Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air... A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it takes its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.
--Paul Bowles
As an antidote, perhaps, to the rains of England through which I've just finished hiking, my nephew Doug and I will visit Morocco in October. It's a country that's always fascinated me, probably ever since I first watched Casablanca -- a film shot entirely in the Warner Bros. studios, with the exception of one scene shot at the Van Nuys airport! The magic of the silver screen.
The trip is sponsored by the same "adventure company" that guided Pascal and me to 18,000 feet in Nepal last October, but this "adventure" will be somewhat less strenuous. We will fly into Marrakesh about three days before the tour begins and drive to the coastal city of Essaouira, originally a seventeenth century Portuguese fortress. So exotic and unknown a destination that (to me) it seems odd that Jimi Hendrix hung out there in his early days!
The tour proper begins back in Marrakesh, an eleventh century Moorish city. We then drive into and over the High Atlas mountains and down into the Sahara. We will stay overnight at various villages along the way, as we plunge deeper and deeper into the sea of sand and rock. The central feature of the trip will be four days traversing a bit of the Sahara atop spiteful camels, staring up at the swirling stars at night. Remember Lawrence of Arabia? Remember that scene where he dressed up as an Arab for the first time, strutting back and forth in front of a mirror, swirling his robes about him? You know that floor-length mirror in my guest bedroom? Well, never mind. You get the idea. So, yeah. I daydream. And I'll be riding camelback for four days. Or, as the itinerary tactfully puts it, we can alternately walk and ride, depending on our feelings about the experience. And, as the itinerary also tactfully puts it:
[The camels'] saddles are cushioned with traditional blankets to make our safari a comfortable experience over the magical seas of orange dunes and contrasting spaces of shiny black volcanic rock.
Okaaaaaay! It sounds very cool in theory. I'll let you know how it works out on the ground, as it were.
The trip ends up in Fez (or Fès), a medieval city with a large, ancient native quarter, or medina. Its medina is the sort of place in which I like to imagine (romanticist that I am) that I could end up losing my way, unable to find my way out, forced to spend my remaining days living hand to mouth in a native hovel, cadging dirhams (or euros) from tourists to pay for my couscous, and attempting each day to write the great novel that will earn me enough in a cash advance to pay my airfare back to America.
That American writer, Paul Bowles, after all, ended up spending most of his years in Tangier, and actually finished up his great existential novel, The Sheltering Sky (which I read a couple of weeks ago while hiking in England!) in Fez.
The sky hides the night behind it and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above.
Maybe so. Maybe not. But the trackless dunes beneath the desert sky should be an excellent place to test Bowles's scary epigram.
And Morocco has plenty of desert.
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