Friday, December 28, 2018

Book 1 #20 Out of Africa





Ochre City 

Axis mundi

The Bissets were finally returning to Marrakesh and asked us to go back with them.  
 I saw the adventure here was over.  
 The absence of my child was destroying me.  
 Tortured nightmares became intolerable. 
 What was he doing to her? 
 I began to seriously regret my romantic notions of leaving her with him.   
Back to Marrakesh we went, to live in fine style in the Bisset’s palatial mansion, where Tom painted and sold his works and earned us enough money to return to Europe.


Marrakesh had not finished with us yet. 
Living with the Bissets in the highly civilized rhiad-inspired modern mansion in the French Quarter was too good to leave. We had enjoyed their company in Tamri, camping out with all that entailed; then the expedition to Tafaya along the Saharan Atlantic Coast. That was another side of them as a group unit, becoming an efficient team of Leader, cook, navigators, scouts, troubadours, mechanic, and crazy kids as passengers. We all had a defined role. Mine? Cook’s assistant. Muscle when ensablé, fireside troubadour entertainer. General dogsbody. I was not just baggage.

I borrowed one of the family bicycles and took myself off exploring the city at every opportunity. I especially liked rising in the pre-dawn to cruise the markets or go out for miles beyond the walled oasis city to watch the sun rising over the snowy peaks of the High Atlas,  infusing the ochre city with glowing pinks and gold. 

Then cycle back in the morning cool to ride through the uncrowded souk in the stripy light and shade alleys, 
an effect created by the slatted awnings over the lanes. 

Very disco to ride under, traveling fast, like blinking on/off/on/off. 

Find an early coffee maker’s stall and sit discretely anonymous

 watching the normal life flow of the heart of this wonderful city.

Or to roam the King’s Gardens. Find extraordinary mosques, 

shrines, palaces.
Spend hours in wonder 





taking in the geometric tile patterns 




                                 on fountains, walls, floors.
I found the gardens. Among many, retreats of delight and wonder, I found the Jardin Majorelle.  So inspiring. That cobalt infused my being, so intense. I have carried something cobalt with me ever since; a bead, a truque, a thread of wool.


 Usually by nine or ten in the morning I’d return to the Bissets for the typical French breakfast of croissants & cafe au lait where the late risers were just emerging still tousle headed & bleary. That was when I’d retreat into the yoga room with early-riser Jeanne, her daughters and often Jean, for good sessions and meditation, if there was time.

I loved spending time with Jeanne who taught me so much about diet and yoga. Jean captured my mind. There he lives as a magnetic beautiful man who enjoyed his role as teacher. He would take me to his study and fill my head with his gleanings. His special research was the Prehistory of civilization. When we had been down in the Sahara he would wander off up the dry wadis for hours, sometimes alone, but mostly with his children. I tagged along too. He looked for prehistoric evidence and often returned from these sorties with a bagful of flints, old bone, stone tools, arrowheads. All exposed by the floods that whooshed through the wadis after rain. Around the fire at night he would examine his finds, sorting them, telling us all his theories about their origins, expanding into timelines and cultures of this ancient land. It all had me enthralled. I’d always wanted to be an archaeologist and he was my first mentor. It would be decades before my dream was actualized. Here in his study I could fill in the gaps of what little I’d understood so far. Most of his books were in French but I was a quick study and could basically understand the charts diagrams maps & other illustrations.

 I loved going through his stone artifacts collections and letting my hands and fingers absorb their inherent intelligence. He also had terra cotta and bronze statuary from ancient cultures.
 Facsimiles of the Venus of Dusseldorf, plaster slabs of cave art with bisons and hunters. Rice paper copies of Chinese and Tibetan and Sanskrit sutra texts. Buddha thangkas..And so much more.

Looking back I now see how each of these objects later played huge roles in my life.

It was an  Ali Baba's cave for me. Sometimes at siesta I would just curl up on his couch with one of his books and fall asleep, my head full of visions of Stonehenge, Çatal Hüyük;, Harappa, Olmecs.

The bookshelf shelf of works on comparative religions, myths, legends, drew me.
I discovered the ideas of Mircea Eliade. Axis mundi. I wanted to find some evidence of Atlantis. Real tangible hard evidence. But apart from unproven myths associated with some ruins in Morocco on the north coast, and the explosion of Santorini, it seems it was just that.  A myth. I still liked toying with the idea of it. 
Madame Blavatsky's translation of the Stanzas of Dzyan had its' place here too..
What stirred Nothingness to become Something?  Time was Not, for it lay asleep in the Infinite Bosom of Duration.


Among the Sanskrit teachings  I came across the concept of kalpas, eons of time in which we grew, flourished, decayed and died, to return on the next turn of the Big Wheel. 
 Atlantis could fit in there, I pondered,  but the fossil record time line proved otherwise. Science knocked those notions right out of the ball park. Didn't stop me enjoying the fantasy, examining the pieces of the jigsaw, patch working a crazy pattern for an insupportable scenario in which our human civilizations had evolved from a galaxy far far away, cycling through many kalpas. Atlantis fitted in there; a myth carried through time as a warning, to which we never pay heed. According to the Sanskrit teachings we are now entering the 4th or maha-kalpa, an apocalypse of fire, water and wind. Let us reflect on that now as we cast minds back over our catastrophic devastating 2018 experiences. The ship of Fools with the Uber Fool at the helm.

Meanwhile back in Marrakesh fifty years ago, Tom was honing his preacher skills. In the evening after siesta I’d ride over to the Jamaa el F’na and find him all prophetic in his long white robes, enthralling bewildered groups of tourists and tribal visitors from Ghana or wherever, preaching his Dieu et Humanite raves. Brothers Sisters, We are all One. This is the Start of the New Age of Aquarius.  Share the Love. He would pass out little gifts of God’s Eyes and his preacher’s handbills, written out the previous kif-filled night, full of his naive pentel pen drawings &  philosophy. Then he would play his little tabla drums and I would accompany him with flute and dance, calling on other young women to twirl with me to the music. Some did, usually uninhibited hippy crazies, free as birds in foreign lands. But also young tribal men and women who just couldn’t resists, probably missing what was their normal as they navigated strange new cultures. I also vividly remember a tubby Texan strung about with cameras in a Hawaiian shirt doing a jig with us one night, watched by his little Lady Bird who looked like she wanted to just evaporate in sheer embarrassment that her Fred could do this to her. One for the family album ma’am!

Days passed, then it became obvious it could become weeks if we didn’t take stock. I had it in my mind to visit Fez. I had heard of the ancient library there where the saved books were taken after the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, Maybe I would find clues there to validate my wafty hypotheses.

After a few weeks we left our friends, with regrets, and set out to the north, via Rabat, Fez and Cuerta. A parting gift from Jean to me was his book I’d been studying: Mircea Eliade’s Images and Symbols. His axis mundi was to influence the huge leap of faith we were about to undertake.

My mind was slipping away.  I lived in a fantasy world.  In Fez I met a Danish man who taught me the Me-Ta Loving Kindness meditation.  Breath in love, breath out kindness.  Me on the in-breath, Love, Ta on the out-breath, Kindness. Compassion for all life. A perfect fit for Tom's We are All One.  I sat in a loft over a musical instrument maker’s shop locked into my meditations, rarely going out into this amazing city, totally absorbed in my inner conflict, reading Eliade, writing my Little Ayesha story. Channeling the Spirit of Atlantis and the Guardians of the Universe. What!!! Yes I had lost it. I had transcended to another plane of consciousness.

Eventually I received a message in that crazed head of mine that we were to go to the to the Arctic Circle, to Lapland, where the Chief Disciple of Buddha (who ?) sat looking out into the Center of the Universe.  Somehow it was part of our quest.  It was the message from the Spirit of Atlantis. There we would find The Answer.  To exactly what I don’t know.   
Quel folie !  I was so psychotic, feeding a fantasia creation. My reality had become a mixture of world myths, astrology, macrobiotics and drug narcosis, now overlaid with a huge construct of the axis mundi.  A ridiculous potage of charlatan nonsense in which I channelled other-worldly spirits, Guardians of the Universe. And so on.

Tom too enthusiastically shared a lot of this mirage construct. I was his seer, his muse, his connection to other dimensions.  Far out !” was his memorable comment, vigorously embracing the new vision, his eyes like windmills as he processed it all through the drug haze oh his 3rd pipe of the day.

So, compass set to the Center of the Universe, sails full of the winds of Karma, Eliade & the I Ching in our baskets, we set off from Fez on a course out of Africa and across Europe; passing through many countries, cultures and adventures as we homed in on this crazy mirage destination; the central axis for all future orientation

There ALL would be revealed. 
 Talk about dreams of Unknown Khadath ! 
We had to test this Truth.

Down the Yellow Brick Road we went. 
 Towards the Arctic Circle.

But here the story goes awry.  
 Fate showed its' hand. A lay down misere.
 Here belief gets suspended 
to the point where I still wonder
about the forces of chaos and butterflies farting 
making hurricanes happen in Rio.... and all that.



Thus ends Book 1
A donkey walk down the Atlantic coast of Morocco. 1968
Book 2 
 covers the next years, walking from Spain to India, with a few side tracks along the way. 
Yes, it is written, but whether I survive long enough to polish it up to Blog?
....stay tuned.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Book 1: # 19 Donkey Walk 6 - Sahara



TAMRI AND TAFAYA



We had been enjoying the Tamri-Imswoune area for about two weeks, relaxing into our routines of exploring the cliffs and the plateau above, meeting the Berbers,finding good  surf beaches, nights around the fire outside or tucked in our tiny cell, drawing, making God’s Eyes, playing music.   Inspired by the Moroccan designs I’d absorbed in Marrakesh and the new skills I'd learned from watching the women in the soukh I taught myself to weave beads, making bracelets and necklets.

I also started embroidering my indigo cotton tabard with elaborate colorful geometric patterns inlaid with beads.  Tom worked on his Dieu et Humanité raves.  We felt safe, happy.

It was coming on to spring and warmer weather.  More tourists arrived.  I began to feel uncomfortable with so many nosy strangers suddenly appearing, poking their heads into our little cell, taking my surfing beach space.  Wandering the paths I had wandered alone so often. 

But one day a French family arrived.  Teachers from Marrakesh.  They said we were famous, and that’s why so many people were visiting.  The news had spread along the grapevines.  Jean et Jeanne Bisset and their beautiful children, the younger girls Arielle, Marianne, Magoli and the older boy, Nicholas, were such a nice open friendly family I just fell in love with them all.  Jean was the most handsome man I'd ever encountered. Cool and smooth, clever and intellectual with it. I fell under his spell. These people were another level. Pure class.None of the defensive patronizing snotty bullshit I experienced with most of the other French tourists.  They had been in Morocco for years.  They were acclimatized.  They knew the ways to integrate and be accepted.  They were such intelligent people, urbane, cultured, sophisticated.  Always telling me interesting facts about Morocco, teaching me French, inspiring me to return to my old joie de vivre; showing by example how to live well and not be influenced by others. They seemed to sense my personal search for Truth, but didn’t patronize me, they nurtured me, were protective of me.

The Bissets came for a weekend and said they would be back in a few weeks on their way to a fortnight’s holiday in the Sahara, traveling down as far as Spanish Morocco. I did not hesitate when they asked us along on the trip. It was to be an expedition of a few cars, and a few friends.  We explained we were basically penniless and forced to beg, but they insisted, they would love our company and could stretch the cooking pot to accommodate us, happy just to have us along.  Well that was wonderful to me.  I hadn’t ever felt so wanted before !

I let all my straight-laced inhibitions about being a leech and a burden on others fall away and Tom reinforced this by telling me all the stories of his previous troubadour existence in which the artist/poet/musician is supported by a royal court or a rich patron just for being an entertaining and inspiring person.  I hadn’t looked at myself in such a light before, but it made being a beggar a little more respectable.  The idea of going into the desert with good fellow travelers overrode all other reservations.

Early in April the Bissets returned, with another Frenchman, Phillipe Beaumont, a writer,  and his friend Bill, a Canadian hitchhiker with long hair and a beard, but not a hippy, more of a student.    We were in two cars, the Bisset’s monstrous old Chevy tank and Beaumont’s Citroen 2CV.  Nicholas traveled in the 2CV with Beaumont because he was learning to drive, while the rest of us squashed into the Yank tank.  Bill, Tom and I were mostly stoned and locked in our world of English language at first.  But the kif ran out on the third day and we became more integrated as a group.  I decided I would only speak French, no matter how hard the struggle to comprehend.   After all I only had three years of secondary school French badly remembered from thirteen years before.  And so I learned to speak and think in French.  But with a Moroccan accent I found out, much later in France, where it was considered somewhat declassé, something that amused me, as all snob values usually do.

From Imswoune we traveled to Tiznit, Goulamine (Goulmim) and on to Tan Tan, taking three days, stopping and camping by the roadside.  Investigating interesting towns and villages briefly, but not getting out of the cars as everyone was keen to get to the ocean and the real desert.  After Tan Tan the road went west to the coast, then running south parallel to the Atlantic which was mostly in sight all the way to Tafaya.  The first dune had us all out of the car and there we stayed, camping the night.

Diary entry.  14.4.68 Dimanche
From the first dune our real expedition began.  We arrived at it just on sunset and it was everybody out and a race to be first to the top.  What is it about sand dunes ?  We all ran up the steep sand, Bill full of wonder, Tom, the children and I in high spirits, playful.  Jean, Jeanne and  Beaumont followed, unable to quite make the pace of youth.  From the top we took in the dusk colors, the pink reflections on the salt lakes, while the guys and the kids rolled over and over to the bottom again.  The moon was only half, but still its’ light was like day, reflecting onto the regularity of sculpted dunes billowing into the distance and over the horizon to the south, our way ahead for the next day.  That night I couldn’t sleep and left the camp to wander up the dune and sing aloud into the night, soft sad calming songs. 

Next day we woke to a wind which quickly increased from a whisper to a shriek, filling our food and eyes.  The dunes had plumes of sand flying off the ridges.  It was very satisfying. Authentic Sahara, I thought.   We all tied turbans around our head Berber fashion and I was pleased for my desert clothes, the loose, long caftan and burnous. The road went past a small salt lake and into sand drifts and the cars became stuck time and again.  Eventually we decided to wait for a convoy following us to finish the journey to Tafaya.  But after an hour’s wait, during which time we talked to a jeep driver coming from the south, we moved on again, pushing and walking through the worst parts.  

We came to a very large salt lake surrounded by big dunes and up onto another plateau to some shells of buildings built by the Italians during the war, but now no more than free standing roofless walls, half swallowed by the encroaching dunes.  We returned to the salt lake where Nicholas, who was driving the 2CV, took it in his head to drive out onto the hard crust, but the car fell through out near the center, thick black mud oozing up past the axles.  We all felt such despair that we would never get it out that Marianne started crying for us all.  But eventually, with everyone pushing we backed it out the way it went in,  splattering mud and salt over us all, except Nicholas of course, who thought it all trés amusant.

While we were involved in that the convoy of cars and jeeps which we had hoped to accompany us through the dunes passed by without offering to help, although our predicament was obvious.  It was an Italian geographical magazine survey caravan with very hep-looking people and two teenage boys in flared velvet-inset blue jeans.   Later, both coming in and coming back from Tafaya, we passed them again held up with mechanical problems, the pretty boys stripped to the waist, their designer jeans and pale city bodies smeared  black with grease. 

After we extricated the Citroen we drove back up to the building shells on the plateau and made camp.  The Bissets decided not to risk the cars any further, but still determined to get as far as Tafaya, on the border of Spanish Morocco, a fabled Barbary seaport of considerable antiquity. So it was decided to wait where we were for another convoy.  Next day was spent just hanging out, me writing and drawing with the kids, mainly keeping out of the wind.Jeanne, Jean and Beaumont wandered off to a nearby wadi and came back with prehistoric flints.  My mind turned back in time to when this had all been an environment supporting wildlife and hunters and gatherers.  I wished I had known more about why it was now a desert.   What lay under all that sand ?  Ancient civilizations ?   Atlantis ?  A truck turned up about four in the afternoon and Jean and Beaumont negotiated a ride for us all to and from Tafaya for 100 durhams. 

This truck was part of a five truck convoy.  We were the only Europeans.  A blue woman sat in the passenger seat of the truck I was in.  We were in the back on sacks of I don’t know what.  We set off into the late afternoon, Tom perched high and cheery playing his drums.  Many many times we stopped, ensabled, (stuck in the sand). At one stop we saw a long string of rocks along the shoreline and Jean said it was supposed to be the fossilized backbone of the whale that swallowed Jonah.  They did look like enormous vertebrae.

Eventually, at sunset, we pulled up for prayers.  I was amazed to see the blue woman had a tiny new-born baby wrapped under her burnoose. It hadn’t made a sound and looked to me as if it would weigh only three pounds. Maybe she had just given birth on the road. The truck crew made a fire and cooked  tajin and mint tea, which was delicious.  Tom and a Berber truckie played flutes while we sipped the hot tea as the last light faded.  Later, jerking and bumping into the freezing night we watched the changing patterns of wind-driven clouds and moonshine reflected on the ocean ever at our right hand.  It came in to rain and eventually we stopped and we all piled out and slept under the trucks for shelter. I woke in the bitterly cold dawn, before everyone as usual, and wandered up a dune to watch the sunrise over the dunes and the light on the ocean, feeling sad and lonely.   Tom had thrown a paranoid jealous fit in the night, accusing me of making it with Bill. I’d snuggled in close to Bill for warmth as the night got colder in the back of the lurching truck. Tom tried to get between us, I made him cuddle my back, while I tried to get warm on Bill’s.   In his rage he had taken my books and photos of Klea and thrown them into the windy night.  I managed to find some of my notebooks, but lost drawings and the photos of Klea.  With them went another part of my broken heart, like a shard of the shattered mirror, leaving me colder, emptier, lonelier, benumbed.

Again off over the bumpy road, becoming bogged, ensabled, repeatedly, for twenty more kilometers and reached Tafaya mid-morning. 

Tafaya confirmed my mind’s eye imaginings of what a Barbary Coast Saharan seaport would be, a leaner, ghost-town version of Essaouira - a scattering of faceless pill-box buildings, half-buried in the sand, at the approaches, then a low white town like an encrustation on the shoreline.  Spanish tiled roofs and the typical Moroccan geometric blue-tiled walls. 

The truck pulled into the central suq, deserted except for a drooping mule tethered to a post, and we unloaded ourselves and the baggage, very happy to have at last stopped the lurching, bumping ride. The relentless wind made sightseeing uncomfortable so we found a café, seemingly the only one open in the town, with a sunny protected courtyard and relaxed, discussing the strangeness of it all.  The town seemed deserted.  The wind had driven everyone in behind shuttered windows and closed doors.  The truck drivers came to tell us they would be starting back before sunset and the Bissets, anxious about the stranded cars, undefended on a road of ill-repute, made arrangements to have us all on the road again with the convoy.  So we had a mere five hours to experience this remote (to me) outpost on the desert coast of Spanish Morocco in a gale that blew relentlessly, making it all less than enjoyable.  

The children, the guys and I wrapped ourselves in blankets and burnouses against the knife-like searing sand on the wind which was now a shrieking gale and took off for the harbor, but it seemed to be nothing more than a wave-lashed breakwater.

Out on a sandbank amidst the foaming wash of breakers the roofless windowless shell of an abandoned prison building set the atmosphere of general dereliction and hopelessness of human striving at the interface of desert and ocean.  As the image shows, it is still there, some 50 years later. What must internment there have been like?

The bones of several shipwrecks protruding from the surf reinforcing the general dreary view. Desolation summed it up for me.

                                                                                                                
Looking back at the sealed town surrounded by desert and blasted by the sand-laden gale there seemed little point in doing anything except sit in the sheltered sunny courtyard of the café. It was all very disappointing after the long journey to get here.   I would have liked to explore further, maybe staying a week to really get the feel of the place, but you can’t argue with the desert wind.  Returning we found Jean and Jeanne had ordered a good lunch for us all.  They had a way of restoring spirits with food.  With bellies full of bean soup, omelette, khobs and mint tea we relaxed away the afternoon dozing in the sun on our baggage. 


Jean spoke of the write aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who wrote The Little Prince, one of my favorite books then, as now. 

Comte de Saint-Exupéry was stationed in Tafaya in the late twenties and wrote the little book based on his experiences after crashing his plane in the Libyan desert some years earlier.
Related image

Image by Yaraslov Blanter
These days there is a little monument to him in Tafaya, seen above,
but it is nearly always swallowed up in the relentless shifting sands.

 A very good wrap of Tafaya then and now can be read here: http://www.travelwithallsenses.com/tarfaya-goal-desert-expedition/

Around sunset the noise of revving trucks overtopped the shrieking wind and it was time to go back to the torture of the gut-lurching sand track. So much for Tafaya.

 
Saharan dunes stretching endlessly to east behind Tafaya
The journey back was quite an adventure.  The same scenario of getting stuck in the sand every few miles, except on the third stop we realised we were being pursued.  By the army !  Apparently we had chosen a smuggler’s convoy !   It was quite hair-raising, they would catch up and be in sight, firing rifles, with bullets whizzing past altogether too close, while we were digging frantically to get the trucks out onto the next bit of clear road  Then the army would get bogged and we would roar off and out of sight, while they dug themselves out.  This went on all day and half the night.  The night drive was especially dramatic. The pursuing headlights coming so close, bullets whizzing past & smacking to truck sides, then receding to blip, gone, just darkness & dust,  as they got stuck & we forged on. And on. We didn’t stop and make camp needless to say and were quickly dropped off at the cars without any lingering fond farewells.  We made camp in double-quick time, hoping to appear as if we had been there all night and not to have to confront the army.  Less than half an hour later they sped past, seeming not to notice us, to our considerable relief.  Later we found out this road was notorious for running contraband from the Canary islands, just offshore.

We all slept late the next day.  The wind had subsided at last and we were in very happy space.  We’d had high adventure, with an unexpected Adrenalin lurch as a finale and everyone’s spirits were up. All survived unhurt, the relief of it!  We took two days to return to Goulamine via Tan Tan, stopping at nearly every wadi to explore the canyons, finding lots of prehistoric arrow-heads and flints.  Jean and Jeanne, being teachers, knew a lot about the area and, although I wasn’t fully understanding them, I was being inspired, although I didn’t know it then, to the later studies in prehistory and human evolution I undertook as a major for my degree.

I must say something here about Jeanne Bisset.  Every day while we were on the road she made us great meals.  We were ten in number, quite a few mouths to cater for.  But every lunch was a feast.  Usually she made an enormous communal platter of salade nicoise, greens, hard-boiled eggs, boiled potatoes, canned tuna, olives, cucumbers, carrots, apples, nuts, which we enjoyed with Arab bread and mint tea.  Breakfast was always coffee and hot rolls and dinner a pasta or tajin. I don’t particularly recall large amounts of food taking up space in the vehicles, but we certainly all ate very well.  Not only that, but with real French chic she always looked elegant, cool and stylish, taking it all in her stride, and still managing to enjoy life despite the onerous chores of camp cook.   She also managed to mostly eliminate washing up, except for cups, as we all ate from one big bowl, Arab-style.

Diary. 
Goulamine.  April 12, 1968.  Today I felt I understood every word and spoke easily back in French to Jean, Beaumont, and Magali outside the camel suq - the first time really that I have been able to truly receive their vibrations.  We sang a song of farewell together, the leaving behind of the desert, a song of thanks and praise.  We were moving in a different pattern after this, cars going in different directions.  I realized that my previous ignorance and incomprehension was a lack of will to understand through fear of making a fool of myself.  Ego defenses which fueled my paranoia, causing unhappiness in me, probably baffling them as they would have received evasive or weird answers to their friendly conversation attempts.

Return to Imswoune. April 13.  Many cars here.  Families with station wagons (how did they get down those “roads” ?) which disgorge jerry cans, fold-up furniture, air mattresses, sleeping bags and gas stoves.  Pale and ugly women in thick makeup - clown-like men in quaint hats.  The Bisset’s travel like this too, but how different Jean et Jeanne are, so proud, intelligent, beautiful, not like these revolting gangsters and their wives.  They are probably innocent government people, but I’m repulsed.  An arrogant snotty  child, Francoise, 10 years old, speaks French, Arab, Spanish, Italian all perfectly (so she tells me), but who parrots stupid phrases of her mother.  They live in a big house in Casablanca, she tells me, with over twenty servants.  She has three personal servants of her own.  They have brought four with them.  The child is pure, innocent, but soon those words she parrots will bend and break her and she will be one of them.

The fishermen are busy running everyone’s lives... always  aji, blati, shooya, allez, venez.  I am tired of them pushing me about and in future will move only if I think their reasons are very good.   A Spanish woman told me of murders by bandits - an English couple at Tamri; a sixty-five year old French woman walking her dog on the beach at Mogador,       where we walked the donkey.  I listened sickly to her fear and paranoia and watched her openly despise and put down Moroccans in front of her “Fatima” whose negroid face showed a mixture of hate, evasion, eager agreement and despair.  I thought of the many times I had walked alone in Morocco, sometimes paranoid, but for reasons of my grief sickness.  Always I felt safe, amongst friends, because of my nationality of classlessness, no servants, no race barriers.  Where we are all brothers and sisters, where the boss is as good as you are after work finishes, but before that everyone hates the boss.  I thought of walking narrow back lanes in Goulamine with Tom  to score a nice packet of kif for five durhams in a crazy teahouse scene where they turned us on.  He was paranoid as hell, but I felt safe.
-end Diary entry.

Our retreat had become infested.  The long days of uninterrupted solitude were over.  Maya, untethered while we were away, had become renegade and eaten crops up on the plateau. Our hosts were not amused.  We sold him for about a quarter of what we paid for him.  We wanted to give him away, but that was socially unacceptable apparently.  We felt our hosts had been so generous and kind to us, and he had after all caused them financial loss, that it was the best we could do to pay them back, but they wouldn’t accept him for free.  I watched him being led away to the old life of drudgery he came from, wishing I had some magic carpet to transport him to a happy life of freedom in Australia.  I gave the money to Tom and he bought kif with it.  I helped him smoke it, but with a sense of powerlessness and inequity.  I really didn’t have a handle on life’s realities at all.  But I was determined to live in my dream in which freedom was for everyone and everyone was good and kind at heart.  A bubble built to burst. 

The Bissets were finally returning to Marrakesh and asked us to go back with them. 
I saw the adventure here was over.   So back to Marrakesh we went. 

Reculer poru mieux sortir
Gathering ourselves together for the next stage of our journey, 
wherever it might lead us.