The Salt Road (23 page)

It was getting stuffy in the car: I turned the ignition key and buttoned down the window. Just as I did so two teenage boys on a beaten-up bicycle rode idly past, and one looked back over his shoulder at me. He said something to the friend who sat in front with his feet up on the frame, a bundle of knees and elbows, and then turned the bike and wobbled past me in the opposite direction.

‘Gazelle!’ they declared loudly in unison, and rode off, giggling.

Gazelle? Was this an obscure form of insult, or a compliment? I had no way of knowing. I supposed it was better than having someone shout ‘Hippopotamus!’ at me or ‘Elephant!’, but even so … I looked around and found that this had set some of the men in the nearest café to laughing. Others watched me out of their lazy black eyes, their expressions unreadable. I was relieved to see Taïb returning, even if he did appear to be in a heated discussion with someone in a royal blue robe with smart gold-embroidered facings and a vast black turban. Furious, guttural words shot out of the two of them like gunfire; hands waved wildly. Then Taïb grabbed his companion by the shoulder and I thought they were about to fight; but a moment later they embraced heartily and burst into uproarious laughter. Clearly, I understood neither the verbal language nor the body-language involved in this culture.

Reaching the car, Taïb opened the door and drew his companion into view. ‘This is my cousin, Azaz.’

They bore very little resemblance to one another, for members of the same family. Where Taïb was fine-boned and long-jawed, Azaz had fat, merry cheeks and a large Saddam Hussein moustache. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said, shaking my hand vigorously. ‘I speak English very good, French and German too; all tourists come to me for advice. I am very sorry to hear about your accident on the Lion’s Head.’

I was taken aback by this. ‘Does everyone in Tafraout know?’ I asked rather crossly.

‘Oh, yes,’ he assured me. ‘Everyone! Everyone knows about the young English woman on the mountain. But we are very glad our Lion took care of you and sent Taïb to help.’

‘Half English, actually: English father, French mother.’

‘I think your friends were worried they did not find you when they came down from the Lion!’

‘You know them too?’

‘Of course! I know all climbers who come here. Lots of English! I have met Joe Brown and Chris Bonington and the journalists who write guidebooks and magazine articles: they all come to me and I tell them about the mountains and routes here. So, yes, I know your friends Miles and Eve and her nice husband, Jez.’

‘He’s not her husband,’ I said.

Azaz didn’t appear to be shocked by this at all; quite the opposite – he laughed hugely and clasped his hands together. They were very plump and soft-looking, I noticed, and covered in extraordinary silver rings.
Not
the hands of a rock-climber. ‘Ah, we are very wide-minded here; very relaxed. We shall call him her
copain
, her very good friend.’

Azaz stepped back. In my peripheral vision, I saw how he and Taïb exchanged a glance and then they both got into the car, with Azaz in the back; though he leant so far forward between the seats he might as well have been sitting in the front with us. He and Taïb kept up a barrage of Berber chatter, not bothering to translate for me as we roared out of the town and up the long hill towards the plateau. A mild sense of panic began to wash over me: where were we going again? I could not even remember the name of the village we were heading for: how could I take the basic precaution of texting Eve my whereabouts? It occurred to me again that I really didn’t know anything about Taïb, much less his cousin. Might they drive me somewhere remote and subject me to some appalling ordeal? Would my body be left out in the wilderness to be picked over by jackals and vultures? Did they even have vultures here? I thought of the men in the roadside cafés in their smiling male complicity with the teasing boys on the bicycle: if I disappeared would the entire community turn its face inward and present an incommunicative blankness to the world, in the same way their architecture hid its secrets behind tall walls and shuttered windows?

‘I must let my friend Eve know where I’ve gone, or she’ll be worried,’ I said loudly, breaking into their conversation.

‘There’s no need,’ Taïb assured me. ‘Everyone knows you’ve come with us to Tiouada – there’s a
fichta
there tonight.’

‘A what?’ But they were chattering again.
Tee-wada. Teeooada
. How would you spell that? I dug in my bag for my mobile phone, turned it on and was about to start texting when a loud beep sounded and an envelope icon appeared. I had a message, it seemed. I opened it up.

SOME GUYS HV INVITD US 2 DINNER IN THR VILLG. HOPE U DNT MIND! C U L8R, EVE X

Great. I was about to respond when the signal flickered and then vanished. Even better.

‘What’s a
fichta
?’ I asked into a momentary lull in the conversation.

‘
Une fête
, a celebration: a party!’

‘Beeeg party,’ Azaz beamed. ‘Many musicians, everyone will be verrry happy. And Taïb and I will play.’

‘Play?’

‘The drums!
Agwal
and
tamtam
; and Mohammed will bring the
ganga
…’

Ganga?
Did he mean
ganja
? What sort of party was this going to be? My panic levels notched up again. ‘Where are they, then, these drums?’ I demanded.

‘In the back, behind Azaz.’

I turned. Beyond the back seat was a pile of jumble: blankets and boxes, a crate; and indeed, two large unidentifiable objects obscured by an old multicoloured rug. ‘I thought we were just popping in to see an old lady to ask her about the amulet and then coming right back.’

Taïb turned an impassive face to me. ‘No one ever just “pops in” to see anyone in Morocco,’ he said smoothly. ‘We have a great tradition of hospitality. There will be food and tea and music –’

‘And just how long will all this take? I have to get back to the hotel.’

‘You have so much else to do.’

I glared at him, flushing hotly. I knew I was being ungracious, overreacting to a kind invitation and the chance to see something of the real life of the country; but I was unprepared for it and feeling all semblance of control slipping away from me. For a moment I contemplated demanding that he turn the car around and take me back to Tafraout: but, indeed, what did I have waiting for me there? More dull hours to spin out on the hotel terrace as the sun dipped and went down into shadow; a solo dinner in the not-very-good hotel dining room …
For God’s sake, Izzy
, I chided myself:
live a little. Take a chance
. I forced a smile. ‘OK, sounds great.’

‘You’ll love it,’ he promised, and then he and Azaz were chattering again in their harsh, unintelligible tongue. Berber was an emphatic language, full of glottal stops and hawking noises made deep in the back of the throat, and it sounded, as all foreign languages do when you don’t speak them, both fast and aggressive. With all the insistent hand gestures that accompanied even a simple conversation between friends, or cousins, it seemed confrontational, but after a while I began to find it calming, a sea of meaningless noise I could just tune out as I watched the landscape rolling past the window.

And what a landscape it was. Vast and rugged, cinematically wide-screen, it stretched out ahead like a promise, or a threat. There was simply nothing this big, or this empty, in Britain. Even the plain we drove through was spectacular, dotted as it was with enormous boulders carved by the elements into fantastical shapes: five-metre mushrooms, their once-sturdy pillars weathered to apple-core stalks by blasts of windborne sand; great tors like a mass of fat pancakes piled one on another; huge peaks with jutting outcrops like eagles’ beaks; rounded forms like crouching hares and sleeping women; and dozens of thrusting towers.

Taïb touched me on the arm and pointed to one of these, an isolated and striking example. ‘See that? We call that the Aglaïn.’

In the back of the car, Azaz snorted with sudden laughter.

‘And what does that mean?’ I asked; and then stupidly wished I could call the question back, since the answer was grotesquely obvious.

‘The Cock and Balls,’ he said, his eyes shining with mischief.

‘Women who want babies walk all the way out here to touch it,’ Azaz added helpfully. ‘And it works! My cousins have many babies after visiting the Aglaïn.’

‘Would you like to drive over to there so that you can touch it?’ Taïb asked innocently. ‘This car will tackle any terrain.’

‘No!’ I exploded. ‘I would not. What primitive nonsense!’

‘You already have children?’ Azaz did not seem to be playing the same game as his cousin, but I was still unnerved.

‘No.’

‘But you are very old not to have children,’ he continued, quite oblivious to the usual social mores, and to my growing alarm.

‘In my culture women have careers,’ I told him, tight-lipped. ‘And we think that’s just as important as having children.’

‘Nothing is as important as having children,’ he said solemnly, as I turned my head away from their prying eyes.

A little while later we took a left and soon the road began to climb, zigzagging up through a series of switchbacks, bounded on all sides by dizzying tumbles of red rock. Turning near the summit so that I could survey the landscape we had passed through, I gasped, astounded by the immensity of it: a huge, almost barren vista of raw rock, scattered boulders and scant vegetation, not a soul or a house to be seen. Far, far away I could see the dark, forbidding wall of the Jebel el-Kest louring over the Ameln Valley and was amazed to see how the incised features of the Lion’s face were clear even at such a distance. No wonder it was enshrined in the local mythology: no one could get lost even in this wilderness with such a landmark to aim for. I imagined bygone traders making their weary way north out of the desert with their camels laden with gold and ivory and ostrich feathers, topping out on this mountain the Touareg was grinding up and setting a course directly for the Lion’s Head with relief in their hearts, beckoned by the promise of a lush oasis after weeks, maybe even months, of their harsh journey.

On the other side of the mountain pass the landscape changed again, opening into a magnificent winding valley cut through by some vast and vanished river whose course had left behind it precipitous red cliffs resembling a not-so miniature Grand Canyon, their layered strata laid bare for all to see, like a diagram in a geology textbook. But there was no great Colorado River here, in fact nothing at all to indicate the power of the torrent that had created such an impressive gorge, for way down in the riverbed there were nothing but dry boulders, worn smooth and white by the ancient passage of the water. Down we went, sheer drops on one side, masses of towering, unstable rock dotted with little orange starburst flowers and spiky Barbary figs on the other. Goats watched our passage with their slotted eyes as the road forded the ghost-river. We sped along a bumpy causeway, our tyres raising clouds of detritus that masked the way we had come. For one brief, surreal moment I felt as if all my future stretched before me like the narrow ribbon of tarmac ahead of us, leading into the unknown, and that everything in my past was slowly but surely being erased, turning to ashes and dust in our wake.

17

Tiouada, when we finally reached it, was an unprepossessing sprawl of crumbling old adobe and modern breeze-block buildings. Compared to Tafraout it looked poverty-stricken and scruffy, a village balancing on a knife-edge of existence. Everywhere it was dry, dry, dry. We passed an enclosure in which a donkey stood tied to a post by a frayed piece of old rope. It lifted its head and eyed us dully, expecting nothing from life and in that expectation not being disappointed. I could see nothing green in its enclosure, not a leaf, not a plant; the rope that hobbled it looked the most edible thing it could reach.

The village was deserted, shutters closed, doors shut, even the iron grille of the obligatory grocer’s shop drawn down; nothing stirred. Rusting cars stood baking in the afternoon sun, no children played in the street; not a feral cat or even a dog lazed in the shade beneath the papery leaves of the eucalyptus tree in the square. It certainly was not a place that gave the impression of somewhere a mystery might be resolved, a place in which the sole guardian of a lost ancient language might reside: it did not look as if anyone lived here at all. You sensed the entire population might have gathered during the day and after much debate had taken the long-put-off decision finally to abandon the village to drought and desertification, packed up their bags and belongings, and tramped off to find a better life elsewhere: somewhere with a higher water-table and some vegetation.

‘Where is everyone?’ I asked at last.

‘You will see,’ Taïb replied shortly.

We drove past a row of administrative buildings outside which the red-and-green national flag hung limp. Someone had daubed in large graffiti
VIVE LE TIFINAGH!
Long live the Tifinagh! And beside it what looked like a dancing stick-figure, legs akimbo and arms upraised, in black paint on the farthest wall, a figure that seemed at once defiant and delirious. For some reason it looked vaguely familiar to me. I asked Taïb what it meant.

‘Berber pride,’ Taïb said cryptically. ‘That’s called
Aza
: it’s the symbol of the
Amazigh
’ –
Ama-zir
– ‘the Free People.’

‘Really?’ I was curious. ‘Who are the Free People?’

Taïb smiled darkly. ‘We are. The Berbers were the original people of North Africa. Before the Romans came, long before the Arabs, we were here, with our own language and culture; our own religion and beliefs. The Arabs came from the eastern deserts in the seventh century, bringing Islam with them like a flaming sword. The invading Arabs made speaking the Berber language and writing in the Tifinagh alphabet illegal – even speaking Berber in our own homes became an act of subversion. But the Berbers are a proud people, and because they’ve always lived on the edge of hardship, they know how to persist against the odds. They resisted, and were brutally suppressed. But still they fought, on and on through the centuries, stubbornly resisting integration with the Arabs, then with the French. A Berber separatist movement was formed. In the time of the last king, Hassan II, anyone supporting the Berber cause risked a beating, or worse. But the harder you tread on a snake, the more it’ll want to bite you.’