Morocco: Act II

We drive across rocky ground for what seems like hours. We twist and turn avoiding hulking brambles of shrubbery. We double back in the face of sudden chasms, eroded ruts dug out by previous travelers. What scars are we inflicting on this desert, I wonder. A quick tumbling in the corner of my eye is not tumbleweed, but a broken down cardboard box rushing across the ground. It’s moving insanely fast, showing just how swiftly the wind is blowing. It’s almost five miles to the outpost. By the time we reach it, the sun droops low in the sky and is darkened by the torrent of sand invading us from the south east. Pulling in to park, we pass the sandblasted shell of an old four-door from the seventies. Stripped of every last piece, it sits there on the edge of the desert, hollow and vacant like the outpost itself. In a hurry, I pack and repack, trying to minimize our baggage into the desert. I’m marginally successful but still fight against the sand to get it inside where we’ll drink tea and wait for our guide. We meet the jovial Aussies we’ll trek out with and share the sort of idle chit chat one does in such situations. Before setting out, our guide helps us tie our headscarves for protection against the sands and winds. I deeply regret not buying a flowing white one like the Aussie’s. Other than being Asian, he looks just like Lawrence of Arabia.

We set off into the storm a real caravan: Jenny in front, then me, then the Aussies. We’re strung one to the next, each camel’s nose tied to the one ahead’s rump. At the front, we’re lead by a Berber guide, walking in bare feet, his head wrapped like ours against the storm. It’s slow going, but I feel good on a camel. They’re narrow and bony at the top of their hump, but the saddle cushions me and offers an iron bar to clutch when things get bumpy. Otherwise, I just sit up straight and sway with the camel’s rhythm. We head East and then South. For a long time, the outpost looms in the distance, a reminder of what we’re leaving behind. It’s getting dark and the wind is blowing fiercely. I worry we’ll come to camp any minute, still within eyeshot of civilization: children playing in the desert, still in the shadow of the city. But we trek on and on, and when it’s been a mile since I’ve seen a sign of man, I relax.

It makes me sad that I cannot talk about the desert without talking about dung. The whole way out to camp, Jenny’s camel left little presents for the shiny black beetles along the way. But theirs was an eternal Christmas, those beetles, along this path through the sand. For six years, every day, tourists trekked across this land atop these prolific beasts. For six years, every day, the winds blew the round pellets into every low valley, dusting the desert floor until it was painted a deep gray. Our guide trudges barefoot through it, kicking up black sand as he pulls us along. Throughout our time in the desert, it will be a constant struggle to avoid the dung as we make our way from place to place. I hate feeling squeamish about this raw land we’re invading, but I know this is not the natural way. It’s only our bizarre presence here where we do not belong that’s created this abundance. Without these breadcrumbs left by all the Hansel and Gretel’s who trekked out before us, I might have spent my time in the desert as one does discovering a new and secret place. But every dark patch I see speaks of dozens of travelers come before us. I don’t want the fantasy, but someday I do want a little untouched beauty. Mars, here I come.

After about two hours, the archipelago of dark spots on the horizon grows into a crescent of tents facing each other at the foot of a large dune. They’re a patchwork symphony of rugs and rope and posts. The large center tent is open and as we stumble off our kneeling camels, we’re guided inside for tea. We chat in growing cold and darkness until our guide comes and lights a burner that hangs from the center post. The hot white flame consumes a hiss of gas and is too bright to look at. When the food arrives, I dig in with a fervor and eat an obscene amount of vegetable tagine. Desert life makes me hungry, apparently. We walk out into the cool desert air, full and sleepy. The wind has died down and swept away the clouds leaving a bright and starry sky. A halo around the moon stretches on forever filling most of my vision. We tiptoe through a field of dung to a lie on a low dune and gaze up at the night sky. In Austin I saw an IMAX that dove deep into the space behind Orion’s Belt and lying there in the sand, surrounded by the infinite both near and far, I revel in the size of it all.

Sleep comes quickly, there inside our carpeted tent. But it’s interrupted by frequent howling gusts that bat the walls and drive sand through the roof onto our bed. The wind finds every seam, offended by the tent’s interruption of its long journey across the sand. We wake, covered in a fine layer of deep red dust.

After a tasty breakfast of omelets and jam, we take our guide’s suggestion and hike up to the tallest nearby dune. It’s less than a mile, and looks even closer, but it’s a steep climb through loose sand and we stop often for breaks. Every foot we climb, and every inch the sun rises, gives us a new landscape of rendered dunes to look out across. It’s hard going, but feels natural and we make good time. At the top, I pull ahead and rise over the crest full of anticipation for the view beyond. The sands do spread out into infinity. The sky does loom over the raw landscape. The breath is taken from me. But before all that I see the three beer cans and empty bottle of wine the last trekkers left. Lovely. But it’s a nice French bottle and the sun and sand have stripped the cans of their decals. If there were a bleached skeleton desperately clutching one of the cans, it would have been perfect.

At Jenny’s prompting, I rush back to her lower camp by tumbling down the steep and sandy dune. Round and round I go. It’s over in a flash and I sit up with sand everywhere. Everywhere. The barrier my clothes once served keeping me on the inside and the sand on the outside is now just a rough suggestion. I will be picking copper sand out of my ears for days. Back up we go to the dune top. We’re just on the edge of the Sahara. It extends South across half of Africa. But from where we sit, surrounded by sand, the Sahara is our entire world.

The descent takes about ten minutes, but after lunch we’re still in the desert so we set out again on another hike. Heading in a new directly, we climb a low dune and relax in the afternoon sun. There’s nothing to do but lie around and contemplate the sand. Beneath us, hidden from our camp by a dune is a darkened spot of sand, sprouting with green. To one side is a stone well. The closer we get, the clearer it is that the small valley is drenched with water. The sand is wet and glistening. I don’t understand enough about the desert to know why this water can live so close to so much drought.

We pack our bags and lash them to our camels. We’ll trek out farther into the sand for a higher peek at the sunset before heading back to a new camp for the night. Already the sun is getting low, but our guide laughs off my concerns at the approaching darkness. The deeper we go in, the farther we must ride out. And while the moon lights a bright path, we traverse some narrow ridges along the way. I don’t mind the idea of falling in the sand. It’s the camel coming after me that arouses concern. We arrive at the foot of a dune in no visible way different than dozens we passed. But this is the one we’re meant to climb. This is the one from which we’ll watch our first desert sunset. It’s rough going, but we’re fighting against the rotation of the earth so we try to keep a good pace. Google maps tells me we peaked at about 500 ft. Imagine if you will, climbing a twenty-five story building. Taking each step. Now imagine that staircase flooded with sand. That’s what we did. I wish I could rave about the colors of the African sunset. I wish I had pictures to make you cry. But there are no clouds over the Sahara. The sun low in the sky, kissing the tops of the dunes goodnight, leaves the sky not in a fiery explosion, but a pale and gradual darkening to night. And now it’s dark. And we’re on a dune. And our camels are dots in the distance far below. It took a long time to climb up, and neither of us wants to take the same route back down. But the alternative is steep, steep, steep. It’s scary. Jenny is scared. I don’t want to embarrass her, but I don’t realize how scared until her peals are more tears than laughter. I joke, and I minimize, and I pull. There is a danger of falling. But the sand is soft and it seems more dangerous to stop moving. It’s a relief to get back on the camels and let them worry about the footing for a change.

This is the farthest we get into the desert. About five miles deep. From here on, it’s back to civilization, with a brief stop in the bronze age at a nomad camp. I’m still not clear on how that one differs from the tent camp we just occupied, but I have the hour long camel ride to wonder about it. Bumping along on Zero (my camel), I locate my ipod and enjoy a little Yusuf Islam over the quiet of the desert. Wild World, indeed. ‘Torn shattered and tossed and worn’, we stumble into camp. It’s always an appropriate arrival when the camels lurch forward into their kneel to let us off. I can think of no better rickety display of disembarkation than the way these massive beasts lower themselves. To match it, I’d have to walk in the door from a long journey, drop my bags, drop to my knees, and then drop face first into a vat of mashed potatoes.

Our tent for the night is more of a carpeted hut; a pillbox bunker upholstered in rugs and burlap food sacks. But whereas our last tent was just a series of overlapping layers, this one is built. The wind buffets the walls, but no sand squeezes through. We recline on thin mattresses by candlelight and wait for dinner. Mohammed (our guide’s young son) joins us for a while and sucks us into his car games. Jenny plays smashup for a while, but he seems more amused when I ignore the car’s form and treat it as a talking action figure. We here his parroting my english babble well into the night.

Dinner is another explosion of vegetable tagine. The food all blends together just a bit less that the deep dark sleep that soon follows.

We conked out especially early that last night on the sand to fit in a desert sunrise before heading back to the outpost. This time just before sunrise is the desert’s coldest and the only time I’m glad I brought my coat. But the sand is a simple landscape, and the sunrise in no way outshines the sunset the night before. The dunes have just two sides at any time; the one lit and the other dark.

We grab a light breakfast that hopefully will not disagree with our bumpy camel ride back into the world. The trek is over the moment the outpost peeks over the horizon. It’s a relief to be back, but this desert was the reason I came, and all I’ll have now are memories.