In Arabian Nights (22 page)

'He sent word to Jumar's home that he would like to view the
animal, as it was said to be very beautiful. The next evening Sher
Ali arrived.

'With no money to afford staff, Jumar received his guest himself
and prepared a fabulous meal of succulent meat garnished
with vegetables grown by himself. Sher Ali ate until he could eat
no more and, after a glass of tea, he asked about the horse.

'Jumar Khan shifted in his seat. "Oh, respected guest," he
said, "as you know, it is our tradition to provide a feast for a visitor.
And the more esteemed the visitor, the finer the meal is required to be. In
my state of poverty, I was unable to provide a meal fitting for a distinguished
guest such as yourself," said Jumar Khan, placing his hand on his heart. "The
only way I could keep my honour was to serve you my beloved horse."'

The road wended southeast down the Draa Valley. An ocean of
palms rippled out on either side, emerald green in a landscape so
dry it seemed miraculous life existed there at all. The local bus
ran the route, transporting merchants and their fruit up to
Ouarzazate and ferrying their purchases back down to Zagora.

On our childhood journeys to Morocco, we visited
Ouarzazate time and again. It was little more than a hamlet
then. But providence had delivered fortune in an unlikely way.
Hollywood had discovered the stark beauty of the region and
used the mud fortresses and adobe villages as backdrops in a
thousand movies, from
Lawrence of Arabia
to
Gladiator
.

Film money had delivered to the local people the kind of
wealth that fuels the most fantastic dreams. Once he had dished
up a third helping of his stew and finished his tale, Mustapha
gave me a single piece of advice.

'I cannot tell you what story is in your heart,' he said. 'But I
can tell you that money earned with ease is the devil's currency.
Everything it touches is cursed. If you want prosperity, work
hard for it and don't take charity unless you are a day away from
being drowned.'

'Drowned by water?'

'Drowned by life.'

As the bus grunted and wheezed between the potholes, my mind
flitted back to the days when our Ford Cortina made the same
journey south. My mother spent her time sorting through
brocades and kaftans she had snapped up at the previous souq,
and my father would be in the front with our gardener at the
wheel. He never stopped talking for a moment. Conversation
was a kind of lifeblood to him, a way to process his thoughts
before he committed them to paper.

My school friends went on family holidays. We never did. We
went on expeditions, journeys with a purpose. My father would
use them to draw our attention to aspects of life we might otherwise
have missed. He used to say that anything the senses
showed you could be regarded in a different way.

On a journey down the Draa Valley a generation before, he
had asked the gardener to pull over.

'I have to get something,' he said, opening the door. He
crossed a patch of scrubland and made his way down through a
grove of date palms to the stream. We asked our mother what he
was doing.

'Wait and see,' she said.

Ten minutes later he was back. There was something in his
fist. When we were all looking, he opened his hand and showed
us. It was a smooth black pebble, with two veins of white
running down one side.

'What is this?' he asked.

'It's a pebble,' I said.

'What else is it?'

We shook our heads.

'That's all. It's a pebble and that's that.'

My father put the pebble in my hand and told me to look at it
carefully.

'Do you see anything else?'

'No.'

'Really look,' he said. 'Change the way you are looking at it.'

'Baba, I'm looking. Really I am.'

A few minutes passed. The gardener stepped out to stretch his
legs. When he came back, we were still looking at the pebble.

My father weighed it in his hand.

'What you see here and you call a pebble is all sorts of things,'
he said. 'It's a fragment of something else, but is complete as it is.
It's been rounded smooth by the river, moulded by time. If it
stays in the river for a few million years longer, it will become
sand. To an ant it is a mountain and to an elephant it's almost too
small to be seen. And to us it's an object of beauty, something that
feels very nice to touch, but it's useful too.'

'Baba, it's a pebble,' I said, 'and it's not useful at all.'

'Tahir Jan, that's where you are wrong,' he said. 'You see, this
little pebble has a thousand uses. You could put it in a pan of
milk and the milk wouldn't boil over. Or you could throw it at a
wild dog that's attacking you, or scrape it on the ground to draw
a map, or use it as a paperweight. Or,' he said quietly, 'you could
just keep it on a shelf and look at it from time to time, as a
reminder of our journey and of this very beautiful place.'

That evening, the bus reached Zagora after three punctures and
a quick stop to barter chickens at the side of the road. In the
countryside of Morocco, there are tokens of modernity –
transistor radios, colour televisions and plenty of mobile phones.
But the essence of life has not changed in centuries. The man
sitting beside me on the bus had five chickens, all trussed up by
the feet. Oblivious to their evident discomfort, he pulled them
down from the luggage rack and took them on to the road. He
bartered them directly for other goods at a line of makeshift
stalls.

One was swapped for a jar of honey, another for a bag of
clementines; the third was traded for some pomegranates, the
fourth for a bottle of olive oil; and the fifth for a rough wicker
basket in which to carry his goods.

When I stepped down from the bus at Zagora, I was immediately
attended to by a boy of about ten years. He was holding a
fishing rod in one hand and a jar of worms in the other, and he
swaggered when he walked.

'I will help you,' he said.

'How do you know I want your help?'

He shook the jar of worms and peered in to see if they were
moving.

'I know because you are a tourist,' he said, 'and tourists have
money but no wisdom.' He tapped his temple. 'Nothing in their
heads.'

'Who told you that?'

'My father did.'

'What does he do?'

'He sells carpets over there.'

'What's his name?'

'Ashraf.'

'And what's yours?'

The boy shook the worms again.

'I'm Sami,' he said.

A few minutes later, I was sitting in a cramped carpet
emporium, across from Sami's father. The shop was a concrete
box, airless and so dusty that everyone inside coughed almost all
the time. Ashraf's face was hidden by a mask of scruffy beard
and dominated by a long, hooked nose.

He poured me a glass of mint tea.

'They call me the Eagle,' he said.

'Are you cruel and eagle-like with your clients?'

'No, it's because of my nose,' he said.

I told him it had been fortunate that I had met Sami at the bus
stop.

Ashraf flared his nostrils.

'He was fishing,' he said.

'For river fish?'

The carpet-seller coughed hard and gulped down a lump of
phlegm.

'For tourists.'

'Oh, yes, he told me that tourists have nothing between their
ears. Empty heads.'

Ashraf grinned. 'You are different. You are a man of
intelligence,' he said.

He poured me more tea.

'Well, I am also fishing,' I told him.

'For what?'

'For a story.'

'Then, you are in the right place,' Ashraf replied. 'You see,
each of my carpets is a story, a window that looks into another
world.'

Sami started coughing so violently he had to go outside for air.
When he was gone, his father stood up and pulled down a fine
tribal rug, alternating red and white lines, ivory tassels at the
ends.

'Look at this one,' he said, kneeling again. 'It's a story of the
desert. The sheep which grew the wool were nourished by
the plants that were themselves nourished in the soil, on the
banks of the Draa River. The dyes came from berries in the trees,
and the knowledge to create this masterpiece came from an
ancient wisdom, trapped in the memory of the tribe.' Ashraf
coughed again. 'There are stories in all my stock,' he said.

'But I'm looking for another kind of story . . . something with
a beginning, middle and an end.'

The carpet-dealer lit a cigarette and filled the cubicle with
smoke.

'They do have a beginning, a middle and an end,' he said.

'Not in the same way, though.'

Ashraf exhaled, and coughed some more.

'Two things can look very different,' he said. 'They can be
different shapes, different colours, made out of quite different
things. But to the heart they are exactly the same.'

When a man's sleep is better than his waking,
It is better that he should die.

Saadi of Shiraz

REAL TRAVEL IS NOT ABOUT THE HIGHLIGHTS WITH WHICH YOU
dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness,
the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere
else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half
proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your
heart. The road south from Zagora was like that. I half wished I
was somewhere else, or that I had a companion to bore with conversation.

A farmer with a pick-up full of sheep gave me a lift to his
village. Facing the road, the community was a jumble of square
Berber homes, built with the same giant blocks of mud that I
have so often seen used in Afghanistan. The farmer pointed to a
single lamppost and told me to stand under it.

'A white taxi will come,' he said.

'When?'

The moment I asked it, I heard how stupid it sounded.
Punctuality and timetables were concepts that hadn't reached
the Draa Valley.

'It will come today or tomorrow,' said the farmer after some
time. 'If God wills it.'

I thanked him and waited obediently under the lamp post.
The February sun was hot on my neck and the scent of bread
baking in a nearby mud-brick oven was almost too much to bear.
I had not found any breakfast in Zagora and so I followed the
smell of baking bread. I came to a low adobe building with a
chicken coop and a crazed dog on the roof. A boy ran out,
shouted, laughed, burst into tears and fetched his father.

The man was unusually lean, muscular and alert, like a greyhound
in the starting trap. I wished him peace and he echoed my
words, shook my hand firmly and looked at the dust.

'Taxi,' I said, pointing at the lamp post.

The man repeated the word twice: first as a question and then
as a statement. He shook my hand again, praised God.

In a single movement, he bent round to his house, poked his
head inside, barked at his wife, turned round again and invited
me in. I entered the cool, dim room in time to see the hem of a
woman's kaftan rushing out of the back. It would, of course,
have been unseemly for a male guest to have set eyes on, let alone
to have met, the women of the house. There was a single room,
furnished with a low table and cushions on the floor. In one
corner was a nest of embroidery and, in another, a Qur'ān
wrapped in a scrap of green silk.

An ancient figure was asleep on the cushions. I didn't see him
at first, not until my eyes had adjusted to the lack of light. The
lean man prodded him awake and whispered. The ancient
roused from his sleep, fumbled for a pair of wire-rimmed glasses
and struggled to fit them over his eyes. He looked at the lean
man, then at me, jerked upright and greeted me in French.

'I am waiting for the taxi,' I said.

The old man seemed confused.

'Where are you going?'

'To M'hamid, the end of the road.'

'That's far,' he replied, nodding.

We sat in silence. In Morocco, a family's life is put on hold for
a guest, even one who has invited himself. I found myself thinking
about our world. If we found a stranger, a foreigner, on our
doorstep we might be more likely to point him elsewhere rather
than invite him in.

The arrival of a guest into a home is quite different in Oriental
society. Nowhere is it more pronounced than in Morocco.
Hospitality is a ritual built on honour, something of such importance
that no family would ever stint in their duty. The
ceremony developed through centuries of nomadic movement and
intertribal conflict and is part of the soul of all Arab people.

In the sixth century, before the foundation of Islam, the tribes
of Arabia passed their lives fighting one another. These interminable
battles might have ended in their mutual extermination
had they not developed a code of honour governing their wars.
According to the rules that they developed, the object of war was
not to win battles or destroy the enemy, but to provide a field for
the performance of heroic deeds, which were subsequently
immortalized in poetry.

For the early Arabs, to fight honourably was more important
than to win.

Tea was served, boiling hot and thick with sugar. After it came
bread and olive oil, followed by a platter of fresh dates. The lean
man piled all the food in front of me and urged me to eat. He
picked through the dates, chose the best ones and gave them to
me a few at a time. I praised their sweet taste. The older man
shooed a hand towards the door.

'We grow them out there,' he said.

'I've seen the palms in abundance.'

The ancient pushed his glasses up his nose.

'This is the desert but God gave us the palms for every need,'
he said. 'We eat the dates, and make baskets from the leaves, and
use the trunks as beams in our houses, or we hollow out the
wood and make buckets. What more could we ever need?'

At that moment a teenage boy sloped in, greeted us all and
pulled out a new radio. The old man strained to focus on the
object, which began crackling out music.

'It's music from Casablanca,' said the youth.

His grandfather took off his glasses and wiped his old eyes.

'The world is not what it used to be,' he said dismally.

'All the way from Casa,' the boy repeated.

'It's nonsense,' said the old man. 'This boy here has no interest
in what is important. His head is filled with things he hears on
that radio thing.'

'What is important?' I asked.

The grandfather thought for a long time. He smoothed an
arthritic hand over his hair.

'Palms,' he said. 'Date palms.'

Another round of tea was poured and I stood up for
Casablanca. The old man scowled.

'It's a place of loud music and loose women,' he said.

'Some of the music is not too bad and not all the women are
loose.'

He looked up from his lap.

'How do you know this?'

'Because I live there.'

The young man dropped his radio and ducked his head in
respect.

'You live in Casa?'

'Yes.'

'How is it?'

'It's fantastic,' I said.

The boy wriggled.

'I want to go there. I want to see the ocean.'

His grandfather lay back on the cushions and closed his eyes.
I described the ocean.

'It's the most magical thing in the world,' I said. 'Each time you
look at it, it's different. Sometimes the waves are furious, like a
wild monster, and at other times it's so calm and blue that it looks
like a sheet of glass. And over the ocean lies another world.'

'America,' said the boy dreamily.

'That's right.'

'One day I will cross the ocean to America,' he said.

In the afternoon, a white communal taxi screeched to a halt at
the lamppost and I was pulled inside. Before the door was even
closed, the vehicle sped away; it disgorged me at the small town
of Tamegroute a few miles on. I got down, dusted my shoulders
and found myself touching the pink ribbon on my wrist. Ariane
was thinking of me. I vowed then I would never leave the
children at home again if I could avoid it. I had brought them to
the kingdom for the purpose of experiencing real Morocco, not
to remain in an oasis in its greatest metropolis. From then on we
would travel as I had done in my own youth, on our own
journeys with a purpose.

In the late afternoon, I found myself at a
zaouia
, the study
centre beside the tomb of a saint. Tamegroute may not be famous
outside Morocco, but it holds a special place in the cultural core
of the kingdom. A thousand years ago, the town was already
famous, celebrated for its scholarship and as a rest point en route
to Timbuktu. It houses one of the most important libraries of
Islamic texts in the Arab world and dispenses charity to the
elderly and the mentally infirm.

A cluster of wrinkled men were sitting on the steps. When
they saw me, they moved into action, like automata. One of them
put out a hand; another staggered to his feet; a third began to
sing. I was going to ask them directions to the library. But before
I could say a word, a fourth man, much younger than the others,
led me aside. He was dressed in a black wool
jelaba
, the hood up
over his head like a monk. His hands were hidden, pushed up
opposite sleeves, his face concealed by shadow.

'I need directions to the library.'

'I will tell you,' he said.

He took me out into the bright sunlight away from the others
and seemed to have authority. He handed me a sheet of crumpled
paper.

'I work with the patients,' he said.

'What is wrong with them?'

'They are fragile, fragile in their heads.'

He pulled off his hood and I saw his face. It was energetic,
unshaven and a little pallid, the kind of face that keeps your
attention because of the eyes. They were green and glittery, like
wood opals.

'I am Ilias,' he said.

'You look after the patients?'

'Yes.'

'Do you heal them?'

'We try to.'

'With medicines?'

'No. There is no money for medicines.' He kicked a stone from
his sandal. 'So we talk to them,' he said.

Ilias took me on a tour of the library as the sunlight faded into
dusk. The building housed an extraordinary collection of manuscripts,
most of them Qur'ānic commentaries, works of
mathematics and astronomy, law books and historical texts.
Many of the books were crafted from gazelle-skin velum, all
written by hand, and some were more than seven hundred years
old. In the West there would have been security systems, glass
cases and lists of rules pinned up on the walls. Part of the charm
was the library's simplicity, its sense of peace.

Ilias invited me to take tea in a café not far from the
zaouia
. I
was impressed by his natural ease. Everyone who saw him
appeared to be energized by his greeting.

'You know everyone,' I said.

'The town is very small. Even an ant couldn't get lost in
Tamegroute.'

I laughed and then asked about the treatment.

'We believe that by talking we can change the patient's state,'
he said.

'You ask them about their problems?'

'Certainly we do, and they tell us what they are thinking, how
they feel. But we believe in reaching something deeper. We try
to wake the sleeping mind.'

'How do you do that?'

'We use humour,' he said.

Ilias told me that the most successful way of treating the
maladies he encountered was to engage the mind with something
stimulating, something that could penetrate deep but not
be filtered out.

'Humour cuts through the layers,' he said. 'It has a magical
effect. When we have a patient who is fierce, we can change his
mood instantly.'

Ilias peered at me, his opal eyes catching the last trace of twilight.

I asked if he had heard of Joha.

'Of course!' he cried. 'We tell Joha tales every day.'

'Do you have a favourite?'

Ilias paused to greet a friend, sipped his tea and said: 'It was
the middle of winter and Joha had no money at all. He couldn't
afford firewood and so he wrapped himself up in his old blanket
and sat on his bed. He was very hungry, but didn't even have
enough money to make his usual pot of soup. At least, he
thought to himself, the wind is so strong that my greedy
neighbours won't come bothering me for food like they usually
do. He spent a long time thinking of the delicious soup he could
not afford to prepare, tasting the flavours in his imagination. Just
then, there was a knock at the door. It was the neighbour's
youngest son. He had been sent to ask Joha for some of his soup.
"Damn it," shouted Joha, "have my neighbours become so low
that they now smell what I'm thinking?"'

As it is customary to tell seven Joha tales in succession, I told
the next one.

'Joha was feeling generous. He went to the teahouse and invited
everyone inside to come back to his home for a magnificent feast. As the throng
of guests neared his house, he realized that his wife would beat him if he
didn't warn her of the open invitation. He ran ahead to tell her. When she
heard that fifty people were about to descend, she beat Joha's head. "There's
no food in the house!" she shouted. "How dare you invite people without telling
me first!" Gripped with embarrassment, Joha ran upstairs and hid himself.
A few minutes later, the guests arrived and knocked at the door. His wife
opened it. "Joha invited us," the guests said. "Well he's not at home," said
Joha's wife. "But we saw him come in the front door," said the guests. Joha,
who was watching from an upstairs window, shouted down: "You fools, I could
have gone out of the back door, couldn't I?"'

A series of vehicles took me closer and closer to the end of the
road at M'hamid. There was another white communal taxi, a
truck laden with canned fish, a petrol tanker and, after that, a
horse-drawn cart, on the back of which were squashed a dozen
children on their way home from school. The palm groves of the
Draa Valley must be seen to be believed. They extend mile after
mile, tens of thousands of them, in an oasis of cypress green that
runs the length of the river. But then, suddenly, at M'hamid they
stop.