That way
Over the mountain, which who stands upon
Is apt to doubt if it be indeed a road;
While if he views it from the waste itself,
Up goes the line there, plain from base to brow,
Not vague, mistakeable! What’s a break or two
Seen from the unbroken desert either side.
R Browning
Buses all the way to Tangier would be tedious and we were at a bit of a loss until Charles suggested, “Why not fly?”We did so the following day, to Gibraltar. We slept in La Linea and then took the toy train up for a few days in Ronda. Playing the tourist was not unpleasant, but flying back to Marrakech on 1st June was a blunt resumption of GTAM. It was out of the flying pan into the fire, as Marrakech was boiling hot and blue with fumes and it was as necessary as pleasant to eat on the roof terrace of the Hotel Ali. Graeme, who was due to join us at Ijoukak, drifted in. He wasn’t due to join us until the third week of June, so went off with some French lads for the Bou Guemez in the meantime. If they climbed M’Goun I’d not be surprised if Graeme joined us for Toubkal! The new quartet of big John Barnard, Max and Chris Huxham and Chris Bond clocked in, and Aït Idir was there to see we had transport back to Telouet. Finally, Ali and Hosain arrived from Taroudant, relieved to be heading for the out-trail again.
When we returned to Telouet, we repeated the highlights from our previous visit: a good lunch and supper chez Ahmed at the Auberge Telouet, a visit to the Dar Glaoui and dancers after dinner in the khaima. There was a boy dancer too, once he’d been persuaded to perform. Solemn-faced and in a blue gandoura, he jiggled up and down with disciplined gusto. Several of our newcomers joined in and a good time was had by all. Being back was deeply satisfying for the four of us of the team, and as Elyazid Mohammed and other Anmiter lads had arrived (with Taza and Tamri, who had lodged with them) we were suddenly quite a crowd; the auberge turned into a real caravanserai. We were travellers in the way of a long tradition.
That first night back on GTAM, after Ahmed had produced a huge brace of delicious tagines (one mutton, one chicken), he laid on a larger ahouach evening, several musicians with tambours (bendir) and one huge leather drum which was thumped with a length of rubber piping, its bass boom sending shivers up the spine. A lone voice would call out, followed by a brutal, solitary note from bendir and drum, a process repeated several times then, after wild you-yous (ululations) the score of women would be off in song, slowly tramping and swaying around the musicians. They were dressed in shimmering layers of almond white and pink and their heads were bound in scarlet tasselled scarves. One of the girls bore the same striking features as the boy dancer. What I liked was the obvious enjoyment our muleteers had at the spectacle while several rows of local children sat, silent or clapping in time, utterly caught up in the scene. One of the joys of Morocco is the lack of practised prejudice based on tribe or colour, a refreshing change from so much of bloody Africa south of the Sahara, never mind elsewhere in the world. Of course there is still pride and competitiveness but now one sells to a neighbour rather than raiding. “Arab and Berber are just like English and Scots”, as Ali would explain.
Sleeping out was pleasant; the moon, smooth in a baby skin, rode the gauze of stars and the gum trees shivered around the angular tent lines. The short break in Spain might never have been—it could be compared to an eye blink on our tortoise journey. I sometimes looked on our doings with a sort of disbelief. Was this really us? Then the moon would rush out of shadows again. Who dares sleep under an Atlas moon?
I was awake early and amused myself watching the ants carrying off the supper crumbs from the carpet. When I finally had to rise I followed the busy line for 50 metres before finding the underground nest entrance. I’ve often wondered what happens under there when the heavens open. There’s no sealed door. These were minute ants but they could carry crumbs larger than themselves. One morsel had been grabbed by two ants and, as neither would relinquish hold, they progressed with movements somewhere between a waltz and a tango. There were also some huge black ants and another medium-sized species which moved in sporadic darts and stops. When they make their dashes, the speed is such their legs become a blur of motion. None of the species is very interested in humans, thank goodness.
We trekked off from Telouet across the plains towards a dome of hill, passing through a village with a mosque tower that had some childlike drawings on it, including vases of flowers. Oddly, the date of construction was given according to the western calendar. Several of the party had brought walking poles and the click-clicking of those made the party sound like a convention of the blind. We joined an assif (stream) beyond fields scented with roses and began the real climb, putting in long rising traverses on another decayed piste, until breaking off onto a mule track that took us up by the black pylons that rather disfigure this historic pass. The slopes were flocked with the pink alyssum domes and blue hedgehog broom while just about every flower we’d seen to date was blossoming, a wall to wall carpet of colour, the red soil a delight to every species. (The north slopes had a cover, acres in extent, of brilliant white cistus.) If anyone wants to marvel at the range of mountain flowers in the Atlas they could do no better than walk up to the Tizi n’ Telouet in mid-June, an easy three-hour tramp.
The wind made the tizi itself untenable (Harris and others found similar conditions over a century ago) and, not far below, the cavalry caught up with us and went skeltering down a corkscrew of a track, hard to envisage as a major caravan route in the not-so-distant past. Odd damp patches produced greens, buttoned with the blue of carduncellus. The valley-head is a complex and jagged ring of peaks, jutting out in prows and walls of tottering strata, many-hued and barren beyond belief yet, over on the east, spur after spur falls in fans of green terracing due to a high source, the thread of water being captured in a seguia which contours with arterial importance to spread the life-giving water to the fields below.
After a steep, dusty, corkscrew the going changed to grey, the path and the pylons undulating along an elephantine crest that led down to a confluence of streams. Even by Atlas standards this is a grim pass; de Foucauld’s description of a century ago still stands: ‘...de tous côtés s’élèvant de hautes montagnes de grès; tous est roche; le chemin, sans être difficile, est très raide et très pénible’ (...on all sides rise high mountains of sandstone; all is rock; the route, while not difficult is very steep and very tedious). Joseph Thomson compared the valley head, with its burnt and blasted aspect, to a volcanic crater. He noted the work of glaciers in times past and kept his head down looking for flowers as he toiled up. At the Dar Glaoui, his party was met by a scary fantasia. History often rather overlooks this explorer but his 1888 Atlas trip covered more ground than most. He climbed into the Atlas from Demnate, crossed the Tizi n’ Telouet twice, climbed a 3000 m peak (Taourirt) from Telouet, then explored extensively from Amizmiz, reaching the main crest south of Ijoukak (therefore gaining a third crossing of the range), climbed Igdat and, later, the Tizi n’ Likemt above Tachddirt. He also crossed the Bibouan Pass and returned by the coast route from Agadir to Mogador (Essaouira). How quickly things change though. As the century ended, Isabella Bird (Mrs Bishop) and, later, Lady Grove made what could be described as safe tourist crossings of the Glaoui pass to Telouet. By the time the Glaoui entertained Churchill and Lloyd George at Telouet, the Tizi n’ Tichka road was in place.
There was no sign of the mules when we came down to cultivation level, so we took a track over fields to pause above the village of Titoula, now mystified at no contact having been made. We sat waiting; eventually we would see or be seen. We soon noted some people waving and we descended to a pantomime request to follow. We edged down by the side of the village, conscious of stares from grilled windows and toddlers fleeing indoors at the sight of us. We passed some huge walnut trees and edged fields above the eroded riverbank to eventually cross to a seguia-path and, round a bend, there was the camp set up on a grassy terrace under the fingery shade of walnut trees. It was a truly idyllic site: noisy with green woodpeckers, chaffinches, nightingales and blackbirds. Pools allowed baths and a riverside boulder provided impossible climbing problems, until shown how by a girl in plastic shoes with her baby brother tied to her back. A smiling hunchbacked lad and many others watched our every move. We entertained them after supper, when the lamp was lit, by producing shadow shapes against the wall.
Our new GTAM group took twice as long as usual to get going from the Titoula riverside and I girned in my log, ‘I wish I could buy back the hours others cause me to waste’. Tamri then lost his footing on the gritty path up to the seguia and rolled back down to the campsite, and both Taza and one of the temporary mules cast shoes. “One of those mornings”, Ali shrugged. In the end I went on through the three-dimensional fields, enjoyed trim Ta’ayyat village, where the neat stone houses have painted window surrounds. Cows were being driven out and wended along the hillside paths. An older man was giving a younger one a screaming which only stopped at an azib in the gorge when he took to throwing stones at a dog to protect our passage. After we had sheltered under boulders from a shower near the azib, he offered us mint tea.
A hamlet down-valley is Idirl, the village where an Oxford student party was based in 1955. The book Berber Village by one of their number (B. Clarke) is still worth reading for the background to village life and their travels to and from Telouet. They were joined by Wilfred Thesiger, a regular visitor to Morocco. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t do more than mention the trips Thesiger made to the east and west. To the east, he went via the Ounila valley, the tamda and along the southern foothills, drove to Boumalne des Dadès, then, linking up with the Gellners, traversed north to Zawyat Ahancal. This is a much less demanding venture than I’d always been led to believe, but was the first of such a nature for a long time and at a period when conditions were far from safe. They also set off to walk to and climb Toubkal, but the route is not described. They probably passed below Yagour, with its many prehistoric carvings, then up the Oued Ourika.
The tea azib was in a secretive side gorge of character (the Assif n’ Tizgui), with the path rising and falling over spurs and criss-crossing the stream for the easiest option. Being at an easy angle and in the shade, it was doubly relished. Women were coming down with colossal loads of alyssum bushes on their backs. The gorge ended on grassy slopes full of flowers (a year later we listed over 70 different species) with nodding sea pinks (white), stately thistles, a white thyme, gladiolus, pinks, rock roses, vetches, St Bruno lilies and endless puzzling compositae. A big adder-like snake was skulking in a pool where I was considering a paddle.
The saddle of the pass itself, the Tizi n’ Telghist at 2200 m, was a long, wide, close-cropped green sward quite unlike anything elsewhere. Animals were grazing there and among the multihued slopes above. Chiselled crags walling the south were interspersed with springs and ‘greens’. The Tizi n’ Tichka area is ruggedly bare (to the bus-borne viewer anyway) yet hides some of the most beautiful sources and meadows: a very special place among the green corners of the earth. The peace was shattered by a near-war between two gangs of female cowherds, as one had allowed her mules and donkeys to get among the others’ cows. As they were trying to mount the cows, this was not popular.
We bore left from the meadows along a shelf and then descended into the valley (Talat n’ Taynast). A steeper, more direct descent could be seen on the other side, running down across black shales. With a boy and a cow for scale, it looked quite dramatic. We crossed to join that track, had a pause by water under a walnut tree and rounded several spurs to reach the large village of Issiyrs (Izikhs) which was being rebuilt at a great rate. We picked up a swarm of not very friendly kids, so took to wending on through fields and watercourses. Several times the kids were warned off only to return, and when we stopped to eat in the welcoming shade of mature walnuts, one boy remained. He threw stones, urinated and cursed at us—despite various women (taking fodder home) telling him off or trying to chase him away. That was the only incident of such a kind I’ve ever had, but it left a bad feeling.
A little owl perched on a boulder nodded us off, its sad call carrying a surprising distance. I once drove past one perched in the crook of a hairpin bend and its eyes swivelled round as we passed until I thought its head would screw right off. You remember little incidents like that. The little owl often nests in ruins, so has acquired the Arabic name ’umm al-khirab (mother of the ruins).
The descent of the Issiyrs valley was a good tramp, very steep at one point, down shaley black slopes then through fields with the grain ready to harvest (the men cut, the women carry). Most of our gang simply walked down the piste but I’ll do anything to avoid its unremitting hardness. One of my diversions took me through the only other village, Tamguingant, where everyone was most friendly and the children shy as mice. The houses appear scattered as randomly as sprouting mushrooms, and my path ran through a passage where houses had extended over the public way. Like a Giotto Madonna, a tiny tot and mother eyed me through a barred window.
Suddenly the main road was below us, with heavy loaders and artic lorries grinding up the Tizi n’ Tichka (2260 m), the main road south from Marrakech over the Atlas for the dreams beyond Ouarzazate. We once went over the tizi just before the king visited the south. The mosque towers had been painted like candy sticks and every roadside hamlet hung out welcoming carpets (rather than flags) and royal portraits, a very colourful gesture. I’ve also crossed a few times in winter conditions and was impressed by the canny driving of the big CTM bus. The driver was so familiar with the road that he would slow for certain bends knowing that around them he would find a drift. The road is seldom closed for long since snowploughs are stationed on both sides.
I never tire of driving over the Tizi n’ Tichka: a scenic treat and a spectacular piece of engineering. After crossing the Haouz plains from Marrakech, the road comes in high above the main valley, which is then flanked with a huge balcony view before reaching river level. This is followed in endless convolutions and easy gradients to Taddart where the buses will always break the journey for a tea stop—very civilised—before the final fantasy zigzags and elbows up a desolate spur facing utter mountain bleakness. Summit meadows (in spring) are a surprising floral extravagance but Tizi n’ Tichka translates as the ‘pass of high pastures’. We once stopped my camper van to fill the water bottles and shepherd boys appeared like magic—as they always do. Requests for dirhams changed to smiles when they heard the tape I was playing. It was a Berber song which they knew, and soon they were chanting, clapping and dancing along to the music. We spent the night nearby, the view dominated by Jbel Bou Ouriol, and they spent hours looking at a picture book of Morocco. They had just moved up from Taddart the previous day, to graze the summer pastures.
Taddart is one of our regular stopping places too. Over the years I’ve bought some fine crystals there and a white silk kelim. Originally we had thought of spending a GTAM night at Taddart, but the auberge was rather pricey and the hamlet too urban for our absorbing pèlerinage. We hit the main road a few kilometres above Taddart where a new cluster of transport cafes has sprung up in the last few years, a sort of New or Upper Taddart. We piled into the first café to consume litre bottles of fizzy drinks and mint tea. The day was very hot. I spotted a possible campsite just ten minutes walk back up our side valley, and we weren’t there long before the mules arrived. Ali and Anmiter Mohammed rode off on a shopping spree to ‘big’ Taddart, the others re-shod one of the mules and we prepared bivvy spots for the night, under a spreading tree. The yellow lights of lorries sweeping the hillside and the growl of their passing was strangely evocative; after all, the Tizi n’ Tichka was a very big landmark across our east—west progression. Mohammed burst into the very song which the children had sung and danced to on the pass two years previously. In theory, we only had the Toubkal Massif and the Western Atlas to traverse but, while the Toubkal Massif is relatively small in area, it is a brutally vertical world and horizontal progress would be slow. Our next area, the country of the Oued Zat, is some of the least visited in all of the Atlas, being very cut-off and difficult to reach—and we’d never met any outsiders in the Western Atlas.
The following morning, while we were walking down the main road through several nerve-wracking loops, Charles and I dubbed the others of our party the ‘Phuds’. They were all PhDs, yet to our now smoothly operating expedition, seemed fussy and inefficient. All too often, groups coming out brought the hustle and hassle of western ways with them and needed a week or two to simmer down and relax in a world more in touch with the rocks and flowers of reality.
Before reaching Taddart we turned off onto a new piste beside a cylindrical water tank and wended up the steep valley flanks to gain a col on the enclosing crests. The piste contoured along, the sky colourful as a fuchsia hybrid, the slopes of hacked oakwoods shivering with morning mists. The piste led to Afra, a village perched on barren ground, the starkness changing when we saw the apron of green valley below. Up-valley, a jagged peak dominated the north side of what was Jbel Bou Ourioul (now Adrar Tircht) at 3578 m, west of Tizi n’ Tichka. The upper end of the Afra valley is verdant with melt water meadows and a path loops on under crags to reach the Tizi n’ Tichka. Adrar Tircht from the tizi of the main road is a long, unremitting slog up remarkably even-angled slopes, so maybe one should test its other name as ‘peak of the donkey’ and ride up. As we passed through Afra, ovens were smoking and a hen high-stepped past with a mouse in its beak. The piste died not far beyond, among farmland and walnut trees with the local school perched high above.
At one time, a téléférique system ran through in connection with manganese mines. I can recall the eyesore line in the 60s but all signs have disappeared, although one new guidebook still has the line shown on a map! The Oued Afra drained this tight valley and its side streams into the Oued Zat, a large river, which the Tizi n’ Tichka road (P31) crosses at the beginning of its climb into the mountains. It was complex country made even more difficult by being divided between various sheets of two different map scales. A drift of goats was heading upwards, a speckled smoke on the landscape. All day the views upwards impressed. We took a goat trod through wet fields, which led to an impasse of crag falling into the river and, after trying the crag, we realised the path was the river. Girls were carrying huge loads of grass as all the fields were being cut. We crossed to the south bank of the narrow glen, contouring high as the river fell away. Dropping down to the village of Assads (or Acadç on the idiosyncratic 50,000), a spur jutted into the oued with the buildings overflowing down both flanks.
We found a way through, and took a path along the south bank to a small flood plain above where we thought we saw the track we wanted which was shown on both maps. This led to the Tizi n’ Wakel (1836 m) and cut off a dogleg to join the Oued Zat beyond. The path either did not exist or had vanished from disuse as mule traffic now goes the longer, safer route on down the valley and then up the Zat valley which has a good piste. While decrying our shortcut I’d still recommend the pass, only follow a perfectly good track from Assads that runs around and up to a higher village, Assaka, from where a good track angles along to the Tizi n’ Wakel—pas de problème. The path down from the tizi to the Oued Zat at Wimmadsan (Wimadzen), however, is no longer safe for mules but gave impressive walking. Peyron gives the village name as ‘the wood of the blacksmiths’.
Navigation is, of course, much easier by hindsight. We tried to find the declared path for the Tizi n’ Wakel, but such goat trods as there were soon ended and we slithered on gritty granite scrag among cloying scrub and battered trees in an exhausting heat. The rockier areas, as in maquis country, provided the only respite, and we scrambled up and eventually into the Tizi n’ Wakel, a cruel toil made more annoying with the clear route from Assads to Assaka coming into view across the valley. We drip-dried and drank our cheese sandwiches on the tizi.
There appeared to be a choice of paths beyond and we opted for the higher, which contoured with a dip, to a spur overlooking the Zat valley. One section had been washed out in an avalanche. Adrar Meltzen (3595 m) dominated the view from the col onwards, a cleft peak with a high valley running towards us. Miles of crest ran off to a far thrust of summit facing the Oued Ourika and the plains of Marrakech. Lt Washington on a mission to Marrakech in January 1830 made a three-day expedition to the Ourika, and managed to reach 1950 m before snow turned the party back. This is the earliest real mountain attempt by Europeans that I’ve discovered. The fine tent-like sweep of Meltzen as seen from Marrakech often tricks people into assuming it is Toubkal. North of Meltzen is the scarped Yagour plateau which has many sites with the sort of carvings we’d seen on the Tizi n’ Tighist. ‘Meltzen the magnificent’, we dubbed the peak, climbed on an earlier exploration, escaping from the slavery of Toubkal—a typical raid of the kind we’ve always relished.
The path into the Zat valley often angled down over grit-on-rock surfaces at a very steep angle, and I worried about how the mules would cope. However, nearing Wimadzen (roughly the pronunciation) we saw our blue-burdened beasts trotting along the piste below. They didn’t condescend to wait for us and, after we’d filled water bottles at the village supply tank, we hurried after but failed to catch up. The piste was hard and heat-blasted. They angled down to a spur before Tizart and we thought “Good! Camp”, but Ali was on the road to explain that with the piste wending high the mules could go more easily along the Zat bottom—which was their turn to make a bad choice. I went down to the mules with Ali (anything to avoid the punishing piste) and they all shot off over the end of the spur only to become entangled in all sorts of bother down at the river. I could hear curses and much crashing of oleander bushes but a long time passed before they escaped and were visible paddling up the river. Deciding oued was even worse than piste I sweated back up to the road. The others were talking to two young urban Moroccan students who were making a multi-day trek round Adrar Tircht with minimal gear and experience but no lack of initiative and enthusiasm.
We were led high and the piste disintegrated on the outskirts of sprawling Tizart, a village with a view of Himalayan grandeur. We went on contouring round the valley flank until we came to a big side valley, the Oued Ansa. We angled down just as the mules reappeared below, still largely splashing up the riverbed or thrashing through the verging oleanders. The Ansa ran out a wide flood plain of grey boulders, and camping looked problematical. However, a bridge led over to the hamlet Imergen (Imyrgn) at 1534 m where, among tight fields and an abundance of irrigation channels, we squeezed our tents onto a few bare patches below the trees. The mules got some newly cut grass and Tamri did his best to steal Taza’s. Ali was huffy because of the muleteers’ erroneous diversion, and I was a bit huffy too when pre-meal drinks were of such vital importance when help in preparing supper would have been appreciated.
The meal ran on into darkness, the lamp casting weird shadows among the branches overhead. The fun would really start the following day. I read out Peyron’s down-Zat description to them, a man not given to over-statements: ‘With its quaint houses and friendly inhabitants, and dominated by lofty ridges some 1600 m above the valley floor, we leave Zerwon, descend again to the Zat and follow the river bottom for some 5 h—at first through a dramatic gorge hewn out between Meldsen and Tafoughalt; the only way to remain dry-footed on this stretch is atop a mule; otherwise wear old gym shoes to cope with repeated river crossings alternating with stony paths wending past small cultivated patches and walnut trees...at the gorge exit lies the tiny hamlet of Imergen...a popular place for angling (permit required).’
Bats flickered about the Imergen site. Identity was not even attempted: there are 26 species of bat in Morocco. There are near 50 species of geckos, lizards and skinks and 23 snakes. The most surprising over-abundance is for orchids: 40 species.
About ten minutes into the next day, before any difficult terrain, I had a stone turn underfoot and ended up with both feet wet—which relieved me of worrying about wet feet thereafter. Then came the promised fun. After a first crossing there was a traverse of the sidewall for about 30 m but Charles, who will do anything to avoid water, and John managed to spin this out for 300 m and still had to wade eventually. The details blurred by the end of the day, as hours slipped by wending along wet verges, seguia channels, and criss-crossing the river at various depths so often that it was easiest to go barefoot in sandals and shorts.
There were only traces of mule path but at every possible corner fields and walnut trees were lodged like green river flotsam. A bluff had a seguia built round it and led to a larger area of cultivation. A good path came down from another village, also named Assaka, which perched high above in a side valley. After waiting twenty minutes I waded back in case anything was wrong but the others appeared and Charles yelled they were going up to the track (a stiff climb up to join a path angling down being water-avoidance in extremis) so I retraced my route and joined the track at Zat level. I waited to catch sight of the others then wended on, the path excellent. A few men were riding mules. There was still plenty of criss-crossing. At some houses on the south bank I zigzagged up to pass the hamlet only to have a local yell at me to go down, giving a splendid mime to show the higher track was all up and down while the lower was easy and level. Sure enough, the locals were all using the lower route, which was more in the river than out of it. With the gorge at last relenting, we began to lose the blessed shade the high walls had afforded. The path on the south side did all the local had said and wended away up only to twist down below Zarwoun (Zroueun) where we waited for the anti-water contingent to catch up.
Continuing on, a good path led determinedly up, the only stiff ascent all day as we climbed from 1534 m to around 2020 m. In a corner, there was a rock basin where we were glad to drink, as were the mules who caught us up at that point. Ali and Hosain had been quite impressed by the route, there being nothing similar west of the Tizi n’ Test. Round the next corner the twin villages of Taghazzirt and Ouniyd pincered a tree-choked tumble of fields, an amazing vertical slice of productivity in that remote wilderness. We wiggled through the first village but then lost sight of the mules, a useful guide, so stopped for lunch by a big boulder in the cool shade. A dozen children sat at a safe distance like a row of parakeets, chattering over everything we did. We must have seemed like strangers from Outer Space visiting among the soaring peaks. Some of the bolder followed us through Ouniyd and ensured we didn’t go astray.
Any hope of high traversing vanished when we saw the tiny dots of the mules hundreds of metres below, splashing off up the next bit of gorge. The mule path took to the Oued Zat and, so, perforce, did we, to paddle a good proportion of the rest of the day’s route. The kids followed for a surprisingly long way, hitching up djellabas and splashing about like spaniel puppies. They and the cultivation gradually fell away as we followed the golden flow on and on up the gorge, so closed in there were no views—and precious little sign of our mules either. We slowly regained the height we’d lost. ‘Very enjoyable’, I wrote in my log but I suspect, as our variable speeds indicated, the day was enjoyed by some more than others. After a rest we came on some azibs which appeared on both sides of the river and, on the biggest terrace, we found camp half-up, brews on and Hosain busy shoeing mules.
These were the azibs of Azib n’ Tilst, as lonely a spot as could be imagined yet an azib just upstream was occupied and grain was being grown as well as the normal herding of sheep and goats. The gorge had given way to a more open valley and somewhere above lay the Tizi n’ Tilst (around 2800 m), our exit to the north (Ourika valley) while south, a tortuous side valley ascent led to the Tizi Tazarzit (3110 m) and the desert country south of the Atlas. That southern crest rolled westwards like ocean waves, rising higher to the final sweep of Taska n’ Zat. Its triple peaks register 3818 m, 3912 m, 3850 m, then, circling round to enclose the springs and streams of the infant Zat, it rises to Arjout whose rock-bound hulk dominates the upper Oued Ourika and Setti Fadma. Peyron notes that nothing was written about the Zat summits until 1908. This was very much terra incognita, and still is, as hard graft is needed to penetrate the Zat fastness.
Our progress was made to look pretentious and cumbersome by a gaggle of men and two bare-legged boys who strode down past the camp, mere bundles slung over their shoulders, before vanishing into the gloaming: a majestic simplicity. I had a busy evening of logistics and planning for the days ahead.
In the morning I rose with a dicky right knee and hobbled through breakfast for our 0615 departure. There were a surprising number of azibs up the valley and if the barking dogs indicated our passage, the human contacts were friendlier. I wonder how many years per European for the upper Zat gorges. After an hour of gravel crunching, the walls closed in again for a mixture of boulder scrambling and waterfall-dodging that sharply focussed the mind for the following couple of hours. Fun though it was, I didn’t dare trust my knee.
A big stream came in and eventually, with much map, compass and altimeter study, we pinpointed our position and were suitably humbled. The next stretch took us up to a spot Peyron recommended as a bivouac site (2467 m on the map), below a stream descending from Tougroudadane (3320 m). (The peak falls to Setti Fadma on the opposite side, a drop of 2000 m of wild, harsh rockiness.) Despite being such an idyllic spot it seemed ungrazed. As well as masses of yellow woad, there were hundreds of pink alyssum clumps, erysimum, blue-tinted daisies, wallflower, silvery thistles, golden thistles, erodiums, cerastium, forget-me-nots, scarlet pimpernel and bold stars-of-Bethlehem.
I was able to make that listing since, at the start of the next succession of gorges, I decided not to go on: an athletic and demanding sideshow was not worth jeopardising the main GTAM route. The tendons were caught at the knee or over-tight meaning I couldn’t fully straighten my right leg, so I think not forcing myself on was wise. I’d already traversed the Zat crest but regretted missing Arjout (the moon) which had been high on my list of desirable objectives ever since our ‘Ridge of Dreams’ high-level traverse in 1979. That quality trip had started at the Tizi Tagharhat (of Hooker and Ball fame) above Sidi Chamarouch and taken in all the summits from the tizi (3456 m), over Iferouane (once 4001 m) to Taska n’ Zat and after six bivouacs over 3000 m, we’d escaped south and (one more bivvy) out to Ourzazate—just as the weather collapsed.
We brewed coffee while I sorted out some food for myself and retained the old coffee pot for my cooking and brewing. The others then continued up the Oued Zat and I hobbled back to find a good bivvy spot by the river, on which I played the lizard for much of the day. In the Atlas there isn’t much chance of removing clothing for a more extensive tan so I made the most of it—perhaps to my undoing. Most trips I finish with only my face and forearms a deep brown and with eye-catching white-brown stripes on my feet from wearing sandals. I revelled in the day of solitude and read a short story every hour or two, using the pages to help light a scrub fire to boil coffee water after. One of the stories gave me an idea which was to develop into another children’s story, and would keep me busy at odd moments for the rest of the trip.
Supper was a thick mushroom soup into which I added pasta and dried vegetables, scoffed along with a tin of spiced sardines. Bread and cheese and coffee rounded off the repast, all cooked with wood from skeleton juniper. A few stunted survivors decorated the crags that soared up in every direction apart from the valley up to Tougroudadane, a peak which surged in and out of view among blowing cloud. Some animal or animals were afoot up the gorge and I hoped I’d see moufflon, now so rare. The ticking of hooves was clear but I saw nothing. (Moufflon, the wild Barbary sheep, are being introduced in the valley west of Imlil but the easiest place to see them is in the Bird Garden in Agadir!)
At 2020 there was a minor earth tremor, half-felt, half-heard as I woke from sleep. Later I had the company of a half moon and half a million stars. A saturating dew then had me pulling on some clothes inside my sleeping bag. The dew also dampened my store of wood and, the morning being completely windless, the breakfast fire just sent up a pillar of smoke and turned the sticks into charcoal. To my flower list I added campanula, rampion, poppies, thrift, a minute campion, a white campion with ‘reversed’ petals, a gaudy thistle, a mysterious baby’s breath-like flower, mullein, bedstraw, a camomile-like species, various chrysanthemum types, trefoil, knapweed, lavender, valerian, broom, a shrubby rose, milkwort, mallow, kidney vetch and a carpeter of ‘everlasting’ nature besides others too exotic to recognise. Birds were few: wagtails, dippers, choughs and a redstart being the poor total. As my leg was still not completely sound I resisted dashing off on any ploy and headed back down for the azib. The descent was both easier and faster than on the ascent, the benefits of hindsight and being able to look down on problematic areas.
At one section I had to keep under cover for twenty minutes while a flock of sheep and goats threaded along the crags above, knocking stones down into the gorge. (The roar of water made warnings of any falling stones impossible.) Near the end of the gorge, I ran into Ali and Anmiter Mohammed heading up so we made some coffee together. I found Hosain and Mohammed-2 up on the cliff facing camp; camp had become largely untenable from a disgusting plague of flies inside the tents. We kept to our eyrie until the evening cool had removed the visitors.
Other wildlife was not so unpleasant. We found moths had mobbed the wet path by the adjacent azib, carpeting the muddy section in a puzzling suicidal manner. Before supper, we removed sixteen long-legged spiders from the tent while inch-long crickets and huge slaters kept crawling in. In the night, a tickle on my back turned out to be a glow-worm. Our water-supplying seguia was full of dashing trout. A chough had me racing in panic when it did an excellent imitation of a falling stone. My knee felt better but my legs were breaking out in lumpy spots. Later in the day I retreated to another eyrie and worked out ideas for the story. Waiting for supper, I wrote the book’s concluding paragraphs!
Everyone drifted back down from the heights next day, Charles and Chris B only at 1930 as they’d traversed Arjoût and Tougroudadane to the Tizi n’ Tilst then descended from there, despite Charles still fighting off a cold he’d probably inherited from Lorraine. The party had camped by high springs the first night and Charles and Chris B had gone up the North Ridge of Taska n’ Zat, the others (not all in the best of health) had climbed easy Arjoût which has a grand view to Jbel Toubkal. Ali and Mohammed joined them and, to their common joy, Ali spotted a tribe of Barbary apes up on the crags. I’d never heard of these anywhere in the Toubkal massif before.