Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  The silence of the mountains amplifies any sound that breaks it. The cracking of a twig for a fire, a dog’s bark, a child’s shout identify the village long before we reach it. A picnic is laid for us on carpets and cushions set on a terrace shaded by walnut trees. After washing our hands in water from a silver salver, a meal of couscous and tagine, the name of the food and also the conical earthenware pot it comes in, is served, with Amina and myself as guests of honour. This brings its own problems. There are no knives, forks or spoons and I have to learn to eat Berber-style, using my right hand only - the left being traditionally reserved for ablutions. This is not without its own very strict etiquette. One does not stick one’s hand in and pick out what one wants. Oh dear me, no. One uses one’s thumb and two fingers, the thumb squeezing the food into a ball solid enough to dip carefully into the sauces and return to one’s mouth. All this from ground level.

  I find it hard enough even to reach the rice without swaying most ungracefully off balance, and the rolling of it into a ball using only three digits is a damn sight harder than it sounds. Especially as the rice is hot.

  Mercifully, a small band starts up, creating a diversion and enabling me to use an extra digit to grab some of the wonderfully tender chunks of lamb soaked in the juice of olives.

  Oranges, mint tea and a rosewater finger bowl are brought round and our dejeuner sur l’herbe continues with the performance of a courtship dance. Men and women form up in two lines facing each other. The men, all in white djellabas, chant, yodel and beat out a rhythm with hand-held drums, whilst the women clap their hands and respond with their own chant. One from each side dances in the middle. The man struts and shakes his shoulders in passable imitation of an animal ruffling its feathers and scratching the ground. The dancers never touch each other, yet it’s performed with a flash of the eyes and a boldness of movement that makes it highly charged. Something chaste and wild at the same time.

  Day Twelve

  MARRAKESH TO OUARZAZATE

  Marrakesh bus station, romantically known as the Gare de Voyageurs, is not the sort of place to arrive at the last minute.

  The details on the departures board are predominantly in Arabic, and in the busy central hall mine is one of the few heads moving from left to right as I try to decipher the scant French translation.

  The depot is modern, concrete and functional, and beside the ‘Horaires de Depart a large portrait of the old king, Hassan II, looks down on the confusion from a veneered wooden frame. The king is the supreme civil and religious leader of his country, and remembering Amina’s words yesterday about the superstition attached to any journey, I suppose it is reassuring to have the Commander of the Faithful gazing down on you as you look for the right destination, even if he has been dead for two years.

  I must have forgotten to add ‘Inshallah’ (God willing) when I bought my ticket, for once through the gate, I narrowly avoid being mown down by two departing coaches before I locate the Express Nahda service for Ouarzazate, Zagora and the south.

  The last few seats fill up in an atmosphere of increasing anxiety amongst the squad of young men who appear to run the bus company. Lists are checked, cross-checked and checked again, with deepening frowns.

  Eventually, with a valedictory fart of thick black smoke, our elderly Daf pulls out of the yard and begins a slow crawl round the outskirts of Marrakesh in heavy morning traffic.

  At one stop I watch a man in a djellaba and straw hat scraping up donkey droppings from the middle of the road with two boards. I can’t work out if he’s from the council or just an opportunist. When I was growing up in Sheffield the police horses used to pass our house on some sort of exercise, and if any dung was left behind I had to watch in profound embarrassment as my father and our next door neighbour, both keen rose-growers, raced out with shovels and fought over it.

  When we’re finally clear of the city the driver shoves a dusty cassette into a slot on the dashboard and the bus fills with the sound of chanting. It’s a tape of the Koran, played to invoke Allah’s protection on our journey and recited, I’m told, by an Egyptian who is considered such a star that he intones the Holy Book at Mecca itself.

  The driver seems a placid, reliable sort, rarely using his horn in anger and seemingly undistracted by a plastic vine which trails up one side of the windscreen, dangling its faded black grapes over a photograph of a woman, veiled in white, hands raised in devotional gesture, which is stuck on the windscreen above his head.

  The mountains begin to close in, and, as the driver hauls the coach round a dizzying succession of hairpins, the prevailing colour of the countryside changes from rufous maroon to brown and grey. Convoys of four-wheel drive vehicles, carrying their affluent tourist cargoes towards the Desert Experience, hover impatiently behind us.

  Some four hours after leaving Marrakesh the coach pulls in to the small, noisy town of Taddert, the last truck stop before the Tichka pass. The smoky aroma of fresh-grilled kebabs is irresistible, though obtaining one isn’t quite so simple. Helpful locals point me to a roadside butcher, from whom I buy the meat, before taking it over to the fire, where I pay again to have it cooked. As I tuck into it, a truck, on its way down from the pass, air brakes hissing, comes to rest opposite me. It carries a load of cattle and one little old man, gripping the sides and peering impassively from a long line of bovine backsides.

  After Taddert it isn’t long before we run clear of the last agricultural terraces and climb slowly and steadily upwards between bare, fractured rock until we reach a plateau covered in short spongy grass and pools of standing water, where a few sheep graze. This is harsh inhospitable land, watershed country, whose melting snows feed rivers that will run either north to the plains of Marrakesh or south to die out in the desert.

  We’re at the pass (tizi in Berber) moments later. A bristle of communications masts and a sign, around which some European boys are draped for a photograph, announce that we are at the top of the Tizi n’Tichka, at 7500 feet, the highest pass over the Atlas Mountains.

  An hour or so later, I leave the coach near the town of Ait Benhaddou. We’re still on the flanks of the Atlas Mountains, but for the first time on the edge of real desert. The landscape reminds me of Arizona, flat-topped mesas turning red, gold and purple as the sunlight moves over them. Yet this small town we’ve come to, some 15 miles off the main road, is one of the most familiar on the planet. Anyone who has seen Gladiator will have seen it. Anyone who has seen Lawrence of Arabia or Romancing the Stone or The Four Feathers will have seen it.

  Almost the only time I went to the cinema with both my parents was to see biblical epics. The last one I remember us enjoying was called Sodom and Gomorrah, which, with lines like ‘Beware the Sodomite patrols’, was perfect for a young adolescent about to go away to an all-male boarding school. Only today do I find out that the Sodom that so impressed me in Sheffield forty-five years ago is the village I’m in today.

  Like so many settlements on the old trade routes south, Ait Benhaddou was fortified by the warlords who controlled the High Atlas, the most famous of whom was T’hami El Glaoui, who ran southern Morocco as his own fiefdom right up until independence from the French in 1956. A multitude of picturesque towers rises from a rocky bluff overlooking a wide dry riverbed, at the top of which are the prominent ruins of an agadir, a fortified granary, its bastions now so eroded by the rain they look like melted candles.

  This was a wealthy town, renowned for the beauty of its women as well as the splendour of its buildings, and when the clear sunlight catches the elegant tapered towers with the richly decorated patterns on their upper walls and archways I can understand why the tourists, and the film-makers, keep coming back.

  I enter past the recently demolished arena from Gladiator and up into the streets, tapping walls every now and then to make sure they’re real. The hardened clay pathways are narrow and picturesque and eerily tidy. There are no motor vehicles and, it seems, very few residents. The only shops are selling souvenirs and gift
s for tourists. Ait Benhaddou is a sort of Sleeping Beauty - pretty, well preserved and oddly sterile, waiting for the next movie to bring it back to life.

  It is late in the afternoon, and as we near Ouarzazate the landscape is spectacular in the declining sunshine. Rock faces twisted like muscles in spasm are scoured by a low sunlight that picks out every nuance of colour until they glow like smouldering coal.

  And all at once I see my first mirage. It’s an ancient and glittering citadel rearing up out of nowhere, part fortress, part palace. On closer inspection it proves to be the city of Jerusalem, and on even closer inspection it proves to be held up by scaffolding.

  Shouts of ‘Dino!’ and the smell of fresh paint fill the desert air as an Italian construction crew go about their business putting the finishing touches to marble urns, copper braziers and plasterboard loggias.

  ‘Jesus and Judas,’ reads the windscreen sticker on one of their vans.

  At the Berber Palace Hotel in Ouarzazate this evening a young Englishman introduces himself. He’s an actor, playing John the Disciple in an ABC television version of the New Testament currently being shot in the Moroccan Jerusalem. A short curly haired American, naked save for a towel around his waist, passes through the lobby exclaiming loudly, ‘Boy, that hammam has knocked me out! Wow!’

  My friend calls him over.

  ‘Michael, meet Jesus.’

  This is a historic moment, but all I’m worried about is that if he shakes hands his towel will fall off.

  So we just say ‘Hi!’, and Jesus hurries away to change.

  ‘There’s a whole lot of us here,’ says my friend. ‘We’re all disciples.’

  Sure enough I notice them later in the restaurant, all with identical beards. At a table for twelve.

  Day Thirteen

  OUARZAZATE TO TlNFOU

  Ouarzazate recedes into the distance. A town of substance, a regional capital, a centre for the increasing trade in tourists who want the Desert Experience without having to go too far into the desert. It has an airport and some big hotels and a military garrison but not much else to hold us up.

  The mountains are not quite done with us yet. We may have crossed the High and Middle Atlas but there’s still the Anti-Atlas ahead of us. As the road climbs towards yet another pass the Land Rover coughs and splutters and we pull in to the side. Our driver opens the bonnet and releases a hissing cloud of steam. Like a priest wielding a censer, he scatters a couple of bottles of Sidi Mansour mineral water over the radiator and we set off again. A few miles later the knocking from the engine becomes so insistent that I wonder if there might not be someone trapped inside. Our driver tries manfully to ignore it, but you might as well ignore a broken leg, and reluctantly he brings us to another, and I suspect more permanent, halt.

  As we’re staring into the engine, two very sleek Toyotas, coming fast out of the desert, bowl down the hill towards us. Seeing our plight, the occupants stop, offer greetings in the Arab fashion, right hand lightly touching the heart, and a man in a cotton robe, face shrouded in a blue veil, comes across to us. His skin is dark and tight across his cheekbones. He appraises us with a fierce unblinking eye before reaching into his robes.

  ‘I am a nomad. Here is my card.’

  It’s a kind offer, and reminds me of the Monty Python sketch of a cliff-side full of hermits, chatting, gossiping and offering to do each other’s shopping.

  Squeezed into one vehicle, we toil without further incident up to the pass, the unforgettably named named Tizi n’Tinififft, 5500 feet above sea level. To the north, east and west the crests of a half-dozen mountain ranges extend to the horizon. A gorge splits the earth and we follow the curving walls and rock-stacks of the canyon down towards the incongruous green ribbon of palm trees and cultivated land that marks the course of the River Draa.

  The Draa was once one of the great rivers of North Africa, mentioned by Ptolemy as running from the Atlas Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. As the desert has spread the river has shrivelled and, in this last hot decade, has disappeared into the sand without even reaching the sea.

  Here, beyond the town of Agdz, the Draa is fresh off the slopes and shows how barren desert can be transformed if there’s water around. A carpet of palm trees extends for up to a mile across the valley floor, providing a livelihood for a string of towns and villages along its route. It is, in effect, one long oasis, with glimpses of silver-green water amongst the trees, and brightly coloured clothes drying on bushes, through which flocks of black goats pick their way. The valley provides the best dates in the world, so they say, and we stop to buy some from a boy of nine or ten who stands by the side of the road holding a basket in outstretched hand.

  Within seconds a crowd of competitors, none older than fourteen or fifteen, engulfs me.

  It seems fun, but the force with which they fight to get near me, the intense clamour for a sale and the almost studied indifference of my driver to these skinny jostling boys give me the feeling that this is as much about survival as free enterprise. Perhaps all is not as well as it looks in the picturesque villages of the Draa valley.

  It’s early afternoon when we drive into Zagora through a horseshoe-arched gateway and down Avenue Mohamed V, which, with its arcades and long line of shaded shop-fronts, has the atmosphere of a Wild West frontier town. Children walking back from school hold exercise books up to their faces to keep the sun off.

  There is a scuffed, crudely painted, concrete road sign here, a child’s-eye view of desert sands, camels and gleaming-eyed Touareg grouped around a grubby arrow and the words ‘Tombouctou 52 Jours’. It’s a reminder that Zagora is the largest town we shall see for another 1000 miles and that its tourist hotels and hard-topped roads may seem like rare luxuries in the days ahead.

  After Zagora the palm groves thin out and the casbahs become fewer and farther between. The Draa reduces to a trickle, then ceases to flow altogether. A fierce gusty wind springs up from nowhere, gathering the sand and dust into clouds that cover the sun and plunge this dazzling landscape into anonymous greyness.

  Progress slows and we rest up for the night at Tinfou, 20 miles south of Zagora and a few miles short of the end of the road at Mhamid.

  The Auberge du Repos de Sables has great character, if limited comforts. The building is a small casbah, complete with four clay-brick towers at its corners, at the top of one of which is my room. The auberge is family owned and run in very laid-back style by the El Faraj family, painters and potters whose work covers the walls. The rooms are small, whitewashed and simply furnished with bamboo and beam ceilings.

  I open out my Michelin map, ‘Africa North and West’, until it covers most of the bed. I look at the route we’ve taken so far - blue sea, then red and white roads that have carried us across the green and brown of mountain and valley. From here on there is only one colour: golden yellow, stretching 1000 miles, south, east and west. The size of many Moroccos.

  Except for the single word Sahara in bold black type, there is hardly any print across this emptiness apart from a number of faint blue inscriptions: ‘Mejaouda, Peu d’Eau a 4m‘, ‘Hassi Tartrat, Potable‘, ‘Oglat Mohammed, Eau Bonne’. I realise that not only is this the first map I’ve used which has sources of water specifically marked, but that their names are often hundreds of miles apart.

  In the night a fierce wind bursts open the shutters behind my bed and I’m aware how much cooler I feel. By morning I’m reaching for a sweater.

  Day Fourteen

  TlNFOU TO TlNDOUF

  Wake at six as a muezzin’s cry rends the stillness. Fortunately, I can control this one, as the voice comes from a pink alarm clock bought in the bazaar at Marrakesh. Click it off and lie there idly speculating whether any Muslims have ever been woken by the sound of the Bishop of Bath and Wells.

  Examine the day. It looks perfect. Clear skies, translucent desert light. I climb down the ladder from my turreted refuge and take in the beauty of the morning. Just outside the main gate, three camels sway their h
eads towards me before resuming their chewing. I watch a couple of sparrows perching on swaying palm fronds and can’t help noticing how chubby they are for birds on the edge of a desert. The road is empty, save for a slowly advancing figure on a moped.

  The only shadow in this sub-Saharan Eden is a dry cough that I picked up yesterday.

  A persistent, gritty, welcome-to-the-desert cough.

  By the time we’re packed and ready to go the wind has started to rise. The last Moroccan road quickly runs out and we’re off piste, swerving and twisting as the drivers search out the hard surfaces. A screaming wind is scything sand off the dunes and hurling it across our windscreen. As we enter the Sahara, it’s as if we’re entering a storm at sea.

  Beyond Mhamid the desert stretches away into Algeria, the second-largest country in Africa. It is not best friends with neighbouring Morocco, and one of the reasons lies beside the solitary tarmac road that runs across this flat and rubble-strewn landscape. Above a walled compound on the outskirts of Tindouf, a flag slaps and cracks in the wind. The flag - a chevron, three horizontal bands and the moon and star of Islam - belongs to none of the countries whose frontiers meet in this desolate spot. Not Algeria, Morocco nor Mauritania. It is the flag of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, and you will scour the atlas in vain for its name, for officially it doesn’t exist.

  Inside the compound there is an almost cloistered hush. The wind has dropped and the stillness of the surrounding desert deadens noise like a fresh snowfall. In the middle of a quadrangle of sand and stones people are meeting and talking softly in the shade offered by an open-sided thatch-roofed shelter. Around the walls of the compound runs a single-storey block of rooms providing accommodation and other facilities. The writing on the walls provides a clue to the mystery of the Saharawis. ‘Tienda’ above the shop, ‘Comedores’ above the refectory. Another clue is in the faces of those talking. Over half are clearly not African. They’re light-skinned, with chunky moustaches and round, earnest faces.