The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2)

by Carol Drinkwater

  Within the lovely walled medina, a poem of white façades and shuttered blues, none of the restaurants served alcohol. Mint tea was the beverage. I moseyed about for a while taking photos and then, at the very edge of the old city, found a fish bar overlooking the ramparts where I ate alone, reading, and drank a glass of high-priced wine with my grilled herring.

  I was up and out of my digs by six thirty the following morning, eager to take a small boat across to the island of Mogador – this appellation was given by the Portuguese in 1506 – but the wind was high, it was Mohammed’s birthday and no one seemed willing to make the short crossing. The catch was in, though. The fishermen had worked overnight. It was a glorious, if breezy, morning with fleets of blue fishing boats slapping in the dieselled, greasy water. I stood with the strays, dogs and cats, as hundreds of slithery silver sprats and sardines flapped for their lives in the salt water puddled within the base of the skiffs, damned in their efforts, for they were destined to be served as fritures. The fishermen, barefoot, trousers rolled to their knees, were wading among their catch, somehow avoiding squashing them, and pouring buckets of water, drawn from the polluted portside, on to the expiring creatures while scooping them into baskets and tossing them to the first of a chain of men each of whom passed the basket on to the next in line until, eventually, the fidgeting mounds of silver stripes had landed on the quay and were emptied into plastic crates piled high. This same activity was taking place all around this inner anchorage while gulls screeched, hopped and gobbled greedily at the few escaped offerings. I was the only woman, the only onlooker. It was early: the holidaymakers were sleeping or at their breakfasts.

  This fishing port had a laidback, timeless feel to it, but Islam governed. The activities I had been observing were repeated all around the Med, yet this was the Atlantic, though its history was Mediterranean. From Phoenicians to Portuguese to the French. Religion was laid on later. It was not part of the tradition, not part of man’s knowledge or survival skills on land or sea. If I had been observing this scene in Portugal, Spain or France, it would have been identical, save for a church spire or two, instead of minarets breaking the skyscape.

  Afterwards, I wandered aimlessly, observing the festivities. Musicians with unfamiliar stringed instruments and exquisitely embroidered, coloured pillbox hats, lunch stalls displaying freshly caught red mullet, bream, slabs of bigger fellows I couldn’t recognise, all decorated with cuts of lemon and seaweed, alongside crustaceans. I followed the curves of the port past les douanes, customs, to the fish market and a sheltered corner where a band of Arab fishermen were crouched in hoods and turbans, mending their deep-red nets in the sunshine. A boy seated on a wooden box was selling cigarettes. A man in dark-red djellabah who resembled Father Christmas bought himself a single smoke. Blue fishing boats everywhere; a sailor’s haven for over 2500 years. Salt and fish whiffs on the wind. Near the port police I discovered a scrawny marmalade cat skulking in the shadows, its face a mass of congealed blood from where it had been ripped and clawed in a fight. Nearby, a flea-bitten dog chained behind a wooden fence protecting a littered patch of scrub.

  Back through one of the medina’s terracotta gateways where women in white haicks sat cross-legged on the ground, begging. I bought goat-skin slippers for Michel and learned from the vendor that this vigorous local wind was called the alizee. Herbalists everywhere, displaying argan soaps, oils and ‘anti-wrinkle creams’ dubbed the ‘new olive oil, only better’. Over a glass of mint tea, I spotted amlou on the menu, a dish of ground almonds, honey and argan oil. It was too late for breakfast so I ordered a salad dressed in the endemic oil. It tasted nutty, slightly bitter. I fell into conversation with a lanky retired Englishman reading the Daily Telegraph, wearing faded red Moorish slippers. I was surprised to learn he’d been a resident for over a decade.

  ‘Saouira,’ he corrected, ‘Arab name, it means picture. Brits have been here since the nineteenth century when this entire coastline was Mogador. We’re a mixed bunch, not just hippies and dropouts. A remote station such as this suits our island mentality. Back then, this place was a thriving port and the British shipping lines conveyed Indian cotton and tea from China and India. There were British clubs and a British Consul. Substantial Jewish community, too. Cricket was played beneath the palm trees. It was splendid, all told, until the bloody Berbers rode in with rifles at the beginning of the twentieth century. Well, that was the end of the fun and games for our boys. The French took control in 1912. Bloody shame.’

  I was fascinated. So many galleys, vessels and warships had sunk off these storm-tossed shores, brought down by cannons and gale-beaten rocks. How much blood had been shed in the endless battles for supremacy?

  ‘There’s an actress here, too, ex-Dynasty star, Stephanie Beacham. She owns a riad somewhere within these walls. She’s rarely in residence though.’

  He could not tell me her address, which was a pity. Stephanie and I had known each other since our twenties. She had visited us at our olive farm.

  Later, I found an account by a nineteenth-century English resident of Mogador describing a sea bombardment by the French in 1844. Many of the inhabitants had fled while the British, including the Consul and his wife, bravely hung on. A strong north-easterly had interfered with hostilities, which seemed to end in chaos when ‘wild tribes’ (Berbers) pillaged the city and put to the sword many of the Brits and Jews. The author described the situation as ‘a pandemonium of discord and licentiousness’. Mogador was ‘left in a heap of ruins, scarcely one house standing’. Evidently, the port was reconstructed because it continued as a trading post and centre of commercial exchange. I also discovered that the cotton imported by the British was not from East India but Manchester and was delivered by camel train to interior cities, some as far afield as the salt-trading centre of ‘Timbuctoo’. Essaouira exported the finest of all Moroccan produce and this included substantial tons of olive oil. In 1855, it was recorded that ‘trade last year was greatly increased by the unusually large demand for olive-oil from all parts, and there is no doubt that, under a more liberal Government, the commerce might be developed to a vast extent’.

  Olive oil from all parts. I wondered what had been intended by ‘all parts’. I was equally interested to note that, at that stage, Moroccan ironwood oil, argan, was not listed at all as an export from these shores. I walked the beach, negotiating rocks, searching for an idle fisherman who would row me over to the uninhabited Ile de Mogador, actually two small islands and a cluster of islets. It was the beginning of the Eleonora’s Falcon breeding season out on those purple islands. These rare birds of prey, named after a fourteenth-century Sardinian princess who introduced laws to protect them, flew from Madagascar to breed here and I decided that perhaps protection of these extraordinary long-distance migrants was the reason I could not find a ferryman. Continuing on towards the lighthouse, I perched on a clump of rocks, attempting to glimpse one of the falcons, but was out of luck.

  At the bus station I found that no buses, whatever configuration I gave the trip, went where I was headed. Immouzer was sixty-two kilometres inland from Agadir by bus or grand taxi, and further from Essaouira. I first needed to take a bus to Agadir and from Agadir another bus or taxi inland on roads that wound through a gorge known as Paradise Valley. Once in Immouzer, I would be obliged to find another mode of transport, for there were no buses, to take me onwards into the High Atlas Mountains. The fact was that where I was intended was off all beaten tracks. I drifted among a chaos of taxis, buses, hawkers and tourists trying to nail down a solution that would make the journey feasible. I had not come this far to turn back. The chauffeurs of the grands taxis had agents who ran round shouting destinations. When a potential passenger cried ‘Yes’, he led them to a vehicle where they waited until another five had been secured. The taxis rarely departed without a full complement of six.

  One such agent advised that I skip the journey to Agadir altogether, hire a grand taxi in Essaouira and go directly to my destination.
He warned, though, that not in a month of Fridays would I find five others travelling my way. I bowed to this and we found a driver who, in this week of festivities, said he preferred not to work and that I was requesting a distant trek that would keep him from his family. Negotiations! Eventually, between the three of us we struck a deal. The price quoted was one hundred euros, one way. In European terms this was not a fortune, but in heartland Morocco it was a tidy sum and a chunk out of my budget. If I required the driver to wait for me, it would be double the price plus the cost of his overnight in a hotel. It was too far to drive there and back in one day. We shook hands, until the following morning, on our one-way arrangement.

  That evening I climbed the Portuguese ramparts and looked out to sea, watching the sun set beyond the islands. Below, the outlines of a Phoenician dye factory. The Greeks had named them Phoenikas, ‘men with purple faces’. When they transported the purple product, the sea sprays mixed with it, covering the sailors, turning their skins purple. Dye factories, fish salting, olive oil. Surely the Phoenicians delivered all these skills here? The Romans came after, greedy to take control of the precious factories for themselves. Did they fail in attempts to persuade the locals to forget the argan and take the olive?

  Sand, sea and sunken history beneath the modest fleets of twenty-first-century sardine boats bobbing in the harbour.

  *

  The village where we had broken down was strict Muslim. There were no women to be seen anywhere although we had driven by a Women’s Cooperative for Argan Pressing. I walked back to it, but it was closed for the holidays. Mohammed, my driver, was now insisting I remain in the car. While I waited in the windy but stifling midday heat, not twenty kilometres outside Essaouira, for the repair of the punctured rear tyre – the spare was worse – I passed the time reading faxed pages from Michel, information he had found somewhere for me. I was pleased to receive it and to know that he was still enthusiastic about my travels.

  The argan tree, Argania spinosa, also known as Moroccan ironwood, is a shrub-like, thorny evergreen with an almond-sized fruit and kernel which, when pressed, gives an oil that is ‘as highly prized and ten times more expensive than olive oil’. Similar to olive oil, it has low fat content, is high in unsaturated fatty acids, reduces cholesterol and prevents arteriosclerosis. The Moroccan Berbers use the oil for cooking, skin care and medicinal needs. It serves the same purposes as olive oil, but the methods of gathering are different. These fruits are prized by wild goats that climb the argan trees to eat them. After digesting them, the stone is excreted within their dung. The Berber women collect these hard-shelled seeds and press them.

  Like the olive, the argan tree is hardy: it can tolerate excessive heat, poor soil conditions and extreme drought. But unlike the olive, if drought hits, the argan goes into a dormant state and only refoliates when the rains return. The tree can survive for up to two hundred years, so it lacks the eternal staying power of the olive. Its flowers are small, pale yellow. The olive’s are white though the wilder shrubbier oleasters can produce flowers with a creamy yellowish tint. The fruit of the argan takes over a year to ripen and reaches maturity in June/July the following summer. The olive’s maturation is briefer, but for those who prefer very black drupes the process can take as long as ten months. The argan is endemic to the calcareous semi-desert conditions in the Sousse Valley in south-western Morocco, and to nowhere else in the world. Here, the arganerie forests cover some 828,000 hectares, but the area has shrunk to half its size in a century. Due to human intervention – felling for timber, firewood, charcoal, land clearance for agricultural purposes and climate changes – the forests are under threat and UNESCO has designated them a Biosphere Reserve. In earlier epochs these self-seeded forests covered a far more extensive region and it has become harder for them to propagate naturally. Major programmes are in place to reforest with nursery-raised trees in order to combat desertification and to protect the tree itself.

  I stared out of the window at three men engaged in the repair of a simple puncture.

  Originally, the argan forests had extended across this vast plain, a semi-Mediterranean steppeland, to the open sea coasts. I wondered whether their produce had been bartered with the foreigners who traded here. Had the Phoenicians or earlier traders taught the Berbers how to press these unique fruits?

  ‘On either side of us stretched away to the horizon what looked like orchards of old buttressed apricot or plum trees laden with ripening fruit. I could scarcely believe that I was in a natural forest and that the trees, centuries old, had not been planted by man.’ From David Fairchild, Exploring for Plants, written in 1931.

  It was late afternoon by the time we were back on the road. The tyre-patching had taken close to six hours! I had suggested I return to lovely Essaouira for the night and we start afresh at dawn but at this Mohammed had grown sullen. He had been booked for today, he said. Hardly my fault, I gently pointed out, but as he spoke no French, my Arabic was less than basic and his Berber dialect was another universe to me entirely, conversation and argument were all but impossible. We slogged on. My concern was that once through the Sousse Valley we would be climbing into the Atlases after dark and I would see nothing. He assured me this would not be the case, though I had no certainty he had understood me. On we went. Every time we came to even one single argan, its branches laden with feeding goats – it is a most bizarre and comical sight; a pyramid of shaggy-haired, horned creatures scaling, one on top of another, a stunted tree – he pulled over for photographs and was puzzled when I insisted we keep moving. Frequently, a single goat, legs akimbo, was munching happily at the apex of one of the stubbies.

  Rural hinterland: ochre plains; basic living conditions; donkeys ridden side-saddle by boys geeing them with sticks; blankets in the sun airing over prickly scrub and wadis as dry as dust. The soil was variations on beige. Donkeys, when not journeying and transporting, rested in the shade of the argans. The original wild olive would have resembled this tree. The men in their long brown djellabahs, hoods lifted when the wind blew, walking in file, friezed against the skyline put me in mind of a caravan of camels, single-humped hereabouts. Sub-arid vegetation; a tortoise walking in the road. Occasionally, I attempted conversation or shot a question, but without luck. Eventually, Mohammed put on a cassette and we sank into our separate silences; the low whining music and the views beyond the window our sole points of contact. Three hours in, the jebels were becoming more frequent, the land undulating, less flat. We had reached the lower ranges of the Atlases. The earth grew salmon-pink dotted with argans and olives. Living quarters so primitive they might have been Stone Age. Occasionally, a lone vendor sat at the roadside. What trade passed? Small yellow flowers on the argans. A fully formed argan, after rains when it was in leaf, from the middle distance was not dissimilar to an olive, but by comparison the olea was sweeter looking than its desert cousin. It possessed grace, an elegance, with lovely leaves of silver and dusky-green to give it a class that the thorny, twisted, sparse-leaved argan lacked.

  Hairpin bends, ascending, steepening. Gazing out on magnificent scenery, not a dwelling, not even a stone bothy in any direction. The colours were Monet-soft, ochre, sand- and straw-hued, delicate, pleasing to the eye. A rusted van appeared from nowhere. In its rear cab sat a camel, gazing back at us, chewing with loose, dribbly lips. Nothing existed here but vast nature. Donkeys grazed, goats, too, on the treetops gorging on argan fruits. The rivers, the streams, the wadis, every one bone-dry. But even here, four hours’ drive from any settlement, where clothes dried on mud walls, where mud-brick blocks had four walls and little else, displays of satellite dishes. Islam was in communication with these Berbers.

  Mohammed grew upset, cursing under his breath.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Barrage, barrage,’ he repeated over and over. ‘Lose time.’

  A road had been closed off. The road. He reversed agitatedly, swung off on to a descending piste. Bone-shaking, rutted; his mood grew worse. Eventual
ly we linked with another path. This pleased him. Before I knew it we were upon a cast-iron bridge traversing a barrage-reservoir, an extensive dam. Its proportions were spectacular and possibly supplied most of these Atlas communities. Once across, Mohammed drew to a halt. I took some photos: lake set against mountains in the middle distance. Goats grazed at the waterside. Two soldiers came running, boots thudding against the echoing bridge. The first buttonholed my camera, but I refused to let go. A tug of war ensued. I was in hot, incomprehensible debate and called for Mohammed’s assistance but he was barefoot on all fours, praying, lost in his spiritual world while I was fighting to keep a grip on my material one. Eventually, I calmed the young soldiers who were informing me that the king’s brother was responsible for this magnificent piece of engineering. I duly admired it, they lessened their hold and I retrieved my camera. Everyone shook hands, but Mohammed was still praying. I was keen to be on the move before any change of heart. When he was done, my driver rose to his feet, donned shoes, brushed the gravel from his forehead and we continued.