playground.
Having served an apprenticeship climbing mostly in north Wales, the Lake District and Scotland, the Atlas were my first ‘big’ mountains when I went there with an expedition in 1965. Apart from the Berber inhabitants we met in the valleys, and the odd goatherd in surprisingly remote places, we had them to ourselves. There were no commercial trekking companies in those days, and it would be another 15 years before the first English-language guidebook appeared. Cheap flights were unknown, and we made our journey to and from Morocco through France and Spain on the back of a three-ton ex-army truck.
That journey was an adventure in itself. But it was the mountains, and experiences won there, that had the greatest impact on me. They changed my life. We climbed all and everything that appealed, crossed cols and visited remote valleys and villages, and on one of the 4000m summits I made two decisions which, on reflection, seemed incompatible. The first was to marry my girlfriend, and the second was to abandon the job in which I was working Monday to Friday, looking forward to Saturday, and try to find work among mountains. Nearly fifty years on, I have no reason to regret either decision.
Exactly twenty-one years after that first visit, I returned as a journalist to accompany a trekking party making a tour of the central block of the High Atlas. In the decades between those two visits the mountains appeared to have changed very little. But my life had been transformed.
1
TRAVELS IN AN ANCIENT LAND
1965: At 21 I was wide-eyed and eager for adventure, and the Atlas Mountains were seductive in their wild mystery – so different from anything I’d known before. With fitness and misplaced confidence rather than any natural ability, we climbed with naïve ambition – yet we survived. But perhaps more than any vertical activity, it was the journeys made to distant valleys that held the greatest appeal and which now come alive more vividly in the memory.
This land seemed to belong to the Old Testament. It felt culturally ancient, part of another world. Sun-baked and barren in summer, it had rock-strewn canyons where goats searched for something on which to graze. From the summits of snow-free mountains that filled every horizon, a golden haze told of the Sahara. There were no reminders of the twentieth century, and the dreamy-eyed goatherd who stood at the edge of our camp each morning could have been descended from Abraham.
Under his gaze three of us left our tents behind, and with rucksacks packed for a few days of exploration climbed towards the head of the valley, bore left to cross a 3500m pass, then fought a way down the other side among a turmoil of rocks and boulders through which a mule-trail unravelled into an arid gorge. In its bed waist-high thistles were the only signs of vegetation, and apart from mule dung and the black pebbles of goat droppings nothing broke the monotony of rust-coloured stone. As cliffs hemmed us in, our voices spoke back at us in echoes that hung for long moments in the air before being vanquished by the clatter of rock upon rock.
Late in the day we turned a spur to discover, clinging to the hillside like a series of swallows’ nests, a village of flat-roofed houses commanding a wonderland of terraced fields and groups of trees. The silver of overflowing irrigation ditches flashed in the sunlight; on a level with the village, and all below it, the mountain slope was vibrantly green and fertile; above the houses, bare crags offered a stark contrast.
At the foot of the terraces a small rectangular meadow was overhung by a walnut tree and outlined by drystone walls. The grass had been cropped short and a waterless ditch ran through the middle. Nearby, two barefooted girls stood and stared; one had an open sore on her cheek troubled by flies. She turned to her friend; they both giggled, then scampered up the path to the village.
We sat beneath the tree as the sun slid behind the mountains, chasing shadows through the valley and up the hillside to smother the houses one by one. The girls returned, bringing with them older siblings and three or four adults, with whom we exchanged greetings and shook hands. With no common words between us, pantomime was used to request permission to sleep in the meadow. The Berbers, we had found on our first day in the mountains, were hospitable, if openly inquisitive, and the villagers here confirmed those early impressions. We were welcome to spend the night in their meadow, but we couldn’t expect privacy.
Darkness fell, and as we prepared a simple meal more villagers came down to join us. Someone hung a lantern in the tree while several children crouched in the branches, the better to see what we were up to. Adults either leant or sat upon the wall; Berber voices discussed our basic culinary skills; a jug of milk was placed beside us – a simple gift for strangers.
As the valley was chorused by cicadas, cigarettes were handed round. Some fingers greedily took more than one, the spares being secreted inside the folds of a djellaba, and for the next few minutes faces momentarily glowed as lips drew in the nicotine and inhaled.
Eventually the villagers either grew bored with us or decided it was time to eat, for they deserted us in small groups and went back up the stony path to their houses. The lantern was left in the tree for our use, and up in the village candlelight flickered behind glass-free windows.
It was too warm to use a sleeping bag, so I lay on mine gazing at the stars, playing and replaying moments of the day, urging myself to forget nothing, to soak it all up and store it away. Here in an Old Testament land I was aware of creating memories for unknown tomorrows.
Sleep was blissfully elusive, and long after the village had fallen silent and the cicadas were hushed, a faint sound of music came drifting on the balmy night air. The music, the beating of flat drums and voices singing, grew louder, drifting along an unseen pathway high above the valley bed. It reached the houses, where lanterns showed revellers home from a wedding. Shadows revealed figures dancing on rooftops; the drumbeat, the singing voices, the odd explosion of laughter, all these sounds built to a pitch…then silence broke like a wave over the valley. Lights went out. It was midnight.
In the morning, shortly after dawn, we were rudely woken by water seeping across our sleeping bags. A stone had been removed from an irrigation ditch upstream of our bivvy site, and now we found ourselves lying in a water meadow.
Finding himself taking an involuntary cold bath, Mike swore, then broke into laughter. Wet sleeping bags hardly mattered. It was time to get up, dry off and move on.
2
MULES, FROGS AND BIVVY BAGS
Twenty-one years after that first visit I found myself drawn again to the Atlas Mountains, this time with a trekking party; my commission was to write a piece about the experience for a magazine. Exactly twice as old as I’d been on that first visit, I was well aware that my enthusiasm for mountain travel had not dimmed in the slightest, and Morocco’s high places were every bit as rewarding as they had been in 1965.
It was a good hour or so before the mules caught up. We were making the most of the shade cast by a solitary juniper tree not two metres high when we saw them. Mules first, and behind came the muleteers striding in cream-coloured djellabas and home-made sandals with Michelin-tread soles; around them hung the Atlas smell of warm leather and fresh dung mingled with dust that rose in low clouds disturbed by 16 shod hooves. The lead mule halted. The others stopped too, snorting and shaking their manes that set bells tinkling until a well-aimed stone and a whistle through closed teeth from Ibrahim got them moving again. I stood up and followed at a discreet distance, hoping to avoid a lungful of that dust.
It was better on the pass – the air a little cooler, with a vague breeze flowing across scrub-pocked slopes – but a summer haze restricted views beyond the second of what I imagined would be countless ridges before the mountains fell on the edge of the desert. I thought I could smell rain. Ten minutes later the
