Three people crowded into a two-man tent in a jet stream wind on top of the highest mountain in North Africa sounds as attractive as an undeserved parking ticket but truth to tell, I would not have been anywhere else. I was hugely happy to be there and was as warm, cosy and well fed as long experience and good gear allowed. Outside the tent was a different world.
I was already dressed in thermal layers and outer clothing but still pulled on constricting overtrousers, big Berghaus jacket, wrapped my shen around my face so only eyes showed, tightened the hood over this cocooning, donned boots, added head torch and thick mitts and only then unzipped the outer tent to crawl out into the maelstrom. Jbel Toubkal, 4167 metres high, lords it over the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. As I’d been exploring the Atlas for thirty years and have climbed from the Andes to Arctic and home hills to Himalaya our predicament was hardly one of innocents abroad. If only, if only, one did not need to pee.
The sky was a lurid purply-black, touched with dirty yellows and reds. The last time I’d seen colours like that was in a hospital ward on a body bruised in a car accident. The sky was in serious confrontation with massed clouds. Occasionally the moon tried to mediate, changed its mind and vanished for long spells in the darkness. The winner was the wind, a screaming brutal monster that tried to blow me bodily away. Wind can be exhilarating to near madness but that was evil with the severest wind-chill I’ve ever known. Crawling to the lee of some rocks, I knelt, back to the blast, and tried to shove my trousers down to reach the zip of my fly. This was impossible in clumsy mitts and the few seconds with bare hands meant they had a less than happy hour thereafter warming up again inside my sleeping bag.
“What’s it like out there?” Graeme asked.
“A bit breezy.”
Ali giggled.
Before crawling back inside the tent I had stood, leaning like the Tower of Pisa, supported at a gravity-defying angle by the wind. A gusty wind sometimes catches one out, with childish glee, shuts off in an instant, and the supported sprawls on the ground. Not this wind: it was a constant. Familiar mountains surrounded our high perch but I’d not surveyed them from black night before. Looking south, far away and down, down, lay a spray of lights which had to be Ouarzazate, the town beyond the Atlas that introduces the desert to the sown. Looking north—nearer, bigger and brighter but equally down—lay a great spread of glow worm dots which could only be Marrakech, the eagle’s head for the spread wings of Atlas, the hub for its sweeping rim of unlikely snows. I’d chosen this book’s title for romantic associations so laughed aloud to see the conceit made reality. And why not? I had put feet to my dream and this book is the story of that dream, the end-to-end trek of the Atlas Mountains, a 900 mile walk in 96 days, which I want to share before everything recedes like a tide into the flat waters of memory.
I have come to love the Berber peoples of the Atlas, I admire their proud history and rich culture and this story is about them as much as about us. In some ways I find it difficult to describe this other world as, for me, Marrakech and the mountains are like the familiar, comfy garment, slipped on for a spell, whereas to the newcomer the cultural kaleidoscope of Morocco can be startling. But if familiarity has bred content the journey was no less hard graft. I have a certain pride in what we achieved and owe the team and helpers this record of our undertaking.
Above all, the journey was one of enjoyment, and that at nearly every turn and not just in retrospect (even in the wind on top of Toubkal) so I apologise to the sensation seekers: we had no fatalities, nobody was mugged, we ran into no revolution, the flight out was not hijacked. As Ali put it everything went “roughly smoothly”. We were not superstars doing super feats, just a couple of greying codgers happily defying the slippery slope of years for a bit longer. Justifiably then, ‘I speak of Africa and golden joys’ (Shakespeare) and beg, in the Arab saying, ‘May Allah show mercy on the tongues of travellers’.