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

The lonely moor

Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there arose in the distance a gray, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream.
--The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Hound of the Baskervilles may be the most popular -- and best -- of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle.  I first read it when I was about 15, shivering with pleasure -- and I read it again this week. 

I still enjoy it.  I'm perhaps less overawed by Holmes's powers of deduction than I was as a teenager.  But both then and now, I'm able to lose myself in Conan Doyle's vivid portrayal of the English moors -- their gloom, their loneliness, their desolation.  The gothic atmosphere painted by Conan Doyle is as memorable as his detective's solution of a bizarre crime, a ghastly murder apparently caused by a fire-breathing hound from hell.

But is Dartmoor -- where the action takes place -- really as dismal and gothic as the story would suggest? I don't know. I've never been to Devon, where the moor is located. It's a large (for England) tract of land -- 368 square miles of uncultivated peat and granite, bogs and tors, bisected by (reasonably enough) the River Dart. The treachorous swampland, the mire that ultimately claimed the life of Conan Doyle's villain, really exists -- Fox Tor Mires being its actual name, rather than Great Grimpen Mire. And the mysterious neolithic standing stones and stone huts are there to be seen, just as in the story.

But, as I look at the photos of Dartmoor that come up from a Yahoo! search, it's hard to see much that's sinister. In fact, the moorland is quite lovely -- the moors and tors looking much like parts of Wyoming. Come to think of it, my expectations of grimness and desolation while I crossed Rannoch Moor in the West Scottish Highlands were never quite realized. Rannoch Moor was also beautiful, and not at all foreboding.

Admittedly, the day I hiked across Rannoch Moor was exceptionally clear and sunny. And most of the photos I've seen of Dartmoor were taken on equally appealing days, days that would tempt the tourist -- from England or anywhere else in the world -- to come visit. In the fog, perhaps, during a wild and stormy night, I might feel different, especially if I were spending the night in a house overlooking the blackness of the moors, my room lit only by a candle.

Part of Dartmoor's grim reputation -- aside from its being featured in The Hound of the Baskervilles -- probably derives from the presence on the moor of Dartmoor Prison. One of the creepy plot devices encountered in the Conan Doyle story was the desperate and brutish escapee from that prison, at loose upon the moors, whom Holmes and Watson encountered. But I also suspect that the average, untraveled Brit -- after a thousand years of civilization and agricultural cultivation -- simply sees wilderness through eyes different from ours as Americans. (Howls of British protest will be cheerfully heard out.)

I'm thinking of our own English forebears, settling in New England. Recall The Scarlet Letter, in which Hawthorne causes the town to represent Christianity and civilization, and the wilderness outside the town to represent barbarism and the realm of Satan. This very early American attitude reflected European sensibilities, where men and women for centuries had strenuously devoted their lives to clearing the forests, exterminating the wolves, seeking out and burning covens of witches frolicking in the wildlands -- a long, continuous effort to replace the wilderness with safe, cozy towns; fortified castles; well-tended crops.

It wasn't until the nineteenth century that we ourselves, in America, began breaking free from this mindset, adopting in its place a romantic exaltation of wilderness. Any major American art museum will contain examples of the nineteenth century's Hudson River School, and later paintings of the American Mountain West. The Sierra Club and the photography of Ansel Adams arose out of this spirit of nature romanticism.

Which is not to say that the British don't also have a strong romantic attachment to nature. In general, however, British romanticism seems to value landscapes shaped by civilization -- the old mill, the arched bridge, the ruined abbey, the ancient Roman pathway -- more frequently than nature in the raw.

All of which is simply a long-winded way of saying that Americans have until rather recently lived in a country more undeveloped than developed -- as did the Europeans -- but have done so during an era when the forests were easy to clear and the wolf at the door didn't pose an existential threat. As a result, wilderness seems more natural and less threatening than it does, perhaps, in Europe. The photos I see of Dartmoor are beautiful, and I hope to visit it someday. But neither its size nor its wildness seem exceptional from an American's perspective.

Of course, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the entire Lake District would fit within the combined city limits of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and the Langdales within the Lake District never rise above three thousand feet. And yet -- last summer, I did manage to get lost in the fog, didn't I?

Play it, Sam

Time goes by.  It seems hard to believe, but one week from now my nephew Doug and I will be settling in, following dinner, at the Es Saadi Hotel in Marrakech.  A long distance, physically and culturally, from my allegedly "haunted" house here in Seattle.

I'm reviewing the clothing and equipment list sent to me by the "adventure company."  The fact that the list is much less extensive -- and thankfully includes fewer items requiring purchase -- suggests the difference between my Morocco trip and other trips I've enjoyed with this same provider.  No ice axe or sub-zero rated sleeping bag this time.  The oddest suggestion is for bicycle pants, to provide additional padding between a camel's back and my own backside. 

Somewhere I have that item, left over from a bicycle tour a number of years ago, but I can't figure out where the pants are stored away.  It's getting down to crunch time -- either find them soon or buy new ones.

The mental preparation is more difficult than the physical gathering of clothes and equipment.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've always been fascinated by desert lands in general, and Morocco in particular.  Certainly ever since I saw that ersatz Moroccan movie, Casablanca.

I doubt that I ever saw Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in Road to Morocco, and let's just say that I'm not viewing that particular film in preparation for the trip.  I am reading, however, Paul Bowles's novel The Spider's House.  I'm only about one fourth of the way through the 1954 novel, but it gives the reader a highly atmospheric feel for Fez -- where we end our trip -- during the period when popular resistance and violence were intensifying, agitation that would lead to the eventual end of the French Protectorate in 1956.

Over a half century has passed since Bowles wrote about his favorite city, and Bowles was already lamenting Fez's physical and cultural changes in 1954, but I suspect that the book remains a good introduction to certain physical and psychological aspects of that part of the world.  I probabaly will be finishing it during the flight over.

Doug will leave San Francisco next Wednesday, about the same time as I fly out of Seattle.  We meet at JFK, where we'll have a layover of several hours before departing for Madrid.  And thence to Marrakech. 

Rev up the four-wheel drives.  Cue the camels.  I'm on my way!

Exorcizo te ...

Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei Patris omnipotentis, et in nomine Jesu Christi Filii ejus, Domini et Judicis nostri, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti, ut descedas ab hoc plasmate Dei (name), quod Dominus noster ad templum sanctum suum vocare dignatus est, ut fiat templum Dei vivi, et Spiritus Sanctus habitet in eo.

It's an old house.  Oddly shaped rooms; old-fashioned, leaded-glass windows; a few interior doorways without doors; twisting halls usable only as wall space for bookcases.  A puzzling doorbell button outside the den (where I'm composing this post) connected to no actual doorbell.  Lots of strange creaks in the night, not to mention squirrels running across the roof, the occasional rats in the walls, the closet door in my bedroom that often makes a slamming noise when I step out of bed in the morning, and -- of  course -- the ever-intrusive raccoons.

Normal stuff.

But ghosts?  No. Not in the twenty-five years I've lived here.  Never.

Until now.

My housecleaning service called this morning.  The manager was apologetic. My latest cleaning woman, with me only since my August 3 blog on the subject, is flying the coop.  The reason?  My house's "paranormal activities."  She put up with it, she says, for one four-hour visit.  The odd noises. Noises without plausible explanation.  Noises that paused only when she yelled at them, demanding that they stop. 

But her last visit was too much.  The angry sound of someone pounding on the keys of my piano.  The "cold room" -- the room frigid beyond any natural explanation.  The "dark mass" she watched move toward the electric outlet and disconnect the cord of the vacuum cleaner she was using.  Who could blame her?  She's outta here.

 The manager was apologetic, as I say, but also somewhat curious -- humorously, but nervously curious. Perhaps, I had encountered phenomena of this kind before? Heard other complaints?  No, you say? In going back through the service's records, it appears that, about two years ago, another cleaning woman had declined to work further in my house for exactly the same reason -- odd, inexplicable occurrences that scared the bejesus out of her.

I, of course, initially suspected this to be merely a pretext. She just didn't like cleaning my house.  But following the first time she cleaned my house, in August, the service routinely interviewed her about any problems she experienced working at my house that she wanted to discuss. The cleaner reported that she loved my house, enjoyed working here, and was happy to continue with me as a client.  Then -- during her next visit or two -- things began to happen. 

The manager has had a long, in-depth face-to-face meeting with the service's employee. My housecleaner knows I've lived here a long time, and have had no problems.  She argues that, perhaps, she's more sensitive to the spiritual world than I am.  Or that the spirits who've lived amicably with me (wholly unbeknownst to me, yea, these 25 years) for unknown reasons hate and despise her.  Whatever.  She's had enough.  She ain't coming back.

And so, the search is on for another housecleaner. 

If this were a movie, of course,  you'd all be yelling at me to move out. Now! While I still have my sanity and my life.  Call upon Ghostbusters!  Consult with a priest!

But I'm a child of the Enlightenment.  Everything has a natural explanation. I certainly wouldn't be suspicious just because my pregnant wife had a sudden craving to wear a tannis root charm. I'd even go down into the dark cellar without a flashlight if I heard weird noises.  I'd even kee ........oh ... oh no !!!!!!!!! it can't be!! ............... aaaaaaghhhh!

" .... qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos, et saeculum per ignem."