Book 1: # 15 Donkey Walk 2 - Shanti to T'a'f'na

Shanti to T'a'f'na.

 

Atlantis calling - Dreamers on the Yellow Brick Road -  my collage created in Photoshop

From the lighthouse the way south down the coast was rocky and impassable on foot. Taking the lighthouse keepers advise we went south west inland on the shanti to T’a’fna.

 "Watch out for lions.” He chuckled as he saw us off. 

 Lions ?  LIONS! 

Well I didn’t know enough about African animal distributions in those days to really dismiss the idea completely.  I really doubted what he said though, and laughed, showing him I appreciated his little joke.

The sort of thing a north Queensland bushy likes to do to Pommy tenderfoots on their intrepid way across the outback. Puts the wind up them, like, with stories, like giant crocs and enormous poisonous snakes that will chase you down on sight, eh, for the dopey mind to dwell on in the long cold dark stretches of the night when the wilderness is alive with the weird noises from unknown wildlife and it seems to be so threateningly big and close. “Why don’t you get a torch and investigate, George”, whispers Sally, peering anxiously into the blackness beyond the tent flaps.

I swear I heard roaring one night. 

Diary extract. The shanti to T’a’fna - signpost Tafelney 15 km.  Walk into an ever-narrowing river valley.  Silvering oats - fortress dark mud houses.  We hear roaring from the close wooded hills - camels.  Cross fast brown streams - snow on the mountains on one horizon - pale late afternoon ocean retreating behind still visible through the hills - ahead the road partly constructed and abandoned leaving a sinking surfaced stony wide track.  Where streams cross partly washed out.  Towards evening enquire at two houses - “la! - no dormi!” - so we walk on ahead towards narrow dark mountain pass.  A fast-moving man catches up with us as we guide Maya through a stream ford, he beckons us on, then vanishes into the gloom. I get paranoid.  It’s a dark bad road, lions, mud, overcast, no moon. 

Then we come to a house just past a bend and yes - a long narrow room, candlelit.  Two large bowls of cous cous and peas, oat bread, tea, butter. Madame was beautiful, seemed about 60 or 65, her small eyes kohled wearing a transparent flower embroidered caftan over another brocaded flowered robe.  She came down from her raised throne platform when I asked her to kohl my eyes - we went across into her bedroom through the donkeys, cows and sheep in the courtyard. Maya lifted his little head as I passed, stroking him. You good boy. A radio was playing Egyptian music.  She, and her maid, or perhaps a lesser wife, sat cross-legged fanning each other and she applied the kohl, gave me some and her face cream of herbs.  The other wife/servant gave me her mjah.
We are given very comfortable room with soft mattress, she is a goddess.

Next day up at sunup.  The valley changing by the minute with the light. 

Moroccan breakfast

 
Tea, bread and butter.  How English that sounds and how elaborately unlike that ritual is the scene I watch here as the tea ceremony begins. The tiny pot. Five glasses, pouring back and forth, the rocks of sugar, the murky green herbal mint result.  The bread, black, flat, oatbread, round, unleavened.  The butter in a wide shallow dish which Madame softens by sinking her fingers into it for you.  Eat the bread in small pieces crushed into the butter mound. Honey. Almond tartlets.

  

Cape Tafelney to Cape Sim

Walked across the small pass.  Feeling of coming into the land of milk and honey.  Donkey fell on a very bad muddy patch and threw the load over the side of a steep crumbly drop - the mountain rises sheer on the other side. Poor fellow is sinking deep at each footfall.  Arab on horse appears at exact right moment and helps us. 

Cape Tafelney closeup as it is now

At last, in the distance, the ocean again - a long beach - date palms - geometric patterns of fields.  A wide river bed. A strangely carved-out mountain.  A surf - a smooth wave, good corners.  Tafelney. Took it all in and stopped at a pink police station and had tea in the sun while the men heard our story. 
Later, on the beach, watched fishermen bringing in their boats in the small surf - Arabs in surfboats, I found it funny. Remembering those Manly surfboat days and Himself, the iconic Ozzy surf hero. He simply would not believe his eyes here! 

These people are all so kind,so "groovy”. 

Worlds away from Mr. Pumped- up, oh so vain demi-god. This a their normal. Just another day, no marching flag-waving as they surf in their dories, bringing home the fish.

I sit dozing, observing, in a large fishing surfboat on the beach in the sun, out of the wind.  Something I did years ago in that other land, so far away.  Now here, above on the clifftops I see Arabs in long robes on donkeys - all around are fishermen squatting in the sand around a fire, cleaning the catch - eels and red puff fish - a Berber girl in orange caftan hitched up, her hair held back in a red flowered scarf, barefoot with bangles and beaded necklet is talking to them all.  She wants to know who I am, what I am doing here. She won’t talk to me directly. A camel, aloof, moving in slow-time, passes like a dream and half an hour later I can still see it slowly walking up the beach in the distance.  No owner, it seems to know where it goes.

Later groups of loaded camels lurch down the track accompanied by blue-robed men. 

They gather on the beach, make a fire and squat around it making bread and tea. More arrive. They tend to the camels and keep to themselves. Some curl up under their robes and sleep. They will leave at sunset and walk most of the night.

Outside the row of boatsheds Tom in white showing his photos to six Berber fishermen  relaxing in a  beached boat.


“Le Hind, Afghanistan, Espana, Australia” 

Dreamers

they comprehend little from our point of view.  What patterns form in their minds with these images I wonder.  What images form when I say “Australia” They just don’t know.  One recently told me with assurance that Australia is on the coast of England. Sometimes I think some British think so too. So few read or write - I almost envy them the elimination of all that complication.  They teach me basic Arab and Berber.  Khobs.  L’bin.  Wadi.  Tafoortkt.

Tom went off with a fisherman to investigate a small house.  Led Maya and I back to it through swamps and along a narrow piste beside the river.  Our house (well for a night maybe).  A square mud and stone tool shed with an earth floor set in patchwork jigsaw fields - palms, we have two outside the door.  Privacy.

Sunset.  We go back to the beach. 

The blue-robed cameleers have departed, a long caravan still visible miles away up the beach; rhythmically undulating along the hard beach sand, slowly receding into the setting sun.

The policeman is here in white turban, khaki caftan - a belt of bullets slung around his torso.  He has left his rifle at the police station, but below his arm hangs his kris.  He wears his burnous like a cape, looks very impressive.  He had to go to Mogador (Essaouira), no doubt to report our arrival to King Hussein.  We sit around on the fish boxes by candlelight smoking.  He gives Tom a kif pouch.  He is apologetic.  He has forgotten to take our passport details and tomorrow he has to go all the way back to Mogador with them.  He gives us a good bag of kif, about a dirham’s worth Tom says. We sell the God’s Eyes for a dirham.  He takes us to meet his wife. An urbane French speaking plump lady. No country peasant, she had been brought up in Marseille. A worldly woman, but still bemused and somewhat taken aback by us. She obviously adored her husband.  We sit in a small room looking out over the ocean on mats while she makes coffee.  We eat walnuts and almonds and exchange compliments. I give her a God’s Eye.   She gives me a sheet to wear at night.  I’ll make it into a pair of loose pants for Tom.

Again we move on, inland again, following the shanti to T’a’fna.

The piste led through gentle vales beyond the dunes and we followed a valley up, passing through walled fields and small hamlets.  People came running out of their houses to greet us as we wandered by playing our flutes.  Maya walked easily ahead, stopping to nibble at roadside weeds occasionally. 

Goats in Argan tree

Mid-morning, the day was warming, so we stopped in the shade of some argan trees to rest, hobbling Maya by a patch of grass and getting out the s’bubsi for a relaxing smoke.  I heard a rustling in the branches above, and a solid crunching noise that had me on my feet, lions still not totally negated from my list of possible strange big close noises. 

It was goats.  Three goats in fact.  One bleated at me and another raised his tail and let fly a stream of little hot black pellets which landed in the kif bowl.  We both laughed and the goats playfully bounced up to the next branch and resumed munching.  A small boy appeared and squatted with us companionably, knowingly eyeing off the kif as we flicked out the goatshit and loaded the pipes.  He picked up the flute Tom had been playing and gave us a pleasant little Araby riff and I harmonised with him on mine, blending hippy road music with his ageless goatherder tune. 

Berber couple

 Then a shy woman with her husband close behind appeared with a plate of honey with crushed almonds in it and some hot bread to dip in it.   They too sat and shared the kif.  She was small, slight, middle aged, dressed in field working clothes. No opulence on display like the grand lady we met last night. Curiosity overcame reticence as asked in Berber where we had come from, where were we going? The boy had a few words of English and roughly translated. We drew a map in the dust, but beyond Essouira I think they didn't really understand quite how far we had come. But they pointed out the tracks ahead, showing us the easiest to T'a'fna..  We danced, a slow sensual dance, twirling slowly, floating our shawls around our bodies in the air currents. Tom and the shepherd boy played flutes and her husband clapped his hands, moaning out a harmony, using his voice like an oboe in a wordless song.  We left them with God’s Eyes for presents, which they looked at curiously, not sure quite what to make of them.  I explained in my best new French Moroccan Arab garbled argot that they were for good luck, to attract the good spirits.

We come upon a market. Un suq.  But really it’s a slaughter yard.

Diary: Goats lie weakly choking, their feet tied, their eyes blank, but comprehending; above their heads the blood drips from the steaming heads of their brothers.  Entrails slip and drop from the benches, running out like silk rope.  At the end of the row of stalls in the slaughter yard the blood bright and curdled thick on the men’s plastic shoes as they skin the animals, thrusting arms deep along the sides to loosen the skins, then pulling them down from the neck in one movement, the reversed tube steaming, the revealed meat pale and clean.  All around exposed cut windpipes twitch and gurgle.  One swift knife cut and the beast is left to come to terms with eternity - death knows no bargain.  The animals being carried in for slaughter cry loudly, hopelessly, each answering the other desperately.  An older goat doesn’t move and is silent before and after the knife.  A donkey walks into the blood with four kids echoing horror and terror tied to its’ bac.  Flute sounds and blood stuck fur. Pink and green plastic shoes.  A policeman asks us if we enjoy our journey “a good suq, good meat” he says, hungrily eyeing off the offal and intestines grilling on a vendor’s coals.  We, fish only vegetarians these last eight years, try to show nothing of the horror we are experiencing. We lead Maya away as quickly as we can.

That night we slept high up the valley on a rocky ridge in an abandoned goat shed on clean straw we purchased from a nearby farm.  In the far distance I could see the ocean, just a strip of grey in the last light.  The hut was cosy with a small fire and our sleeping mats. We were tired after the long day so we slept early after a good soup, an omelette and fresh bread from the farm.  Next day it was up at dawn.  Both of us were really picking up after what had, at first, seemed a doomed expedition. before it started.  We did our Salute’s to the Sun, then wriggling our now freed-up bodies we mucked around like kids playing tag, teasing and dancing before running off to the morning wash in a nearby spring.   Breakfast was tea and bread with honey before pushing on before the sun got too high. The piste was now a hard, rocky, steep climb, although not too difficult and well traversed.  

 Maya took it in his stride with no urging.  He was quite a proficient little donkey and had obviously been well-trained.  We were probably the ruin of him though, as we couldn’t bear to even think of giving him a whack on the backside, nothing he did seemed to warrant it, yet we observed so many donkey owners lashing away at the poor little things, often so overloaded and downtrodden it broke my heart to see it.  But he took our little load very easily.  Just our sleeping mats and blankets, a few clothes, the cooking gear, a lightweight mountain-climbing portable arrangement with an emergency meths burner, candles, our paints and notebooks and whatever food and water we had organised for the particular stretch we intended to walk, with an emergency backup of lentils and flour, because we really had no idea of what lay around every next corner.  We had no maps, no real destination, it was just follow our noses.   Dancing along like Pan’s children, twirling as we played our flutes, sometimes singing, sometimes just silent, open, taking it all in.

At the top of the valley steeps we came through a cutting onto a plateau and a road.  A dusty lane that took us south to T’a’fna.  Behind us a black wall of cloud with lightning and the threat of immanent rain.

T’a’fna turned out to be a low-key cafe petrol stop shop on a main road crossroads.  Ahead lay gorges back to the coast, down a narrow piste which led off from the main north/south Agadir/Essaouira road.  As we arrived it started raining, heavily.  The shopkeeper, Ugo, was a French Moroccan businessman who smoked Galloises, drank gin surreptitiously and had a taste for very loud radio, especially when jazz came through the crackle.  I thought he looked a bit like Yves Montand, but dharling, what do you expect, I mean don’t they all?  French Moroccans I mean.   Yust Yoking.

The deluge was incessant, forcing us to stay at Ugo’s crossroads pitstop, sleeping on the floor, writing, drawing and making God’s Eyes during the day, passing the time with the various customers as they stopped off for their cigarettes, groceries and petrol. Other transients & locals sheltered, hunched & squatting, wrapped in blankets propped against the walls under the eaves and inside.. People kept arriving and staying as it was hazardous on the roads, with decreasing visibility as a dense sea fog rolled in. Tom went into Preacher mode, with his flute and his Diêu et Humanité rave, gathering the otherwise bored and anxious refugees from the storm around a large table over endless glasses of mint tea accompanied by the kif pipe.  Even the local policeman smoked openly. Many were caught up by the God’s Eyes.  I couldn’t make enough. They sold fast and I just set up on a blanket on some sacks, very comfortable and warm, watching the rain, making the pretty little truques. Relaxed, fascinated by the movie passing before my prime focus, dreaming into my Magical realm of the Insighted Vision.   Every God’s Eye a work of art, hand-made, individual. A mandala fest.

This all felt good to me.  I didn’t want to be performing; something inside wanted peace. Close focus work needing concentration and skill was ideal.  The old craft therapy used in rehab.   When I finished a few I hung them on a string and suspended them in the shop, providing a rather nice effect of pretty colored dangling charms.  Basically, I was just exercising a sadly cauterized nesting instinct - trying to decorate the ceiling - corrugated iron, and not yet Glenn Murcutt  fashionable.  They looked so nice, rotating in the breeze, their strong colours brightening the dim interior. The addition of little crystals beads and tiny bells transformed the basic God’s Eye to a New Age wind charm.  Good luck charms.  Good luck, honey!

I think we were good for business, because our host Ugo fed us well and didn’t complain once, despite having what I would call a “prickly” personality, as I observed in his interactions with some customers, especially when he’d had too much gin, when he would even sit morosely muttering to himself in slack times.   A bit disconcerting, but we had no option but to lump it, locked in as we were by the incessant torrential rain.  It must have been some major weather event, because I didn’t encounter anything like it the rest of the months we spent in Morocco.  Perhaps it was a minor typhoon.   After day three I cottoned on to the fact that Ugo was homosexual, when a couple of slim nip-bummed Moroccans disappeared out the back to his quarters with him for several hours.   When he emerged he was very drunk and stoned and extraordinarily open and friendly and made us all a good tajin, very welcome in the sort of weather we were enduring. 

There was a dry hay loft above Maya’s stall and we slept there, wrapped in our burnooses. Poor Maya’s stall below had a leak that ran down his ears into a puddle just inches from his nose.   Every time I went to check him, talk to him or feed him, he just looked up with that fathomless expression depressed donkeys share everywhere.  Not empty, not sad, just a very long way away from the present reality of ultimate dismal imprisonment and servitude.  Sometimes we got him stoned and he got a bit friskier, but that may have been us seeing what we wanted to see.   The hay loft was a refuge where we could to indulge our physical passion, rather hard to keep away from each other when we were in plain view in the café and we loved to kiss and hug, but not in that parlour, every eye on us , thank you.  Already we were public property.

Day after day the rain persisted, a curling gale twisting amongst it from time to time, driving the wind into the shed of a café, spinning the God’s Eye collection in dizzy patterns.  Sometimes the little road to the coast opposite was obliterated in the dense downpours, to be suddenly revealed as a gust swept the curtain aside, with torrents of water streaming down it in scouring gutters.  We were tense, needing to get on, to be free of the confinements of this shed and these circumstances.  To be free of the constant eyes and be able to dance our free dance of love again, Tom and me and Maya.  It began feeling almost desperate.   We watched every passing storm hopefully, only to see it intensify within the hour again.  Surely it must pass soon.  Surely. But it didn’t.  

The traffic on the road was not heavy, but a lot of vehicles stopped at the cafe, pleased to be out of the foul conditions, lingering rather longer than they otherwise might have.  We got to talk to a wide range of road travelers, catching all sorts of news on all sorts of levels.  A large map of Africa was on the café wall, providing a magnet for them of course, and travelers tales poured out as they sat over tea, or omelette and bean soup. 

We felt we were wild cards in this cultural landscape known from antiquity as the Barbary Coast.  But we were just another eccentric integer in a general flow of diversity.  This was the main north/south road connecting Europe with sub-Saharan Africa and carried the cornucopia of cultures from both disparate regions of the planet.  This road attracted all sorts and this café stop was well-placed between Essaouira and Agadir for a rest-stop where they gratefully got out of their vehicles, pleased to escape from wind and rain.

I observed rich and poor.  Proud desert people with bare feet.  White-shirted suit-coat-off middle-class Moroccans with city jobs.  Farmers under sacks. Nomads with camels. Civil servants in black cars.  Playboys in yank tanks or Porsches.  Merchants in anything. 

A fancy lanky Negro man with a wild Afro head of curly hair, in a sequinned satin shirt.  He must have been a rock star judging by the way his retinue behaved.  A spade-cat chauffeur who spoke Arabic. Two women - straight from Ladbroke Grove (giving me a sense of dejá vû) - the full hippy groupie thing in silver thigh boots, lacey tights, mini-skirts and false eyelashes that did the dusting.  He called them Lynx and Sable.  They were all very very stoned and I sensed they were tripping.  They got right down with Tom, fingering the God’s Eyes knowingly.  “Cool, Cool, Brother, spread the Good Word”, he whispered, checking me out as I projected the missionary’s simpleton wife, the one he’s saving, from my little work-nest on the floor. As they left they bought all the charms I’d made up by then, probably about 25 or so, for 100 Durhams.  Money seemed to have no value to them at all.  I gathered they were staying in a rented mansion on the coast, not far away. Was it Jimi? Years later I found he did have a house on the coast in the general area. Certainly could have been. I'll never know.

As the days past I met foreigners from everywhere. Countries I’d never heard of like Togo, Dahomey, Gambia and Mauritania. Shiny black people - the statues of African art come alive.  Nubians, Fulani, Fon, Hausa.  I longed for a slab of clay to capture these wonderful heads. Germans on business, suited, in air-conditioned Mercedes were as common as spines on the cactus.  Dapper, used to first class accommodation, thank you.  He would sometimes have his round blonde secretary with him who would come searching for the loo (and emerge having had quite an experience with a very odd look on her over-powdered face).

An Italian film crew in a fleet of Land Rovers. Rich velvet-clad hippies in a super-van painted with psychedelia; with dreamy eyes and gentle manners who saw the charms hanging around the cafe and murmured “Far Out Man” as they bought one to hang from the rear-vision mirror. Frequent geologists from South Africa , Scandinavia,  with maps and interesting equipment in their Landrovers, in a rush, got to get there by Friday. French and Italian tour operators. They stopped for petrol and were off, the passengers peering through the rain-soaked windows, all fogged up.  The local bus disgorging schoolkids and sheiks. The through express to Agadir, shrieking to a stop, heaving and groaning on its axles before off again in a swoosh of spray from the tyres.  A Rolls Royce with closed blinds - the chauffeur ran in to buy cigarettes. Who knows who was inside - a prince, a gangster, a harem?

People of all colours, even blue. Tuaregs, the blue people of the desert to the south who disgorged en masse, running in the rain, from a large decrepit goods truck.  Seeing these blue people excited my imagination.  They would be the guardians of the secret of the Waters of Immortality, the place my little witch Ayesha would visit to awaken the memory of the Spirit of Atlantis. Ayesha was yet to be born but here in this hot-bed of passing humanity the story started hatching, The zygote was splitting.

The view from my position on the floor was sometimes quite thought- provoking.  With the passing parade being as I’ve described, I got a view of legs and feet and shoes quite a lot.  Arab and Berber people quite often sat on the floor too, waiting for the bus to come or go, or just the women, while Himself had mint tea sessions with the Men up at the tables.  I just watched.  Sorbing.  Noticing.  Listening.  Dreaming.  Comparing and contrasting.   At one point I thought of the film I would make, where only the feet were in view and we had an interesting sound track over.  Maybe just an odd face swooping into view and going again.  All to the sound of the hurricane outside.  Or arrivals and departures, with buzzing conversations petering out or growing in intensity according to numbers and social pecking orders petering out or growing in intensity according to numbers and social pecking orders.  It became a fascinating exercise, a backdrop to the routine of endlessly winding the pretty coloured threads onto the sticks and adorning them with endless colour code combinations of bead dangles.

Eventually, after about a week, the rain eased and we loaded Maya again and bidding our host and now lifetime friend Ugo, a fond farewell, set off down the little rugged piste we’d been tantalized by all these days. 

OK, other people, another place. Not us but close facsimile

 It was a dramatic journey through canyons that wound in and out of the cliffs beside the Atlantic.  This was where the ancient continent fell away, I was sure.  This is where the Atlas Mountains fell into the ocean. Atlantis must be close, just out there.  Maybe under our very feet.

Round and round, down and down, went the track. Into deep ravines and along precipitous cliffs.  The ocean was often straight down by our right hand. Then it would vanish from view as the path turned back in on itself to some curious seemingly blind cove that suddenly, just as you thought there was only going to be a wall at the end, opened onto the next series of windings through a gap in the rocks the donkey had to squeeze through, minus his panniers. 

We came to a little hamlet where a canyon divided three ways.  No more than a handful of buildings hewn into the cliff rock, like Anasazi pueblos, blending so well that at first I thought they were ruins, but then the friendly and inquiring faces appeared followed by a patter of bare feet as the children came shyly out to check us out.  It seemed like an interesting place, but ahead looked even more interesting as the mountains loomed above us and a great gorge opened out; the piste followed it away and out of sight.

Imswoune Gorge - the piste following it away and out of sight.

It was getting late as we entered the gorge.  The light was subdued, mauve, eerie. The donkey’s feet on the stone echoing off the canyon walls.  I couldn’t see the top.  But looking up at one point I noticed a shadowy figure sitting on a rocky ledge, unmoving.  Then I saw another, and another.  The further we walked into the tunnel of the gorge, which seemingly had no end, the more silent seated figures we were able to make out in the gloom.  What we could see was that they held rifles.  Turning, I saw them behind us.  One by one as we passed they descended the cliffs and walked behind us, silently, not approaching, keeping pace a hundred metres or so away.No way back now. 

We reached for our flutes and filled the dusk with a playful duet of joyful love.The acoustics were great. Echoes of our playing bounced randomly back as we danced through the twists and turns. 

At last I heard the booming surf ahead.
We were followed by an unknown threat, but ahead, Atlantis. So close.