The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2)

by Carol Drinkwater

  From now on, a spiralling ascent. Evening was falling. The radiator grew temperamental. Regular roadside stops to feed it. The day was closing in around us. We still had distances to go. Mountain life, Atlas life. Convoys descending on donkeys laden with burlap sacks bursting with – what? Argan? Camels ascending laboriously, worn down by their loads. Pale pink houses and a pale pink mosque. Stone-terraced walls. Barefoot children. Rural Berbers living simply, in a fashion as old as time. How far in a few short days from the mass industrialisation of Spanish olives! Everywhere, miniature posts of stone. Cairns, demarcating property boundaries. Stones as basins for earth, stones to hold water, stones for the foundations of their modest abodes. Not the mud-brick quarters I had seen in the Sahel. These homes, with rectangular walled gardens, were constructed from locally quarried limestone, and the masonry work was skilled.

  Girls, no more than six years old, slippered feet, faces hidden behind scarves, floral ankle-length dresses, herded their goats, driving them homewards, shooing them up mountainsides. Fresh-faced children charging after their beasts. Easy-limbed within the open unconstructed spaces. Yet even the most undeveloped girl-child was attired for Islam.

  Where patches of mountain had been tamed, cultivated, I found olives. Not wild growth; these had been chosen. At each radiator stop I strolled the narrow road, squinting towards the summits or down into the valleys. I might have been in Turkey, the Taurus ranges. A remarkable similarity. It brought home yet again that these mountains were born, all from the same sea, seabed deposits that erupted so many millions of years ago, in the early life of the planet, heaving up limestone, clay, sand and mighty primitive submerged rocks to create an enclosed ring of mountains round the water’s rim. These ranges are the bones of the Mediterranean. They have been instrumental in the geological formation of the Mediterranean’s terrain, its flora and fauna, a topography that remains more or less the same, save for the African deserts, the entire journey round.

  A few wild olives in the gullies and almonds, too, pockets of trees. Their petals had fallen and they were in light-green leaf. Imagine if I had been here three weeks earlier when the pastel blossoms had been flowering. Mohammed was pouring yet another bottle of water into the greedy, drunken radiator. The evening was absolutely lovely: softly golden, benign, silent. The cradle of an ancient way of life. I spotted groups of scarved women huddled together on the ground, shoulder brushing shoulder, narrating secrets beneath the almond trees, laughing, smiling, serious faced. This was their world. This was how it was, how it remained for them, and observing it, it seemed for a split second to be the perfect otherwhere.

  I stepped freezing, socked feet on to the balcony from a dormitory room that had been damp, cold and really not too comfortable. Due to the altitude, 1200 metres above sea level, it warranted heating but the hoteliers had not been expecting an extra guest and I had arrived at close to nine, the depths of night hereabouts. The residence was a curious place. It conjured up ghosts of a post-World War I sanatorium in Switzerland. I half expected to bump into Freud at breakfast. The facilities were basic. The atmosphere was hushed. People whispered. I was an unexpected stone rolling in late, after the service of dinner had begun at tables embracing a central open fire. The hook-nosed, black-haired Berbers in burgundy sweaters were gracious and accommodating. They were Muslims but they served, expensively, a Moroccan Cabernet to the handful of guests, all of whom were French except for one morose German couple who consumed copiously and exchanged barely a word between them. Why were these people in this middle-of-nowhere spot, this austere retreat? Were they, like me, eager to learn the magic water arts of the argan? No, they were hikers, enjoying the mountains. From my balcony, the exhilarating view swept across ridges and valleys and sparse forests to distant crests folding into ulterior shadowy eminences. This region was renowned for its cascades where ancient olive trees plunged from on high to a narrow plateau where, at the foot of the waterfall, swirled a bubbling natural basin. A two-hour trek through the groves to the baths was a well-trodden path, but, alas, there was no water, no cascade, no pool, nor had there been for three years. Untimely droughts are not uncommon in the Mediterranean, but this was different, unexpected. Climate change?

  Lahrcen, the night porter, registered me. When I explained the purpose of my visit, he agreed to assist in whatever way he could. At first he suggested that I enquire at the Hotel Cascade, nestling at the foot of the barren falls. There lived a family who farmed argan trees, ‘but not here,’ he explained. ‘We are too high here. Argans cannot survive at this altitude.’

  ‘Somewhere more remote,’ I had begged, off the tourist track.

  ‘Leave it with me.’

  I was alone in the dining room enjoying the last mouthfuls of a rudimentary breakfast – bread, coffee and a wide selection of home-made jams – missing my daily conversations with Michel who was in China, when moustachioed Lahrcen, bleary eyed after a night’s tour, tiptoed in. ‘I’ve found you a family,’ he announced without emotion.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘From my own village. A taxi’ll take us. It’s ten kilometres from here but a difficult piste,’ he warned. ‘The driver’ll be here when he’s finished what he’s doing.’

  ‘Can’t we go in your car?’

  ‘I walk to and from home. I’ll take you to meet women who press the argan nut in the traditional way. In one hour, be ready.’ He crept from the dining room.

  Another table was now occupied. A Muslim family. The mother was young, plump, pink and full-cheeked like a hamster, swathed from head to foot in robes and scarves. The father, a little older, hair tinged grey above his sideburns, was also in a long robe and slippers, babouches. They had a small son. Conversation was in Arabic, between father and offspring. They were Arabs, not Berbers. The mother said not a word, only stared dolefully into her breakfast.

  I waited for the driver at a round table on a pebbled terrace alongside a dried-up fountain in the brisk morning air. Birdsong resounded, mellifluous, crystal-clear in this early spring, highland weather. Eventually, Themen pulled up in a Peugeot not fit for the knacker’s yard. I was warned again that the transit would be uncomfortable. Hardly surprising. The vehicle lacked springs altogether and was without seat belts. Although Lahrcen spoke passable French, Themen’s was minimal and much of the conversation was translated. Both men were Berbers.

  ‘It would be rare to find Arabs in the Atlases.’

  They spoke of ‘Moroccans’ as though they were a race apart. These Berbers clung to their ethnic identity and it overrode nationalism. They were Berbers first, Moroccans second. Themen lived with his wife and children in the clifftop village where the hotel was situated, but Lahrcen’s home nestled within the valleys.

  ‘Where I’m taking you, no tourist has ever been,’ he grinned.

  I thanked him for the honour. I did not take his words seriously.

  Our way led us along the tarmacked road I had arrived by. The water crisis in the region was acute, I learned. Wells were empty; concern was mounting; no rain for three years. The same cry everywhere. Some families were quitting, leaving for cities, for jobs, an easier existence, families with no experience of urban living. The majority ended up in the shantytowns.

  We swung off the tarmac and descended a winding bridle path. No gutters, no pavements, just pebbled passage. The tones were pastel yellow, salmon and beige. They lacked nuance, the earth was too dry. Overtaking a pensioner in a turban riding a donkey, buckets flapping against the beast’s haunches, he waved. He was on his way to collect water. Sometimes it was necessary to travel distances.

  ‘That’s my village across the valley.’ Lahrcen was pointing to a settlement some kilometres ahead. The Peugeot continued down the mule track, powder rising up around us, hazing the view.

  ‘You walk this every day?’

  He nodded. ‘Crops are poor. Families can’t survive by farming. I’m fortunate. Few have jobs. I’m chief night porter.’

  I smiled. There were no othe
r night staff.

  His village was composed of a population of one thousand. It was bigger than it looked from this five-kilometre range. As we snaked a descent, we passed small files of women in coloured but faded clothes, or solitary females, all weighed down, bent by provisions stuffed into plastic sacks on their backs. They had come from Agadir by bus and tramped the remainder on foot. I thought back over the climb Mohammed and I had made in the car. The nearest bus station, which was not a daily service, was over twenty kilometres away. This shopping expedition took the women four days. There was just the one taxi in the vicinity and we were in it, but in any case these highlanders never travelled by car. They walked or rode camels and donkeys. There were no vehicles at all in Talmste, Lahrcen pointed out.

  Frequently at the track’s perimeters stood neatly piled stacks of stones, waiting to be taken for house construction when someone required them.

  To reach the inner heart of the settlement, we were obliged to negotiate an upwards maze of tiny lanes and impasses. The car made various false starts, over-revving, leapfrogging towards rocks. On several occasions, we rolled back while the gearbox screeched in agony. People waved and smiled at our approach. They paid no attention to the car’s high jinks. Both men were known here. Eventually, Themen switched off the engine and we piled out, abandoning the Peugeot.

  Lahrcen’s house was an uphill trek. Its structure comprised a jumble of buildings, each a single room leading through to the next hut. I was introduced to his wife, rotund and vibrant, waiting with her coat on, cradling a number of bags as though ready to leave. Alongside her, standing to attention, a line of three children of diminishing height. The tallest, a girl, was clutching the left ear of a white goat with a plump brown chicken perched on its crown. The second girl, the youngest, had a purple birthmark that covered one side of her face.

  Outside, there was an oven, a blackened hole in the wall, with flat iron pans to bake their flat breads. The doors had all been painted in blues and greens, not dissimilar to our farm, and it gave a sense of serenity and harmony to the whitewashed home. There was no furniture, not in any of the rooms I was shown into. A few rugs on the floor, but that was about it. Lahrcen proudly showed me the new kitchen, more a walk-in cupboard or ancient scullery with two bottle-fed gas rings, a boiling kettle and an early-generation Frigidaire. Outside, plants, lacking water, were surviving in big square tins, rather like in the white villages of Greece. The traffic was the echoing clop of donkeys or the slip-slop of children’s slippered feet. On the flat roof was the washing and the satellite. Four hundred stations could be received, Lahrcen bragged. It struck me as unlikely. He enjoyed watching the Agadir football team. Here, there was no football because there was no level ground to play on.

  ‘Shall we go?’

  I nodded, snapping shots of the homes, collapsing biscuit tins hugging the hewn rock slopes.

  ‘Do you have enough film?’ Lahrcen asked. ‘If not, we’ve a shop in the village.’

  ‘Thank you, the camera is digital.’

  ‘Digital?’

  ‘Numérique,’ I repeated. ‘It needs no film.’ I showed him the last couple of shots. He seemed amazed.

  ‘Do you want me to fetch my camera, just in case?’

  I smiled. ‘There’s no need, but thank you for the thought.’

  ‘Well, let’s go. They’ll be waiting for us.’

  Worried, wiry Lahrcen with robust wife at his side patted their offspring, chivvying them back into the house and we returned to the car.

  ‘My wife’s coming with us.’

  That was fine by me. ‘Will the children be safe alone?’ My question amused both parents and I learned that no door was ever locked here, neighbours looked out for one another and there had not been a crime within living memory committed in the village.

  As we walked, I noticed that all the doors of these flat-roofed stone and mud houses were decorated with bold designs in brilliant colours. It seemed to create an atmosphere of extravagant happiness. There was also a mosque, just the one, but none where we were headed. There was a school, too, with black numerals painted all over the exterior walls. My presence was a curiosity to those who passed us on foot or donkey. All were scaling the hillsides fetching, transporting, heaving canisters of water. Most were dusty women whose faces were deeply wrinkled, but whose skin was scrubbed, glowing. A rectangular water basin, fed from high-altitude snowmelts, had been constructed down in the palm of the valley. It was the only one in the vicinity that had not dried up. A small group of the scarved women were seated on the muddied and tiled surface at its side, with children splashing and horsing about close by. As is so often the case in remote communities, the fountain was a meeting place, a focal point for gossip, laundry and interaction.

  We piled into the Peugeot – men in the front, women in the rear – and began a treacherous trajectory along a sandy corridor. A wall of limestone to the right and a deep precipice to the left. I forced myself not to consider the possibility that the taxi, with its treadless tyres, would skid and plummet. Brakes, wheels, gearbox, no part of this machine was mechanically primed for the outing we were embarking upon. On several occasions, we were obliged to stop, return to first gear and proceed again. Once or twice Lahrcen and wife got out to push. I was not allowed to! We were going to Lahrcen’s in-laws whom they had not seen in six months. It was perfect timing; this was the holiday season, Mohammed’s birthday, when families made the social rounds. For a fleeting moment, I thought I might have been duped, that the night porter had set this up to obtain a free ride, but I quickly saw this for its pettiness.

  The mountain slopes were tiered with drystone terraces to conserve the precious rainfalls, protect the flimsy topsoil. Olives and almonds grew.

  ‘Many of the families hereabouts are olive farmers.’ Lahrcen seemed delighted by this fact. But the argan could not survive at this altitude.

  I leaned out of the window, shutting out the yawning abyss alongside us, clicking right and left. A sense of privilege washed over me, an immeasurable gratitude to these people. An hour later, still frogging along, I began to believe Lahrcen; no tourist had penetrated this mountain’s interior. The sight of me caused children, playing outside lone bungalows alongside tethered black or white kids, to roar with laughter, to jump up and down with glee. When we eventually ditched the car, continuing on foot, they followed behind us, heckling excitedly.

  ‘I hope you’re not offended,’ whispered Lahrcen. ‘They’re being cheeky.’

  ‘Not in the least. What are they saying?’ I swung back to take a shot of a trio of unscrubbed, snotty-nosed urchins. As I did, one launched a stone that struck me in the shin. Lahrcen was after them in seconds but they fled, crouching behind the rubbled wall of an abandoned property. Slowly, heads popped up uncertainly, then grinning. I walked back and showed them the photograph. Their eyes grew bright and big as though witnessing magic. Not for the first time did I wish that my camera printed off instant images, like the defunct Polaroid.

  Two women were waiting outside the house as we approached. Lahrcen’s wife plodded on ahead to greet her mother, handing the plastic bags of gifts to the elfin-sized woman. I was welcomed with respect; bowing of heads and shy gestures to come inside. The house of stone and earth had been carved into the hillside. It was substantial, three storeys including stables on the lower level. This family was land-wealthy and, far more crucial, water-rich. Across the narrow strip of caked lane in front of their home, the cliff plunged deeply. Perhaps thirty metres down the precipice was a verdant, irrigated ledge with olives and palm grove. Water arrived by an open conduit that had been fashioned out of baked mud. It was fed by a source back along the valley and resembled the ancient Roman channels, but the Romans had probably taken the principle from the Middle Eastern qanat system. The canal supplied this family and two other properties further back. Its simple principle had to be almost as old as agriculture itself.

  The road went nowhere. It stopped a few yards further along.
Here was journey’s end. No Berber settlements had penetrated beyond. We were situated at the higher level of an inner cavity, a massive breach in the mountain. Now I understood Lahrcen’s remark. No one came here. Perhaps a sturdy 4x4 could make it but otherwise the only access in and out was by foot or on a beast. If the water dried up on this mountainside, this family and the others we had passed would be done for. Their sole means of survival was the rewards of their land. They farmed the olive trees clinging to the lower levels as well as the modest palm groves. Here and there, lower down, grew a rogue, hunchbacked argan and elsewhere the in-laws owned an argan forest. Its oil they sold. It fetched them better prices than olive oil. They were also entitled to harvest certain of the wild crops. The rights to collect the fruits – a yield of about eight kilos per tree – were strictly governed by Berber village traditions and everyone adhered to the unwritten rules. In this way, each family who so wished was entitled to profit from the wild forests. It reminded me of the British medieval system for commoners’ rights, which guaranteed peasants access to trees growing on commons and open parkland.

  By local standards, this family was comfortably off but their livelihoods were entirely dependent upon nature. There was no form of employment here, no community in a sense that we would understand it: no post office, church, mosque, school, hospital, medical care, veterinary surgeon, telephone, not even one shop, and barely a handful of neighbours. They cared for their own animals. Children lacked formal education or they were obliged to return back to the mouth of the pass. There had been one other tiny school soon after leaving Lahrcen’s village. If they fell sick, they healed themselves with plants or they found a way to get out. It was one of the most isolated hamlets I had ever come across. But they had satellite and with it they followed the football and they received the news. The channels here, as elsewhere in the Mahgreb, favoured Islam.

  ‘When the Arabs moved north from the Arabian desert, waging wars along the way, spreading the message of Mohammed, the Berbers of North Africa embraced Islam and took the Arabic language, though many of our tribes have maintained their own tongues,’ explained Lahrcen.