a small rectangular meadow was overhung by a walnut tree and outlined by drystone walls. The grass had been cropped short and a waterless ditch ran through the middle. Nearby, two barefooted girls stood and stared; one had an open sore on her cheek troubled by flies. She turned to her friend; they both giggled, then scampered up the path to the village.
We sat beneath the tree as the sun slid behind the mountains, chasing shadows through the valley and up the hillside to smother the houses one by one. The girls returned, bringing with them older siblings and three or four adults, with whom we exchanged greetings and shook hands. With no common words between us, pantomime was used to request permission to sleep in the meadow. The Berbers, we had found on our first day in the mountains, were hospitable, if openly inquisitive, and the villagers here confirmed those early impressions. We were welcome to spend the night in their meadow, but we couldn’t expect privacy.
Darkness fell, and as we prepared a simple meal more villagers came down to join us. Someone hung a lantern in the tree while several children crouched in the branches, the better to see what we were up to. Adults either leant or sat upon the wall; Berber voices discussed our basic culinary skills; a jug of milk was placed beside us – a simple gift for strangers.
As the valley was chorused by cicadas, cigarettes were handed round. Some fingers greedily took more than one, the spares being secreted inside the folds of a djellaba, and for the next few minutes faces momentarily glowed as lips drew in the nicotine and inhaled.
Eventually the villagers either grew bored with us or decided it was time to eat, for they deserted us in small groups and went back up the stony path to their houses. The lantern was left in the tree for our use, and up in the village candlelight flickered behind glass-free windows.
It was too warm to use a sleeping bag, so I lay on mine gazing at the stars, playing and replaying moments of the day, urging myself to forget nothing, to soak it all up and store it away. Here in an Old Testament land I was aware of creating memories for unknown tomorrows.
Sleep was blissfully elusive, and long after the village had fallen silent and the cicadas were hushed, a faint sound of music came drifting on the balmy night air. The music, the beating of flat drums and voices singing, grew louder, drifting along an unseen pathway high above the valley bed. It reached the houses, where lanterns showed revellers home from a wedding. Shadows revealed figures dancing on rooftops; the drumbeat, the singing voices, the odd explosion of laughter, all these sounds built to a pitch…then silence broke like a wave over the valley. Lights went out. It was midnight.
In the morning, shortly after dawn, we were rudely woken by water seeping across our sleeping bags. A stone had been removed from an irrigation ditch upstream of our bivvy site, and now we found ourselves lying in a water meadow.
Finding himself taking an involuntary cold bath, Mike swore, then broke into laughter. Wet sleeping bags hardly mattered. It was time to get up, dry off and move on.
2
MULES, FROGS AND BIVVY BAGS
Twenty-one years after that first visit I found myself drawn again to the Atlas Mountains, this time with a trekking party; my commission was to write a piece about the experience for a magazine. Exactly twice as old as I’d been on that first visit, I was well aware that my enthusiasm for mountain travel had not dimmed in the slightest, and Morocco’s high places were every bit as rewarding as they had been in 1965.
It was a good hour or so before the mules caught up. We were making the most of the shade cast by a solitary juniper tree not two metres high when we saw them. Mules first, and behind came the muleteers striding in cream-coloured djellabas and home-made sandals with Michelin-tread soles; around them hung the Atlas smell of warm leather and fresh dung mingled with dust that rose in low clouds disturbed by 16 shod hooves. The lead mule halted. The others stopped too, snorting and shaking their manes that set bells tinkling until a well-aimed stone and a whistle through closed teeth from Ibrahim got them moving again. I stood up and followed at a discreet distance, hoping to avoid a lungful of that dust.
It was better on the pass – the air a little cooler, with a vague breeze flowing across scrub-pocked slopes – but a summer haze restricted views beyond the second of what I imagined would be countless ridges before the mountains fell on the edge of the desert. I thought I could smell rain. Ten minutes later the first drops fell, so large and well spaced that you could actually count them as they made damp craters in the trail, the edges of which collapsed inwards the instant they dried. A few rumbles of thunder could be heard behind us, muffled by summits nearly 4000m high. Not wanting to be caught here by the storm, we headed down into the misting valley, the mules forging ahead, muleteers holding onto tails, talking all the while.
There was no more thunder, but it rained all the way down. Not the heavy rain predicted by those initial forerunner drops on the pass, but a steady, persistent drizzle that soaked shirts and steamed glasses. Too warm to bother with waterproofs, wet clothing was acceptable, but towards evening, once we’d chosen a site for our bivouac on a meadow where two streams met at a confluence of valleys, dry shirts and anoraks were put on and we began to prepare a meal.
Rain continued to fall while the meal was cooked. Clouds lowered over the mountains and brought an early nightfall. It rained while we ate, and it was still raining when we slid into bivvy bags beneath a star-free sky. Frogs slipped into the water and eyed their new neighbours from a low vantage point.
The mules were hobbled for the night, but you could hear their teeth tearing at the short grass, followed by the unmistakable sound of digestive tracts gurgling and the odd fart too close for comfort. I made a mental note not to sleep near a mule again.
Our bivvy site was a rarity in this corner of the Atlas Mountains – it consisted of soft, fairly level turf and a pair of meandering streams. Wild mint grew along the margins of one; tall thistles with bulbous heads stood in clumps alongside the other. There was no village, so no terracing or ditches for irrigation on the hillsides; no trees nor shrubs, but a half-circular wall of rocks about knee-high suggested there had once been a shelter here – perhaps for a shepherd.
Headtorches went out one by one, and at last even the voices of the muleteers fell silent. Yet sleep was elusive. Lying there with just my head projecting from the bivvy bag, I was content with the warm rain on my face, and the stream sliding gently past less than an arm’s length away. The rain was of no concern. Almost soothing, it threatened no flooding, and I was sure it would be gone by daybreak. So I lay there rewinding our journey of the past five days, only vaguely anticipating days ahead and content with the now of being. Then, suddenly, my thoughts were interrupted – a frog had leapt from the water and landed on my forehead.
The rest of the night was spent with my head inside the bivvy bag.
3
MINT TEA WITH A MULETEER
Trekking with mules over a series of high passes, visiting Berber villages and scrambling to unmarked summits had resulted in another memorable two-week journey in 1986. But at the end of the trek there was an alternative way out of the mountains that four of us wanted to take that would preclude the mules. Having no objections to our plan, the muleteers and the rest of our group agreed to meet us at the end of the day in a village close to the road-head, so we set out before dawn and clambered in the darkness aiming for a distant ridge…
On this our last morning in the high mountains, my headtorch beam had lost much of its power, but day was now stealing into the sky and I could pick out a few recognisable features on the steep slope ahead. The other three were spread out – their flashes of white light growing dim, the sound of stones being rearranged by their boots, and the occasional voice caught in a fight for breath.
We came together to climb the gully. It was not a technical climb, rather a scramble over boulders, before we worked our way on ribs of rock, then steeply angled scree, followed by more rock ribs. Above these we stopped to rest, with legs dangling and eyes scanning peaks that emerged from anonymity with a blaze of red along their rim. Five hundred metres below, I imagined I could see where we had spent the night.
It took