‘Get the hell out of here, you pasty-faced turd-brain!’
So barked the dog. Furious yellow eyes flashed above slavering fangs, driving me to the safe haven of a hilltop. There was another dwelling nearby, rice sacks rattling in the wind above a drystone sheep pen. I sucked in my breath and bellowed the Islamic greeting.
‘Salaam-u aleykum! Peace be upon you!’
Above a limestone crag flashed a pair of dark eyes. Two hands, tattooed with henna, gripped the feldspar. My tentative steps acted like the pressure on an alarm sensor. A dog pounced over the ridge. He was barely a leap from my ankles when the girl stilled him with a single command, and he turned back on his track, head dipping in disappointment. She didn’t move or make any other gesture of welcome, but watched me, her smooth, coppery brow creased with caution.
‘Azul! M’nik a’atgeed? Hello! How are you?’
She returned the greeting warily. I stepped a little closer. She looked about 12 or 13. There was a flash of pink further back; another child in a tracksuit.
‘Do you have bread?’ I asked in Arabic.
A few coins gleamed on my palm. A chance to stock up on food, perhaps. I reached forward to offer them, but she clicked her teeth.
‘Hashuma.’
The Berber honour code. I was in luck! If this family subscribed to hashuma, they were unlikely to set the dogs on me. The pink tracksuit belonged to a curly-haired boy called Sufyan. His sister’s name was Khadija. They stared at me for what felt like a really long time, eyes wide with fascination. Eventually, Khadija whispered something to Sufyan and he sat down on the crag, rolling up his tracksuit trousers. There was a burst blister on his ankle.
‘Tibb,’ said Khadija. ‘Medicine.’
So I got to work. Unzipping my medical kit from my backpack, I scissored off an alcohol pad, wiped off the dirt, applied a few drops of antibiotic ointment and sealed the wound with a plaster. Later, Khadija brought a teapot and some hard bread, cooked in a clay stove at the back of their hut, and showed me some black granules of cumin. Like generations of Berbers, they had been using natural resources to keep their bodies together.
In all Morocco’s major towns there are ‘Berber pharmacies’, where you can find jars of saffron (to increase the blood flow) and cayenne pepper (to fight bacteria), along with jaguar powder breast-firming cream, hair-repairing snake oil and packets of ostrich fat to relieve back pains. Back in Fez, I had often browsed the shadowy stalls of the ‘Witches’ Market’, across the street from Leo Africanus’s old hospital. I peered into rusty cages, locking eyes with chameleons and tortoises and dusty-spined hedgehogs. Once I passed a woman in full niqab, carrying a packet of rhino horn powder to the counter (‘traitement le faiblesse sexuelle’ read the label). Another time I met an old lady who needed help pulling down a long-tailed skink hanging over a spice jar. She was buying it, she told me, to help her husband’s diabetes. Judging by the weary lines on her face, I suspect it was a last resort.
Neither the rhino powder nor the skink was likely to solve the customers’ problems. The popularity of such remedies (and their unfortunate impact on endangered species) is boosted by tradition and the efficacy of other natural cures. Wandering around the Atlas and meeting Berbers in the desert, I came across people using argan oil to treat skin complaints, inhaling cumin seeds to clear their sinuses, using ginger as an anti-inflammatory and cleaning their teeth with sticks of fibrous, antiseptic miswak. In communities that can’t depend on social welfare or access to city hospitals, knowing the uses of the local botany can be the difference between life and death.
Sufyan’s injury wasn’t serious, and in such a craggy environment there would be plenty more. Still, the medicine was a way of bonding, and Khadija thanked me with a glass of tea and a much appreciated flatbread. I wished I could say more than the Tamazight greeting, but as a first encounter it fired me up for the day.
I felt marvellous: I had managed to hold down half a conversation with two Berber children. I marched out of there like I had slain a dragon. The stony valley slid beneath my feet, scree crumbled down the plain, my feet dug into a rocky divot. Then, like a trapdoor sprung by a secret button, the earth came walloping up and slapped me in the face.
One advantage of being in the open country is there are few people to witness your pratfalls. A herdsman was striding in the distance, but I don’t think he noticed. There were a few sheep nearby. A couple of them glanced up, like readers in a library when your phone goes off, but most were busy with the knoll they were mowing. I scrambled up an outcrop and, sitting in the knotty shade of a holm oak, tasted the iron on my lip. There was a bump on my forehead, but it didn’t hurt particularly. Besides, it pimpled into insignificance when I looked up.
Rippling around me was the northwestern cusp of a real wound: a mighty tumescence caused by the collision between Africa and Europe around 80 million years ago. Shadow lapped the clefts of the valleys under smooth-skirted limestone façades, which gathered in tidy peaks like tagine pots in a craft store. Mountain spurs shouldered above them, receding and overlapping, fading through indigo and delphinium blue to milky invisibilities. If it weren’t for the sting in my face, I would have felt like a god, or an eagle, hovering over valleys and villages, sharply cut terraces and cataracts of tumbling stone. Sprawling southwards were the vast, violet-bruised limbs of Atlas himself, condemned after a glimpse of Medusa’s head to an eternity of being crawled on by ruminants. The Berbers have given these peaks a more direct but equally dramatic name: they are the idraren draren, the ‘mountains of mountains’.
Clouds were scudding out of clefts in the hills, shadowing barley fields and fortified kasbah terraces; battering rams ready for battle. The sun rapiered between the viscous membranes of the clouds, slicing the colour from the uplands, turning the sheep to fleets of silhouettes. I saw a dozen herders in the course of that afternoon. They were still and watchful: teenage boys in tracksuits, a couple of thick-browed middle-agers, an old man in pinstripe trousers and a double-breasted jacket. He let me wander with him for a while, although not long enough to work out how on earth he managed to keep his sheep so close together (he had nearly a hundred of them), which he seemed to do by flicking his tongue off his top teeth: order maintained by alveolar click. His back was tent-pole straight, but his skin was as creased as the untreated hides I had handled in Fez, cross-hatched around his eyes from a lifetime of squinting at wind and sun.
‘How long have you been herding?’ I asked.
‘Oh … it’s a long time now. I was herding when the French were here.’ Nearly 60 years ago. ‘It was better then. Why don’t you bring them back?’
We both laughed, but he shook his head, his eyes limpid and weary. ‘There are too many thieves now. Yes, yes, you had them in the past, but they went by foot. Now they come with trucks and they can take away the whole flock.’ He turned towards the woods and the road. ‘I’m going to sell this lot in Ain Leuh. The hills are no place for us old ones.’
I was amazed he had lasted this long. The wind was whistling in my ears, but it was the heat that threw the sucker punch. Layers of air quivered at the tips of the hills and the earth was tessellated with cracks where the flocks had munched it bare. I swung my legs over a bastion of limestone, following a dragonfly the size of a toy helicopter. Sitting down, I gobbled up the bread Khadija had given me, along with the rest of my cherries, squandering their juice on my fingers. From the top of the knoll, the old man was still visible. He looked so small now, a pin-striped blob surrounded by cream-yellow thumb prints.
The sun was westering and the sky was turning a sallow, stormy col-our, with tinges of violet in the gullies. It was time to find somewhere to stay, or to think about hitching a lift back to Ain Leuh. Feeling a little anxious, I worked my way back to the road through puddles of cloud shadow, until a slab of pink blocked the path.
‘Attay! Tea!’
In front of me was little Sufyan. Like an angel, or a genie that turns up just when you need it, he
was inviting me home for refreshment. Except … there was a little bit of work to do first. A flock of sheep was mincing behind him, herded by a woman in a sombrero and a red smock. A string belt tucked her smock inside a pair of baggy trousers, which were sequinned with pine needles, flakes and seed wings and strands of wool, stuck to the glue of grease and tree sap. She was Sufyan’s mother Aziza, and she looked like a queen surrounded by her entourage. She teetered out of her woolly company, eyes dancing under a rim of frayed straw. Rubbing the dust from her smock, she blew on her hands to cool her skin. I pressed a hand on my heart in greeting, but she reached out to hold it, then kissed her fingertips and uttered a ritual phrase.
‘We have a hundred sheep,’ she told me. ‘We also have three cows and two calves – but they have gone.’
‘Stolen?’
‘We don’t know.’ She tipped her head so the hat almost fell off and rolled her eyes at the heavens. ‘It is all by the reckoning of God.’ And so began the hunt for Aziza’s missing cattle.
The nutmeggy tang of bark, the ginny aroma of junipers, the pong of decaying mulch – a smorgasbord of sylvan smells. The canopy thickened and it was hard to see at times, but the glades were bright with an underwater kind of light, sucked down through the hoods of the saplings. Aziza led the way (she moved faster in her plastic slip-ons than I did in my rubber-soled boots), pausing to steady her hat or peer at the forest floor. Eventually she called a halt with a determined blast of breath. I crouched to see, my eyes rolling over pine needles and cedar mast, acorns and curved leaves that still held the recent rain. At last I saw it, impressed in the grassy mud: a pair of kidney-shaped pug marks.
‘Alhamdulillah! Thanks be to God!’
Aziza led the way along the warp of the trail. We scrambled between the trees, under the yellow bustle of a woodpecker, descending around a pile of stones – an old sheepfold fallen into disuse – and followed the chime of water to a spring. Limey with algae, the concrete-rimmed drinking trough dribbled over a sward as green as pistachio.
To the hum of chatter and the splash of play, women were washing clothes and feeding their children. With bright scarves and tattooed chins, they were from the Aït Mouli tribe, and their faces shone with friendly welcome. Aziza knew them. After a seesaw of greetings, she asked if they had seen her cows. One of them had a clue – a calf spotted in a field on the other side of the wood. So Aziza adjusted her sombrero and bade them farewell.
‘The water is good?’ I asked, pointing to the spring.
‘Bezzaft! Excellent!’
I refilled my bottle and took an icy glug, before following Aziza back on the trail.
Trees. Road. Scree. A few stray goats from another herd. Aziza pointed out the differences between the pug marks: goats like pairs of tapering rabbit ears; the sheep more jammed together; a pair of longer cleavings with tiny grooves at the base like the dots of exclamation marks (going by Aziza’s widened expression, I think these were deer foylings).
I had learned some of the patterns in the Sahara, from watching Lamina and Jadullah. The fauna was different, but the discipline was transferable: eyes focused on the ground, quick to detect the slightest indentation, analysing depth and frequency for additional clues. It is one of the most important skills in the school of nomadic life – and one of the most fun, like solving a crossword or assembling a jigsaw puzzle. It was an echo of Lamina’s tutelage, a link to the nomads I had left behind in Timbuktu. For a moment, it felt as if they were walking beside me.
We plunged deep into the woodland. The canopy shuffled the air above us, drops of light seeping through like rain. I could hear nothing out of the ordinary, but Aziza trotted ahead, cupping a hand to her ear. Suddenly, she pulled up and let out a blast: a run of yodels so fast they had the force of a trumpet. There was a rustle in the trees. The boughs parted and the leaves swung aside like a curtain. Rolling towards us, blithe as teenagers sauntering down a high street, were three cows and two calves. Aziza didn’t ululate or stamp the ground in triumph or anything like that, but there was a bounce in her step all the way back to her tent, and I felt a little thrilled myself to see her reunited with her cattle.
Sufyan had invited me to join the family for tea. But I couldn’t simply step inside: there was a protocol to follow. I would have to wait until Aziza’s husband Rasheed came back with the rest of the flock. He loped down the hill, shoulders drooping with fatigue, his burnt coppery face smeared with sweat. Nodding to Aziza’s explanation, he sat down on a boulder to ask me a few questions about my background and what I was doing here.
‘It will rain tonight.’ A bony finger pointed skywards, where the clouds had grown as fat as cattle ready to calve. ‘You must stay somewhere warm.’
I assured him I would be fine – hey, I had a woolly jumper in my backpack! After a few words with Aziza, and much muttering about hashuma, he gestured to a barrel of water. Rasheed went ahead, driving in the sheep and calling off the dogs, helped by his older son Mohammed, while the other children showed me where to set the water. Phewww! For a nervous while, I had feared I might have to sleep rough on the hills. I felt like one of those down-and-outs from The Thousand and One Nights, picked up by a whimsical princess and carried to the family palace.
The palace, in this case, was a cuboid frame of poplar poles roofed and walled with stretched-out flour sacks. There was a drystone sheepfold at the back and a grouchy mastiff – my old nemesis from earlier – prowling by the door. Spirited past slavering jaws, I sat down on a musty-smelling deep-pile rug, beside a tin packing trunk, a pile of kilims and a tumulus of cooking pots. To my surprise, a pinewood wardrobe hovered behind me, heaped with clothes.
It was a wonderful evening. The children – Khadija, Mohammed, little Sufyan and his twin Maria – encircled me to stare, flick my face, pull my beard or (when they got really comfortable with me) take all the stuff out of my bag. ‘Um – could I have it back now?’ I asked, followed by a long-winded search around the tent, during the course of which various presents were distributed: my sun cream for Aziza, a hat for Mohammed, pens for the little ones. I could hardly begrudge them, especially when Aziza had waved off any talk of payment. ‘Hashuma,’ she decreed. ‘Hashuma!’ I rallied, a little less sincerely, watching her pasting her face with Ambre Solaire.
While the children gathered round to look at the pictures on my phone, Aziza bustled about, shaking a stick at a couple of chickens, sweeping a pair of cats away from the cooking pots. In the heart of the room, dead fir roots burned in a stove: a tin box on a slab of scree, speared by a steel flue pipe, which burrowed through a confluence of sacks, supporting the roof like a tent pole. An earthenware tagine pot was warming on the stovetop, adjusting the salty animal odours with the rooty smell of steamed carrots. When it was ready, Aziza emptied out a basket of bread, baked in a clay oven outside.
Later, Sufyan took me out to show me his slide – a wooden washing pallet slanting off the sheep pen. I wanted to wander about, but the dogs were really ticked off by my presence and snarled bitterly whenever I went out to pee. Ushering me back, Rasheed cut the horizon with dark looks, telling me to stay inside ‘for safety’.
He wasn’t comfortable with his neighbours. Some of them only pitched here briefly, he said, and ‘we don’t know if we can trust them’. This wasn’t the solidarity of the historical sources, the asabiyyah that Ibn Khaldun associated with tribal people. Later, wrapped under woollen blankets inside, Rasheed talked about it.
‘When my father was a child, the jamaa (the gathering of tribal elders) decided everything.’ He wolfed down some bread and swiped his palms against each other, a mime of atrophy. ‘But now it is all in the hands of the government and the district court. The jamaa cannot help us any more.’fn1
This was one of the reasons so many people were moving to the villages. Tribal institutions and traditional welfare, developed over centuries, were becoming impotent.
‘And everyone tells us’, Rasheed added, ‘it is better to live in the towns.’
‘But would you prefer to live in Ain Leuh?’ I asked, while we soaked up the remains of the tagine.
‘No! There is no work there, and where would our animals go? Anyway, this house is strong, isn’t it?’
He was right. With the arrival of the stars, the heavens unleashed hell. Hammer blows of thunder drummed against the chanting of the rain. The dogs took it as a declaration of hostilities, and threw so much back they barely had any voice left to curse me in the morning. Yet, despite the ferocity of the storm, not a drop breached the tent.
In an annexe behind the main room stood Aziza’s loom. Two thick logs shouldered the warp, the yarn as tight as violin strings, with straight boughs hung as bars and string knotted to the frame at the top of the weft. Bristling across the bottom of the loom, indigo and black, the carpet-so-far looked like the skin of a mythical creature that is already half flayed. I had visited many artisanats in Fez and other cities and had heard of the ‘nomad women’ who wove these loop-pile carpets. Now I was looking at the proof. It was like going backstage and peeking into an actor’s dressing room.
Aziza used her own wool, locking it away for several weeks after the shearing, carding it and blessing it with chants against the djinn. Black represented fecundity, being the colour of storm clouds; blue was the colour of wisdom. Black crosses (symbols of the earth’s four corners) swooped along the weft, like the routeline on a map, girdling a trail of lozenges (which represent the vulva and sexual union).
The Timbuktu School for Nomads Page 10
