by Annie Hawes
Mohammed the father, unfazed, has begun idly tracing out a map of our journey in the breadcrumbs we have somehow managed to spread all over his table. He has decided to show us how easily we can get to the Sahara, and to Timimoun, without passing through more than a small corner of Godless Algeria. We are surprised that Mohammed even knows where Timimoun is. It’s a tiny town, several hundred miles away across a large chunk of desert, and in another country.
It may be small, he says, but in a desert, small does not mean unimportant. And in its heyday, this funduq was one of the last stops on the trans-Saharan route towards Tangier. Once upon a time merchants and their camel-trains would arrive here from right down in the desert – and sometimes even all the way from distant Mali – telling tales of their travels. The name of Timimoun was often heard within these walls.
The town of Adrar, Mohammed remembers, was the first stop after the desert crossing where you would find drinkable water. But with only one more day’s travel northwards, you arrived at the green paradise of Timimoun, the shade of its date-palm oasis. There, the caravans could really rest after the hot sand and the dry thirst: the walled palmeraies cool and fresh, the welcome sound of trickling water everywhere, the people friendly and hospitable. And you paid for your lodgings there not with money, not with goods, but with the manure from your animals! Because in Timimoun, manure was as precious as gold. How else could their gardens bloom in all that sand? So of course they would always welcome travellers – and their beasts of burden even more.
But when was this, we ask, perplexed. It must have been long ago, surely?
Of course it was, he says, laughing at our ignorance. But the tales still got told when he was a boy. Things don’t get forgotten as fast here in the countryside as they do in the cities. And even when Mohammed was a child, the caravans still came up from the Tafilalet – where the ruins of Sijilmassa lie – and from the Gourara, the string of oases with Timimoun at their head. They would bring delicious fresh dates and strings of dried figs, spices and woollen cloth, camel-hair burnouses, baskets made of palm-leaves and panniers of palm-fibre for your mules. But the nomads’ visits, he says, had slowed to a trickle over the last few generations. The nomads’ traditional spring and autumn grazing lands straddled both sides of the border; they had always crossed it at will, and combined their trading with the grazing of their flocks. But on the Algerian side the French had taken the best land and covered it with vineyards. The rich grazing had gone: there was little reason to come this way any more. Then in the 1960s the French army captured every nomad it could find – 6,000 of them, people said – and locked them up behind barbed wire in what they called regroupement camps. And what was left of their pasture, up on the high plateau, was split in two along the colonists’ border with a lethal fence; 200 miles long, 5,000 volts of electricity running through it, flanked by minefields into the bargain. Meant to stop the Algerians getting help from across the border in their war for independence. The French lost Algeria anyway, but they certainly put an end to the nomads’ old ways. You’d be hard put to it to find a camel-hair burnous around here these days.
Gérard wonders, he says, why they haven’t thought of electrifying the fences and adding a few minefields around Ceuta and Melilla.
Tobias looks most alarmed. He hasn’t caught the irony and, worried about what sort of nutters he has taken up with, says nervously that he doesn’t think Africans deserve actually to die for trying to get into Europe. I submit a much better idea: why not copy a superbly eco-friendly British fence from a little earlier in the twentieth century, a simple natural barrier of impassably ferocious thorn bushes, fifteen feet high and thirty feet wide, built – or planted, rather – in India. A thousand miles long, I seem to remember. Or was it two? Not designed to stop Indians getting into Britain, of course, but to stop them getting to their own seashore, where they would cunningly evade British taxes, and undermine British authority, by making their own salt.
Tobias gets it now and laughs weakly.
Mohammed the father, meanwhile, has returned to work on his breadcrumb map, over which he soon has Gérard and Guy poring. Instead of heading east along the coast as we’re planning, then turning south for the desert after the city of Algiers, he says, cutting a north–south swathe with his fingertip to represent the border, we could avoid the whole Mediterranean part of Algeria, with all those great cities full of troublemakers. Just head south-east inside Morocco and take to the desert right away. A hundred-odd miles to the south of the main Oujda frontier, the one we’re heading for, a perfectly good back route crosses the border. Here, he adds, crumbling another fragment of bread to cover the south-east more thoroughly, at Figuig – it’s an oasis town, on the old desert trail heading straight for Timimoun. Most of it’s asphalted, these days. And the only city you need meet en route is Beni-Abbes, a small and peaceful place.
I’ve already stopped listening. There’s no way Guy is going to want to miss out on Algiers, home of his fathers. And we’ve got a perfectly good – and, thankfully, inedible – map of our own, anyway, if we change our minds.
Mohammed the son now returns, accompanied by Towel-man and a delighted Yazid, who is positively glowing, bearing in triumph a tiny baby goat wrapped in a bit of sacking. He certainly seems to have enjoyed getting back to his roots out there. They bring the creature over to the table for our admiration.
Just a quick look, says Mohammed. It needs to go straight back to its mother.
It lets out a tiny bleat. Aaaah, isn’t it lovely? I say, reaching out a hand to stroke its sweet little nose. Mistaking my finger, understandably perhaps, for a source of goat’s milk, it bites me. Quite hard. OK, it definitely does need to get back to its mother.
Goatless again, the menfolk get back to their route-planning. I turn to gazing about the room. A gleaming blue-neon fly-killer attracts my attention now, buzzing quietly on one of the far tables, evidently brand new, making a loud hiss and crackle as some passing insect meets its untimely end. Tobias catches my eye, gives a wink and a jerk of his head in its direction, followed by a big grin. Aha! That’s what we brought here! Electronic goods, as predicted. A contraband fly-killer! I don’t think I’ll bother telling Gérard.
Back to the men’s travel conversation. And now I get a terrible urge to giggle. This scenario is absurdly similar to so many I have sat through back in Europe, with one of those numerous travel-fetishist men who insist on going through every detail of some journey you’re about to take: exactly which motorway exit you’ll need, how bad the traffic is on a Tuesday morning, the good short-cut from the Little Chef, don’t miss the bridge at Wyre Piddle, third turning on the left . . . I always stop listening, just as I have now. I won’t remember all that stuff, won’t recognize landmarks I’ve never seen before, and I’ve usually got a perfectly good map of my own.
The only difference here is that Mohammed is wearing a jellaba. And that we’re not talking about the intricacies of the A32 but of a trans-Saharan desert trail. I suppose this does prove, against all expectation, that there once was some evolutionary use for middle-aged male travel-fetishism. It probably saved countless lives in the high days of cross-Sahara camel-trade. But just think how many generations of middle-aged merchants must have sat in this very spot, discussing ad nauseam the minutiae of their camel- and mule-travels, in order for not just the fame, but the precise location, of Timimoun to have spread this far. I’m glad I wasn’t there.
6
Cool, fresh mountain air. We are in a high valley cleft in the hills, where a pair of spectacularly craggy peaks towers above us, rising into a crisp blue sky. We have finally arrived at Chefchaouen, a jumble of buildings nestling into the stony hillside like some precipitation of the rocks themselves, a rough crystal formation of whitewashed cubes. A red-sandstone citadel guards the main square of this bustling market town, where we are now casting about for signs of a hotel. There should be plenty available, Tobias said. Come summertime, this place is always packed with cannabis
tourists from Europe and America.
Tobias has left us now, gone on his way with Yazid, without ever giving away the secret of our mysterious delivery to the Restaurant Ismail. Or so Gérard believes. We do know, however, that Tobias’ morale has taken a turn for the better. He has vowed to take his courage in both hands, as soon as he gets back to his mother’s tonight, and ring Marla again. He is sure, in his heart, that hers was just a momentary panic, only natural in a young girl thinking about her future wedding. She will have come to her senses by now, and all will be well. He will be in Texas by summer, he is sure. A happily married man with a good American job.
Gérard wonders idly about that huge, long frontier between Mexico and the USA. He’s sure he’s heard that there are many hundreds of miles of fencing along it. Does anyone happen to know if the Texans have some upgrading plans in the pipeline?
This main square here is on the edge of the old medina, just like the one in Tetuan, but this is a much more countrified version. Chefchaouen doesn’t have an extra, colonial city outside the old medina walls, the way Tetuan does. As Yazid pointed out, the colonizers never did get much of a grip here. A mere thirty years, all told. And Chefchaouen has succeeded in staying as it always was, mostly contained within the red-sandstone ramparts built over five centuries ago. It is a big place, too. Somewhere within those walls, says Gérard, there are a whole twenty mosques. Chaouen, he adds, means ‘peaks’, or ‘horns’, while chef means ‘see’ or ‘look’. Isn’t that an amazing name for a town? ‘Look at the Horns’!
That depends, says Guy warily. You could just as easily translate it ‘Peak View’, couldn’t you? I gather from this dusty response that Guy has certain suspicions concerning the source of Gérard’s information.
At the bus stop across the square, a bus-driver waits for a jellaba’d man to persuade a reluctant sheep into the luggage compartment below. A farmers’ market is going on at the far end, an open souk. Up there, chaos reigns. Can there always be this many people shopping in Chefchaouen? We’ve tried doing the tour and have had to retreat. We stumbled between mules and donkeys, were jostled by crowds of shoppers and spectators, tripped over women in those Peruvian Berber outfits sitting cross-legged on their rugs with pyramid piles of fat, round loaves. We squeezed past a queue of women taking their turn to speak to a man who sat inside a wooden box, dressed in gleaming white linen jellaba and massive white chèche – a kind of low-slung sentry-box, a stool outside it for the client of the moment. A scribe, the local man of letters. Evidently, here in the wild country, none of Yazid’s alternative solutions to the public reading of letters has yet caught on. And no wonder the scribe looked so sleek and prosperous. More than half of the citizens of Morocco can’t read or write, according to The Little Cunning One. The figure’s more like seventy per cent for women, while thousands of their sons and husbands leave home to find work each year. Think how many missives must go to and fro. Past the scribe and into the fruits and vegetables area, works of art in red, yellow, green and gold, gleaming on beautifully arranged stalls, or casually heaped in buckets and boxes, the surplus produce of someone’s vegetable garden; the grower lying in wait, cross-legged on the ground, to trip us up again. And broad beans without end – whole stalls piled high with them, bowls, buckets and sacks overflowing, in every possible shade from dark brown through green to almost-white, the stallholders doing a roaring trade. More Berber women passing through the crowd, one bent double under a load of kindling-wood, another with a smiling face and a swaddled baby strapped to her back, who stops to chat with an Arab woman, a white haik covering her from head to toe. How could these two groups of people can have lived side by side for centuries, neighbours and friends, and yet have kept their cultures so separate, I wonder? Outside the square, on the way to the mule- and donkey-park, more food: sheep, goats and chickens. Meat on legs, ready to load onto the bus. And butchers standing by, knives sharpened, poised for the kill, in case you prefer your dinner in passive mode. Time for a quick exit.
Turning to skirt back round the crowd, the next woman we passed was – someone we knew! Mariam the schoolteacher, along with her husband, whom we now know as Aytan – an intense-looking young man with a short black beard – accompanied by a much older man, a countryman by the look of his weather-beaten face and rough wool jellaba, whom she presented as her neighbour Mokhtar. She and Aytan had been travelling the hills with Mokhtar all afternoon, on a quest for a new, and inexpensive, mule for his farm, she said. No luck so far. Not a mule to be found. Not at a reasonable price.
Mokhtar shook our hands in the slowest and most ceremonious style, with a long gaze into each of our eyes, and a pause at each hand-on-the-heart. Then he expanded for some time, in a mixture of French and Spanish, upon the price of mules and the dishonesty of their vendors, while Gérard and Guy nodded wisely and sympathetically, as if to horse-trading born. Mokhtar was appalled by the day’s bargaining. Especially that one up the road from the Restaurant Ismail! Daylight robbery! Gérard agreed that, indeed, in this day and age, the world was full of dealers from whom he himself wouldn’t buy so much as a second-hand donkey.
And all of a sudden, we all found ourselves invited to join our new acquaintances tonight for the feast of Eid al-Fitr. Everyone in the whole of Morocco – in the whole of the Islamic world, from here to Indonesia – would be celebrating the end of Ramadan and the Breaking of the Fast tonight, said Mokhtar. We must come and celebrate with them! Plenty of food for everyone! Look for a hotel? He would not hear of such a thing!
Mariam and Aytan backed him up. They would be eating with Mokhtar and his family anyway, they said. There was plenty of room to sleep, if we didn’t mind a pile of woollen rugs on the schoolroom floor. The school would be closed for the next three days for Eid, anyway.
Our first taste of the startling hospitality of North African people, which would continue to amaze us throughout our journey. It was agreed, then. No hotel. We would all squeeze into a couple of taxis, they said, as soon as the market was over, and head for open country. Brilliant, we said.
Little did we know just how brilliant. We would end up spending half the night and most of the next day with our hosts, stuffing our faces with as much enthusiasm, I’m ashamed to say, as if we too had spent the last four weeks fasting. I have never seen such an amazing array of food produced with so little in the way of equipment. Or, for that matter, such heroic commitment to educating the young with so little in the way of equipment. But more of that later.
The three of us have now paused to regroup for a moment on the terrace of a bar at the quiet end of the square, shaded by tall, feathery eucalyptus trees. It isn’t open, of course, but its chairs and tables have been thoughtfully left out for weary passers-by. A man comes peddling pastries from a tray – some fig-and-honey rolls for later? he asks enticingly, spotting my interest. Almond cakes? Vanilla slices? Cumin biscuits?
I can’t resist it. And we need a little something to contribute to the evening’s entertainment, after all. I get two huge paper cones, half a dozen of each. I don’t bother even trying to barter. It seems ridiculously cheap anyway – why should I quibble over a bit of rich-country-resident tax being added to what a local might pay?
Alas, within minutes of our arrival, our quiet end has stopped being quiet. A lorry-load of wood is being decanted and reloaded onto a train of donkeys, a few feet away from us, to be carted off uphill into the medina. One spirited beast has taken violently against this thankless task and is protesting at the top of its voice.
The wood is for the hammam, says a small child who has now attached himself to us. For heating the water. Interesting information, and we reward him with the biro he asks for. Mistake. We are now swamped with infants, squeaking and gibbering, trying to scare us by bouncing out from behind the tree-trunks or creeping out from under our seats, giggling hysterically and asking over and over again for biros and/or dirhams. Now, beside us, a nice, peaceful man who has been sitting quietly smoking in the back of his open van
suddenly reveals another, noisier side to his nature. A passer-by approaches him, brandishing a large pair of scissors, and he leaps nimbly down from his vehicle to reveal a knife-grinder’s wheel within, coupled to a two-stroke bike engine. He starts the motor, creating a throbbing bass counterpoint to the donkey’s roarings and the infants’ squealings. So far, so loud. But now he applies the blunt blade of the scissors to the stone wheel. The sound of a thousand fingernails scraping across a blackboard. Every fibre of my being tells me to run.
Time, I think, for a tour of the old town. Thank the Lord for city walls. A marvellous invention. Just a few yards inside them, all is peace.
Moustafa was right: once you’re inside the city walls, there is certainly a lot of blue in Chefchaouen. Every doorway, lintel, railing, even the plant-pots sitting outside the front doors on the narrow pavements of the medina – all of them have been painted in many variations on a strong, vibrant, Madonna blue. Nothing I ever saw in Portugal could compete with this. There is no sign of a blue-paint Hand of Fatima here, though, and little need for such a thing, since half the doorknockers in the town are little brass Hands, palm out and fingers raised – the correct alignment for warding off the Evil Eye.
The inhabitants of Chefchaouen don’t stop their blue paint mission at woodwork, metalwork and ceramics, either. They even add a dash of their favourite colour to the lime wash they do their exterior walls with. Every street, wall, house, strikes a slightly different blue-note from its neighbours; the alleyways glow with a surreal, cool light. These are obviously the homes of people whose morale is high. Everything amazingly clean, neat and in good repair. A very prosperous-looking town, whose prosperity, we gather, is based mainly on the marijuana plant.
We walk on uphill through alleys perfumed with frying garlic, coriander, cumin, cinnamon – festive preparations on hand. Above us, two women are silhouetted against the sky, calling out to one another as they hang their washing on high roof terraces. One low doorway stands open; inside it a man is working at a vertical loom. He turns as we pass, and we all wish one another No Harm. The alleys are just wide enough for goods to move freely – for two laden donkeys to pass one another, that is. Which they do rather frequently, causing us to squeeze ourselves into bright blue doorways. Good town planning, this, though, as I know from Italy. The narrower the alley, the more hours of shade it gets in the day, and the more temperate the homes and streets will be. There are lots of steep twists and turns, arches everywhere, and plenty of evidence that this is a town which has grown over the centuries, extra space added on, squeezed in, wherever it could be fitted. Aerial rooms have been suspended just above head-height on beams slung across the streets, filling the space between the houses and forming low shady tunnels, with benches of stone under them so the old folk can rest their bones from the steepness. Off the main drag, a profusion of secretive arches and even narrower alleyways, of nooks and crannies, gates into tiny patios or vegetable plots, sudden dead ends where you find yourself in somebody’s wood store or sheep-pen. So many centuries have they been working on these buildings, replastering and rewhitewashing, that there is not a plumb line to be seen anywhere: the whole thing looks organic, created more by the hand of Nature than of Man. Nature in a very azure mood, that is.