Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  ‘I’m interested in the accident,’ he says. ‘I find English people plan too much. The accidental is not there.’

  He should know, for he married an English girl, Naomi. Slim, angular and a head taller than her husband, she’s articulate and down-to-earth, as befits a Suffolk farmer’s daughter. Besides Narjiss they have another daughter, called Emily, and a cat called Compost, who lies in the garden bed where he’s not meant to. I ask her why they decided, after seven years together in England, to come and live in Fez.

  ‘Fettah’s a Moroccan man,’ she says, as if explaining something she’s had to explain to herself often enough. ‘He didn’t take on some of the roles that Englishmen take. When he realised what child-rearing was, he’s going, “Where’s your mum? Where are your sisters? Where are your friends?” I was going, “No, no, you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it.”’

  Figures flit by in doorways behind her.

  ‘Life here’s very much a community thing. You’re never on your own, you’re always surrounded by family and friends. And they all help and there’s a real teamwork going on. So, in that respect, life’s easier.’

  Fettah is one of seventeen brothers and sisters. His father had three wives, and for a while, siblings were arriving at the rate of two a year.

  Naomi smiles and loops a rogue strand of hair back over her ear.

  ‘The two younger wives are still alive. They live together in one house and they’re both called Fatima and they get on fine.’

  This must account for all the smiling ladies in the kitchen, preparing food, playing with the children, helping here and there. It must account for why Fettah can find time for work, teaching, restoring the house and running music festivals, and why sometimes Naomi misses privacy and space of her own.

  ‘Fez is quite a traditional city and people are fairly conservative. If you go out in the street you have to have a reason for going out, for shopping and visiting … you don’t just sort of amble. Women are at home, cooking, cleaning, looking after children, that’s their role.’

  This is said with a touch of regret but no malice. Anyway, Naomi thinks that attitudes have changed in the three years she’s lived in Morocco. People are less frightened of expressing themselves, of talking about politics.

  ‘Holding hands and kissing in doorways. That’s all changed since I’ve been here.’

  This day of peace and quiet, walking around Fettah and Naomi’s garden, eating a vast couscous around the table on the terrace, hearing of their plans for the house and their affection for these unique surroundings, has lulled me into a dangerous sense of contentment. I haven’t thought of the Sahara all day.

  It’s all about to change. This time tomorrow, inshallah, we’ll be in the city of Marrakesh, beyond which sand and mountains merge into the edge of the void.

  Ring Jonathan Dawson in Tangier to thank him for his hospitality, only to hear that Birdie has broken his beak. Apparently he pecked at some phantom delicacy on the terrace and bit hard on a floor tile. His beak has gone black at one end and may have to be removed.

  Day Eight

  FEZ TO MARRAKESH

  Fez and Marrakesh, the two most important cities of old Morocco, lie in the centre of the country, built to guard ancient trade routes through the Atlas Mountains. Modern Morocco has moved to the coast, around the capital Rabat, and Casablanca, the country’s biggest city, with a population twice that of the old towns - Tangier, Fez and Marrakesh - put together.

  This is why we find ourselves accelerating south by heading west, using the fast motorway system around Meknes, Rabat and Casablanca as the quickest way to get to Marrakesh.

  South of Casablanca the main road slims down to a poorly surfaced single carriageway, choked with trucks and buses. Quite suddenly, some 80 miles north of Marrakesh, the landscape undergoes a transformation. Maybe I was asleep and just woke up, but as we pull up out of a dip beneath a railway bridge I notice Morocco has changed colour. The greens and golds of the fertile northern plain have been reduced to a line of pale yellow wattle trees running beside the road. Beyond them, the land is brick-red and bare.

  The walls of Marrakesh reflect this red land with a beguiling rosy glow which deepens as the afternoon light fades. Running unbroken for over 6 miles, their towers and battlements throw a spectacular cloak around the city. But if Fez was enclosed, almost hidden away behind its walls, Marrakesh is bursting out of them. The new town pushes right up close. It’s colourful and expansive, with broad avenues and a Las Vegas-like dazzle and swagger. Slab-like resort hotels, with names like Sahara Inn, jostle alongside a brand-new opera house. This is an old city desperate to accommodate the modern world.

  I’m disappointed. I’d expected something exotic and unpredictable. After all Marrakesh has the most romantic connotations of any city in this romantic country. Perhaps it’s because the snowcapped range of mountains that frames the city in every tourist brochure is virtually invisible in the haze. Perhaps it’s because almost everyone I’ve seen so far is white and European like me, or perhaps it’s because I feel, on these tidy tree-lined streets, that I could be anywhere.

  Then someone suggests the Djemaa el-Fna.

  To get to it I have to leave the wide streets and bland resort hotels of the New Town and pass inside the peach-red city walls through the twin arched gates of Bab er Rob and Bab Agnaou.

  Once inside the gates the atmosphere is transformed. Tourist buses prowl, but they have to move at the pace of a largely African throng. The tallest building is not an international hotel but the elegant and decorative minaret of the Koutoubia mosque, rising to a majestic height of 230 feet, from which it has witnessed goings on in the Djemaa el-Fna for over 800 years. There is an entirely unsubstantiated story that because the minaret directly overlooked a harem only blind muezzins were allowed up it.

  The Djemaa el-Fna is not a beautiful space. It’s a distended rectangle, surrounded by an undistinguished clutter of buildings and lines of parked taxis. Its name translates as ‘Assembly of the Dead’, which is believed to refer to the practice of executing criminals here.

  It’s bewildering. There’s so much noise that they could still be executing criminals, for all I know. There seems no focal point to the commotion - no psychic centre. At one end, where gates lead into the souk, tourists take tea on cafe balconies and overlook the action from a safe distance. The locals favour the food stalls, which are drawn up in a circle at the centre of the Djemaa, like Western wagons waiting for an Indian attack. They are well lit, and the people serving the food have clean white coats and matching hats. This concession to First-World hygiene is deceptive. The rest of the Djemaa el-Fna is a realm way beyond protective clothing.

  A troupe of snake charmers with wild hair and staring eyes tries to provoke old and tired cobras into displays of aggression, playing pipes at them with ferocious intensity. A squad of lethargic transvestites dances lazily, clicking finger cymbals without much conviction. Not that they need to do much more than that. Judging by the size of the crowds around them, the very fact of a man dressed as a woman is deeply fascinating to Moroccans. There are fortune-tellers, fire-eaters and boxers prepared to take on all-comers. Performing monkeys, chained and skinny, will be thrust on you for photographs. Berber acrobats hurl each other around while their colleagues work the crowd with equal agility. There are self-taught dentists, astrologers and men who let scorpions loose across their faces.

  Women do not seem to take much part in these entertainments, but they form the majority of the beggars, moving silently through the crowd, sleeping children on their shoulders, palms outstretched.

  The Djemaa el-Fna is part fairground, part theatre, part zoo, underscored with a frisson of mysticism and primitive ritual.

  Despite my appetite for all things strange and wonderful, I feel more and more of an outsider as the evening wears on and the hysteria mounts, stoked by the constant thudding of drums, squealing of pipes and blasts from brass horns. Repetitive, remorseless rhythms shred
away the layers of consciousness until you either give in or, as I did, flee the whole madness and retreat to the wonderful world of bland resort hotels.

  Day Ten

  MARRAKESH

  The grandest hotel in Marrakesh, and one of the most famous in the world, is the Mamounia, named after the exotic gardens around it, which were laid out by Pasha Mamoun, a governor of Fez, in the eighteenth century. It was once the official residence of the crown prince, until the French turned it into a hotel of great style, sophistication and expense.

  The shopping arcades of the Mamounia do not deal in take-home gifts, unless there’s someone you know who might want a 6-foot silver lion sinking its claws into a 5-foot silver antelope, and the shopkeepers are not the sort who will fish out a box of matches and an evening paper from under the counter for you. In fact, they would not dream of calling themselves shopkeepers. They are dealers in and connoisseurs of fine things. Determined not to be intimidated, I enter one of these emporia hoping to find something useful, like a leopard-skin satellite dish or a lapis lazuli shoe-horn, and end up making the acquaintance of an exquisitely jewelled Spaniard called Adolpho de Velasco. He is not even a dealer, he is a designer.

  ‘A big designer,’ he corrects me. ‘I launch the oriental look in the whole world,’ he claims, before adding, endearingly, ‘I’m not modest. When I do something that I like, I like people to appreciate it.’

  He sees no contradiction between the jet-set playground Marrakesh has now become and the spartan fortress founded nine centuries ago by Abu Bakr and his holy warriors, fresh out of the southern desert.

  Marrakesh, he says, has always benefited from a trade in fine things from across the Sahara. ‘An enormously rich trade - glass, jewellery, precious stones, spices, silks.’

  I ask him if he has spent much time in the desert himself. He rolls his eyes theatrically.

  ‘Yes.’ He pauses. ‘And it’s terrifying.’

  Beneath a shock of carefully coiffured hair Adolpho’s lean, leathery face takes on the aspect of an early Christian martyr, racked by some distant anguish.

  ‘It’s something that takes you, as it were, into another dimension.’

  Cheered by this, I bid Adolpho goodbye, only to receive an expansive invitation to come to his home for a drink at the end of the day. He gives me an address.

  ‘Next to Yves Saint Laurent.’

  And he’s not referring to the shop.

  I visit the souk, the old market in the medina, for a dose of reality, but even here the modern world seems to have won the day. I’m drawn with dreadful inevitability into a carpet emporium, an attractive vaulted interior off a muddy back street. The salesman has lived in London for many years.

  ‘Marloes Court.’

  Then, as if I don’t believe him, he adds, in quick succession, ‘Andy Williams was my best friend. Do you know the Sombrero Night Club?’

  His name is Michael.

  ‘Same as yours,’ he adds, warmly if unnecessarily.

  I hover over an undoubtedly tempting Berber rug, bearing a Star of David motif, a reminder that it was not just Moors but the Jews as well who were thrown out of Spain by the Catholic Monarchs.

  ‘I’m going south, across the desert. I can’t take things like that with me.’

  He shrugs, as if to say how could anyone who knows the Sombrero Club be going south across the desert.

  There are some bewitching sights. Lengths of freshly dyed cotton are hung to dry across one alley, forming a swirling indigo canopy above us, and in the yard that leads off it I catch a glimpse of the men who dye the cloth, bent to their task, arms and torsos stained deep blue.

  By the time I leave the souk the sun’s going down, and so are my energies. Then I remember that I have to find Yves Saint Laurent.

  Yves, as I like to call him, lives in and owns the Majorelle Garden, a botanical garden in the New Town, and Adolpho de Velasco lives in a house surrounded by tall trees just over the wall from the great man. Adolpho is more than a neighbour; he is one of Yves’ forty ‘favourites’, which, amongst other things, means being privileged to receive one of his specially painted Christmas cards. Adolpho has a set of them, all framed, of which he is very proud. He’s proud too of how he has expanded his cottage by converting a loggia into a conservatory, with an open fire crackling at one end and the stout trunk of a false pepper tree rearing up and through the roof as if an elephant’s foot had just come through the building.

  Immaculate in a gold-trimmed djellaba and stroking a very large citrine medallion around his neck, Adolpho smokes imperiously, talks flamboyantly and orders his servant to replenish my glass of pink champagne with such frequency that almost every sentence of my interview ends with the words ‘don’t mind if I do’.

  Adolpho is a hot-blooded, passionate Mediterranean of the sort our fathers warned us about. He does not like things, he loves things. Himself, Morocco, his neighbour, emeralds, whatever. In fact, the only thing he doesn’t love appears to be tourists from Birmingham, one of whom had complained of having her bottom pinched while walking in the souk. Adolpho was indignant.

  ‘“What she look like?” I ask my friend. “Well, she was like this, she was like that.”

  ‘I say, “Bill, was she ugly?” “Yes,” he say. “Yes. Very.” I say how lucky girl she was. Never in England, in Birmingham, will ever, ever, her bottom be pinched.’

  His eyes swell with pride for his adopted land.

  ‘Lucky country. Lucky country.’

  Day Eleven

  MARRAKESH

  I meet Amina Agueznay at a scrubby patch of wasteground outside the city walls, where taxis, donkeys and minibuses have worn the grass bare as they come and go touting for business. Names of destinations are shouted out and horns blasted to announce the imminent departure of buses, which everyone knows will not leave according to any timetable but only when they’re full to bursting.

  Amina is very much a modern Moroccan, a jewellery designer in her mid-thirties, unmarried and independent. She’s short, bespectacled, articulate and possessed of an attractive self-confidence. She has lived and worked in New York and her English accent is more Mafia than Moroccan.

  When we met yesterday I put it to her that the Atlas Mountains, the world-renowned backdrop to Marrakesh, are a computer-generated image to fool the tourists, for strain my eyes as I have these past forty-eight hours, I have seen nothing more than a dim grey blur in the hazy skies to the south.

  According to Amina, the mountains not only exist, but they’re less than two hours away, and she will show me villages more breathtakingly beautiful than anything else I’ve seen in Morocco.

  She picks her way coolly through this frenzied transport market until she finds a grand taxi, an old Mercedes of the sort I remember in Munich in the 1970s, which she judges to be safe and sound. As we make to get in, an old man deftly intercepts us and stretches out a hand for some money. Amina gives him a coin. Very important, she says. Moroccans are very superstitious, especially about journeys, and a coin to a beggar will help ward off the evil eye.

  We head south, passing low, flat-roofed houses with rough-textured, dried-mud walls. Storks circle above them, carrying food to nests high on chimneys or tall trees. Our taxi driver has perfected a technique of roaring up to the vehicle in front, hugging its slipstream, but not overtaking until he can clearly see an oncoming vehicle.

  Around 30 miles from Marrakesh we stop, to my relief, at a large village called Asni. Outside the cafes, tagines simmer on charcoal braziers, salesmen offer us an assortment of knives, rings, fossils and crystalline rocks, and Berber women, wearing long green cloaks and white headscarves with lacy fringes, pass by with loads of undergrowth on their backs.

  I learn from Amina that the Berbers (the word comes from the Greek for barbarians) were the original inhabitants of Morocco. Some say they came from the Caucasus Mountains but no-one disagrees that they moved into Morocco long before the Arabs. Ibn Khaldun, the great fourteenth-century chronicler of Ar
ab history wrote of the Berbers: ‘the men who belong to these family of peoples have inhabited the Maghreb since the beginning’. The Arab word Maghreb means ‘the lands of the west’ or ‘the lands of the setting sun’.

  Despite the fact that over seventy-five per cent of all present-day Moroccans are of Berber descent, the Berbers have been traditionally repressed by their Arab conquerors and largely confined to rural mountain areas like the High Atlas. Amina says that things are different now. There are Berbers in the cities. They’re hardworking, ambitious and creative. She seems uncomfortable with direct questions about Arab-Berber relations. Maybe it’s because Morocco is anxious to avoid any equivalent of the recent violent protests by Algeria’s Berbers over the suppression of their culture. Maybe it’s because Amina, it transpires, is a Berber herself, from the south on her mother’s side and from the Rif Mountains on her father’s side.

  Beyond Asni the road rises so steeply that we have to exchange our Mercedes for a pick-up truck, squeezed into the back with a group of villagers.

  The road coils along a gorge beside a riverbed, bone-dry today but bearing the scars of fierce torrents of the past. In two places the concrete highway has collapsed and been washed away, and they have been waiting since 1975 to have it repaired. We pass a precipitous village called Imbil, which sells postcards and has a government centre for hikers. From here a dirt track climbs steeply through a landscape of dry stone-walled terraces, which support sturdy vegetable plots and cherry orchards. The air cools and bubbling streams race down the mountain.

  The dusty white hairpin bends are becoming so tight that the hard-worked pick-up, unable to make them in one, negotiates a series of death-defying three-point turns, leaving us at times backed up to the very edge of a precipice, with only a handbrake between us and a 1000-foot drop.

  At last we pull up onto a flat saddle of land offering temporary relief and a breathtaking view down the valley. To the south, a dizzy succession of interlocking spurs, and to the north, a spread of horizontal terraces and rooftops. This is the village of Aremd, 8000 feet high, overlooked by jagged raking ridges and wedged in a fold of the mountains, with this narrow, gravelled track as its only lifeline.