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 heads 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.
There’s a WC prominently indicated, one of a row of privies in an ablution block. As I push open the door I’m hit by a sharp whiff of uric acid rising from the damp sides of a hole in the mud floor. We who are used to having our body waste disposed of instantly forget that in the desert flushing lavatories appear only in mirages.
Our host for the next few days is a short, wiry man of middling age, eyes creased and narrowed. With his hands sunk deep in the pockets of a thick quilted jacket and his body angled forward as if braced for the next sandstorm, everything about him suggests stoic defiance.
His name is Bachir Mehdi Bhaya and Algeria is not his home. He was born and brought up in the contentious territory of Western Sahara, a land of long coastline and hostile desert, larger than the United Kingdom, which once comprised the Spanish colonies of Rio de Oro and Saguia el Hamra. When the Spanish abruptly left in 1975 taking everything including the bodies in their cemeteries, they offered what was left to Morocco and Mauritania.