The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  We crossed the Tizi-n-Tarakatine Pass as the sun was beginning its lazy descent towards the horizon; but the air was clear and the shadows were indigo-sharp as we negotiated the winding road that passed through the col, and as we rounded the corner into the valley I gasped. Before us lay the magnificent Ameln Valley, snaking away to the horizon with the vast wall of the Jebel el-Kest’s mountain range looming over its right flank.

  ‘See the crag up there?’ Miles called back over his shoulder and pointed up at the rock wall. I followed the line of his finger towards the crag. Even at first glance it was massive.

  ‘There’s a classic Joe Brown 5b goes right up through the middle of it; Middle Ground, it’s called. Brilliant: steep and sustained, incredible exposure.’

  I grinned. His enthusiasm was infectious, and it was typical that that down-to-earth Yorkshire climber, no doubt one of Jez’s heroes, should have given a route such a prosaic name amongst all the tongue-twisting Berber exoticism. As we made our way down the valley even Miles seemed to cheer up and started pointing out other routes they had climbed, or wanted to: Great Flake, Old Friends, the White Tower, Black Groove, Black Streak, Great Slab and Agony Arete. All the way down the red walls reared over us. The idea of climbing them made my palms itch, and then sweat, as I felt by turns fascinated and unnerved by the sheer size of the routes: some looked to be three hundred metres tall, or more. I’d never tackled anything so large; any expertise I owned had been won on British crags, and those mostly single pitch. Multi-pitch climbing meant at most a hundred metres of Cornish granite in gentle sunshine with the sea lapping the feet of the cliffs and an ice cream to be bought from the van at the car park when you finished the route. Here, you’d be climbing from dawn to dusk in African heat, on unfamiliar rock, in a country that had neither rescue services nor easy ways down; and certainly no ice cream van waiting at the top. I glanced at Eve to see her reaction to these monster rock faces, but she was a less experienced climber than I was and didn’t seem to have clocked the level of difficulty we faced. Given her lack of big climb experience, I’d be making all the decisions, and probably doing most of the leading too. Abruptly, I felt terrified at the idea of climbing alone with her in such a place. While I might crave control, the weight of responsibility seemed suddenly overwhelming. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing to be with the guys after all: they knew the rock and the area. Perhaps we could climb in a four until I had my eye in.

  My nerves were still jangling as we reached the base of the valley and Jez turned around to grin at both of us. ‘See that up there?’ he said, gesturing out of the window at the tallest crag in the range. ‘We’ll take you up there tomorrow. You’ll love it, won’t they, Miles?’

  Miles cast a sardonic glance back over his shoulder. ‘Consider it a freebie: guided climb from the experts. You can buy us dinner in return.’

  ‘Aye, all week.’ Jez winked, or was it just a droop of his lazy eye? ‘It’s a great walk in, fabulous views. You park at Assgaour and walk up through the ruins of the ancient village, then take one of the goat-tracks up to the crag. Takes a good couple of hours, unless you run it like we did last year. Pull up, Miles: let the ferret see the rabbit, eh?’

  Miles pulled the car in to an unpaved turn-off and we all got out, glad to stretch our legs after the three-hour drive. After the air conditioning of the car, the air felt hot and dry and carried with it a sort of musty scent, at once earthy and spicy. I closed my eyes, savouring the odour, for it smelt nothing like anything I had ever smelt in Britain. Yet somehow it was familiar.

  ‘It’s not that scary, is it?’ There was a hand on my shoulder and I jumped. Miles was peering at me intensely. He had very blue eyes and for some reason this seemed weird to me; for two or three seconds I stared at him as if he were an alien until he looked away awkwardly to where Jez was pointing out the various pitches to Eve.

  ‘Sorry, no, it wasn’t that,’ I said. ‘I was miles away.’

  ‘It’s a big route, most of them are. Three hundred metres. It says 5a in the guide but there’s not too much of it at that grade. Bit of loose stuff to get through: you know, pick a hold; if you don’t like it, put it back.’

  We both grinned and the awkward moment passed. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s amazing, isn’t it? Like a cartoon. Some people just can’t see it, and I have to say it’s easier when it’s in full sun. Once you’ve spotted it you can’t not see it whenever you look at the mountain – it’s like Magic Eye.’

  I looked. The wall of the dark red gorge loomed above a village of scattered mud-brick houses in shades of pink and terracotta, dwarfing the little white mosque, the tiny trees. Vast pyramidal rock formations appeared to have been piled one on top of another, their jagged edges delineated by indigo shadows. The scale was impossible to judge: the whole thing was immense. Under Miles’s instruction, I followed the line of an enormous ridge flanking the right-hand edge of the tallest peak and moved upward. It took a moment to see what he was trying to show me, but when I did I could not look away. There! Two deeply shadowed eyes, a long nose and curving muzzle: a lion’s head: the Lion’s Head. It was bizarre; unmistakable. My heart began to hammer. I closed my eyes, but when I did I found superimposed upon the image of the lion the proud face of a young man, black-eyed and intense …

  10

  Tafraout was full of black-eyed men; but none was the man I had ‘seen’ in my reveries. It had to be said, though, that the local Berbers were a handsome people, with strong facial bones, arresting faces and lithe frames. I watched them strolling around the town in their dusty robes, talking and smoking, laughing at each other’s jokes, sometimes holding hands.

  ‘They do that a lot round here,’ Miles said, nodding in the direction of a pair of elderly gentlemen in hooded robes and the region’s distinctive yellow leather slippers walking by hand in hand.

  ‘Aye, we were a bit worried when we first come here,’ Jez added. ‘Thought they were all arse bandits or something.’

  Eve burst out laughing. ‘Very enlightened of you. Anyway, I think it’s rather sweet. It’s good that men show their feelings, that they can be affectionate towards their friends and family in public. I think the world would be a much nicer place if everyone could walk around holding hands.’

  Jez looked towards Miles and raised an eyebrow. ‘Fancy a stroll?’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

  Off they went down the road, hand in hand, hamming it up for their audience. The locals looked on, puzzled at first; then they began to grin broadly. A couple of boys in Manchester United shirts who had been kicking a ball around in the road outside the café where we were drinking coffee and reading our guidebooks pointed and laughed, then followed them down the street, aping their gait with uncanny accuracy.

  ‘Not sure who’s won the mickey-taking contest,’ I said to Eve, but I was glad no one had taken offence at Jez and Miles’s horsing around.

  My first impressions of the town were those of pleasant surprise. I didn’t know what I had been expecting of the place in which we would be staying, for all the photos I had seen had been of the outlying area and of the climbs. Maybe a crumbling adobe village like those we had seen beneath the Lion’s Head, quaint and otherworldly. Most of what we had seen of Tafraout was modern: a sprawl of low-rise buildings lined the main street in from the valley with ground floors given up to little businesses – lock-up shops and cafés, three mosques and a kasbah-style hotel on a hill. We arrived just as the sun was going down and there were not many women around. ‘They’re probably all inside cooking for their menfolk like good little housewives,’ Eve said, but I wasn’t so sure. The few I had seen so far had been working in the fields, or coming home from them, wrapped head to toe in the traditional black robes of the area, the fabric draped to display as much of the intricately embroidered hems as possible. They wore red leather slippers on their feet and shuffled along under back-breaking loads of greenery that must surely be fodder for their animals. Husbanding livestock in such a re
gion would be demanding and difficult. The only vegetation I’d seen on the way up from the valley had been cacti, palm trees in a dried-up riverbed and some gnarled-looking trees I didn’t recognize but that were dotted about the orangey-red landscape at such regular and widely spaced intervals that I could imagine the complex root systems marking each tree’s territory beneath the surface, snaking out in all directions in a desperate search for water. For all the modern trappings of the place – the pharmacies, cars and satellite dishes – this was clearly a region bordering on desert, rocky, dry and dusty; it would be hard to make a living here. I’d read in the guidebook that most of the men of the area worked away from home for much of the year in cities across Morocco, bringing their Berber values of shrewdness, determination and a strong work-ethic to bear on thriving little businesses in Casablanca and Marrakech, and sending money home to sustain their families. The lion we had seen presiding over the valley was said to watch over their women, children and old folk while they were away, and indeed I’d noticed that the majority of the men we had seen here had been elderly, or young lads. Women in such a community would have to be pretty tough and self-reliant.

  I watched a pair of them now coming up the road carrying a huge basket of vegetables from the market by one handle each. They stopped to exchange greetings with some men standing outside the bakery; one of the young men took the hand of the older woman and kissed it, then returned it to her and touched his hand to his heart. It was a gesture out of the fourteenth century, a touch of ancient chivalry. I found myself smiling broadly and was still doing so as the two women came towards us, chattering to one another. As they drew near, the older of the two paused in her conversation as if feeling my eyes upon her, then quickly drew her veil across her face with her free hand, covering her mouth and nose, and her friend immediately followed her example. They quickened their pace and walked past us, heads averted. I felt obscurely disappointed by this, marked out as a tourist, an intruder in their world. Which, of course, I was.

  The men seemed to be doing a better job of cross-cultural bonding. Down the street, Jez and Miles had joined their mockers in a kick-around, and some of the older men had joined in too, shouting and laughing, running and tackling with a joyous enthusiasm rarely seen except in children.

  ‘Ah,’ said Eve. ‘Football: the universal language.’

  We sat there companionably sipping our coffees and watching the world go by. Across the road a pair of cats – striped, tigery beasts with sharp yellow eyes and long limbs – lay in the shade of a barber’s shop awning and did the same. A metre away a large feral dog lay on her side with three puppies sucking at her teats. People coming out of the shop stepped carefully over them, even though I was sure I had read somewhere that Muslims disliked dogs, considering them unclean. It was all very laissez-faire: I could feel myself relaxing moment by moment, the little tightly wound Isabelle inside me uncoiling by fractions.

  That night we ate at a restaurant Miles had discovered on his first visit, and found we were sharing the place with at least three other climbing teams. Some of us had already hit the hotel bar, since it was the only place in town with a licence to sell alcohol, and several were a bit the worse for wear. There was a lot of giggling and shouting as we stumbled in the darkness down a narrow alleyway bordered by old adobe houses. The doorway to the restaurant was lit by an ornate lantern and framed by hibiscus and bougainvillea. A huge, grinning sun had been painted in bright primary colours on the wall outside: a fitting symbol for the town and its attitude to life. Miles knocked on the door and moments later it was opened by a tall man in blue Berber robes and a red turban. His dark eyes glittered as he surveyed us – a dozen Western climbers in scruffy jeans and fleeces, breathing beer fumes out into the night air, the women with their hair unabashedly uncovered – and I wondered what he made of us, loud and dirty and irreverent: infidels all; but then he caught Jez and Miles in a huge embrace that somehow managed to encompass the whole group and swept us all inside.

  ‘My home, your home!’ he declared in heavily accented English, and we all trooped in, dutifully removed our boots and approach shoes, and sat where we were told, on tabourets and cushioned benches around a series of low circular tables. With candlelight flickering on the carved stucco-work and bright brocades, we feasted on spiced lentils and flatbreads, spectacular tajines of lamb and prunes with almonds, and a fragrant chicken couscous jewelled with bright vegetables and garnished with a scarlet sauce that made all of us gasp in awe and beg for the recipe.

  The restaurateur tapped the side of his nose. ‘Is family secret,’ he told us. ‘It contains mixture of over twenty different spices. If I tell you how is made, you have no reason to come back here. The magic is lost. Mystery is very important in life, no?’

  And with that, he swept our empty dishes away and strode back into the kitchen with a swirl of his blue robe.

  Eve and I raised eyebrows at one another. ‘He’s quite something, isn’t he?’

  ‘Very striking,’ I agreed, thoughtful. There was something self-contained, confident and easy about the manner of the people we’d encountered in the few short hours we’d been here, which was attractive to someone who was used to the cocky one-upmanship of London men, a competitiveness that masked a deep insecurity and distrust of others. ‘Don’t get too interested,’ Jez said, eyeing us with amusement as we craned our necks to get a glimpse into the kitchen. ‘Someone got there first. We met his wife last year.’

  Talk turned inevitably to climbing and plans for the next day. It was a mixed group – in age, ability and ambition. Three other women, one of them grey-haired and in her fifties, the other two (Jess and Helen) younger and flaunting rather more flesh than was wise, and five men other than Jez and Miles: two middle-aged guys and three young hotshots who boasted about the new routes they were here to bag. ‘Acres of unclimbed rock,’ the blond one was saying, ‘dozens of routes just waiting to be taken.’ He spoke as if he were in the vanguard of a conquering army about to ravish the virgins of the city.

  Helen now leant across and batted her eyelashes at Jez. ‘It all sounds a bit hard round here. The climbing, I mean. Jess and I were wondering if you and Miles’d be up for taking us out with you tomorrow, since you’ve been here before, as guides, like. Give us a bit of an introduction to the rock?’ She admitted they’d never climbed outdoors before.

  Miles’s face was the very picture of horror, but Jez was kinder. ‘Sorry, girls, love to, but we’re taking Eve and Iz out with us tomorrow. You should try bouldering on the granite; there’re even a couple of bolted routes you could have a go at – technically difficult but not dangerous.’

  Helen shot me a look of pure female jealousy, hard and witchy. I gave a little shrug – not my battle, honey – but Eve was loving every moment of it. ‘Yes, we’re going to do the Lion’s Face,’ she said, putting her hand territorially on Jez’s thigh, and I watched his face go very still as he tried not to betray a reaction.

  Someone took pity on the girls: an older man with a pale, lugubrious face and glasses who was here with his wife – the woman with short grey hair – and brother-in-law. ‘We’re climbing just above Oumsnat tomorrow,’ he said to Helen. ‘There’s a single pitch wall there with lots of good introductory routes on it – you can come with us.’

  I could see that Helen was not going to give up without a fight, but luckily our conversation was interrupted by the restaurant manager coming back with a large tray bearing a silver teapot and a dozen glasses. He was followed by a blonde woman in a Moroccan tunic and jeans who surveyed us all and grinned, enjoying our surprise at seeing a European emerge from a Berber kitchen rather than one of the ubiquitous black-robed ladies. He poured out the mint tea from a ridiculous height with great élan so that it formed a frothing foam in the little decorated glasses that she passed amongst us along with some exquisite little almond biscuits. When she got to me, she stopped in her tracks and bent forward.

  ‘How lovely. Did you buy it here?’
/>
  I had forgotten I was wearing the amulet: the climbers were all far too interested in their sport to comment on it. I ran my fingers over it and it suddenly felt warm to the touch, as if it had taken in the warmth of the candles and the food and stored it in the red glass discs.

  ‘Ah, no. It was … a gift.’

  ‘Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘A little,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘I reckon it looks like a Moack,’ Jez grinned. ‘Don’t you, Miles?’

  Miles made a face, uninterested. ‘Who climbs with Moacks nowadays? Bloody antiques.’

  ‘My dad gave me his: best runner I ever had,’ Jez said cheerfully.

  The restaurateur’s wife grinned. ‘I doubt it was made in Sheffield,’ she said, astutely guessing his accent. ‘It looks as if it’s from the desert, or at least inspired by work from the desert tribes. Tafraout’s on the ancient trading route out of the Sahara towards Taroudant and the coast. There are a lot of southern influences in the jewellery made here.’