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 Arab 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.
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.