Into the Sahara

"Do not lay a hand on the boy; do nothing to him.  I know now that you fear God, since you have not withheld your only son from me."  Abraham looked about and saw a ram caught by its horns in the bush.  He went and took it, and offered it as a holocaust in place of his son.
--Genesis 22: 12-13

This past weekend, Muslims in Morocco celebrated the feast of Aïd el-Kebir.   Each year, every family that can afford it ritually slaughters a sheep and offers it in sacrifice, commemorating the ram killed in sacrifice by Abraham in place of his own son.  (According to the Quran, it was Abraham's eldest son, Ishmael, who was to be sacrificed, not Isaac as stated in Genesis.)  For weeks before the feast's culmination, Moroccans have been purchasing and fattening sheep; on the feast day itself, each family slits the neck of its sheep, and dines on the meat, offering whatever it does not need to the poor.  The king himself offers a sheep on television, on behalf of the entire nation.

My nephew Doug and I returned Saturday from 2½ weeks in Morocco.  What we saw was not simply a strip of North African desert, but a country rich in diversity -- diversity in scenery, peoples, languages and cultures.  It was an impressive trip, and left me with the hope of visiting parts of the country again in greater depth.  And as a backdrop, throughout our time in Morocco, herds of sheep were being offered for sale in open markets, sheep were being brought home in wheelbarrows, carts, pick-up trucks, automobiles.  Or sheep were being taken home on foot, led by children who treated the sheep as pets.  In one case, we even saw a sheep riding on the back of a motor scooter. 

Doug and I landed in Marrakech on October 10, and had most of the day free to wander around on our own before meeting up with our group.  The next morning, we met with three other travelers for a pre-trek sidetrip to Essaouira on the coast.  Returning to Marrakech on the twelfth, we met the remaining members of our group.  Our eleven-person group consisted of  two couples, five single women, and Doug and me.  We spent another two nights in Marrakech, seeing the city and giving the newly arrived members a chance to adjust their circadian rhythms.  We then climbed into four-wheel drive vehicles and began driving south into the High Atlas mountain range that looms to the south of Marrakech.

The High Atlas is, in fact, high, with peaks climbing above 13,000 feet.  Portions of the mountain range are barren; others are carpeted with cedar trees and populated by inquisitive Barbary apes (tailless macaque monkeys).  The higher peaks of the High Atlas were covered with snow by the time our trip came to an end.

Once we left Marrakech, we were in Berber country.  Very friendly people with a pre-Arabic native culture, an ancient culture that's been influenced by more recent migrations up the caravan routes from sub-Saharan Africa.  Complexions came in every imaginable shade.  The kids get instruction in school, we were told, in Berber, Moroccan Arabic, classical Arabic, French and English.  They spoke mainly Berber, with varying degrees of fluency in French.   

We then drove down into the Dadès valley -- where we walked through oases studded with date palms, and explored fortified kasbahs -- and up again and over the Anti-Atlas mountains, down to the desert town of Zagora.  This was as far south as we traveled.  In Zagora, we encountered a billboard announcing that we were only 52 days by camel caravan from Timbuctu.  Tempting, eh?

The next day, we left paved roads and headed east on stony tracks into the desert, traveling off-road at one point up a dry river bed.  We made our first camp near the village of Remlia, within shouting distance of the frontier with Algeria. We climbed onto camels the next morning.  Or, I should say, we carefully sat on our kneeling camels, and then hung on for dear life as the camels rose, first on their rear  legs, and then on their front legs, pitching us camel-novices backward and forward.  Once up, however, the riding was easy and we quickly learned to enjoy the gentle swaying rhythm as the camels glided along.

We camped a total of four nights -- the first night, believe it or not, it rained -- with the last day and night at Erg Chebbi being the most surreally beautiful part of the trek.  The dunes, in light and shadow, looked exactly like the images of the Sahara that you no doubt have dancing around in your mind.  I found it impossible to take a bad photo.

After leaving our camels behind, we returned to four-wheel drives and drove to Erfoud.  Our hotel was in the form of a kasbah, a wall enclosing a meandering maze of stucco buildings and passage ways.  After the rigors (?) of our four-day trek, we recovered nicely with evening gin and tonics beside the swimming pool, a Berber band playing in the background.

The next day was one long drive north from Erfoud, back over the High Atlas, to Fez, arriving in the evening at our hotel.  Fez is the city I'm most eager to re-visit.  The medina is probably the world's most massive and most intact medieval city. The entire medina is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We did do something of a shopping tour of the medina, meandering through it from one end to the other.  But, for my taste, we did too much shopping and too little meandering.

Fez's medina comprises shops, small industries and residences. It is not merely a tourist shopping destination, as is, for the most part, that of Marrakech.  It's a maze of tiny streets and alleys -- many barely wide enough to allow human passage -- in which one could easily become lost.  Our local guide joked that one of his clients from years ago is still wandering its streets, trying to find a way out.

Paul Bowles caught my feelings about Fez's medina in his 1954 novel, The Spider's House:

"What's very hard to believe," she said presently, "is that this can be existing at the same moment, let's say, that people are standing in line at the information booth in the Grand Central Station asking about trains to New Haven.  You know what I mean?  It's just unthinkable, somehow."

Indeed.  One day was all too short a time to even begin to comprehend the life that occurs in this amazing complex.

And all about us, in Fez even more than in Marrakech, frantic final preparations were being made for Aïd el-Kebir.  Sheep were everywhere, holiday spirits were high, one of the great annual celebrations of Islam was about to occur.  But not for us.  Although we had to leave on the very eve of Aïd, not everyone in our group minded missing the festivities.  The religious symbolism wasn't compelling to everyone -- and those gentle, woolly sheep looked so awfully cute