by Tahir Shah
The road passes fields in which sheep and goats graze, in a land once farmed by the Romans – they grew vines there. Eventually, after a thousand twists and turns, you reach the snowline, with the little town of Ifrane a little further beyond.
Surrounded by nature trails and hiking routes, and packed with cafés, Ifrane surprises all first time visitors – whether they be Moroccans or from farther afield. Covered by a thick blanket of snow through much of the winter, the town is quite European in feel.
There’s none of the detail so readily associated with Morocco – no arched doorways, no mosaics, or geometric friezes carved into plasterwork. Instead, Ifrane is a haven of sloped Alpine roofs and timber frames, set against a backdrop of woodland. It’s straight out of Chamonix.
In the central square there’s the scent of chocolate-covered crêpes and the aroma of log-fires burning. The only tell-tale sign that you’re in Morocco are the flowing jelaba robes, worn by many to keep out the winter chill. And the storks. Their voluminous nests crown too many rooftops to count, and are more Moroccan than almost anything else.
At Café La Paix, a throwback to the days of the French era, I met a retired American couple, George and Gene. They had perma-tans, perfect teeth, and told me both at once that Morocco was their greatest love.
‘We come twice a year,’ said Gene. ‘After spending a few days in Fès, we come up here to Ifrane.’
‘It’s a kind of therapy to balance the frenzy of the Fès medina,’ added Harry.
I asked if he skied. Harry thumped a fist to his thigh. There was a metallic sound.
‘Duff leg,’ he said. ‘Korea’s to blame.’
We sat in awkward silence for a while – Harry lost in the memories of youth, Gene applying lipstick liberally to her oversized smile, and I staring up at a pair of storks robbing twigs from another pair to build their own nest. The birds were all filled with a wonderful enthusiasm, as if they couldn’t quite believe their luck. And, looking around, I could see the source of their zeal.
Ifrane is a mountain sanctuary like no other.
Much favoured by Hassan II, the former King of Morocco, the town has long hosted royalty, and is fêted for its celebrity associations. A champion of the outdoors life, Hassan II would spend months at a time there, moving his royal Court into the mountains when he tired of the capital, Rabat. With its long perimeter fence, the royal palace is in pride of place on the road towards Azrou. In the days of the former King’s rule, a constant stream of dignitaries would make their way up to Ifrane to be received at Court.
A great many of his VIP guests were accommodated at an imposing Alpinesque chalet set on a promontory just above the town. This mixture of royal guesthouse and luxury hotel grew a little tired in recent years. But, after six years of work, not to mention a fortune spent on it, Hotel Michlifen Ifrane – owned by King Mohammed VI – has risen like a phoenix above Morocco’s own Alpine backdrop. With the finishing touches complete, the hotel has reopened to visitors once again.
The Michlifen is one of the cosiest and most luxurious travel hideaways in the Kingdom. Inspired by the simple architecture of the Alps, it’s a sanctuary of natural pine panelling and of dressed stone walls, of painted Scandinavian wood, sculptures and antique furniture.
The hotel’s main lobby is vast but informal, filled with dazzling mountain sunshine by day and understated mood-lighting by night. The exposed stone pillars, the bare wooden floor, and the deep leather couches, give a sense of the American Rockies, rather than the Moroccan Atlas.
While the décor maybe Occidental, the service and warmth are definitely Moroccan. On weekends the hotel is filled with families who arrive mostly from Casablanca and Rabat. As elsewhere, the national obsession with doting over children certainly reaches Ifrane’s snow-covered peaks.
Visiting with my family, I tracked my little son down to the kitchen, where he was being indulged by the chef with a pot of chocolate and a spoon. And my daughter spent an entire afternoon playing checkers with the barman whom, I noticed, always let her win.
A stone’s throw from the hotel, laden in snow, the main square of Ifrane was alive with locals and with visitors through the short winter days. Students from the Al-Akhawayn University pack the cafés. Established through an entente cordiale between the Saudi Arabian and Moroccan Royal Families, the University is one of the most prestigious in Morocco. All around, there were storks building messy twig nests high on the rooftops, and children darting between the poplar trees down near the lake.
In dazzling sunshine, we set off on a hike through the forest.
The small town of Ifrane was soon well behind us, the snow crunching beneath our boots. We walked for miles, weaving a haphazard path between the firs, pausing every so often to hurl snowballs at each other. There was silence, except for birdsong, and the muffled cries of children down in the valley below.
After two hours of hiking, we came to a clearing where a family were gathering sticks. Their faces chapped from the wind, their hands bleeding from thorns, they seemed startled at seeing us. The husband dropped the branch he was holding, and raced over to greet us.
Welcoming us all to that part of the forest, he asked after our health in the prolonged salutations of Moroccan mountain life. His wife and daughters inched forward gingerly and kissed my wife and children.
Minutes later, we found ourselves invited to share their midday meal. No amount of excuses could curb their overwhelming hospitality. As we tucked into a feast of lamb tagine and fresh-baked bread, a fire was lit to warm us, the family throwing on all the twigs they had gathered that morning.
‘The children must eat!’ the husband exclaimed again and again, picking out the best pieces of meat and passing them to my little son and daughter, ‘because children are a gift from God.’
I asked how the winter had gone.
‘The snow’s been deep this year,’ said the man, ‘and that’s good because more people come and ski.’ He paused, wiped a hand over his mouth. ‘I have lived here my entire life,’ he said, ‘I was born in a little house just over there, as my own children were. And I must tell you there is something that I don’t understand.’
‘What?’
‘Why people do want to go up and down all day on skis? It just makes no sense at all!’
In the afternoon we drove to the resort of Michlifen, after which the hotel in Ifrane is named. We reached it through an unending fir forest, lost in the mountain crags of the Atlas.
Although far less organized than European resorts, it has an old world charm that’s been lost through commerciality from much of Europe. Hauled up the mountainside by a simple lift system, skiers were slaloming their way downhill with differing degrees of style. What amused me was the complete absence of pretension. It was as if no one was looking at anyone looking at them. And, for challenged skiers like me, there’s nothing so precious as the feeling that no one’s bothered about how many times you fall.
Huddled along the road were local people with sledges, clusters of used ski equipment for hire, and even horse-drawn sleighs.
While standing at the side of the road bartering for a pair of tenth-hand skis, I got talking to an aged Frenchman. He said he could remember the old days when Ifrane was packed with the chic European crowd through the winter season.
‘You should have seen it,’ he said a glint in his eye. ‘We used to drink Pastis on the square, and eat fondue until late in the night, washed down with a nice Muscadet.’
I asked if Ifrane had lost its magic. The Frenchman waved a finger at me hard.
‘Non, non, monsieur,’ he replied, ‘it’s better than ever.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course it is. Take a look around you! The French never would have permitted such joie de vivre as this!’
THIRTY
Morocco’s Pirate Realm
RELOCATE FROM A CRAMPED East End flat to a haunted mansion, in the middle of a Casablanca shanty-town, and you can’t help but slip into the Mor
occan Twilight Zone.
It’s a world conjured straight from a child’s imagination – a realm of Jinn and exorcists, of dazzling colours, exotic foods and unending possibility.
During the years we have lived here, we have descended down through the interleaving layers of Moroccan society to its very bedrock. In that time I have become preoccupied with the Morocco that tourists rarely glimpse, the one that lies just beneath the surface, waiting to be discovered by anyone ready to receive it.
Every day Europe’s budget airlines ferry tourists back and forth, depositing them at the gates of a few key Moroccan cities – Marrakech, Agadir and Fès. Yet, the rest of the kingdom is left largely alone. So, stray a little off the beaten track, and the rewards can be immediate and quite extraordinary. And, as often happens in Morocco, the greatest treasures are where you expect them least of all.
I was reminded of this last week when my daughter, Ariane, came home and begged me to help with her pirate project. She’s obsessed with Johnny Depp, and imagines all pirates to be bumbling caricatures, rather than the ruthless killers of today’s African Horn.
Googling ‘Morocco Pirates’, she began a treasure trail which led right from our own door.
An hour’s drive up the coast from Casablanca is the capital, Rabat. It’s rather staid – orderly traffic, clipped hedges, and droves of diplomats. Across from it, nestled up on the windswept Atlantic shore is the small town of Salé. Most Rabatis like to stick their noses up at their down-at-heel neighbour. They regard it as sordid, squalid, a complete waste of time. I had bought in to the whole Salé-bashing syndrome, and found myself snarling at the mere mention of the name.
But Ariane insisted I’d got it all wrong.
She told a tale of a pirate realm worthy of Jack Sparrow himself, one where Robinson Crusoe had been taken as a slave. For eight centuries, she said, Salé had been a world centre of looting, pillaging, and of white slavery. The frenzied debauchery had reached its height in the 1600s, under the greatest marauder in the Barbary history, the infamous Jan Janszoon.
A Dutch freebooter, and former Christian slave himself, Janszoon made himself overlord of a pirate republic based at Salé. He waylaid many hundreds of ships across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, possibly extending as far as Iceland and the Americas. In true pirate tradition, he sired countless children. His descendents are said to embrace a Who’s Who of celebrity, including the Marquis of Blandford, Humphrey Bogart, and Jackie O.
Intrigued by this curious nugget of international pirate trivia, I bundled Ariane into the car and sped north.
Soon we spied the skyline of Rabat, all proud and stately as a capital city should be. Across the estuary, the syrupy yellow light of late afternoon gave a glow to the ancient walls of what was once the pirate realm – the Republic of Salé.
Even from a distance there was something bleak and piratic about it.
Gnarled volcanic rocks, breakers, wine-dark sea, and walls right out of Treasure Island. Approaching from along the coast, we found ourselves at an immense and ancient burial ground – tens of thousands of graves packed tight together, the head-stones lost in each other’s shadows.
Unable to resist, we strolled slowly between the graves, the chill Atlantic wind ripping in our ears. Ariane said she could imagine the pirates sleeping there, cuddled up with their secrets and their treasure maps.
In the middle of the graveyard a fisherman was crouching with a long slim rod, and an empty paint can filled with fish heads. He was surrounded by cats. When I asked him about pirates he narrowed his eyes, nodded once, and pointed to a low fortress at the edge of the cemetery.
We went over to it.
Crafted from honey-yellow stone, the Sqala, as it’s known in Arabic, was built into the crenellated sea wall, rusted iron cannons still trained on the horizon. A policeman was standing outside. He had a weatherworn face, watery eyes, and a big toothy grin. Ariane asked him about pirates. Before we knew it, we’d been ushered inside.
He led the way through a cool stone passage and out onto a rounded terrace, bathed in blinding yellow light. There was something magical about it, as if it were so real that it was fake, like a Hollywood set. The cannons there were bronze, lizard-green with verdigris, each one bearing a different crest.
‘They were obviously captured by pirates,’ said Ariane knowledgeably. ‘If they weren’t, the crests would all be the same.’
Staring out to where the water joined the sky, the policeman suddenly recited a poem about unrequited love. He said there was no better place in all the world to compose poetry than right there, and that poetry was his true love.
I asked if he’d ever heard of Jan Janszoon. He cocked his face to the ground beneath his feet.
‘The dungeon,’ he said grimly.
We went down jagged steps, along a vaulted corridor bored out from the stone, lit by shafts of natural light. Home to nests of stray cats, it was damp and smelled of death. The officer showed us a truly miserable cell which looked as though it had been quite recently used. His grin subsiding, he explained awkwardly that the last prisoner had been forgotten, and had starved to death.
‘Was it the famous corsair, Jan Janszoon?’ I asked.
The policeman shook his head.
‘For him, you must go to the old city,’ he said.
After sweet mint tea, and yet more poetry, we escaped with directions scribbled in Arabic, directions to the home of Jan Janszoon lost in the maze of the old city.
After years living in Morocco, I am no stranger to walled medinas, and have traipsed through dozens of them – often searching for a cryptic address. In that time I’ve learned to be thick-skinned when approached by hustlers laden with tourist wares.
Slipping through the Malka Gate, we prepared ourselves for the usual onslaught of salesmen and mendicants. But it didn’t come. Instead, the silence was so pronounced that we could hear the children playing marbles in the labyrinth of lanes. Without waiting for us to ask, one of them led the way to the great mosque.
Built in the glorious twelfth century Almohad style, it’s one of the greatest treasures in the kingdom, and one of the least known. The boy said there were seven doors, one for each day of the week.
Twisting and turning our way down the whitewashed lanes, we found a time-capsule of Moroccan life from a century ago. There were vegetables piled high on carts, and chunks of fresh mutton laid out on fragrant beds of mint; tailors busily sewing kaftans, mattress-makers and carpenters, brocade-sellers, and dyers hanging skeins of wool out in the sun. And, rather than any tourists or tourist kitsch, there were local people out shopping, bargaining for underpants and melons, pumpkins, wedding robes, and socks.
When Ariane showed the scribbled directions to the marble-playing boy, he led us to a spacious square, the Souq el Gazelle, the Wool Market. It was packed with people buying and selling used clothes and brightly-coloured wool. The boy said it was where slaves had once been sold, having been dragged ashore from captured ships.
Nudging a thumb to the directions, I asked about the home of Jan Janszoon.
The boy beckoned us to follow him.
Winding our way through the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter, the air pungent with kebab smoke and baking macaroons, we reached the crumbling façade of a building. Once plastered, the dressed stone was exposed, ravaged by the elements. A fig tree had taken hold and was growing out from the side, and the studded wooden door was falling to bits. The boy glanced at the scribbled directions and gave a thumb’s up.
Ariane and I stood there in awe. We were on hallowed ground after all – at the home of the greatest pirate in Barbary history, the progenitor of Jackie O no less.
As the muezzin called the prayer, his voice singing out over the tiled rooftops of old Salé, I whispered thanks to Jan Janszoon and to his band of marauding corsairs. Through a special conjury of Moroccan magic, the Dutch-born freebooter had lured us through a keyhole into his own pirate realm, the Moroccan Twilight Zone, where nothing is ever
quite what it seems.
THIRTY-ONE
Moulay Idriss
A MAN WITH A HEAVILY scarred face and a limp, sidled up and asked me to follow him.
I was standing in the central square of Moulay Idriss, Morocco’s most sacred and sinister town, peering at a map. I asked the man what he had to show. He tapped a finger below his eye, and motioned towards a narrow alleyway. My curiosity piqued, I slipped after him into the cool shadows behind the main square.
At the far end of the alley there was a turn, followed by another lane, then another, and another. Realising that I was deep in the labyrinth, I called out, but the man didn’t stop.
After fifteen minutes of trailing behind him, he tapped his eye again, and pointed to a door.
‘What is it?’ I asked in a timid voice.
‘A secret.’
‘What?’
The man nodded, pushed the door inwards, and led me into a dark building with a low ceiling. My nose picked up the scent of sandalwood, sparking a memory from childhood. I pushed open one of the shutters, while the man pointed at the floor. As light flooded in, I waited for my eyes to focus. Then I gasped in surprise.
Nestled on a cushion in the middle of a room was a large glass jar filled with what appeared to be olive oil. In the liquid was part of a human skull. It looked like it had been trepanned and was missing the lower jaw.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘In the ruins, near Volubilis. A farmer came across it in his field,’ the man paused, and rubbed a thumb and forefinger together. ‘It’s for sale,’ he said.
I didn’t want to appear rude, but explained that I’d be in the doghouse if I went home clutching a trepanned human skull. Making excuses, and smiling as widely as I could, I retraced my steps back to the main square. As I tramped back out of the maze, I found myself wondering what kind of maniac would buy part of a skull from a total stranger, in a place that seemed to scare most visitors away.