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 gifts 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.