On 31 January, after nearly three weeks of desultory delving in Rabat, Gavin headed south for the capital of the Glaoui’s former kingdom, Marrakesh. If Rabat held the bare bones of the story, Marrakesh and the mountains that towered above it held the living flesh – the dramatic backgrounds and the haunting scenes of the crimes, and all the emotion and high romance. Gavin was instantly more at home in Marrakesh, which conformed exactly to his expectations of the exotic. Installed within the Medina, the old walled city, he wrote to Jimmy Watt on the day of his arrival:
I’m so relieved to have left Rabat that this seems like paradise even though I am alone. This is really one of the most fabulous cities left in the world, and hasn’t changed much since I last saw it five years ago – in fact so far as one can tell it hasn’t really changed since it was built in the year 1200. At least this square, on the edge of which I live, hasn’t changed since those days. It’s called the Djemma el Fna, and at any given moment it contains some seven or eight thousand people forming groups round acrobats, dancers, snake-charmers, performing ostriches, apes, story-tellers, musicians, clowns, etc, etc. The people who come to watch are the same as they’ve always been – people from the mountains (fantastic snow peaks fourteen thousand feet high which form the whole of one horizon), people from the desert, people from the plains and the cedar forests – just people in fantastic numbers who come here for entertainment and pleasure, parking their camels and donkeys and mules and letting themselves enter into the spirit of the thing. The noise is deafening, the drums so loud and urgent – drums and cymbals clashing and pitch flares burning and this fantastic crowd … Everything except the bicycles belongs to the middle ages – and an Arabian Night middle ages at that.
I’ve had to stop this letter, because it’s now evening – only 9 p.m. but already so cold that the only thing to do is to get into bed and pile all one’s coats and things on it and curl up in a ball. While the sun is up it’s too hot to wear a jacket with any comfort, but as soon as the sun goes down the chill of the snows lying on those gigantic mountains creeps down into the town and becomes paralysing. In the square men pressed up against their camels for warmth. I haven’t got a camel, unfortunately. Must get one.
By the next evening the crowds in the Djemma had swollen to between twelve and fifteen thousand people, and round a group of Sudanese dancers Gavin counted a ring of 872 persons – ‘and that ring is touching all the other rings’. The whole atmosphere made him restless and unsettled, as he explained in a letter he wrote to me that night:
But how to concentrate in these surroundings QUARK. I’ve been on the wagon for some time, which means one drinks too much coffee, which means one gets headaches and doesn’t sleep, which means etc etc etc. YOU KNOW. Here one can’t be bored and just gets restless and ineffectual, feeling that this ought to be the jumping off point, not the end of a journey. So as a form of displacement behaviour I remove my beard, and then think how silly my face looks without it. Like my book – long and silly …
The stars have come out very bright, and the drumming has reached a crescendo and smells of mixed spices waft in at the window mingled with all the other smells that make a Medina in the olfactory sense. Outside is an enormous and shapeless old Berber with a long white beard on a camel so big that it looks into the window. It’s a bull and it’s blowing that extraordinary red balloon out of its mouth every ten seconds. A boy is leaning against its flank, playing a genberi(?) and singing, but there’s so much din that I can’t hear his voice. These drums seem somehow to inflate one from inside so that one feels ready to burst for no known reason.
I looked at the Atlas with crimson sun on the snows from my rooftop this evening, and wondered how we ever thought we would cross them in winter! They look like the Himalayas. When and if we do go we will need complete Alpine equipment. I see it all much more plainly now. And sometime we must do it together.
From his base in Marrakesh Gavin planned to explore by car the principal locations of his story – the great kasbahs and palaces of the Glaoui kingdom in the High Atlas. As interpreter and guide he hired an intelligent and trustworthy young Berber guide named Ahmed who, in addition to his native Berber, spoke Arabic and French, and was both literate and artistic (most of the drawings in Gavin’s book were done by him). Early in February they drove out towards the snowy mountains beyond the city, and climbed higher and higher into a bare wintry world where the air was thin and shrill and the sky as blue and as clear as ice. Gavin’s objective on that first reconnaissance was the great castle at Telouet – the now abandoned and crumbling fortress capital of the Lords of the Atlas, and the hub of his story.
The castle stood at an altitude of more than eight thousand feet in the High Atlas Mountains, circled by the giant peaks of the Central Massif, all of them rising to more than ten thousand feet, and bearing in their rocks all the colours of the rainbow. A torrential river, the Oued Mellah, flowed away through a valley of salt below the castle, where vultures soared above the high rock spires that clustered before the face of a nearby precipice. The great mass of the kasbah of Telouet was ill-ordered and ill-planned but majestic in its complex ramifications and lack of symmetry. Empty now, its towers were the nesting sites of storks, and vultures, ravens and kites wheeled above the castle’s green-tiled roofs. It was a haunting, eerie, magnetic place, this great fortress high up in the heart of the Glaoui’s former fiefdom, and Gavin’s first exploration of it reaffirmed his enthusiasm for his new-found story.
When the Sultan and his Court returned to Rabat, full approval for the project was granted and Gavin went back to the capital for interviews. ‘The return of the Court from Syria and Egypt,’ he wrote to me, ‘has caught me up in a whirlwind of officialdom which I regret, but which is necessary for my book. I have to talk with Personages, which is after all what I have asked to do, but my thoughts go back like homing pigeons to the mountains.’ But Gavin’s return visit to Rabat coincided with the test firing of a French atomic bomb in the Sahara, and his appointments were again curtailed. He made further appointments for interviews with Palace officials and key players in the story – including the doctors who had attended the Glaoui’s deathbed – for the first week in March. But on 1 March something happened which forced him to put off his interviews for a third time.
He was sitting writing in his small and shabby room in the medina in Marrakesh at about eleven-thirty at night, bent low over the table (for the single electric lightbulb gave little light), and had just written ‘Hadj Abdullah ou Bihi, grand caid of the Haha, was sent for to the Sultan’s palace, where he was given the choice of a cup of poisoned tea or starvation to death while publicly exhibited in an iron …’ when he was interrupted by a violent shake of his chair. He looked over his shoulder, and as he did so the whole room shuddered, the tiled floor seemed to slope up towards him, and his pen and some small change slid off the table. A second later there was a second shudder, followed by a similar sensation of vibration and tilting. Mystified, Gavin concluded he had been the victim of a hallucination, and carried on writing. Not until he went out the next morning did he begin to have an inkling of what might have happened.
The city was alive with rumours, which before long were confirmed. The seaside resort town of Agadir, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, had been razed by a violent earthquake which had caused great loss of life – the dead, by the time the final tally was made, amounted to more than ten thousand, nearly a third of the population. A friend of Gavin’s, a French photographer by the name of René Bertrand, who had been to the scene of the disaster, told him: ‘The limbs of the dead stick out of the ground as if they were waving to you. It is a place of horror, I tell you, horror.’ To make matters worse, the shade temperature in Agadir after the earthquake shot up to an unseasonal 105 degrees, and before long the stench of putrescence extended for three miles around the town and the hard-pressed rescue workers had to wear gas-masks to continue their nearly impossible task amongst the rubble. Driven above ground by the des
truction of the sewers where they lived, rats swarmed about the ruins, while the dogs and cats fed upon the human corpses. Over all hung a humming cloud of flies.
Gavin returned from Marrakesh to Rabat, where, at Margaret Pope’s flat, he finally met the Chief of Press Services at the Royal Palace – Moulay Ahmed el Alaoui, the cousin of the King. Moulay Ahmed was like a human dynamo, Gavin observed, doing a hundred jobs at once in a hundred places at once. Moreover he had the ear of the King, so that his duties had many ramifications beyond the title of his job. The King’s cousin took a liking to Gavin, sympathised with his project, and offered to help. But any official interviews were out of the question. The earthquake had seen to that. He himself was taking the King and his entourage to Agadir the next day, along with the foreign diplomats and the press corps. Perhaps Gavin would like to join them?
The next day – Sunday, 6 March 1960 – Gavin set out for the scene of the catastrophe. The party flew there in two planes, one for the King, his ministers and the foreign ambassadors, the other for the press attachés and international press. From Agadir airport they proceeded in convoy, first the royal cars, then the ambassadors in one bus, followed by the press in another. Masked figures sprayed the vehicles as they entered the death town. To Gavin Agadir looked as if it had been levelled by an air raid. Large areas were now no more than fine dust, but wherever there was more substantial rubble rescue workers were still digging and bulldozers moving amid the debris ‘with the infinite slowness of a dream’. ‘There was no halt on this weird tour of a city so newly dead,’ wrote Gavin; ‘again the cars reached the road-block, were sprayed by dim, masked figures, and moved out into the world of the living. For me the nearest parallel in my experience was emerging from the suffocation of drowning …’
That evening Gavin was back in Rabat. Though the earthquake, following so hard on the heels of the atomic explosion, had wrecked the formal advancement of his project – a petty setback, he knew, compared with the death and suffering he had just witnessed – his contact with Moulay Ahmed had turned up information about two rich sources of future material. The first was the existence in Marrakesh of ex-Princess Madani Glaoui, one of the few living people in possession of all the facts. She professed to have lived for years in fear of her life, threatened by Glaoui and French alike, and had been personally present at poisonings and other outrages. She would only talk on production of a letter signed by the Sultan or the Chef du Protocol, however, and that could not be produced on this first visit. The second discovery was the existence of a collection of specialist books, the Collection du Pac, in the Bibliothèque Municipale in Rabat, which promised to be a treasure trove of historical information within the public domain.
Gavin returned to London on 7 March, laden with Moroccan rugs, blankets, amethysts, flutes, stringed instruments, ceramics and leather ware. Shortly afterwards he wrote to his publishers: ‘It is impossible to complete this work without a further visit. I think the whole subject has greater possibilities than any I have yet tackled or indeed thought of. But time is needed, and in estimating the length of a visit full consideration must be given to the infinite procrastination of Moors.’
To me he wrote: ‘I am inspired to write to you to the effect that you MUST keep Xmas-1st March free next winter for the projected Atlas journey. This because I have been so deeply struck by my brief excursions into the mountains, and because I’ve found what I thought would be so difficult – to wit someone who speaks all three languages fluently. So the main hurdle of language surmounted, we MUST do the trip, and nothing must stand in the way. You’d agree if you’d seen the mountains and the mountains’ kasbahs – it’s a country that it’s impossible to exaggerate pictorially.’
Sadly, I never did travel on an expedition with Gavin Maxwell. Though The Lords of the Atlas was to become a classic historical work, Gavin never wrote another travel book, in the strict definition of the term, to follow his masterly A Reed Shaken by the Wind.
TWENTY-TWO
Avalon besieged
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, ‘Inversnaid’
Gavin returned to London to find trouble and near-tragedy awaiting him. In the week before his return the house in Paultons Square had caught fire and his otter had fallen sick. The primary cause of the fire was a faulty oil heater, which in the small hours of the night had developed an excessive flame; one of Gavin’s tropical tanager birds had flown into the flame and with its wings alight had flitted about the room setting the curtains and anything else that was combustible on fire; the smoke had killed all the rest of the birds, and by the time the fire brigade arrived, the room was virtually burned out. I was still living in the house at the time, and if I had not heard the fire – a lightning-like crackling sound across the floor of my bedroom in the early hours of the morning – the whole house might have gone up in flames, and myself and Jimmy and Edal with it.
I left the house the morning after the fire to fly to west Africa, where I was due to begin filming in a Nigerian leper colony. In the few days between my departure and Gavin’s return Edal succumbed to Shigella dysentery, and for a fortnight was too ill to eat solid food – so ill, in fact, that her life for a few days hung by a thread. By the middle of April, however, she was fully recovered and fit enough to take part in a BBC television magazine programme featuring the Chelsea author and his exotic pet. A few days later she returned with Jimmy Watt to Sandaig, travelling by first-class sleeper on a dog-ticket that described her, for the benefit of any suspicious railway official who might feel inclined to check, as an ‘Illyrian poodle’. But just before Edal left London an extraordinary coincidence had taken place that ensured she would not be the only African otter living at Sandaig that summer.
Gavin received a telephone call from a Mr and Mrs Del Davin, who were on leave from Sierra Leone and had brought with them a male otter cub they had acquired unweaned in Africa and reared on a bottle. The name of the otter was Teko, after a veterinary station of that name in his native country, and they were looking for a home for him in Britain before they returned to Africa. They had seen Gavin and Edal on television – would he be interested in taking in Teko too?
Presently they were at Gavin’s door, and from the back of their car produced a ball of chocolate-coloured fur that uncoiled to reveal a small, tubby otter cub noisily sucking three fingers of its right hand. Despite superficial differences in colour, shape and size, Teko was apparently the same species as Edal – an African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) of the type found throughout Africa south of the Sahara. Teko seemed a thoroughly domesticated and friendly creature, and Gavin coveted him desperately. Already in his mind’s eye he saw the two otters gambolling together under the waterfall at Camusfeàrna and porpoising after each other in the blue waters of Sandaig Bay. Perhaps one day there would even be cubs – a whole family of African otters roaming about his Highland home. ‘It seemed to be the beginning of just such another summer idyll as the last,’ he was to write of this time. ‘But there was to be no idyll, then or thereafter, for I had left the calm reaches of the river.’
The first sign of trouble in store came when the Davins brought their otter cub to Sandaig a fortnight or so after Gavin had returned there. In the field in front of the house an attempt was made to introduce the new arrival to the incumbent otter. But Edal no sooner caught a whiff of Teko’s scent than she uttered a shriek of rage and would have made a dash at him and done her utmost to kill him had Gavin not restrained her on her lead. Repeated efforts to bring the two otters together ended in failure. ‘Edal screamed and remained screaming,’ Gavin noted in his Sandaig diary on 5 May. ‘Half hour’s walk sounded like souls in purgatory. Teko frightened, screamed back once or twice, then silent.’ Otters are territorial animals, and Edal’s jealousy and possessiveness generated in h
er an implacable and terrifying hatred of the creature she saw as her rival. A high, screaming wail greeted Teko’s every appearance. Once she did manage to get near enough to Teko to catch him by his tail, which she bit and worried as if she were killing a rat. She would kill him if she could.
To complicate the picture even more, a third otter had arrived at Sandaig. Mossy, a female Scottish otter cub, had been caught by a local gamekeeper’s terriers and brought to Sandaig the day before Teko’s first visit. Unlike Edal and Teko she was a truly wild animal and had already been weaned. This made her very difficult for Gavin to care for, especially as she was seriously injured about the jaw. Mossy’s life was a short and sad one, and Gavin’s Sandaig diary traces the outline of her desperate struggle for survival.
4 May Mossy liberated at night with assortment of food. Cried all night – I imagined because of lost liberty.
5 May Mossy’s food shovelled all over floor but little if any eaten. 10 a.m. tried her with bottle. There seemed a token gesture of sucking, but no intake. At 1.30 tried again – this time swallowed perhaps a dessert spoon; injury to jaw now plain as double compound fracture. Fed three-hourly. I slept in same room, she escaped three times, each time pen rebuilt.
6 May Vet arrived 4.30. Doubted plastic surgery possible, suggested possibility healing with false joint, gave Terramyacin tube with fine nozzle to squirt between bone ends three times daily. Fed Mossy three-hourly – now taking two fluid ounces at each feed.
9 May V. short of sleep and nearly exhausted. Slept on floor in my room with Mossy loose. V. active all night – no sleep possible. Mossy climbed everything. Reconfined at 5.30 – after which she scrabbled and dug. V. nocturnal.
10 May Mossy weighed – 3 lbs.
Gavin Maxwell Page 35
