys and parrots. Their main possessions were their camels, their heavy tents of brown tightly woven camel hair, their layered djellabas and cloaks of indigo-dyed cloth. They call themselves “the people of the veil” and are particularly proud of their twenty-foot-long headdresses which cover most of their faces while traveling.